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In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book that proposed to
rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Its central point was that the
Nazi genocide was chiefly made possible by the existence of a deep
form of “demonological antisemitism” that had seeped into German
society; Hitler and the Nazi regime weren’t so much agitating against
Jews as they were simply giving ordinary Germans the green light to
act on their already virulent genocidal attitudes. Without this form
of “eliminationist antisemitism,” which according to Goldhagen was
essentially a part of the fabric of German society long before the
Nazis came to power, the Holocaust would not have been possible.

Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was an international
bestseller. It purported to unseat what had previously been considered
the conventional understanding among scholars of the motivations of
the German soldiers who carried out the Nazi genocide — that they were essentially “ordinary men” without any particularly strong ideological indoctrination who found a way of rationalizing their participation,
albeit in many cases willingly and enthusiastically, in acts of human
barbarism under orders of the Nazi regime. One of the most important
works that examined the mindset of the German soldiers was Christopher Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, an itinerant
paramilitary force of erstwhile civilians who were transformed into “professional killers” that perpetrated the mass murder of tens of
thousands of Polish Jews in the space of a few months in 1942.

Daniel Goldhagen’s study also examined Reserve Police Battalion 101,
but it set itself the objective of attacking Browning’s explanation
for how those everyday Germans became such “willing executioners.” For Goldhagen, what he called the “monocausal explanation” that those
soldiers were congenital antisemites was sufficient to understand how
they were capable of such monstrosities. One of the reasons that
Goldhagen’s book gained such widespread attention was that it was an
indictment of German society writ large, proposing to hold every
German individually responsible for the Holocaust instead of laying
blame exclusively at the door of the Nazi regime.

Most Holocaust scholars harshly criticized Goldhagen for his overly
simplistic and reductionist narrative, which they believed flattened
the diverse historical processes that made such a systematic act of
mass murder possible. In Browning’s afterword to Ordinary Men, he said
that many of Goldhagen’s observations of the voluntarism exhibited by
German soldiers in massacring Jews were unoriginal and didn’t
contradict many of the insights already set forth by historians before
him. Browning referenced Raul Hilberg’s authoritative account of the
Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, which asserted that
the killers “were not different in their moral makeup from the rest of
the population. The German perpetrator was not a special kind of
German,” instead coming from a “remarkable cross-section of the German population.”[1]

Hilberg believed that the Goldhagen thesis was weakened by two
important factors: “not all the shooters were Germans…[and] not all
the victims were Jews.” But more importantly, Goldhagen’s rendition of
a “demon latent in the German mind” that took on the form of a
“super-pogrom in the hands of shooters and guards” made it look like
the Holocaust was “orgiastic” instead of calculated and methodical:

“All else, including the gas chambers in which two and a half million
Jews died unobservedly by the perpetrators, is secondary, a mere
‘backdrop’ of the slaughter under the open sky.”

The same danger lies in drawing similar conclusions about Israeli
society today.

It would be tempting to conclude, after ten months of relentless
genocidal war, countless victim testimonies of indiscriminate killing,
mass executions, and systematic prison rapes, dozens of gleeful TikTok
videos from Israeli soldiers boasting of their destruction of civilian infrastructure, and most recently, insurrectionary riots from Israelis
over the right to torture and rape Palestinian prisoners without
repercussions, that Israeli society is afflicted with a demonological
and eliminationist hate against Palestinians that goes as far back as
Zionism itself.

These observations aren’t wrong, of course. But they aren’t the entire
story either. Much like the Nazi gas chambers created a routinized
assembly line of death that insulated the perpetrators from the
victims, so too is the latest Israeli technological innovation through
the use of AI systems to loosely identify targets for dropping bombs
from a distance. Yet since the Israeli military is a people’s army
made up of a remarkable cross-section of the Israeli population, and
since many of the atrocities on the ground in Gaza were the product of
the individual voluntarism of Israeli soldiers — Israeli outlets like
Haaretz and +972 Magazine explained this away as “lax rules of
engagement” — it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the
Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. It is in
significant measure a genocide from above and from below.

On Zionist eliminationism

Drawing historical analogies is always tricky, not least because
political regimes and their underlying motivations for carrying out
atrocities during war vary wildly. The kind of imperial German racial
supremacy that was part of the genocide of European Jewry was
different from the settler colonial imperative of the “elimination of
the native” that characterized the genocide of the Indigenous peoples
of the Americas by European colonists, or indeed the Zionist
movement’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 or the Gaza
genocide today. But despite these differences, a common thread still
runs through them, and so drawing these comparisons becomes
unavoidable.

For all of Goldhagen’s distortions of the historical processes that
made the destruction of European Jewry possible, the debate that his
work aroused is instructive in understanding the current genocidal manifestations of the Zionist project and how it is reflected in the
attitudes of “ordinary Israelis” conscripted for war.

You would be hard-pressed to fault people for reaching that conclusion
upon examining Zionism’s founding doctrines, from Jabotinsky’s “Iron
Wall” to Yosef Weitz’s transfer committees, all the way through the
Nakba and the Gaza genocide today. It’s hard not to conclude that it
is all the logical endpoint of Zionist settler colonialism and that
the general Israeli populace is now infected with one of its
particularly eliminationist manifestations.

As if to confirm this verdict, when news broke that nine Israeli
soldiers suspected of gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the
notorious Sde Teiman detention center were detained by the military
police for questioning, Israeli protesters flocked to the prison in
outrage over the arrest of the soldiers, who they called “heroes.”
Soon after, the question of whether it is legitimate to rape
Palestinian prisoners became a serious topic of discussion at the
Knesset.

But just like Goldhagen erred in fixating on such a monocausal
explanation, it would be a mistake to ignore how this real sickness in
Israeli society has also coexisted with a liberal righteousness
embodied by outlets like Haaretz and +972 Magazine, which for all
their pretenses at exposing Israeli atrocities in Gaza through
interviews with military personnel, have also participated in
manufacturing consent for the genocide within Israeli society and
among “liberal” Israelis. Look no further than the Op-Eds and analysis
of Haaretz contributors like Amos Harel, who advocated for the
genocidal war from day one, or the continued dissemination of atrocity propaganda connected to mass rapes.

More important still, this intra-Israeli media narrative was also
actively shaped by the Israeli government and Israeli politicians, who
played key roles in genocidal incitement. But of course, it could
hardly be said that they weren’t already planting in fertile ground.
Israeli society was ready after the shock of October 7, and the
Zionist regime was there to capitalize on it to the fullest extent.
Both society and the state became co-conspirators.

Genocide from below
The concentrated acts of human cruelty on the part of Israeli soldiers
are not a new revelation. As soon as the ground invasion of Gaza
began, Palestinians started reporting what they witnessed. Some of it
was caught on camera — and promptly ignored by Western media — and
most of it was not. But all of it was continuously relayed by
Palestinians who experienced the horrors firsthand.

This site has reported on a portion of these crimes, based largely on testimonies from survivors, and even that encompasses a wide gamut of
sadistic practices and acts of violence that show a high degree of
personal initiative on the part of Israeli soldiers.

In November, Palestinians reported how Israeli soldiers arbitrarily
sniped at children held in their mothers’ arms as they fled south down
Salah al-Din Street, forcing them to throw their children to the side
of the road and keep marching. Other soldiers forced disabled people
and people on crutches to walk without assistance, and when they fell
to the ground, they were forced to crawl through the checkpoint.
Soldiers forced others to strip naked and crawl into a ditch, where
some were shot dead. Others were forced to sit in the ditch for hours
among the bodies of others who had been executed, before eventually
being allowed to carry on. In February, Gazans reported on how Israeli
soldiers and attack drones were following an open-fire policy of
targeting anyone who walked in specific zones, often killing mothers
next to their children as they fled Israeli forces. In March, Israeli
soldiers fired on starving Gazans seeking aid from food convoys,
massacring hundreds in what has become known as the “flour massacre.”

Israeli soldiers also routinely kidnapped civilians and tortured them arbitrarily. Sometimes they were arrested and taken somewhere far away
in another part of Gaza, where they were stripped naked and then
forced to walk back to their shelters in the pitch black of night in
the middle of a warzone. Others were forcefully conscripted as bait
and human shields.

During the first invasion of al-Shifa Hospital in November, Israeli
soldiers shot medical staff and patients when they tried to evacuate
the hospital. When others tried to come out to aid them, they were
shot also and left to decompose in the hospital courtyard and be eaten
by stray animals. During the second invasion of al-Shifa in March,
Israeli soldiers shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused
to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with
differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil
government employees who had gathered at the hospital to receive
salaries. At Nasser Hospital, Palestinians uncovered several mass
graves in April indicating that Israelis had executed hospital staff
and patients; some bodies were found with medical catheters still
attached, others with their hands bound.

All of this just scratches the surface, and none of it even touches
upon the more wide-ranging machinery of death wrought by official
military policy; the purposeful engineering of famine and the bombing
of bakeries and humanitarian aid; the targeting of hospitals with the
purpose of accelerating social collapse given the pivotal role of
Gazan hospitals as hubs for civil society during wartime; the bombing
of fleeing civilians on evacuation routes; the destruction of Gaza’s
economy; the destruction of the health system; the genocidal torture,
rape, and degradation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons; and of
course, the carpet-bombing of virtually every part of Gaza with bombs
meant to wipe out entire neighborhoods.

Many months after these reports emerged from Palestinians, some
liberal Israeli and Western outlets published accounts based on
anonymous testimony from soldiers and military officials that
confirmed what Palestinians had already been saying. In May, CNN
published a report based on the testimony of Israeli whistleblowers
detailing the torture of prisoners at Sde Teiman. The New York Times
followed it up with another report in June, detailing similar accounts
from the prison, in addition to accounts of rape. +972 Magazine put
out several reports on the different AI systems Israel used to
deliberately target civilians, such as Lavender, the Gospel, and
“Where’s Daddy.” In March, Haaretz published an exposé on how
individual Israeli soldiers, with “no rules of engagement,” would
shoot unarmed civilians that stumbled into arbitrarily defined “kill
zones,” and that they were essentially given free rein to shoot
anything that moved on sight, even when they were identified as
civilians who posed no military threat. Another July report in +972
further corroborated this open-fire policy, detailing how soldiers
would kill people and posthumously count them as “terrorists;” how
these bodies piled up on the sides of the roads so much that they had
to eventually be buried and hidden when humanitarian convoys passed
by; how even when there were no explicit orders to exact revenge
against civilians, field commanders deliberately turned a blind eye
and gave their subordinates carte blanche to do what they wanted
(again, +972 euphemistically calls this lax rules of engagement); and
how Israeli soldiers burned down Palestinian homes for fun when the
homes had fulfilled their operational purpose.

The picture that emerges is multifaceted, in which genocidaires can be
found at both the top and the bottom of the military hierarchy. Of
course, it is useful for Israel to focus only on the latter, to paint
them as aberrations in military policy rather than organic extensions
of it.

But the “lax rules of engagement” coupled with the clear genocidal
incitement by Israeli leaders and politicians tell a different story.
Israeli leaders know their society; Netanyahu knew what would be
understood when he implored Israeli soldiers to “Remember what Amalek
did to you;” President Haim Herzog knew what the interpretation of “no uninvolved civilians in Gaza” would entail. The reams of genocidal
statements from Israeli officials could just as well have been general guidelines in lieu of official marching orders amid the peculiar
absence of “rules of engagement” — in other words, the encouragement
of “ordinary Israelis” in the military to exact retribution

And this desire for retribution did not come out of nowhere. Of
course, preexisting racism against Palestinians undoubtedly played a
role in the dehumanization that was necessary to accomplish what they
did, but that racism was fanned to demonological proportions through
the persistent and widespread propagation of atrocity propaganda
around the events of October 7, capitalizing upon and in fact building
up the rage and desire for retribution among the Israelis who were
soon to be conscripted into the army for the genocidal campaign.

Perhaps in other periods of Zionist colonial history, Israel was
content to rule over Palestinians as second-class citizens under an
apartheid regime, as Israel has done over the past 55 years, so long
as they did not resist too violently. It could gradually carry out a
process of slow ethnic cleansing in the meantime, pushing them into ever-smaller enclaves until they are forced to leave of their own
accord. At other points in history, particularly during wartime,
Israel could expel more Palestinians from their lands en masse, as it
did in 1948 and 1967.

But since the Zionist brand of settler colonialism desires to replace
the natives entirely, it stands to reason that the resort to genocide
would always be an option if native resistance ever reached the level
that it eventually did on October 7 — that is, to strike at the very
heart of Israel’s security doctrine of deterrence and its carefully
crafted image as an invincible army. And what happened on October 7
far surpassed what Israel in its colonial contempt could ever have
imagined Palestinians to be capable of achieving.

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/netanyahus-willing-executioners-how-ordinary-israelis-became-mass-murderers/

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