Israel’s invisible victims To the west, Israeli military casualties don’t count Melanie Phillips
The sickening reaction of so much of the western public to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza doesn’t just reveal a frightening degree of bigotry, double standards and moral bankruptcy. It doesn’t just involve a staggering absence of knowledge about the Middle East, the history of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland and the fact that the forces Israel is fighting are also waging a war against the west itself. It also displays a brutalised callousness based on profound ignorance of Israeli society.
The hostility towards Israel’s military action is based on understandable revulsion at the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza whose homes have been flattened by the Israel Defence Forces. Through relentless, disproportionate and often deeply distorted media coverage, this has eclipsed the brief window of sympathy that opened towards Israeli suffering from the depraved Hamas atrocities of October 7 in which more than 1200 Israeli women, men, children and infants were slaughtered, raped, tortured, decapitated and burned alive by Palestinian Arabs.
In the war that has followed to destroy Hamas, Israel has been portrayed as attacker rather than victim. In fact, the toll of Israel’s victims is steadily mounting. Yet to the west, these victims are invisible.
At time of writing, 433 Israeli soldiers have been killed since October 7, with 104 IDF soldiers killed during ground combat in Gaza so far.
This toll is not just a tragedy for the families of the fallen. Every one of these losses is also experienced as a knife to Israel’s heart. For these young men and women are felt to be the sons and daughters of all of us here in Israel.
This is simply not understood in the west, where the killing of soldiers in battle is regarded in a quite different way from the killing of civilians. When the west’s soldiers are killed in battle, this is obviously a tragedy for their loved ones. Such soldiers, however, are not regarded as victims but as fallen combatants. Their deaths are felt as a personal wound by their families but as a national wound by the country. In Israel, the killing of any soldier is felt as a personal wound by the country as well as by the family.
This is because the military occupies an entirely different space in Israel’s psyche than it does in Britain, America and other western countries. Those armies consist of recruits who have chosen to make soldiering their life. Israel, by contrast, has an army of conscripts, with young people required to undertake national service when they reach the age of 18. Although unprecedented numbers of reservists have enlisted in this current war because they understand Israel faces a battle for its very existence, these are mostly young people who are required to tear themselves away from careers, university courses, new wives and young children to put themselves in harm’s way.
When they fall in battle, their loss is not distanced from the daily lives of most people as it is in Britain or America. Israel is a society that exists year in, year out with the fear of losing its young people in the never-ending battle against those who attempt to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth. Families watching their children grow up have to live with the background dread that, when the children reach 18, they may be drafted into harm’s way.
In this tiny country, those killed in combat are mourned viscerally across the community as someone’s son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter. When they fall, their death not only shatters their family but also tears the nation apart.
What makes it unbearable is that the flower of Israel’s youth is being sacrificed for one reason alone — the oldest hatred that wants the Jewish people gone.
Israel arose as a reborn state from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust. On top of that inherited trauma, which is seared into Israel’s collective consciousness, erupted the genocidal barbarities of October 7. In addition to the horror over those who were slaughtered, kidnapped into the unimaginable hell of Hamas captivity or left physically and psychologically damaged for life by depraved forces intent upon wiping out the Jewish people, yet more Jews are now being forced to sacrifice themselves in the attempt to defeat this evil. In the desperate attempt to ensure that no more Jews are added to the murderous toll inflicted on October 7, Jews in military uniform are themselves dying every day.
And to add to this agony, the so-called civilised world doesn’t offer sympathy or support in this struggle against barbarism but instead blames its Jewish victims. When people in the west falsely and malevolently accuse Israel of recklessly or wilfully causing the death of Palestinian civilians, it never occurs to them that Israel would go to enormous lengths — indeed, has always gone to enormous lengths — to avoid any such military action because it knows the horrific cost that will inevitably be borne by the remnant of a people whose numbers have already been so viciously reduced through the centuries.
In a country where every child is a miraculous reaffirmation of Jewish resilience against the attempts over the course of more than two millennia to wipe out the Jewish people, the death of every one of these young Israeli soldiers tears open the historic wound.
This war has many midwives. A reckoning is due in Israel itself for the role played in the October 7 catastrophe by the governing class, from the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu down through the top brass of the IDF and security establishment. And both the Obama and Biden administrations in the US bear a heavy responsibility for having empowered and incentivised Iran, the infernal godfather and patron of Hamas and Hezbollah.
But the fundamental reason for this war is that the world will not permit the Jews to live in peace and security in their own ancestral homeland. There is no other conflict in the world in which the west has encouraged, funded and incentivised those waging a war of annihilation as the west has done with the “Palestinians” for the best part of a century. There is no other conflict in the world in which an indigenous people that is the victim of existential attack is regarded as aggressive interlopers, and their defence against annihilation wickedly misrepresented as deliberate mass killing and even genocide, as much of the west has done with Israel.
More Israeli soldiers are being killed than would otherwise be unavoidable because, in this as in every war Israel is forced to fight against an enemy bent on the extermination of the Jews, the west insists that Israel go to lengths to which these countries themselves would never go to protect the lives of its enemy civilians — lengths which cause more IDF casualties than if Israel had a free hand to defend its people.
And unlike the west, which usually wages war from the safe distance of the skies, Israel puts boots on the booby-trapped ground, with its commanders leading from the front and dying heroically alongside their sergeants and privates.
Not only does the west refuse to acknowledge Israel’s desperate plight; not only does it display indifference to Jewish suffering in Israel; but those demanding an Israeli cease-fire or that the IDF put their own forces at risk in order further to protect Gaza’s civilians are also making it shockingly plain that, if there’s a choice between the lives of Israelis defending themselves against genocide and the unintentional killing of Palestinians in a just war waged by Israel for its survival, it’s the Jews who must die.
May the memory of all of Israel’s fallen children in the lion-hearted IDF — Jews, Arabs, Druze and others — be a blessing. And may their sacrifice not be in vain.
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