A message to the brave Israeli airmen

by Jeremy Salt


Hello brave Israeli airman. What’s it like, firing missiles at people you
can’t see? Does that help, that you cannot see who you are killing, does it
ease your conscience that you are not deliberately targeting civilians, as
your government keeps saying, when you know perfectly well that they are
going to die as the result of your actions. How does this sit on your
conscience? Do you sleep well at night or do you have nightmares of the
women and children you killed, in their homes, in their beds, in their
kitchens and living rooms, in their schools and mosques? Do you actually
believe what you are being told, that Israel is under threat from homemade
rockets, so seriously threatened that you have to go out and take part in
the aerial massacre of civilians? What do you feel when the mission is
over? That you did a good job? Do you and your air force buddies slap each
other on the back before going off for a beer? Would you still think that
you did a good job if you saw the dead and dismembered bodies you have
created, not of fighting men but of women and children, the bodies that are
your particular contribution to the Middle East ‘peace process’? Would you
still regard your mission as a success, the word used by your political
leaders, your media and your government and military spokesmen and women?
How would you personally apply the word ‘success’ to the killing of
civilians? Does it cross your mind that people around the world regard you
not as a success story but as a war criminal who should be prosecuted if
your identity is ever revealed and you step out of your own country and
expose yourself to arrest?

The number of your countrymen in this category is increasing by the day. You
can exchange notes with Dan Halutz, your former air force commander, who
said when asked what he felt when he bombed an apartment building in Gaza
that he felt the wings of his plane tremble as the bomb was released. Did
you think that was funny at the time? Do you still think it is funny? Do you
think it was a pity about the 18 people who were killed. Now the political
leaders who gave you your orders have taken their place in the overcrowded
pantheon of Israeli war criminals. They told you that you were only
defending your country. Actually, it’s someone else’s country. Do you know
that or you have swallowed the propaganda about the Palestinians running
away and your state surrounded by a ring of steel and facing extinction?
Are you a liberal who believes in two ……

. . . but you are never going to admit that even if inside you know deep
down that it is true. You can’t admit the truth because the game would be
up for you and other brave young men and women like, sent out to kill in the
name of protecting the homeland from attack. Well, sixty years ago, the
homeland was attacked by your father and your grandfather and the fathers
and grandfathers of your friends. So, what you are actually doing is
defending your right to hold stolen property, and that’s nonsense isn’t it.
If someone steals your property, does that mean you only have to wait ten,
twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years for it to become yours? It will
still be theirs in a hundred years, won’t it.

What do your parents say when you get home? Does your mother bustle
around you, spoiling you, ruffling your hair, making you a cup of tea, relieved
that her darling boy is home safe and sound. She won’t have any idea, will
she, of what you actually did today, and you aren’t going to be the one to
tell her. In fact you don’t even know and you don’t want to know because you
could not live with yourself if you faced up to the detail of what you did
today. You just fired your missile at a target didn’t you No doubt she will
say well done. Yes, it was well done, wasn’t it. You killed civilians very
efficiently and effectively. No possibility of them ever getting to their
feet again. No chance of those children growing up or of their dead mothers
giving birth to more children. No likelihood that those limbs you severed
can be reattached, no way of rejoining the head to the body you decapitated.

In all likelihood you are a nice young from a good family, proud that you go
into the air force academy. The kind of nice young man who would not
hesitate to rush to the defence of a old man or a child being beaten in the
streets. But isn’t that what you are doing? What possibility do the old men
and women and children have of defending themselves against your aerial
mugging – not that the actions of a back alley bully applies to you. Oh no.
What you are doing is much worse. Infinitely worse. You are not just killing
innocent people. You are murdering them. Is this is what you were trained
to do in the air force academy? Good heavens, no! What an insult to the air
force!! You were trained to attack and destroy the enemy, weren’t you. To
protect the stolen homeland, and if civilians get in the way, as they do
when the target area is the most overcrowded piece of earth on the planet,
it’s not your fault. It is the fault of the enemy. After all, they started
this and so they are responsible for you having to kill civilians in
defence of your stolen country. And you were not deliberately targeting
them anyway, were you. Is it is your fault if the enemy uses schools,
mosques, apartment blocks, university campuses, government ministries and
the parliament building to stockpile weapons? So you are not the murderer
– it is the enemy. Is that the way you justify your behavior? Is that what
enables to sleep peacefully at night? But what will you say if all of this
catches up with you, not in the middle of the night when you are staring up
at the ceiling and wondering what you have done, but in the court of law
where you are being tried for war crimes? ‘I was only obeying orders’.
Surely even you have heard that somewhere before.