The Economics of Complicity - How Israel Is Buying the Destruction of Gaza

[Celerity]

Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023, have changed many things in Israel. Among the most worrisome developments since then has been the near disappearance of people’s resistance to some of the worst excesses of Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration.

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-economics-of-complicity/


Reserve Israeli soldiers register for duty in northern Israel on October 7, 2023

For some months before the attacks, an unprecedented number of Israeli reservists had been refusing to serve in the military, part of a popular protest against the government’s threats to overhaul the judiciary and dismantle the country’s democratic institutions. Military reservists, who form the backbone of Israel’s defense establishment, were leading this resistance. Thousands had declared their unwillingness to serve under the ultra-right-wing government and what they saw as an increasingly authoritarian regime. Senior military officers, veterans of elite units, and Air Force pilots announced that they would refuse orders. It was the most serious crisis of military insubordination of the last several decades.

The movement represented not merely political opposition to authority but a fundamental challenge to the automatic compliance that had long characterized Israel’s pervasive military culture. From a social perspective, this was a particularly compelling phenomenon, with the politicization of a broad swath of the public around legal and political issues that are often overlooked.

But after October 7, the very same pilots who on principle had refused to take orders now began carrying out a strategic bombing campaign targeting a largely unprotected civilian Palestinian population. In effect, they agreed to execute Netanyahu’s directive to turn Gaza into “rubble.” Within days, and then for weeks and months, tens of thousands of Israelis actively supported, or participated in, military operations that amount to some of the most severe violations of international humanitarian law in recent history. The brutality of the war and the use of starvation as a weapon, among other things, have led multiple researchers and organizations to conclude that Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as a genocide, in Gaza.

Yes, there have been protests against the government’s campaign, and yes, some reservists—several hundred, we estimate—are refusing to serve, at the risk of a prison term. But the military reports having no problem carrying out its missions because of noncompliance. According to a poll conducted in March by Tamir Sorek, a professor of Middle East history at Pennsylvania State University, 82% of Jewish Israelis surveyed supported expelling all Palestinians from Gaza (and 56% favored expelling Arab citizens of Israel). General acceptance of the military’s mission has been maintained, in other words, despite both the growing scale of the government’s crimes against Palestinians and its continued onslaught against Israel’s democratic institutions.

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