No IDF Propaganda in STL
Urging an arms embargo and immediate end to the Israeli/US genocide in Palestine, members of Jewish Voice for Peace St. Louis, Progressive Jews of St. Louis, and If Not Now gather in Tower Grove Park on Jan. 1 on the final night of Hanukah. Participants lit candles against the darkness offering words in remembrance of eight sectors of Gazan society — including journalists, healthcare workers and children, and others– honoring their lives and light attempting to be extinguished by IDF soldiers.
By Elior Berkowitz and Frances Madeson with Jewish Voice for Peace St. Louis
The world has now witnessed the depraved actions of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for 14 months: Laying siege to hospitals, refugee tents, or both. Eyewitness accounts from U.S. surgeons of snipers shooting children in the head. Double tap airstrikes on civilians helping a boy with an injured leg. Medical doctors likely raped to death. These
systematic war crimes are so widespread, so extensively documented, that they now merit their own database for academic study.
Yet on January 5th, the St. Louis Jewish Community Center will provide a hero’s welcome to Myles Rosenblum – an IDF soldier and brother-in arms to those committing these very atrocities. We consider this a deep moral failure and we call for this event to be cancelled.
IDF soldiers have widely boasted and broadcast their crimes in Gaza publicly and on their personal social media. The IDF has cautioned its own soldiers about potential international criminal backlash, warning that, “soldiers have been identified from videos and images they posted online that were taken during their service in Gaza.”
We have heard testimonies by IDF soldiers admitting that they kill Palestinians including children with impunity, that “anyone who crosses an imaginary line in the contested Neztarim corridor is shot to death, with every Palestinian casualty counting as a terrorist – even if they were just a child (Haaretz).”
We have seen countless videos of IDF soldiers wearing the lingerie of Palestinian women, intimate personal items found in private homes that they destroyed and ransacked. We have seen the IDF desecrating religious spaces after destroying them, using Palestinians as human shields, and posing with stripped, bound, and blindfolded Palestinians.
The goal of these practices is to devalue Palestinian lives and erode Palestinian human rights.
The state-sanctioned criminality of the Israeli military is not limited to the worst atrocities of the past year. While Israel constantly touts its armed forces as the “most moral army in the world”, ex-IDF groups like Breaking the Silence have for decades worked to rebuff this propaganda. The following quotes from IDF soldiers serving during the First Intifada, published recently by an Israeli psychologist in Haaretz, could just as easily have come from the Israeli invasions of 2000, 2014, or 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.”
“I felt like, like, like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.”
Per the Israeli Ministry of Health’s statistics, updated Nov. 4, psychiatric systems are overwhelmed by IDF combatants newly suffering with untreated PTSD. A quarter of reservists refuse to show up, compelling recruiters to look overseas to mercenaries and internally to the Haredim, religious Jews who have not traditionally served on religious grounds. These are the facts that the rest of the world, including Israelis, see, while the American Jewish establishment wants to tell a fairytale of “strength, sacrifice, and service.”
To host a representative of the IDF to tell these tales is to manufacture consent for war crimes and genocide. We do not consent. Not when there is an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Mr. Rosenblum’s current and former commanders, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Not when the recent Amnesty International Report exhaustively documents the ongoing genocidal actions of the Israeli military. The IDF should be unwelcome in St. Louis just as Netanyahu recently was unwelcome at the Holocaust commemoration at Auschwitz in Poland.
This JCC event, to be held on the same campus as the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, promotes and normalizes brutality and dehumanization amid an ongoing genocide. It remains to be seen what consequences the IDF and their enablers will face. But Mr. Rosenblum and his extremist supporters, who relentlessly associate our faith and
culture with one of the world’s most vicious and reviled militaries, must know that such blatant crimes cannot go unanswered in the long term. Here at home, there will be no hero’s welcome for participants in a genocide. We reject IDF propaganda in St. Louis.
Artist Elior Berkowitz and journalist Frances Madeson are members of Jewish Voice for Peace St. Louis chapter.
Contact: stl@jewishvoiceforpeace.org
