Within days, a video of the incident on 23 March proves them wrong. The phone found on one of the dead men contains footage: it shows a convoy of ambulances and emergency vehicles clearly displaying both headlights and emergency flashing signals, as it stops by the side of a road. We see men disembark unarmed in their high-vis paramedic uniforms. We see the IDF open fire. There is no sign of the threatening Palestinian attack suggested by IDF briefings.
It is the lie that makes Israel’s military impossible to defend.
Footage from a video taken with a phone by one of the 15 Palestinians medics killed; it shows Red Crescent emergency vehicles, their lights and sirens flashing and their logos clearly visible, seconds before they came under a barrage of gunfire from Israeli soldiers in Tel al-Sultan, Rafah, Gaza, on 23 March (Photo: Palestinian Red Crescent Society via AP)
Yet this new lie is the most clear-cut and easily disproven since Israel embarked on its mission to avenge the ethnic and sexual violence that Hamas unleashed on southern Israeli peacebuilding communities on 7 October 2023.
This lie by the IDF matters because it undermines a central axiom of Israel’s war on Hamas: that Hamas are Islamist fascists and Israel is a moral democracy, which holds its own soldiers and politicians accountable when they make mistakes.
Gazan society under Hamas is one of the most anti-liberal places in the world: the constitution defines women merely as baby-machines for making the next generation of male warriors; to be visibly queer has been authoritatively described as “a death sentence”.
square KATE MALTBY
The 7 October massacre taught Jews, yet again, the world doesn’t careRead More
If we hold Israel to higher standards, it is because Israel claims to be a morally superior entity. By many obvious democratic standards, that claim remains true. Newspapers which oppose Benjamin Netanyahu’s government circulate widely, notably the liberal-left icon Haaretz, while a thriving civil society includes a passionate human rights sector which actively challenges his policies.
This is the Israeli plurality which gives liberal allies hope. Israel’s defenders point out – rightly – that there is no Gaza Strip equivalent of the Yish Din; no critical Gaza newspaper like Haaretz, able to freely attack the leadership of Hamas.
Netanyahu cares little what Europe’s last tottering liberal democracies think of him. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Daily Mail last year – on the paper’s well-informed foreign policy podcast 90 Seconds to Midnight, since rebranded as Apocalypse Now – Netyanhu listens only to his own sense of destiny. “Netanyahu is a captive of his own sense of mission, that he was destined, perhaps by divine providence, to save the Western world from the most radical, extreme fundamentalist, murderous opponents of our civilisation, and these are the Iranians and the Islamic jihad.”
Palestinians at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, mourn Red Crescent medics killed by Israeli troops in Tel al-Sultan (Photo: Hatem Khaled/Reuters)
The problem for liberal Israelis, and for all Jews who consider Israel their ancestral homeland, is that in the eyes of the rest of the world, Netanyahu has aligned not only himself but the entire state of Israel with Trump’s populist and antiliberal values. It will be decades, if ever, before that reputational link between Israel and Trumpism can be decoupled.
It may also seem bizarre that the death of 15 men on a roadside, after the deaths of thousands under Israeli bombardment in Gaza, should be the moment where any of us draw a line. Yet when a government pushes a lie about how 15 men were killed, and the lie is proven to be false, we no longer trust them to tell the truth about all the other thousands dead.
That is why this IDF lie is a watershed moment for Israel’s defenders abroad. Israel can either be an enlightened nation fighting Islamist barbarism, or it can be just another place where power executes the powerless and lies to the press. It cannot be both.
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