Far from being “invincible,” the IDF’s morale is broken. Snip:
After a year of committing genocide in Gaza, more and more Israeli soldiers are quietly refusing orders to return to the strip to fight, saying they are depressed, worn out, psychologically damaged, and unmotivated, according to a report by Ha-Makom magazine published on 20 October.
The ultra-Orthodox-oriented magazine interviewed multiple soldiers and parents of soldiers who refuse to return to Gaza. When a platoon of 30 soldiers of the Nahal Brigade was recently ordered to enter Gaza for the latest of several tours, only six reported for duty.
“I call it refusal and rebellion,” says Inbal, the mother of one of the soldiers in the platoon.
“They return to the same buildings that they cleaned, each time trapping them anew. They have been to Al-Zaytoun neighborhood three times already. They understand that it is futile and pointless.”
Although they had only a fifth of their personnel, the commander still insisted they enter Gaza.
It’s the first one. It’s not that they see the people they’re fighting as human, it’s that they keep getting washed and burned out.
I’m saying that’s not a shield against it. Genocidaires dehumanize their victims and they still get fucked up by their own actions and what they’re taking part in. It’s not about morals or consciences or anything like that, it’s just people not handling that sort of violence and horror well at a fundamental level. That’s not to say “oh it makes them sad, it makes them unhappy, it makes them regretful” because it can just as easily make them worse and more violent and unstable, it’s just to say it’s something that actively attacks and corrodes their own humanity. They can psych themselves up and dehumanize their victims and beat their chest as loud as they want, as loud as they need to to push themselves to actually do it, but they’re still going to be broken by it in some way.
This isn’t something original to Israel, obviously, though that provides a very clear and visible example of a population trying to keep themselves whipped into a bloodthirsty frenzy and breaking at the seams because of it. I know it happened to the Nazis too, and that there’s research on that and how Nazi ideology tried to recuperate that self-destruction through violence by lionizing it and making it a pillar of their ideology. I’d assume it’s just a universal phenomenon, that such violence just kind of does that to people regardless of how they try to psych themselves up and cope with it.
I mean some people that work at abattoirs have PTSD, it’s not unique to seeing humans slaughtered.
I think both things are true. The same way someone who works in the business of slaughtering barn animals won’t go vegan or even vegetarian, even if they have PTSD.
It’s got almost nothing to do with “seeing too much slaughter” in the case of the iof. It’s actually laughable (and sad) that some people on this site really think those people are somehow getting tired and traumatized by the genocide.
The iof literally say why they’re feeling this way, it’s quoted in the article
They feel that they’re doing meaningless busy work that’s also getting them killed. Mind you, if they thought their slaughter was actually doing something they’ll happily keep it up so long as they’re not getting fucking washed by resistance fighters.
I’d argue it’s laughable and sad that some people on this site really think these people are entirely unable to get tired and traumatized by the genocide. We know that even the worst of the worst of WW2 Nazis couldn’t face gunning down their victims en masse, it’ll be little better for the IOF.
Does it mean they’re good people who will protest genocide tomorrow? No. But it does mean they’re humans who will only physically take so much of doing it. Just because they’re a genocidal force that must be stopped doesn’t mean we need to deny they have innately human traits.
To add to this, to paint Nazis, Israelis, anyone committing atrocities as inhuman monsters is to fool yourself into thinking there’s something different or other about them. This is just what happens when people grow up brainwashed into hate and conscripted into the army. Normal humans are going to feel bad butchering people, they’ll justify it to themselves and keep doing it but unless they’re psychopaths (which is uncommon) they’ll still have a physiological reaction.