Weapons of Moderate Destruction?

Israel is the USA’s public weapons show. Not only that, it has consistently been the country which dares apply the tactics and methods of warfare that the Pentagon dare not. At least, dare not until the Israelis show whether the rest of the world will be outraged by them or offer up a blind eye.

That has been obvious for years. And in some respects I am sure it is reciprocal. What little I have read of the publications that emanate from such places as the Washington Defence University have pretty well convinced me there is a thriving trade of ideas about how to conduct warfare or ‘anti-insurgent’ operations as it is now often sanitized, between the two.

But, while I suspect that many interrogation techniques developed by the Israelis for use against Palestinians were refined (if that is the word) by US forces and the CIA and led to the viciousness and nastiness of Abu Ghraeb, for example, it is the way Israelis effectively appear to conduct ‘field trials’ of weapons that perturbs me.

Apparently, the IDF is using phosphorous shells in Gaza. Supposedly, these are to provide covering smokescreens for advancing troops. My ex-miltary friend, however, tells me this is nonsense. Such a disguising fog can be created by other methods. Phosphorous burns on contact, and, if my memory of chemistry at school is correct, sticks to clothes and skin and water (which anyone might in panic think was what should put out flames) intensifies the fire.

It is, he has led me to believe, not a tactical weapon to aid the deployment of soldiers; it is an antipersonnel weapon that while fulfilling one purpose, has as at least its secondary object, of killing and injuring people in the most agonising way conceivable and thereby creating fear and terror. Even the most highly trained and ruthless soldier would be unlikely to be able to continue firing while burning to death. And anyone near the victim—even the majority of highly trained professional soldiers—would be either humane enough to try to put an end to the agony or in a state of such fear they would be paralysed.

Of course, this is precisely the kind of weapon best calculated to disrupt guerilla fighters. Fear, especially of burning to death, is a very powerful weapon. And when it is used in a city or a country as densely populated as Gaza, in the streets of Gaza City, how would any regular soldier distinguish between a ‘regrouping’ Hamas fighter and a terrified civilian teenager running away? Even if these things were fired singly and in visual range, and they are not.

After all, even in Britain, armed police have in the past shot a man they thought was carrying a sawn off shotgun in a carrier bag (it was a broken chair leg, and whether he was a known criminal or not does not excuse the killing, especially in a country which has abolished the death penalty), in the USA more recently, armed policemen shot a man they described as ‘believed to be carrying a lethal weapon’. It was a crutch, of the kind I use as a walking aid myself.

While I doubt that I am likely to be ambushed and shot dead by armed police in London (Jean-Charles Menendez notwithstanding) I doubt I would survive more than seconds in Zaitoun, and the friends who know me as a pacifist would have a very hard time countering the claim that I was killed carrying a grenade launcher.

The IDF perhaps will attempt to assure, if not the rest of us, at least their own citizens, that their soldiers are so well trained that that is indeed possible to burn only fighters and not civilians to death. But, as we all know from the frequent communiqués of American forces after bombing raids in Afghanistan or Pakistan, from the Israelis after their ‘targeted assassinations’ (a weasel phrase for ‘premeditated murder’, for that is what an planned assassination is) and helicopter missile attacks, in the dark all cats are grey, and all the dead dug out of the rubble of houses are terrorists.

Corpses cannot protest their innocence, and in the past both Americans and Israelis have relied heavily on that to divert criticism of their methods. We will hear much of the numbers of ‘terrorists killed’ when some final body count is performed in Palestine and that will be a much higher figure than the number of dead civilians.

It is getting on for forty years since the world showed outrage at a photograph of a screaming naked girl burnt by an American weapon like the ones the Israelis are using in Gaza. But there are few photographers, if any, to take that kind of picture in Gaza. Supposedly, being a ‘humane’ people, the Americans abandoned weapons like these, though there have been reports napalm has been used by them again in Afghanistan.

If the Israelis get away with using what is simply a terror weapon, if the rest of the world shrugs its shoulders, then ‘burn baby burn” is going to turn into a (literal) Marine Corps war cry within months. The US forces—having known for years now that they along with the Israelis, can disregard whatever humanitarian international conventions are inexpedient for them—will know they can get away with it too.

And then? Poison gas? Irradiation? Secret crematoria? Once you begin to excuse the use of deliberate cruelty and institutionalise it, you are not setting foot on a staircase on which you can choose to stop on the third step down or the twentieth, and climb back up again to the higher summit of humanity; it leads inexorably downwards to the lowest step of depravity. It becomes an accelerating escalator which only goes down and cannot be reversed.

And yes, the middle of a war is the time to protest. Before the reasons and the rationale for using them, the excuses for mistakes made, are nicely laundered, folded, and presented to us smelling of lavender. While the reality of weapons of, not ‘mass’, but equally terrible ‘moderate’—I term them so because we will be told that these were used with 'moderation', sparingly, are not really so horrific, and were only used in self-protection as a last resort against manic terrorists and so on—destruction is clear before us.

Update:

I've been informed by my ex-military friend (who was appalled at the Israeli's use of this weapon) that it is being deployed even more brutally and cynically than I imagined. He tells me that film reportage clearly shows that these shells are 'airbursts', that they explode not on the ground on targets, but in the air above and therefore spray burning white phosphorous over a wide area, and in a crowded place like Gaza, inevitably over many buildings and their occupants. If this is not, in international law, a war crime (and I dislike that phrase being used as loosely as it often is) I do not know what is.