RUNNING AMOK: Social Media Feeds Of Israeli Soldiers Depict The Ugly Sadistic Truth Of Zionism & The US
Zionism is a self-contained system of truth, with an origin story inspired by divine right, a bridge over its wretched beginnings.
Editor’s Note: While the entire, ongoing US/Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank is perverse, the perversion is epitomized by the steady roll of twisted images Israeli ‘Defense’ Force soldiers proudly display on social media. In their giddy sickness, they embody and betray both the evil of ZioNazi racism and the American government which — from the White House through Congress on to the State and War departments and corporate media — supports and dutifully serves it.
Because of the support of the US, the Israeli crimes, depravity, obscenities and perversion below are also OURS.
— Mark Taylor
In 2024 at the border with Egypt, settlers blocking aid inflate bounce houses and distribute snacks to soldiers, and a child with an Israeli flag tied around her neck like a cape says to a journalist, “What I care? Kill them. I don’t care.” These children are conscripted into the Israeli military down the line.
By Mary Turfah
The Baffler (6/18/24)
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE ISRAELIS? The question as I have heard it asked, with emphasis on the word wrong, is raised not in response to footage of the genocidal death and destruction the IDF has wrought upon Gaza but to what crumbs Israeli soldiers themselves have shared of it. A small sampling of the genre, organized alphabetically by mood:
Carefree. An Israeli soldier inflates a soccer ball, saying to the camera—and presumably his child—“Before we went into Gaza, I promised you that we would bounce a ball on the beach . . . I took a ball [I’ve] carried around.” Another soldier asks him if he’d brought the pump with him too, and he says, “Of course, what do you think, I bought it here in Gaza?” Once the ball is ready the soldiers kick it around in a circle, three of them wearing swim trunks they’d possibly found in the drawers of the bedroom of the people whose house they’re inside. Someone walks the phone recording all of this through a large hole in the wall and, showing us the ruins of Gaza, says, “What a view! What a beach!”
(Casually) Destructive. A bit of a misnomer, since they’re all destructive. I mean actively destroying things. In one video, two Israeli soldiers lean against a ledge. One lights a cigarette as the entire backdrop explodes.
Devoted/Birthday. A soldier blows up a residential block to celebrate his daughter’s birthday.
Domestic. Israeli soldiers show off their cooking skills in the homes of people they’ve killed or displaced (or both). There is olive oil in every house, they say. “The Gazan cuisine, from what we saw, is full of spices.”
Graffiti artist. A soldier poses next to what I presume is his work—the words “Instead of erasing graffiti, let us erase Gaza” spray painted in firetruck red onto a building in Gaza. Beneath the show of unifying genocidal intent, he has added the Star of David, also in red.
Feminist. A female IDF soldier walks alongside a row of Palestinian men raising their arms in surrender, identification papers in hand. (The New York Times wrote that “Israel’s female combat soldiers are pushing new boundaries after rushing into battle” in an admiring report on women’s participation in the war.)
Looter (Thrifty). Israeli soldiers carry large sums of cash and jewelry, taken from homes in Gaza. A soldier holds a delicate silver chain between his fingers. Another soldier, recording him, says, “Noa, look, your boyfriend brought you a new necklace.” He pauses then adds, “Made in Gaza.”
Predatorial. In one photo, two Israeli soldiers snuggle up in the twin sized bed of a child they’ve either killed or displaced. In another, a child’s doll is splayed out on the hood of a car. Another soldier in a child’s bed. And another in a crib. Maybe this one goes in carefree: soldiers giggle uncontrollably in an emptied playground, pushing each other in red-binned carts.
Romantic. An Israeli soldier has announced his upcoming wedding date onto an inside wall of a house belonging to people Israel had either killed or displaced (or both).
Vulgar/Kinky. In one photo, two soldiers walk through the streets of Gaza. The soldier on the photo’s left wears a nude bra over his uniform. The soldier on the right holds the tip of the cup between his fingers. His tongue is out. In another video, a soldier dangles women’s underwear over the face of a colleague, asleep on a couch inside a Palestinian home. In a video, a soldier shares a revelation, “I’m going through these terrorists’ houses looking for guns and explosives . . . at every single house”—he can hardly contain his excitement—“inside of Gaza this is what I see. Every single—unbelievable.” He opens a dresser, narrating, “Two or three drawers stuffed with the most, ehh, exotic lingerie that you can imagine. Just piles of it. Every single house. Stuffed to the brim! Look at that!” he says, dipping in a hand, lacing his fingers through it, “Unbelieeevaboh,” his British accent thickening. He adds, following a strange grunting sound, “These naughty, naughty Gazans.” The video, shared as an Instagram story, includes a poll: the prompt is “WHAT DYA THINK,” and viewers choose from the following: (1) Kinky terrorism, (2) Wtf, (3) Halal, (4) Haram.
I’m sure I’ve missed some all-timers.
While many viewers might find this content disturbing, they are not the target audience. In Israel, where a majority opposes a ceasefire and supports starving Gaza, this content is, on the whole, incredibly well-received. It offers the folks back home an image of fortified dominance, the illusion of control. In March 2024, the liberal Zionist daily Haaretz detailed, in a report titled, “We’re Not Only Here to Fuck Hamas,” how battlefield imagery has flooded online dating profiles in Israel. Beyond its sexual currency, this content, like the torture of Palestinians aired on mainstream Israeli television, functions as entertainment. Telegram channels sharing graphic images of dead or dying Palestinians—and foreign aid workers—have amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The image of the shrunken corpse of a nine-year-old Palestinian boy with cerebral palsy, starved to death by Israel, appeared on one feed as part of a movie poster that included the boy’s severely cachectic face alongside a picture of E.T. in his bicycle basket, riding into the night sky. The film would be called, “A.H.M.E.T.” The boy’s actual name was Yazan; his mother called him Yazouna.
Historians like Ilan Pappé hoped that if the Israeli public understood the injustice committed against the Palestinians, they might reevaluate the cost of their world. Pappé worked to reform the system from within and, after realizing “most,” even if they knew the truth, “would not walk the extra mile that such a position demanded of them,” left Israel.
A parallel, seemingly contradictory trend among Israelis is the widespread dismissal of these atrocities—the dead bodies, the grieving siblings, the starving children—as fake, part of what Zionists call “Pallywood,” Palestinians’ conspiratorial manipulation of the worldwide media to demonize Israel. A grandfather mourning his five-month-old grandson, killed by Israel in Gaza, was accused in the Jerusalem Post of crying over a doll. The Post later retracted the story (titled, “Al Jazeera posts blurred doll, claims it to be a dead Palestinian baby”), but only after it had gone viral.
The pervasive sadism cannot be explained away as the behavior of soldiers at war, adapted to the needs of a new generation whose social media-addiction compels them to document their cruelty. The tendencies to revel and deny coexist, not just within the population but within the same person. Near the border with Egypt, a settler, there to block humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, tells a journalist that (a) the Palestinians are not starving, and (b) they will continue to receive no food (i.e. starve) until the hostages are released.
These justifications are not for him; he throws them at a wall, and the listener is free to see what sticks.
Visceral revulsion
People ask what’s wrong with the Israelis because, I suspect, they find the depravity difficult to believe, let alone comprehend. Attempts to ascribe motive are met with visceral revulsion, an affront to something fundamental and big, like morality. I wonder how a person gets here. And I know our responsibility is not to find a way to psychologically accommodate it, but rather to work to stop it. Still, with every snuff video I find myself back at that same question. In strictly political terms I can appreciate the clarity it allows. Watching these soldiers, I do not feel concern, or anything at all, for them. Instead, the feeling is that of looking at a person, and where you expect recognition you find its inverse—a stunned alienation.
The cruelty itself, on display in videos like the one taken from the vantage point of Israeli soldiers driving their tank over the “I Love Gaza” sign (that greets visitors entering Gaza through the Rafah crossing), is somehow less disturbing than that it is presented with naked glee—no trace of the sober air that marks a person “doing what needs to be done” or an awareness that the rest of the world might not welcome overt, genocidal sadism as enthusiastically as the average Israeli. It’s like they can’t see us seeing them. Or maybe they don’t care. Attempts to explain Israeli behavior often reach for the biomedical. Surely this cannot be willed, they think, and so it must be pathological. In medicine, when a patient is unable to grasp their condition—as when a person experiencing hallucinations does not recognize them as such—we say they lack insight. Because we encounter the Israelis’ smug cruelty most acutely through individuals—be they government officials, soldiers, or formerly-known-as-Twitter warriors—it is easy to perceive it as an individuated “settler psychosis.” Psychosis replaces politics and history; it obscures how societies arrive at ideologies, reinforce and transmit them over time; and how dehumanization is preceded, constructed, and justified, so that it can be rendered with intention.
The logic of elimination
A Hebrew-only article in Haaretz’s food section from February 2024 interviewed two Israeli soldiers about their culinary habits in Gaza. Among the questions posed was a delicately worded consideration of the fact that these homes did not belong to them. “Can you tell us a little about the feelings of cooking and eating in the home of a Gazan family knowing that they had to evacuate or flee?” the interviewer asked, omitting the obvious third possibility. One soldier opened his reply with nonspecific remorse, “There are mixed feelings, no doubt. After all, I use their tools, in their house, when they are not here. But,” he pivoted, “on the other hand, we have to eat . . . It is important to clarify that these are abandoned houses, some of them destroyed or destined for demolition, and this is the way the IDF fights in Gaza.” On the one hand, there is the awareness of a world beyond them. On the other, the necessity of survival. Before and after, the logic of elimination.
Palestinians have been “abandoning” their houses for a long time. At the start of the Nakba in 1948, a member of the kibbutz called Karmia—between Ashkelon and Gaza, built over the Palestinian village of Hiribya—wrote of settling there in the 1950s, “I did not feel like I was stealing from others, I did not feel any guilt at all . . . those who had lived in the kibbutz area had abandoned their homes and fled.” This is what the kibbutz members had been told. In fact, Hiribya had been targeted by Israeli air raids during Operation Yo’av; its survivors fled south, many to Gaza. The operation was carried out following a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a ceasefire between Israel and the Arabs, and after the assassination of the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte (the “first UN casualty”). Bernadotte had arranged a truce and insisted Israel present a plan to ensure the safe return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, thus laying the groundwork for UNRWA. His assassination was carried out by members of the Stern Gang (a Zionist terrorist group later absorbed into the Israeli Defense Forces) whose actions Israel— also condemned by the UN Security Council (in Resolution 59)—refused to investigate.
It was a time of euphemisms. …
“One cannot erase what they do not see. Ari Shavit’s great-grandfather knew, Lord Balfour knew, Ben Gurion knew, the people in the kibbutzim knew, and every soldier in Gaza knows. And the people back home, they know too. In the years since 1917 or 1948 or 1982, Zionism has become increasingly difficult to maintain, and requires a certain insularity—sustained by the United States—that appears, if rooted in a less curated selection of facts and causal links, like insanity. For Israelis, this is self-preservation. Peering into the Zionist project, what we see is what Zionism requires.”
I wish nothing for these IsraHelli soldiers but:
Death
Traumatic PTSD
Suicide.
Call me a bitch: I take it as a compliment.
If Israelis are concerned that they're hated around the world, this is why. I wonder how they can not understand that.