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Moralisten unter sich: Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney

“Die moralischste Armee der Welt” – das ist nach Ansicht beinahe aller Politiker und immerhin auch vieler Bürger Israels ihre eigene, die IDF.

Das war schon immer eine Mär.

Noch vor Existenz des Staates Israel hat der bewaffnete jüdische Untergrund mit terroristischen Mitteln gegen die englische Mandatsmacht gekämpft.

Unter anderem hat dabei der “Etzel” unter seinem damaligen Anführer Menachem Begin – dem späteren Ministerpräsidenten – einen verheerenden Bombenanschlag auf das King David Hotel in Jerusalem verübt, bei dem 91 Menschen ums Leben kamen

Im sogenannten Unabhängigkeitskrieg von 1948 vollzog die israelische Armee neben ihrem Kampf gegen reguläre arabische Truppen nebenbei die lange geplante ethnische Säuberung und vertrieb etwa 800.000 Palästinenser aus ihrer Heimat. In romantisierenden Büchern und Filmen zum Thema israelischer Unabhängigkeitskrieg wurde die brutale Vertreibung unterschlagen – die Weltöffentlichkeit sollte nur das Bild des des kleinen israelischen David gegen den arabischen Goliath sehen.

Khirbet Khizeh

Wie die Wirklichkeit aussah, hat schon früh und eindringlich der jüdische Kriegsteilnehmer Yizhar Smilansky alias S. Yizhar in seinem Buch “Khirbet Khizeh” geschildert.

Auszug:

[ the israeli patrol approached the small arab village of Khirbet Khizeh. Only elderly men, woman and children were still in the village. Some try to flee as they see the israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, the israeli machine gun unit took its  position.]

Shadowy figures that moved in the open, and seemed to be in a hurry, but their haste was negated by the scale of the terrain; it was like the meaningless writhing of a worm.

“Get ‘em,” said Shmulik. “A little to the right.”

“You missed,” said Moishe from inside the binoculars. “Farther to the right and up a bit. Now! Fire!”

We were getting excited.

The thrill of the hunt that lurks inside every man had taken firm hold of us.

“Over there, too,” roared somebody, pointing to another field where, like ants, many figures were running, their jerky haste swallowed up by the larger field. I asked for the binoculars and saw them, group after group, or maybe family after family, or maybe Bands of equivalent strength as they fled, four or five or six, or single individuals—women, too—easily recognizable by their white kerchiefs over their black robes, and their running, because they were exhausted and short of breath, apparently, slowed for a moment to a walking pace, and then growing faster and faster until it settled back into a heavy run, which contained not so muck Speed as a concentration of all strength and breath to prove that everything was being done so that there should be running, so that they might be saved from their fate. That instant a group of three was clearly seen racing up a hill.

“Right there,” I roared pointing them out to Gaby. “Range twelve hundred, to the right of that solitary tree. You’ve got a good shot at them!” And at that instant I shuddered for some reason, and with my hands still pointing with drunken excitement toward the runaways rd spotted I felt somebody was shouting something else inside me, like a wounded bird, and while I was still feeling startled by these two voices, Gaby emptied several rounds there, and Moishe said, “To hell with you! You don’t know how to shoot at all!” Surprised, I felt some kind of relief, maybe like this: “Let him miss, oh, let him miss them!” I quickly looked around to make sure that no one had seen me in what felt like my moment of shame. Immediately and uncomfortably, I went back to scanning that ditch in the field and tracking the panic­stricken figures that were floundering and trying to get out of it, but the earth could not contain them, unless they managed to get beyond those hills, beyond the horizon.

“I got ‘em,” shouted Gaby.

—

[the home of an old woman was blown up and she tries to run to it]

… that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back.

But the soldier grimaced as though he were tired of listening, and he shouted at her again to sit down with the others. However, the woman was already beyond warnings, she left him behind and started running heavily toward the site of the explosion. With a movement of his hand the boy grabbed her headscarf, and her hair was shamefully disheveled and exposed to view, something that startled everybody and enraged the woman herself. Snatching back her scarf with a wave of rebuke, in a single movement she covered her hair and wrapped up the child, who was bleating with all its tiny might, and hurriedly picked up the hem of her heavy dress and ran toward her ruined home.

“Leave her alone,” said someone. “Shell be back.”

“Khawaja,” an old man stood up, apparently one of the most respected men of the village, and came forth from his people toward us, with one hand an his chest and the other extended in front of him in a gesture of courteous request, in a polfite manner that both sides would surely recognize as the basis for dialogue, as appropriate to honored interlocutors, and advanced toward us looking among us for someone to open a discussion with. However the one he selected did not let him utter a single word but pointed to where he’d been sitting and said: “Stay in your place until you’re called.”

The old man started to say something in response, or to rebuke him, thought better of it, shrugged his shoulders, and heavily returned to his place, aided by his cane and the several hands extended to him by those still seated. He sat down heavily and sighed: “La illah ila Allah, there is no god but God.” Something ancient and biblical once again flickered for a moment, until some other prophecy of Boom took its place and hung in the air. Anyone who had forgotten how all this was bound to end knew again what was before him.

“What’s this place called anyway?” said Shlomo. “Khirbet Khizeh,” someone answered.

Man könnte die Kriegsgeschichte Israels von 1948 bis heute skizzieren und leicht eine Vielzahl von Ereignissen schildern die zeigen, dass es so etwas wie eine “moralische Armee” nicht gibt und nicht geben kann.

Dafür gibt Uri Avnery die seit jeher gültige Erklärung, die für alle Armeen der Welt gilt:

any army is composed of all types of human beings,

decent youngsters with a moral conscience

besides sadists, imbeciles and others suffering from moral insanity.

In a war you give all of them arms and a license to kill, and the results can be foreseen.

Gaza, in einer Radierung von Goya (“Leichenhaufen”)

Allerdings kann es einen Unterschied geben zwischen einem brutalen Krieg und einem irrwitzigen Krieg.

Gibt die politische und / oder militärische Führung carte blanche, so wie es George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld und Dick Cheney es getan haben für den sogenannten “war on terror” (Zitat Cheney: “Wir müssen die Samthandschuhe abnehmen. Unsere Gegner sind niederträchtig, und daher müssen wir es auch sein.”) dann fallen alle Grenzen.

Exzesse der Gewalt, wie sie in Abu Ghraib oder Bhagram stattgefunden haben, sind dann nicht “normale” und nie vermeidbare Entgleisungen von einzelnen – siehe die Erläuterung Avnerys – sondern Entgleisungen, die das System vorgibt.

Dazu gehört auch der Satz des damaligen israelischen Verteidigungsministers Yitzhak Rabin bei Ausbruch der Ersten Intifada “Brecht Ihnen die Knochen!” (was seine Soldaten wortwörtlich nahmen), oder der Satz des israelischen Kommandeurs Gadi Eizenkot, der nach der Schlappe des Libanonkriegs von 2006 die Doktrin der “unproportionalen Härte” prägte.

Diese Doktrin fand umgehend ihre Anwendung im Gaza-Krieg von 2008/09, wo unter anderem Weisser Phosphor eingesetzt wurde.

Wer wissen möchte, wie sich Weisser Phosphor auswirkt, kann in einer Suchmaschine in der Rubrik Bilder die Suche “Gaza white phosphorus” eingeben. Vorsicht: Solche Photos werden Sie nicht in Ihrer Tagespresse finden.

The most moral army: Ein schöner Titel für ein unschönes Märchen.

– Schlesinger

PS.: Wie kam ich auf diesen Beitrag? Durch die jüngsten Ereignisse rund um den Widerruf von Richter Goldstone, der in einem Beitrag in der Washington Post eine wesentliche Neuwertung seines “Goldstone-Berichts” zum Gaza-Krieg von 2008/09 vornahm. Im Lichte neuer Erkenntnisse, so Goldstone, sei er zum Schluß gekommen Israel habe nicht vorsätzlich Zivilisten unter Beschuss genommen. Unnötig zu sagen, mit welcher Genugtuung Bibi Netanjahu et.al. darauf reagiert haben und einmal herausstellen mussten, wie moralisch die IDF sei. Unnötig auch zu sagen, dass der Rückzieher Goldstones wenig mit neuen Erkenntnissen, sondern nur mit einer uralten Erkenntnis zu tun hat: Niemand möchte gerne Paria sein. Das war Goldstone seit Erscheinen seines Berichts.

Leseempfehlungen dazu:

- Meldungen aus dem Exil

- Noam Sheizaf in 972mag

- Tikun Olam

- Bettina Marx in DRadio

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Photo: Cherie A. Thurlby / Wikipedia PD

Related articles

• Rereading: Khirbet Khizeh by S Yizhar (guardian.co.uk)
• Rabbi der israelischen Armee rechtfertigt Vergewaltigung im Krieg (972mag)