We constantly hear Israeli politicians and generals talking about how the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is the most moral army in the world. It’s been repeated so often it’s a cliche.
And yet here we are able to watch a cold blooded murder by one of our own on a Hebron street, an IDF soldier putting a bullet in the head of a wounded, unarmed man:
Here we have a captive, a man whose life is the responsibility of the soldiers around him, the very soldiers whose lives he tried to take moments before, gunned down and then left to bleed until eventually a soldier callously puts a bullet in his brain.
The soldier has been arrested. But this isn’t really about the soldier who takes it upon himself to execute a wounded, defenseless man. Now the soldier has been arrested the usual suspects will wax lyrical about how the one bad apple was removed from the tree and how he will face “justice”.
But there’s more to this story than a soldier killing a man in cold blood. Watch that video again. Watch the whole scene. Watch the way those two would-be terrorists lie unarmed and ignored.
Watch the medics who are trained to heal everyone ignore the men lying there bleeding.
Watch the man who walks up to the terrorist lying on the ground to film him on his phone.
Watch how the soldiers react to their friend cocking his weapon, listen for their shouts for him to stop, for him not to fire.
You won’t hear them.
Listen for their shouts at him after the fact.
Listen to their bemused cries “what did you do?” They never ask. “Why did you kill him?” They don’t say.
“What about purity of the rifle?” No one says.
Where is the leadership on the ground? Who’s in control here? How did they allow this to happen?
Already generals and politicians are going out of there way to distance themselves and the IDF from this act. Already the soldier is being thrown to the wolves.
But no one is looking at the whole scene and asking why no one provided medical treatment to the wounded or why civilians were allowed on the scene. Or why no one was in control of their soldiers enough to wonder why one of them suddenly, loudly, cocks his weapon and blows a man’s head off.
And just who IS that guy in civilian clothes taking before and after pictures of the terrorist lying on the ground?
The shouting after the man is killed seems to be only to direct the ambulance around the body.
I don’t cry for a dead terrorist. I shed tears for a country that turns its own children into murderers and an army that cannot tell the difference between a terrorist threat and an unarmed captive.
So should you.
