Unherd: How the IDF escapes justice

[..] as I think back to my basic training, shortly before the hell of the Yom Kippur War, I must admit that we were taught to respect and fear the weapons we were given. The “purity of arms” of the IDF was always partly mythical — yet it was constantly drilled into us. To be victorious, we were told, we had to be just, and as soldiers we were issued clear instructions on when we were allowed to open fire: rules which were strictly enforced. The IDF could not be like those marauding, lawless, criminal armies that subjected Jews to wanton murder, rape, and humiliation during the long centuries of exile. As early as the Thirties, the prominent Zionist leader Berl Katznelson exhorted Jewish paramilitary troops in Palestine: “May our arms remain pure. We train to use weapons, we carry weapons and confront those who attack us. But we do not want our arms to be soiled by the blood of innocents.”

In reality, of course, since its formation in 1948, the IDF engaged in multiple war crimes, not least during the War of Independence itself. Most of these crimes were covered up or denied, from the now well-documented cases of executions in Palestinian villages in the Galilee, which were long denied, to the widely reported massacre of over 100 people, including women and children, in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, for which no one was eventually charged.

Even so, on occasion, a few have been prosecuted and held up as a warning about the potential of young armed men descending into savagery. This was the case of the massacre of over 40 civilians in Kafr Qasim in 1956, which resulted in an Israeli court ruling that a “black flag” flies over unlawful orders to kill innocents. But the occupation, which began following the Six Day War, brought with it growing dehumanisation of the Palestinians and the ever-progressive loosening of rules on exercising violence against civilians, as can be seen now in the escalating attacks by Jewish settlers, often abetted by IDF troops, against Palestinians in the West Bank. The scandal that is currently roiling Israeli society — and the nature of the debate surrounding it — is the culmination of this process, with profound ramifications for the rule of law in Israel as a whole.

In July 2024, the IDF military police opened an investigation into reports of abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the notorious detention centre of Sde Teiman. An initial attempt to arrest some of the suspected soldiers was met with demonstrations, and some protestors and far-Right politicians broke into the camp to protect the culprits. Eventually, five soldiers were indicted for causing severe abuse and injury to a prisoner who had to undergo emergency surgery. As protests reached a frenzy, a clip allegedly showing soldiers brutalising a prisoner was leaked to the media, exposing to the public the severity of the abuse. Initially, the office of the Military Advocate General, tasked with running the investigation, insisted that it could not determine the identity of the leaker. But, in October this year, Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned, conceding that she had authorised the leak to protect her office from false accusations that it was needlessly persecuting innocent soldiers merely carrying out their duty against Hamas operatives. She then disappeared, raising fears about her possible suicide. Fortunately, Tomer-Yerushalmi later resurfaced, only to be taken into custody herself. She is currently under investigation both for leaking the video and for lying to the Supreme Court about its provenance.