Israel's Troops Are Turning AGAINST The War In Gaza!

Right, so Israel’s armed forces are in larger and larger numbers, refusing to return to the front lines and as much as I certainly appreciate few will sympathise with them for having grown disillusioned with the ongoing war on Gaza and beyond, tired of fighting as so many have become, the ramifications for Israel are massive, because for as much as Israel continues to be supplied with arms to continue their atrocities, they do need people to physically use them after all and this is becoming a bigger and bigger issue the longer matters drag on, especially as it will clearly be one factor contributing to the opinion of a retired IDF officer, who has publicly stated that not only is Israel in societal and economic freefall, but it is just plainly losing in Gaza and Lebanon and if you’re perhaps scratching your head given the scenes we’ve observed in Gaza and the fact it has been razed north to south, and are being told Israel are losing there, then this story about IDF morale and the depths of despair felt by some in the IDF, is perhaps something worth listening to for a bit.
Right, so disillusionment in the ranks of the IDF. Who cares? You might think, we’ve seen these people kicking kids toys around, rifling through underwear drawers, jeering at the innocent people of Palestine as they blow up their homes, all put out on social media by the soldiers themselves as they get a sick kick out of mocking the people who’s lives they have destroyed, displaced, up-turned and in far too many cases ended.
But for others certainly, any sense of what they were doing was for the greater good, as their national duty is more and more giving way to desertion and a flat refusal to serve any longer and this is a story we’re not hearing much about, but very much underlines the fragility of Israel’s actions despite the bombastic and genocidal statements that may be produced by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu or any of his other equally deranged coalition government ministers.
It was a story that was first covered in a Hebrew Israeli new outlet called Ha-Makom, entitled ‘Quiet and muted refusal: Regular fighters are no longer willing to continue fighting’ that first exposed the dissent now becoming a bigger and bigger issue for the IDF, because these are not just one or two soldiers refusing to return to active duty, it has been the majority of entire platoons, as this excerpt of their coverage shows:
‘After a year of war, the term burnout is small for the fighters of the Nahal Brigade. In September, they entered the 11th round in Gaza. Each round lasts about five weeks. After that, they go to rest at home. For 11 months, a fighting spirit filled their souls, round after round. But in the latter, something changed. Out of a platoon of 30 soldiers, only six showed up. The rest took out gimmicks.
"I call it refusal and rebellion," says Inbal, mother of one of the soldiers in the team. "They return to the same buildings they cleaned, each time recapturing them. They have been to the Zeytoun neighbourhood [of Gaza City] three times already. They understand that it is futile and pointless." Although they were a fifth of the departmental personnel, the commander insisted that they enter Gaza. "Because they were a small team, they couldn't go out on missions. They just stayed there and waited for the time to pass. It was even more unnecessary."
Last spring there was a meeting of the Nahal graduates and fighters. "My son finished his job and had to decide what he does next," says Rona. She is interviewed under a pseudonym, like the other parents in the article, for fear that the army will molest their children. "He came home happy, went to the meeting and came back turned off. He said that a very honest conversation developed between the fighters who simply told everyone who could stay away from the fighting to stay away. They are not really protected. When you are told that they will come to replace you, it is 50-50. The wards are empty, everyone who is not dead or injured is mentally damaged. There are very few left who returned to fight And they are not normal either. This was before all the killings in Lebanon. And since then he says to me: 'I don't know what army they are thinking of entering Lebanon with, but I am not returning to the battalion.’
Rinse and repeat, covering the same areas time after time only to find them booby-trapped once more, demonstrating the inability and impossibility frankly that Israel is capable of the total victory Benjamin Netanyahu is hell bent on, though more and more that appears to be an excuse, notably in reflection of what IDF soldiers are apparently saying here, to just keep the war going for the sake of keeping him in his post.
These soldiers are returning time after time to areas they’ve already cleared, where they may have lost friends fighting there previously and they wonder what they actually died for, when the futility of the situation seems obvious. You might not sympathise much with these people given what they’ve done and done willingly, the just following orders excuse being what it is, but it puts Israel in a bind if more and more of their soldiers refuse to return to their posts. Refusal and rebellion. This may incense the current Israeli regime, but actually, according to a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, refusing to follow orders that could be construed to be a war crime, and anything Israel is doing in Gaza certainly, is being looked at as such, is party to a court case at the International Court of Justice, is exactly what IDF soldiers should be doing.
The chap in question here is a guy called Eran Etzion, former IDF himself, and a massive critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, which does say something of how far gone Bibi is given Etzion was happy enough to work under four of his Prime Ministerial predecessors, and lets face it, this genocide, this occupation it didn’t begin with Netanyahu and more than it began on October 7th of last year.
That said however, he was very candida in what he would do if he was in the position these current IDF soldiers are in, saying:
‘“They should refuse. If a soldier or an officer is expected to commit something that might be suspected as a war crime, they must refuse. That's what I would do if I were a soldier. That's what I think any Israeli soldier should do,”’
Going even further than that though, is retired Israeli Major-General Yitzhak Brik, and he’s underlined the damage to Israel being done against that backdrop of the futility of the ongoing attacks in Gaza and the despair and disillusionment that is eliciting amongst IDF soldiers in a recent interview with another Israeli news outlet Maariv, where he said:
‘The country is in the process of crashing. The economy is crashing, society is crashing, we have a problem with the world that we are losing.
The public is told that tunnels are being destroyed – that’s one big lie. I talk to those who do the work, including commanders, and they tell me that the public is being lied to. We destroyed maybe a few percent, the entire area of the tunnels in Hamas’ hands.
Hamas is in the tunnels, almost all of them, contrary to what the army says about having destroyed fifty percent. They live in tunnels with air conditioners, fuel, everything. They collected food for a year or two. [The IDF] don’t have the power to replace. You can’t keep a person who occupied Gaza for more than a few months because he has to get a replacement.’
Brik has also reiterated just how bad things are for Israel in Lebanon as well, as they face down not just Hezbollah, but UNFIL peacekeepers and the Lebanese army itself too. On this matter he said:
‘The army today only enters the Litani [river], as far as the Litani. Why? Because this army is tiny. In ’78 it reached the Litani and in ’82 it got to to Beirut. Now it’s only managed three kilometers. Since Yom Kippur until today, there have been 14 chiefs of staff, 11 of whom are red berets, Sayeret Matkal and paratroopers. Friends bring friends without any supervision or monitoring, [it’s a clique]. They don’t know the army. The main problem of this group is that they grew up as paratroopers in the Sayeret Matkal. The whole picture of the overall area – armour, infantry, planes – did not speak to them.’
Saying pretty much what I have in several other videos regarding the Lebanon invasion, that those fighting don’t know the terrain, don’t know the lay of the land, don’t really know the capabilities of their opponents, too often measured in terms of comparison to Hamas and there really isn’t a comparison here, because for as easy as it is to label Hamas and Hezbollah as being much of a muchness, they are worlds apart in terms of capability.
According to Brik Israel is propagandised into oblivion, he came out with a really poignant way of describing it too, saying:
‘The public lives on the Titanic, rejoices at every little success, and makes a huge victory out of it.’
They think they are winning, that big victory awaits, all as the ship they are on sinks. Economically Israel is falling through the floor, societally it is becoming readily more apparent of just what a sickness it is that so many in that country do not see Palestinians as people, but as something to be eradicated and more of the world now sees that and sees them for that now and are horrified and appalled by it as right thinking people with empathy and actual morals naturally would be.
And as much as I can cite a guy like Yitzhak Brik and it might be seen as nice and convenient because he’s giving Netanyahu’s war and his policies on that a beasting, that isn’t to say he’s some pro Palestine supporter here either, you don’t rise to become a Major-General in the IDF by being that, because he has certainly echoed a lot of Israeli and US propaganda in his time as well and has regarded the likes of Iran and their allies, their proxies as the media like to call them, along with the likes of Russia and China as an Axis of Evil, so don’t believe he’s some born again, seeing the light type, he definitely isn’t, but when even someone like that can identify the damage being done by Netanyahu’s regime to the future existence of the Israeli state itself, and where former IDF soldiers are supporting the boycott of returning to their posts as many IDF soldiers now are doing, there is no outcome to this war where Israel comes out on top where they can say they’ve won and legitimately point to actual gains they’ve made, because there are none and every life lost therefore on both sides is a waste that by rights should be avoided.
On top of all their woes directly linked to the war itself however, there is the issue of BDS going on around the world as well and well, Israel isn’t exactly having its door beaten down by people wishing to invest there anymore. In fact the opposite is true as this video recommendation will tell you all about, a massive multimillion dollar deal just went south and it's all down to boycott, divestment and sanctions. Check out that story as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.