Justine McCarthy: A soldier explains his rationale for participating in genocide. ‘It’s so insanely fun’

The soldiers did not mark no-go zones they created in Gaza. They waited for civilians to unknowingly step into them and promptly shot them dead. Then they watched on their surveillance screens as roaming dogs ate the corpses.NAZA, the documentary film that won five awards at the Venice Film Festival, takes its name from Israel Defense Forces (IDF) jargon for human collateral damage. Specifically, it refers to the number of people soldiers are permitted to kill in an attack on a single Hamas target. In an exercise to assassinate one suspect, for instance, they had the go-ahead to kill 500 people.“It was like a video game,” says one of the 24 soldiers and military intelligence operatives interviewed anonymously under the cloak of Tel Aviv’s night-time rooftops.Another says he was involved in killing “several thousand” people and acknowledges he participated in “genocide”, but, when asked why he went along with it, his answer is more chilling than even the image of the scavenging dogs. “You’re having fun,” he says. “It’s so insanely fun.”READ MOREThe technology of modern warfare is pushing man’s inhumanity to man to terrifying new frontiers of cold-blooded detachment. Massacring innocents has become as impersonal as picking off animation figures in Grand Theft Auto. Phones, drones, computer-guided missiles and artificial intelligence (AI) have facilitated the slaughter of more than 74,000 men, women and children in Gaza.Those who metaphorically pull the trigger, cocooned in a control room far from the stench of death, talk of the adrenaline high it gives them. They watch whole families, shops, bakeries, blocks of apartments they have targeted go boom! – then they go to lunch.A question NAZA raises is what damage this killing technology is doing to the minds of the soldiers operating it. One recalls going on a school trip to Poland and not being able to comprehend “what it was in Germans” that made them do what the Nazis did to the Jews. “I still see those Nazis as evil, but what does that make me?” he asks. That, he wonders, suggests he has retained some human feeling, unlike others who express no hint of regret.Israel’s control of Gaza’s telecommunications system gives the IDF access to 60,000 or 70,000 phones. They listen to a child telling her mother on the phone that “daddy’s home” before pulling a lever that blows her and everyone in that house to agonising death. They hear a television on in the background or a baby crying and the death screams of two sisters aged three and six whose father forgot his phone when he went out, leaving it behind to trigger their execution. When soldiers listening on nearby phones can be that detached, how unaffecting might it be for, say, a Starlink controller oceans away in Washington to restrict with one flick of a switch Ukraine’s defence system as Russian drones approach Kyiv’s sleeping citizens? Death and destruction are the functions of warfare technology. The consequence for global psychology is that we grow more inured to the barbarity. We watch children being slaughtered on our television screens and then we, too, go to lunch. Some feel cowed into complicit silence by the sectarian emotional blackmail spewed by Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers. Can there be a more powerful propaganda weapon than accusing critics of crimes against humanity of being motivated by anti-Semitism? If anybody is motivated by religious prejudice it is the likes of Netanyahu’s security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who wants Gaza and the West Bank emptied of all Palestinians. The clue to his obsession with religion is in the name of the party he leads, Jewish Power. As it is in the name of the Religious Zionist party led by his cabinet colleague, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. To the eternal shame of the rest of the watching world, the anti-Semitism accusation has proved to be highly effective in allowing dead bodies to pile up. While Netanyahu was claiming the IDF was “doing everything to protect civilians” in Gaza, his soldiers never got the memo.“The goal was quantity, not quality,” one tells the documentary’s interviewer. Another talks of the urgency to kill and destroy “before we lost international credibility”.We will never know how many lives could have been saved if a critical mass of other countries had cried “stop”. Still, it is not too late. The killing is continuing. The United Nations reported last month that 340 children had been killed in Gaza since a so-called ceasefire began a year earlier. Yet more people are dying in the West Bank and south Lebanon.Minister for Defence Helen McEntee said after visiting Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon the IDF had demolished every village she passed through – bar one – leaving “no sign of life”. Her visit came on the brink of this week’s general election in Israel that has resulted in a hung parliament and has left Netanyahu and his cabinet in situ as the caretaker government. Should endeavours to form a new government fail, there will be another election.Much of the arsenal Israel has used to slaughter or injure more than 10 per cent of the population of Gaza has been provided by the United States. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft jointly with Brown University calculated that Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s administrations spent $21.7 billion arming Israel in the first two years after Hamas’s murderous rampage on October 7th, 2023. Trump is itching to resume the war he and Netanyahu launched on Iran eight months ago in a bellicose attempt to reverse his plunging popularity as US citizens head to next week’s midterm polls. In the event of a second election in Israel, gung-ho Netanyahu would need no persuading that bombing Tehran could give him electoral kudos.NAZA recounts how IDF soldiers were ordered to destroy homes systematically to render entire neighbourhoods in Gaza uninhabitable for returning residents. They went from house to house, looking at family photographs and abandoned schoolbooks before setting them on fire, sometimes using olive oil from the fridge.“We destroyed history,” one says.If there is anything positive to be taken from the soldiers’ accounts it is that international opinion can save lives. Netanyahu has, after all, ordered that the interviewees’ identities be uncovered and that they be prosecuted for causing “harm to Israel’s security and diplomatic interests”. It is up to those not immunised against human feeling by war technology to keep shouting stop.That can change history.