On a war diary - Ronen Tal in Haaretz:
‘It's early evening in a destroyed mosque after an Israeli bombing. The floor is littered with plaster from the ceiling, the windows have been blown out, the chairs turned into pieces of wood.
Gazan men, their hands bound behind them, are sitting on the floor in rows, waiting for their turn to be interrogated. An Israeli soldier with a rifle is standing in front of them and tearing pages out of a Quran.
"I approached him and asked him for the meaning of his behavior," Asaf Hazani writes in his Hebrew-language book "One Way or Another the Sword Shall Devour – Anthropology in War: A Field Diary."
"He replied with a sad look, really the saddest look imaginable. 'Me? I'm taking revenge against them.'"
The image of the sad soldier tearing out the pages of the book so sacred to Muslims lingers through Lt. Col. Hazani's work, which is based on the author's war diary. Hazani is an anthropologist who did reserve duty as a staff officer for a combat division in Gaza.
The tearing up of the Quran was a violation of army norms, but Hazani eschews ethical judgments and tries to uncover the unconscious emotional motivation that caused this gratuitous rite of desecration.’
(…)
‘Hazani's book can be found in every branch of Steimatzky and Tzomet Sfarim, Israel's two main bookstore chains. And copies have been sent to journalists, book reviewers and defense researchers. But this is a rare instance where the author of a current-affairs book refuses to go through with the interview that he himself initiated, because his commanders dissented.
This triggers worries about self-censorship. It's hard not to wonder what the senior officers are afraid of. What embarrassing information that Hazani kept out of his book is he likely to blurt out in a newspaper interview? (The IDF Spokesman's Unit said: "Hazani had second thoughts and decided not to be interviewed. As far as we are concerned, there is no reason he should not be interviewed.")’
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‘In another case, two brothers, both lieutenant colonels, arranged to be in the same sector and go on missions together. Hazani writes that this gives new meaning to the term "fighting family" – a historical term for the Israeli right wing.
Hazani doesn't express reservations about family and friends joining the fighting, nor does he claim that it harmed operations. He sees it as another symptom of the atmosphere of general collapse in the army and all Israeli society as a result of Hamas' onslaught. "After October 7, the sense of trust in the system disappeared. Everyone gathers in his own group and takes care of himself," he writes.
"The country fell apart and only families remain. Some are broken and others are regrouping. They're the ones who are fighting back – the families and the groups."’
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‘Another revelation is senior commanders not obeying the security directives they were supposed to enforce on their soldiers. For example, officers took selfies during the fighting, even though they were warned that this would endanger their lives because the enemy could pinpoint their exact location.
Some soldiers and officers received "kosher" phones that let them communicate within the units and with home. In one case, a major had such a phone but talked to his wife on his private iPhone. Hazani ordered him to end the conversation. "While doing so he looked at me angrily and muttered something under his mustache."
The obsessive photo-taking and filming on phones wasn't only done by soldiers not obeying orders; it seems the military itself considered the orders a nonbinding recommendation. Division headquarters asked the commanders to send pictures from the places they had reached.
"Every evening we would collect their pictures and enter them into the military network," Hazani writes, adding that the commanders had military phones for taking pictures along with the GoPro cameras installed on the soldiers' helmets.’
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‘Regarding the transformation of the IDF into a collection of militias, reservists from the 55th Brigade wrote their company commander that they refused to be released to civilian life because not one of the war's goals had been achieved. They wrote: "This order does not conform with the values we were taught: You don't leave anyone behind.
"How can we return to our families before the 136 hostages [at the time] have returned to their families? How can we return before the threat to the residents of the Gaza border communities has been removed? How can we return to our daily routine as if our mission were accomplished, at a time when every mortal in Rafah can still, at the press of a button, send all the children of Ashdod, Rishon Letzion and Tel Aviv to the bomb shelter?"’
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‘Finally, soldiers were told that the retrieving of the bodies of dead Israelis was an ethical mission. "We sent soldiers to collect bodies, and we didn't know if they were hostages and captured soldiers or Gazans," Hazani writes.
He proposes the phrase "living bodies [gufim] to bring back dead bodies [gufot]," adding: "We knew that there was a chance that on the way the bodies of some of them would become dead bodies due to a clash or an explosive device, and we knew that a dead body isn't a dead body until it's identified as such."’
Read the article here.
The breakup of an army into private militias, the erosion of trust in the most important institutions, the lack of clear war aims, the absence of discipline, all signs that the war has ended in defat. Only defeat, no winners.
Living bodies waiting to become dead bodies.