Follow up on them "Good Times"

[eumelia]

As promised, this is a follow up to my previous post (LJ/DW) regarding the IDF soldier who posted pictures of herself and "the best time of her life" on Facebook.

It appears that this woman is just keen to dig herself deeper. As often happens on the Internet, this incident has taken on a life of its own. Honestly, I don't have the inclination to get very deep into this, because honestly it's not so much her stupidity that bothers me, but the fact that she has become a meme in the Israeli Blogosphere.

And what this memes, means.

This morning this meme reached the mainstream media (seriously disturbing language therein and quoted below):

[...]Since the photos were published by blogger Ido Keinan earlier this week, dozens of people have uploaded images on to their own Facebook pages depicting similar situations.

Abergil responded on Facebook to an image in which a women was pasted instead of the Palestinian prisoners in the original images, saying that it was not funny and that she would not let anyone ruin her "perfect life."

"I can't allow Arab lovers to ruin the perfect life I lead," she allegedly wrote. "I am not sorry and I don’t regret it."

Ms. Abergil is no doubt a particularly vile specimen of humanity. She is however, I think, being singled out in a way that would not have happened to a male soldier.
I mean, about a month ago the video of IDF soldiers dancing to Ke$ha is Hebron made the rounds and that was just hilarious wasn't it? The boys letting out some steam, of course.
The fact is what Eden Abergil did was not rare, you can go to Breaking the Silence's picture gallery and testimonials page (one for with testimonies made by female soldiers, carefull, PDF) and see how prevalent this dehumanisation is.
And yet, it is Eden Abergil who is singled out. Yes, she is the one to put herself on Facebook, but those guys put themselves on YouTube.

Eden Abergil is a woman, not only that, she's a woman from a Jewish ethnic minority and thus racialised within Israeli Jewish Identity politics and therefore what she did was "stupid" and "damaging".
If this had been a man, I believe we would be hearing a very different tune, one that wouldn't be talking about foibles, but about ethics.

Alas, we shall never know.
But we do know. Because a woman humiliating a man is always more punishable than when a man is humiliating a man - especially when there is a clear hierarchy between who is powerful (soldier) and who is dis-empowered (detainee).

Once again, this is considered a PR fiasco and not a necrotic wound in the way the IDF operates in the field.

Are you surprised when you hear about soldiers looting places they've taken over? No? Why should you be, as Eden Abergil herself says "In war there are no rules".

Yeah, who gives a fuck about the Geneva Conventions?

Sorry, I'm derailing myself.

Over the past few days evidence has been found that says that IDF soldiers, the crème de la crème of the Israeli Special Forces, looted the ships they raided during the disastrous flotilla to Gaza back in June (DW link).
The IDF is, of course, absolutely shocked by this turn in events.

"If the suspicions prove to be true, there must be a serious problem in the IDF in terms of values," a senior Israel Defense Forces officer said Thursday morning following Ynet's revelation on Wednesday that an officer is suspected of stealing laptops from the highly controversial aid flotilla to Gaza and selling them along with other soldiers.

"In such a case, we will not be able to say that these are just weeds," the senior officer added.

Weeds.
Stray weeds has been the excuse for years and years and years.
I, for one, am not shocked.
Not am I appalled.
This is what soldiers of every army all over the world do, the sense of entitlement, of power and ownership is hard wired into our minds by tacit approval that we can do no wrong.

In all these incidences I hear talk of values. But all I see is spin.

Damn you don't want to know what else I have open in my tags.
More bad News coming out of my country later.

Comments

[silveradept]

When confronted with her own plank, she accused all of her opponents of having specks in their eyes.

Any time that someone claims it's isolated incidents anywhere near each other, there's a pattern they want to deny. Would it kill the IDF to say that things have gone too far, or are we supposed to believe they've been the very model of restraint by letting the Palestinians still live?

[eumelia]

Yes it would, because being accountable is something the IDF would rather not deal with. Not to mention the government that sanctions these actions.

[silveradept]

Aah. So this is more akin to how the U.S Pentagon is all up in arms about the Wikileaks releases and not about all the stuff that the releases were talking about. Because they don't like it when people actually know what sort of awful stuff the military is doing in their name.

[eumelia]

Just so.

The thing is, there is a cognitive dissonance going on, as in, we have to do bad things in order to "protect ourselves", but at the same time "the bad things we do aren't really bad".

It's vicious tautology.

[silveradept]

Quite. "We have to do these barbaric things and oppress these people viciously, because if we don't, they're going to do worse things to use. They're just looking for an opportunity to be terrorists. So e do bad things to them to stop them from hurting us. it's justified. Anyone who says otherwise is a terrorist sympathizer."

I guess I should be glad the U.S. is relatively new to being open about this justification.