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The Atlantic: After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden argued that Al Qaeda was perfectly justified in killing all those people inside the World Trade Center because they weren’t really civilians–they were complicit in U.S. might and misdeeds. Didn’t their taxes fund America’s CIA assassinations and war planes? As every American understood perfectly well at the time, the attack that day would not have been justified even if all office workers in the Twin Towers had voted for a president and supported a military that perpetrated grave sins in the Middle East. Or even, indeed, if they were all subletting spare bedrooms to U.S. soldiers.

Killing civilians is wrong, no matter how often those who do it insist that the humans they killed weren’t really innocent. Everyone understands this truth when the civilians being killed are one’s countrymen or allies–but forget it quickly when the civilians are citizens of a country one is fighting or rooting against in war, even though the civilizational taboo against killing civilians becomes no less important.

The latest to succumb to this seductive illogic, to insist that slain civilians weren’t really civilians, is New York University’s Thane Rosenbaum, who writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Gazans sheltered terrorists and their weapons in their homes, right beside ottoman sofas and dirty diapers. When Israel warned them of impending attacks, the inhabitants defiantly refused to leave. On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

For purposes of this article, let’s set aside all the adults killed in Gaza, just for the sake of argument. The dead Palestinian children are evidence enough that “real civilians” are being slaughtered. In the above passage, the author focuses on the dirty diapers rather than the baby that produced them. Elsewhere, he acknowledges the revolting number of kids killed in this conflict, and then adds, as if it’s concession enough, “Surely there are civilians who have been killed in this conflict who have taken every step to distance themselves from this fast-moving war zone, and children whose parents are not card-carrying Hamas loyalists. These are the true innocents of Gaza.” In fact, even a toddler whose father is a card-carrying Hamas loyalist is an innocent, by virtue of being a young child!

It is a moral failure not to acknowledge at least that. And the failure is worth dwelling on because wide embrace of Rosenbaum’s logic would be a setback for a world where civilians have legal protection in war, however often it is violated. As Daniel Larison explains:

Rosenbaum’s argument is extremely similar to the justifications that terrorist groups use when they target civilians in their own attacks. It is based on the false assumption that there are no real innocents or bystanders in a given country because of their previous political support for a government and its policies, which supposedly makes it permissible to strike non-military targets. It is very important to reject this logic no matter where it comes from or whose cause in a conflict it is being used to advance, because this is the logic that has been used to justify countless atrocities down through the years.

Just so.

No matter one’s position on Israel, Palestine, or the current conflict, the fact that innocent civilians exist on both sides, that they ought to be protected from death and dismemberment, and that they’re presently dying in large numbers ought not be denied.

Lest there be any confusion about what sorts of attacks I am condemning, consider any bygone instance of a Palestinian suicide bomber blowing up a restaurant or discotheque–or the lobbing rockets into residential neighborhoods inside Israel–as well as Israeli attacks like one that the New York Times just reported on:

When the strike leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip the night before, it also killed 25 members of four family households—including 19 children—gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. Relatives said it also killed a guest of the family, identified by an Israeli human rights group as a member of the Hamas military wing, ostensibly Israel’s target. The attack was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes that have killed families in their homes, during an offensive that Israel says is meant to stop militant rocket fire that targets its civilians and destroy Hamas’s tunnel network. The Palestinian deaths—75 percent of them civilians, according to a United Nations count—have prompted a wave of international outrage, and are raising questions about Israel’s stated dedication to protecting civilians.

Killing 19 children in order to get one Hamas fighter is horrific.

Says Larison, alluding to such attacks:

It may please Hamas to make use of these victims’ deaths for their own purposes, but that doesn’t absolve the Israeli government of its responsibility for causing those deaths. If Hamas benefits politically from these civilian deaths, and it seems likely that they do, it would seem obvious that Israel should not want to cause any more, and yet at each step over the last few weeks Israel’s government has responded with tactics that are guaranteed to continue killing many more non-combatants for as long as this operation continues.

Israel’s experience as a terrorist target suggests that watching foreigners kill children in one’s midst does not break a people’s desire to fight—it strengthens it. The spike in civilian deaths we’re witnessing appears to be a moral and strategic failure.

The tanks rolled in, killing over 1,300 people, many of them women and children, and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble. But all I heard from the media was that some Israelis were very, very scared because a few primitive rockets were being sent from Gaza into southern Israel.

Reporters were not allowed into Gaza and Israeli soldiers were banned from taking on mobile phones for security reasons. So the 2008/9 massacre, which included use of the banned White Phosphorus, went un-witnessed and almost unreported. It also failed dismally in achieving its objective, as Hamas survived and the local population’s hatred of their arrogant oppressors burned as bright as the fires which consumed their homes. But for the “international community” it was “out of sight, out of mind”. Business as usual.

What a difference a few years of developing technology can make. The Gaza atrocities are now being reported on a constant basis by eyewitnesses, be they professional correspondents representing major media organisations, or amateur locals under fire. Because all you need is a mobile phone and a Twitter account.

It is those devices which brought us heart-rending images – some too horrific to be shown on television – of children with their limbs or half a head blown off. Children covered in shrapnel wounds screaming for dead parents; surviving parents carrying tiny bodies. Sights which caused the battle-hardened BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet to sob during a live broadcast.

They are all on Twitter now, should you care to look. This is the shape of wars to come. Anything less than total nuclear annihilation will, from now on, be recorded for posterity by the victims, as well as the victors, in their own versions. Imagine if this was the case in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, not to mention earlier massacres. Historians will finally have both sides’ stories to work from, and the evidence with which to back up their words.

But far more importantly, aggressors will have to live with the consequences of their acts, unable to hide behind hollow rhetoric. Because the Israelis had and have nothing with which to balance those images of bloodied, mangled little corpses in Gaza. Yes, as of today they continue to bludgeon Gaza in defiance of the UN Security Council and polite requests from John Kerry to stop. But they never cared about that. On the other hand, mass protests marches from California to Chile are taking their toll.

Here’s an unbelievably powerful and on point speech by Chris Hedges on Palestine.

Mondoweiss: Max Steinberg is a 24-year-old American who was just killed in Gaza, fighting for the Israeli Defense Forces. He visited Israel for the first time in 2012 on a Birthright trip, the program that sends American Jews to Israel, and he drank the Koolaid. His parents had never been to Israel.

At Slate, Allison Benedikt asserts that he was indoctrinated by Birthright to believe he should fight for Israel. And she blames Birthright for his death:

There are many people to blame for Steinberg’s death. There is the Hamas fighter behind the weapon that actually killed him. There are the leaders, on both sides, who put him in Gaza, and the leaders behind all of the wars between Israel and the Palestinians. I can trace it back to 1948, or 1917, or whatever date suits you and still never find all the parties who are responsible. But I have no doubt in my mind that along with all of them, Birthright shares some measure of the blame…

If you look closely you will see unforgettable moments of love and unity amidst the horror. Iraqi Christians fleeing the fanatical “the Islamic state” group in Mosul are being sheltered in the mosque of Imam Ali in Najaf, and Palestinian Muslims, after having several of their mosques in Gaza bombed by Israel, have been welcomed to pray in Palestinian churches. Church bells in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, ring aloud in solidarity when mosques broadcast prayers for those who have died at the hands of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing. And more and more Jews and Holocaust survivors (here and here) are courageously challenging Israel’s occupation and siege. In other words, friends, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic and hopeful.

Just look at this video. Look at the destruction. And the Israeli ambassador to the US said the IDF should be given a “Nobel Prize” for its restrain… What chutzpah.

Real courage: Jews for Justice stage nonviolent protest at the NY office of “Friends of the Israeli Defense Force” and read names of murdered Palestinians.

CBS News: United Nations committee focused on youth rights accused Israel Thursday of failing to stop the mistreatment of Palestinian children in military and police custody.

The group’s report accuses Israeli forces of using Palestinian children as human shields, and alleges that detained children in some cases face torture, solitary confinement and threats of sexual assault.

Assembled by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, the 21-page document comes three months after a UNICEF paper criticized the “systematic and institutionalized” mistreatment of Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military.

The Israeli Embassy dismissed the latest U.N. report as politically motivated old news.

“This is a report that is based on the recycling of old accusations, based on political biases – and not based on direct investigation on the ground – with the intention of bashing Israel,” Israeli Embassy spokesman Aaron Sagui said in a statement provided to CBSNews.com.

“This is clearly not a bona fide action, and the resulting report obviously does not aim to promote any real improvement as the UNICEF report did … but only to make headlines.”

While the Committee on the Rights of the Child acknowledges Israel’s national security concerns, and that children on both sides of the conflict have suffered from the violence, it notes that Palestinians make up a disproportionate amount of the victims and lists Israel’s “illegal long-lasting occupation of Palestinian territory” among the actions jeopardizing a peaceful future for Israeli and Palestinian children.

One of the more explosive allegations in the report is the “continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants,” of which the report says 14 cases have been reported in the last 3 years.

“[Israel’s] soldiers have used Palestinian children to enter potentially dangerous buildings ahead of them and to stand in front of military vehicles in order to stop the throwing of stones against those vehicles,” the committee writes in the report, citing the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundemental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism.

According to the report, such activity has largely gone unpunished.

“The soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted.”

In a follow-up statement, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the human shield accusations “salient in bad faith.”

“The authors were fully informed (by an official Israeli document submitted by an Israeli delegation) that instructions have indeed been issued and that the use of children as human shields is totally forbidden,” the statement reads, adding that no human shield incidents have been “registered and proven.”

The U.N. report directs its harshest accusations at the alleged torture and mistreatment of Palestinian children in Israeli military and police custody. Children detained in areas like Gaza and the West Bank, the report says, are “systematically subject to physical and verbal violence, humiliation, painful restraints, hooding of the head and face in a sack, threatened with death, physical violence, and sexual assault against themselves or members of their family, restricted access to toilet, food and water.”

In its statement, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign affairs said the report’s claims of corporal punishment in detention are “totally unsubstantiated and inaccurate.”

Many of the report’s accusations of child detainee mistreatment, though, mirror findings in the review UNICEF released in March, a review Israeli spokesmen have pointed to as credible.

“Israel has nothing to hide and when addressed by a serious and credible organization such as UNICEF, we cooperate and strive to implement the recommendations of its reports,” Israeli Embassy spokesman Sagui said in a statement.

UNICEF’s March review, while tamer and more focused than the sprawling report by the U.N.’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, also includes serious charges concerning the treatment of Palestinian children in military custody, including “examples of practices that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

“The common experience of many children is being aggressively awakened in the middle of the night by many armed soldiers and being forcibly brought to an interrogation centre tied and blindfolded, sleep deprived and in a state of extreme fear,” the UNICEF paper reads.

“The interrogation mixes intimidation, threats and physical violence, with the clear purpose of forcing the child to confess.”

Both reports note that Palestinian children are often accused of throwing stones at Israeli military vehicles, and charge Israeli forces with sometimes subjecting young suspects to solitary confinement. Both reports allege that the children are sometimes coerced into confessions, often by signing forms written in Hebrew, a language the reports note most Palestinian children don’t understand.

The Committee on the Rights of the Child’s report, Israel’s MFA went on to say in its statement, reflected poorly on the U.N.

“The list of false, flawed and gratuitous allegations goes on and on: this report is shaming the institution which commissioned it.”

Friends, this is why it’s important to post about the reality of Israel’s aggression… it creates awareness and puts pressure on the Israeli government. Mashable – Excerpt: The Gaza offensive, now in its second and deadliest week, plays out in vivid detail on social media, with bombings and killings documented on the ground in near-real time. And for many, the decades-long conflict can now be seen through the eyes of those who live there.

The Washington Post: Whenever the Israeli army drafts the reserves — which are made up of ex-soldiers — there are dissenters, resisters, and AWOLers among the troops called to war. Now that Israel has sent troops to Gaza again and reserves are being summoned to service, dozens are refusing to take part.

We are more than 50 Israelis who were once soldiers and now declare our refusal to be part of the reserves. We oppose the Israeli Army and the conscription law. Partly, that’s because we revile the current military operation. But most of the signers below are women and would not have fought in combat. For us, the army is flawed for reasons far broader than “Operation Protective Edge,” or even the occupation. We rue the militarization of Israel and the army’s discriminatory policies. One example is the way women are often relegated to low-ranking secretarial positions. Another is the screening system that discriminates against Mizrachi (Jews whose families originate in Arab countries) by keeping them from being fairly represented inside the army’s most prestigious units. In Israeli society, one’s unit and position determines much of one’s professional path in the civilian afterlife.

To us, the current military operation and the way militarization affects Israeli society are inseparable. In Israel, war is not merely politics by other means — it replaces politics. Israel is no longer able to think about a solution to a political conflict except in terms of physical might; no wonder it is prone to never-ending cycles of mortal violence. And when the cannons fire, no criticism may be heard.

This petition, long in the making, has a special urgency because of the brutal military operation now taking place in our name. And although combat soldiers are generally the ones prosecuting today’s war, their work would not be possible without the many administrative roles in which most of us served. So if there is a reason to oppose combat operations in Gaza, there is also a reason to oppose the Israeli military apparatus as a whole. That is the message of this petition:

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We were soldiers in a wide variety of units and positions in the Israeli military—a fact we now regret, because, in our service, we found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives. In truth, the entire military is implicated. For that reason, we now refuse to participate in our reserve duties, and we support all those who resist being called to service.

The Israeli Army, a fundamental part of Israelis’ lives, is also the power that rules over the Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1967. As long as it exists in its current structure, its language and mindset control us: We divide the world into good and evil according to the military’s categories; the military serves as the leading authority on who is valued more and who less in society — who is more responsible for the occupation, who is allowed to vocalize their resistance to it and who isn’t, and how they are allowed to do it. The military plays a central role in every action plan and proposal discussed in the national conversation, which explains the absence of any real argument about non-military solutions to the conflicts Israel has been locked in with its neighbors.

The Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are deprived of civil rights and human rights. They live under a different legal system from their Jewish neighbors. This is not exclusively the fault of soldiers who operate in these territories. Those troops are, therefore, not the only ones obligated to refuse. Many of us served in logistical and bureaucratic support roles; there, we found that the entire military helps implement the oppression of the Palestinians.

Many soldiers who serve in non-combat roles decline to resist because they believe their actions, often routine and banal, are remote from the violent results elsewhere. And actions that aren’t banal — for example, decisions about the life or death of Palestinians made in offices many kilometers away from the West Bank — are classified, and so it’s difficult to have a public debate about them. Unfortunately, we did not always refuse to perform the tasks we were charged with, and in that way we, too, contributed to the violent actions of the military.

During our time in the army, we witnessed (or participated in) the military’s discriminatory behavior: the structural discrimination against women, which begins with the initial screening and assignment of roles; the sexual harassment that was a daily reality for some of us; the immigration absorption centers that depend on uniformed military assistance. Some of us also saw firsthand how the bureaucracy deliberately funnels technical students into technical positions, without giving them the opportunity to serve in other roles. We were placed into training courses among people who looked and sounded like us, rather than the mixing and socializing that the army claims to do.

The military tries to present itself as an institution that enables social mobility — a stepping-stone into Israeli society. In reality, it perpetuates segregation. We believe it is not accidental that those who come from middle- and high- income families land in elite intelligence units, and from there often go to work for high-paying technology companies. We think it is not accidental that when soldiers from a firearm maintenance or quartermaster unit desert or leave the military, often driven by the need to financially support their families, they are called “draft-dodgers.” The military enshrines an image of the “good Israeli,” who in reality derives his power by subjugating others. The central place of the military in Israeli society, and this ideal image it creates, work together to erase the cultures and struggles of the Mizrachi, Ethiopians, Palestinians, Russians, Druze, the Ultra-Orthodox, Bedouins, and women.

We all participated, on one level or another, in this ideology and took part in the game of “the good Israeli” that serves the military loyally. Mostly our service did advance our positions in universities and the labor market. We made connections and benefited from the warm embrace of the Israeli consensus. But for the above reasons, these benefits were not worth the costs.

By law, some of us are still registered as part of the reserved forces (others have managed to win exemptions or have been granted them upon their release), and the military keeps our names and personal information, as well as the legal option to order us to “service.” But we will not participate — in any way.

There are many reasons people refuse to serve in the Israeli Army. Even we have differences in background and motivation about why we’ve written this letter. Nevertheless, against attacks on those who resist conscription, we support the resisters: the high school students who wrote a refusal declaration letter, the Ultra orthodox protesting the new conscription law, the Druze refusers, and all those whose conscience, personal situation, or economic well-being do not allow them to serve. Under the guise of a conversation about equality, these people are forced to pay the price. No more.

See video here.