On October 29, 2023 as Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza had just begun, Israel’s Prime Minister Netan-Nazi, aka Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel's army is “the most moral army in the world.”

This is a twisted lie he has repeated for over nine months. Israel—with the full backing, funding and political support of the United States—has deployed its army to bomb refugee shelters, homes, hospitals; to massacre hungry people lining up for food; to assassinate journalists and medical workers; set tents on fire, kill babies and forcibly starve over two million Palestinian human beings locked in Gaza.

This lie has been exposed by the death, devastation and destruction of Gaza. It's been exposed in video after video of Israeli soldiers gleefully and sadistically celebrating this murder and depravity. And now, a major exposure from +972 Magazine, ‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza, has revealed that the criminal savagery is systematic, deliberate, and directed from the highest levels of the Israeli army. The Israeli army destroyed homes, killed anyone they wanted and left “a landscape littered with civilian corpses, which are left to rot or be eaten by stray animals.”

Armies are a concentration of the morality and social relations of the society these armies are fighting for. So what can we learn about the nature of Israel, and about the nature of their American backers, from how Israel's army fights? 

** “Israeli soldiers routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a ‘no-go zone,’” soldiers told +972. They slaughtered people from the skies without warning—as they were walking with family, looking for food, or with their arms up in surrender. According to soldiers who spoke to +972, there is a “near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets—all with their commanders’ permission.”

** The Israeli soldiers treated all Palestinians as enemies. “[E]very man between the ages of 16 and 50 is suspected of being a terrorist,” one soldier said. “It is forbidden to walk around, and everyone who is outside is suspicious,” another added. “The feeling in the war room…was that every person we killed, we counted him as a terrorist.” This reflects the Nazi view expressed by Israel’s President in October 2023 and in a June post on Israel’s official X account (@Israel): “there are no innocent civilians” in Gaza. 

** The Israeli army shoots up “hospitals, clinics, schools, religious institutions, [and] buildings of international organizations.” An Israeli soldier said, “The spirit in the operations room was ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’… No one will shed a tear if we flatten a house when there was no need, or if we shoot someone who we didn’t have to.”

** The Israeli army makes a sport of burning down people's homes. Soldiers routinely seized Palestinian homes and used them as military outposts. One soldier said the policy is, “‘Before you leave, you burn down the house—every house’… This is backed up at the battalion commander level. It’s so that [Palestinians] won’t be able to return...” Hundreds of homes have been burned down and thousands made homeless as a result.

** The Israeli army has pillaged and destroyed Gaza. One soldier said the destruction is “unimaginable.” +972 reported “[M]any soldiers ‘treated the houses [like] a souvenir shop,’ looting whatever their residents hadn’t managed to take with them. “We destroyed everything we wanted to,” a soldier testified. “This is not out of a desire to destroy, but out of total indifference to everything that belongs to [Palestinians]… I’ll never forget how a neighborhood that was really beautiful … is reduced to sand.” 

** Israeli soldiers regularly delight in the death and dehumanization of Palestinians. There are hundreds and hundreds of videos on social media, posted by the soldiers themselves, showing their glee at the most sadistic genocidal acts. They celebrate the destruction of Palestinian homes and mosques. Revealing the sickness of these murderers, Israeli soldiers regularly post pictures of themselves posing with the underwear left behind by Palestinian women.

** While the Israeli military mainly targets Palestinian civilians, longstanding Israeli military doctrine known as the Hannibal Directive even authorizes Israeli military commanders to issue orders to kill their own soldiers rather than allowing them to be taken prisoner, or hostage. Official documents obtained by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reveal that the Hannibal Directive was applied during the reactionary Hamas attack on October 7, in which hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed and taken hostage. The Israeli miliary was ordered to apply the Hannibal Directive to keep retreating Hamas fighters and captured hostages from crossing back into Gaza. Haaretz reported that this was applied “at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well.” And the New York Times reported that on October 7, the Israeli general commanding the siege of a house where Hamas was holding 14 Israeli hostages issued a command to cut off hostage negotiations, and “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties.” On that order, an Israeli tank fired two shells at the house killing 12 of the 14 Israeli civilian hostages as well as the hostage takers.

Israel's "Most Moral Army in the World" Is an Illegitimate Army of Genocidal Mass Murderers

The Israeli army's sick immorality is a perfect reflection of the morals of Israel—a genocidal apartheid state. 

The Israeli army was born in the mass murder and genocide of Israel's founding in 1948, and it continues be a tool of Israel’s Jewish-supremacist oppression of the Palestinian people ever since. Today it is carrying out one of the most barbaric crimes against humanity in recent history. This goes hand-in-hand with its mission of being a blood-soaked tool of U.S. imperialism’s domination of the Middle East and the world. And it is no surprise that America, itself a model of depraved genocide, has consistently armed, funded, and supported Israel.

The Moral Challenge for You

In the face of such immorality, there is a challenge posed by the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian for all those witnessing this to confront and act on: