The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
> When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card?
It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
It really does only work when deployed against someone of a lower status. Just for example, if you imagine a sterotypical homeless man complaining that he felt unsafe against a sterotypical Karen, in the US there is no real chance he will be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances. It is more or less the "Get this peasant away from me" of our time.
I found your comment to be very insightful and I appreciate it banannaise
Watching some of the endless examples of police abusing their powers or committing crimes or obviously lying in the US on youtube videos has removed any ability to just trust police. In the US, because the police basically can always escalate t violence on any occasion, they are just dangerous to be around.
I never thought about it until this horrible store at the top, but why don't soldiers have to have cameras record their actions? Because war is a terrible thing and we don't want to have video of people murdering each other. But peacekeeprs should have cameras.
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
The strong/dominant beating up in the weak is as old as time unfortunately. One doesn’t always have to make that particular comparison as it is a sensitive one. You can point to any major instance of colonization (by whomever) to see similar polices and in the past it was even more brutal because there were no reporters (eg Belgium Free Congo had an estimated population decline of 75% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... .)
In the 1200's British colonizers invaded Ireland, in 1920's the same colonial oppressors were moved to Palestine. Arthur Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1887 till 1891 and it was his idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
Ship out the jews, radicalize the natives, have the two of them fight for hundreds of years. It couldn't be a more British idea.
It was absolutely not Balfour's idea to create a Jewish state in Palestine.
The Balfour declaration was from 1917. But the Zionists first started to move to the region in the hopes of establishing a homeland in the early 1880s, based on their belief that a Jewish state (anywhere; Argentina was another candidate) was necessary for their long-term survival due to the long history of antisemitism in Europe - getting worse by the day - and their (correct, it turned out!) fear that it could reach cataclysmic levels. It was very much their idea.
Balfour's declaration, which wasn't official law, didn't single-handedly dictate British policy for the next 30 years and 14 governments; people vastly overstate the importance of it. Britain did not "ship out" the Jews - most Jewish migrants to Mandatory Palestine were from Eastern Europe and came to Mandatory Palestine very much of their own volition, without British help. And in 1939 - just in time for the Holocaust - Britain cracked down hard on Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine to try to quell Arab unrest; Jews continued to migrate illegally anyway, despite what the British wanted.
Of course Britain had its role in contributing to the violence in the region, but to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
> to characterize Israel as a British colony is to deny Jews agency. It is curiously antisemitic, even as it (implicitly) absolves them of some of the blame for how things have gone.
I'm Jewish (though not Israeli); my grandparents were among those Jews who fled to Mandatory Palestine against the British's and Arabs' wishes to escape the Holocaust. Kindly, I think I'm a better judge of the right hills to die on when it comes to this particular subject.
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way.
The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy.
I'm going to repost and elaborate on a reply of mine that appears to be shadow dead with no explanation. This doesn't seem to be the usual result of disagreement flagging. The only problem I can see is that perhaps this did not meet the level of substantiveness expected from an HN comment (OTOH I don't see how what it was replying to would meet this either, and mine is at least coming from the direction of intellectual curiosity!)
"Perfect example of how no one thinks they're the villain in their own story"
To be clear, the comment I'm replying to is justifying "mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms" based on some amorphous other "players" supposedly not valuing their own life (as a hypothetical soldier!). If this isn't a stark illustration of how individual people in a cycle of violence justify their own crimes to themselves, I don't know what is.
The position would make sense in the context of say a street mugging where the victim ends up shooting the assailant. It might make sense in the context of domestic policing where the subject of an arrest attacks the police (modulo the usual moral hazard wherein cops create pretexts to claim they were being attacked). But in the context of this article and the proceeding comment, I don't see how it is anything but a rationalization for some pretty sick violence.
That's pretty crazy mental gymnastics. Palestinians have been attacking Israel civilians forever. They strapped bombs under their kids beds, etc. It's clear they don't value Israeli life, nor their own. They have been indoctrinated to hate jews before birth. There is nothing controversial about it. Israel has been doing their best to avoid civilian deaths, polar opposite of Palestinian behavior. Yes mistakes have been made, but trying to equate the two is deliberate misinformation.
Please elaborate on what exactly you're calling "crazy mental gymnastics". Your followup points are merely textbook dehumanization of an entire group. So as I said, cycle of violence.
The only thing I've said here is calling out your incitement to genocide. If that qualifies as an "agenda" to you, then I don't know that there is anything left to say.
> Between 7 October 2023 and 15 March 2026, the UN's humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, says 1,071 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, including at least 233 children.
Does that sound like genocide?
Meanwhile, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks says 1,195 civilians and security forces killed. 4300 rockets launched. How many people would that have been if Israel was jamming kumbaya?
lol. That refrain has gotten pretty tired and even the mainstream is waking up to how preposterous it is.
Suffering horrific atrocities in your culture's past is not some license to commit your own new atrocities. Seriously, try applying your own rationalizations to the Palestinian perspective and see how that makes you feel - can October 7th be justified because "[Israelis] have been attacking [Palestinian] civilians forever" ? The answer is a resounding NO.
A professional looks at and understands the situation as it exists now. A professional is trained to not get into situations where fear controls them. Your argument is a compelling one that either these are not professionals or that they are professionals and are doing this on purpose. The stats today clearly show the massive difference between danger to Israeli personnel and Palestinians. Israel at this point has either failed to train professional forces that seek to deescalate and avoid dangerous situations or is training forces to find situations they can claim fear as a justification for murder. So, pick. They are either amateurs at which point it is a deplorable to put amateurs with this much force near a vulnerable population or they are professionals trained to do exactly this, find ways to kill a vulnerable population and claim self defense.
Luck implies a lack of fault. Also we probably shouldn't open fire on suspects fleeing from a heist either, kid or no kid. Extra-judical justice is generally a bad thing, this is why pit maneuvers exist. Allowing police to fire at moving vehicles is a universally bad idea, and one thats understood by most nations.
Or in democratic societies we can insist that our "public servants" actually serve the public interest of law and order rather than merely using it as a pretext to be able to commit their own violent crimes.
Your rationalization is nothing more than a product of a failed society. Bringing it up as pragmatic advice might make sense, although still not for this incident where the "offense" seems to have been merely stopping a car on the side of the road. But invoking it as some universal value of "what ought" is a pure crab bucket mentality.
Then by your logic, every society on earth failed, because there are no places where you can act belligerently towards law enforcement and expect it to end well.
Correct, they failed. Cops are rightfully called all kinds of nice things in all countries. We are far from having what should be a non failed society. But liberal democratic capitalist countries get much closer to success.
Perhaps by your obtusely applied system of logic, but not by mine. Societal values are ideals to be worked towards, not some sort of axiomatic foundation that pops into existence fully formed. The failed society condemnation pertains to your remark, which comes from a place of having given up on the idea that governments should be accountable to their citizens - aka authoritarianism.
I'll repeat the bit about professionals being trained to avoid and deescalate. That is the point. I think the details of this, and many similar incidents clearly show a lack of attempt to deescalate or avoid. That was the clear argument I made in my post and am re-emphasizing now. This clear trend shows either malicious intent by professionals or amateurs put in a situation they shouldn't have been allowed near and those above them should be held accountable for it.
The IDF is not law enforcement. It's a foreign army. It treats Palestinians with utter contempt and has no problem with killing them. Its job is to protect Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land and to prevent the Palestinians from resisting Israeli rule.
Comparing the IDF to law enforcement in a democratic country is not relevant.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.