Israeli helicopter pilots who shoot missiles into Palestinian homes killing children are acting with “moral values,” and in the name of “democracy,” according to a “60 Minutes” segment on Israel’s anti-Netanyahu protests that aired last night.
The heroes of Lesley Stahl’s CBS News report from Israel were four Israeli reservists who are taking part in the “democracy” protests and refusing to serve under Netanyahu’s far-right government. They explained that they no longer trust the morality of their leaders:
Shira Eting: I was a combat helicopter pilot…. If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions.
Ron Scherf [Commander in the special forces]: In the moral values of them.
Shira Eting: Exactly.
Stahl did nothing to push back against the claim that killing Palestinian children is a moral action.
Israel has killed hundreds of children in Gaza in recent years by firing missiles at apartment buildings said to be the homes of resistance leaders. Numerous international human rights organizations have called these actions war crimes. One earlier refuser, pilot Yonatan Shapira, stopped flying such missions because his air force commander told him that Israel would never employ the same policy of “targeted assassinations” if Jewish civilians were in the apartment buildings.
Stahl’s report erased Palestinians. She asked briefly about the occupation, which has been absent from the demands of the protesters, and Eting provided this lame response:
If you wanna be able to solve the occupation one day, and I think that everyone here does, the only way to stop it and to solve it is to make sure Israel remains a democracy.
But again no pushback. No mention of the fact that countless human rights groups have found that Israel is not a democracy, it can’t be; it practices apartheid. And very few Jewish Israelis want to reverse that policy, or remove Jewish settlers from Palestinian territories.
Stahl made no mention of murderous statements directed at Palestinians by Netanyahu ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Yes, Stahl described them as racist, but offered no report on their effects on actual Palestinians, who are dying across the West Bank as Israel expands settlements at a record pace.
The thrust of this report was the liberal Zionist claim that Israel is no different from democracies around the world, threatened by right wing demagogues. And so these children-killing pilots are heroes in that global struggle.
Omri Ronen: What happened in Hungary and Poland will not happen here.
Lesley Stahl: There is a trend and it’s going against you around the world
Shira Eting: We’ll be the first to stop it.
Lesley Stahl: (laughs) You’re all determined.
So Jewish supremacists will save democracy for the world.
The U.S. media continues to protect Israel from its own actions. The U.S. media– and reporters steeped in Zionism — continue to project a benign image of a rightwing apartheid society to the world.
P.S. The first segment of last night’s “60 Minutes” was a piece on Ukrainian resistance to occupation that implicitly defended the Ukrainians’ right to attack civilian targets inside Russia. Palestinians have never been accorded that right by our media.
“One earlier refuser, pilot Yonatan Shapira , stopped flying such missions because his air force commander told him that Israel would never employ the same policy of “targeted assassinations” if Jewish civilians were in the apartment buildings.”
Middle East Monitor ran this piece in 2021:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210517-ex-israeli-pilot-our-army-is-a-terrorist-organisation-run-by-war-criminals/
A former Israeli Air Force pilot, Yonatan Shapira, has described the Israeli government and army as “terrorist organisations” run by “war criminals.”…Captain Shapira who had resigned from the Israeli army in 2003 at the height of the Palestinian Second Intifada explained in an exclusive interview with Anadolu News Agency why he realized after joining the army that he was “part of a terrorist organisation”….I realised during the Second Intifada what the Israeli Air Force and Israeli military are doing are war crimes, terrorising a population of millions of Palestinians. When I realised that, I decided to not just leave but to organise other pilots that will publicly refuse to take part in these crimes…
It wouldn’t surprise me if Leslie Stahl thought she was being courageous to even hint at Israel’s longstanding, ongoing crime spree. On the other hand, 60 Minutes’ Zionist minders may have received instructions that a limited hangout was needed. Hard to say with all the deception that’s going on. It’s worthy of a Shakespearean play.
“If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children….”
__________________________
We should, none of us, be surprised at the psychotically convoluted thinking evinced by these pilots. Rather, we should be thankful for their willingness to say the quiet parts out loud. In so doing they reveal the extent to which political Zionism has perverted not only logic, but language, both in Israel and the United States.
The interviewer, Leslie Stahl, is no more qualified to challenge or even question the pilots than she is to discuss any issue consuming Israel at the moment, from Apartheid to Zionism. My guess is that she was assigned the interview because her producers knew she was “steeped in Zionism”, lacked any critical distance and would serve up a pandering idiocy.
One could almost feel sorry for them. Their Zionist conditioning has euchred them into a collective gaslighted trance, where they can no longer trust their eyes, minds or experience. Morally adrift, they grasp at any idea or explanation that comes to mind even if the result is a clownish Trumpian nonsense word salad:
Eting said: if you wanna be able to solve the occupation one day, and I think that everyone here does, the only way to stop it and to solve it is to make sure Israel remains a democracy.
Translation from Formal Hasbara: We had to destroy the village and kill all the inhabitants to save it.
Every word in Eting’s comment is either deliberately or unwittingly false. “Everybody here” does not wish to end the Occupation and Israel is not a democracy and making sure Israel “remains” a democracy is not the “only way to solve it”. Three for three!
The learned dishonesty at the heart of political Zionism is not only corrosive of the human soul it so weakens critical thinking that the connection between language and meaning…evaporates.
Consider how diligently Zionism proscribes certain memes: Apartheid; Occupation; Palestinian statehood; Zionism-as-Oppression and the Right of Return on the one hand and simultaneously prescribes others: IHRA; Two state solution; most moral army; most reliable ally; only Jewish democracy in the Middle East; desert bloom; Israel has the right to defend itself…etc.
Is it now permissible to ask who gets to assign meaning in American English?
The chilling contempt of these Israelis pilots have for the lives of Palestinian children reminded me of nothing so much as the haughty amorality of the English elite that Jonathan Swift so deftly satirized in A Modest Proposal by outlining the processes for the efficient disposal-via-commodification of “surplus” Irish children.
Question for Any Zionist: Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to publicly voice contempt – not mere criticism – for political Zionism and the Israel Defense Forces?
View here 794 Palestine posters on the IDF
Lesley Stahl should be ashamed of herself. Mike Wallace would have asked and asked the extra tough questions.
Clearly the Western Media has been muzzled by the moneyed interests on the apartheid side.
Why care about children…they don’t vote. SHAME, ISRAEL…shame!!!