The New Dark Age

On December 23rd, 2024, “Israel’s” Haaretz published an extraordinary investigation into the “impact” of Zionist Occupation Force “brutality” on the “mental health” of its own militants. Specifically, “moral injury” incurred by Tel Aviv’s soldiers while perpetrating unabashed genocide in Gaza.

While at significant pains throughout to paint Israelis as the ultimate victims of the 21st-century Holocaust they are committing, the outlet’s little-noticed reporting offered extensive, unprecedented insight into routine horrors casually meted out to Palestinians by the entity, before and after October 7th, 2023.

The article’s author, along with a ZOF “social welfare officer”, decades prior conducted academic research into why Tel Aviv’s soldiers regularly commit the most sadistic atrocities imaginable against innocent Palestinians. This followed the First Intifada, 1987-1993, during which the entity brutally cracked down upon righteous Palestinian Resistance to “Israel’s” illegal, immoral occupation of their historic lands. The pair’s joint research effort provided a rich yield of first–hand evidence of Zionist cruelty, as ZOF soldiers “opened up” to them.

The pair identified separate “groups” of ZOF soldiers, “based on personality traits”. First and foremost was a “ruthless and callous” faction, who “committed the most severe atrocities” and “viewed brutality as an expression of strength and masculinity.” The “power” they felt serving in “Israel’s” genocidal military was “intoxicating”. One boastfully described how he had “no problem” brutalising and murdering women, citing how he’d kicked a Palestinian female so hard bones in her groin “broke”, and “she can’t have children today”:

“It’s like a drug…you feel like you are the law, you make the rules. As if from the moment you leave the place called Israel and enter the Gaza Strip, you are God.”

Meanwhile, another ZOF soldier “shot an Arab four times in the back” from a distance of just 10 metres, “and got away with a self-defense claim.” This was, the killer admitted, “cold-blooded murder” – and “we did things like that every day.” Another recalled how a young Palestinian was walking down a street calmly, minding their own business, when Zionist forces opened fire. “Bang, a bullet in the stomach,” and he was “dying on the sidewalk”. Israeli operatives then “drove away indifferently” as their victim died.

‘Flattening Gaza’

Per Haaretz, “these soldiers were remorseless and did not report moral injury.” Nonetheless, a few of the genocidal war criminals involved were “convicted by military courts” for their horrendous actions, which left them feeling “bitter and betrayed.” Those murderers who got away with it unpunished were tacitly assisted by “a small, ideologically violent group [that] supported the brutality.” Despite not “taking part” in the killings, “they believed in Jewish supremacy and were derogatory toward Arabs,” so looked the other way.

Meanwhile, a “large group” of ZOF soldiers “with no prior inclination to violence” became callous and inhumane due to the influence of their superiors, and the “norms” of their unit. “I felt like…a Nazi…it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews,” one member of this contingent testified. Another bore witness to how a “new commander”, during their “first patrol” together in the early hours of the morning, hideously mutilated a defenceless Palestinian child:

“There’s not a soul in the streets, just a little four-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all stood there with our mouths open…He told me, ‘these kids need to be killed from the day they are born.’ When a commander does that, it becomes legit.”