The truth slowly comes to light: Israel‘s genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.
Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.
Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”
Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”
Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges… Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline “We were ordered to kill”.
Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war – often referred to as the Six-Day War – not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders.
The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.
None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza – levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population – is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.
Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” – the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.
Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration.
Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.
Hellbound and Down 