to paraphrase a Frankie Boyle joke: the Americans will invade your country and then years later make films about how hard it was for the soldiers
The people starting wars and the ones fighting them are not the same. I'm pretty sure that being in war is pretty fucking traumatic to the vast majority of the soldiers independed of wether they're on the attacking or defending side.
Reminds me of an incredibly tough read I was assigned back for my undergrad about the Nazi death squads in Eastern Europe called “Ordinary Men”. I still have the book as it was so impactful but I haven’t had the heart to read it since. It drove home how these were for all intents and purposes ordinary people rather than the heartless boogeymen we imagine them to be to comfort ourselves
Nazis got prisoners in their death camps to be put in charge of some of the admin and prisoner logistics because it was too hard for the Nazi's mental health to clean up the bodies after the showers.
https://www.history.com/news/the-jewish-men-forced-to-help-run-auschwitz
Unironically I expect this to be the case. These "soldiers" in large part are young folks brainwashed by an extremist government and, to some extent, broader extremist society. There are going to be some of them who looking back later in life are going to be rightly horrified by their own actions. This is breeding a whole new generation of severely messed up people on both sides.
Like most of these, the article tries to point out the horrors that the IDF are committing, but still lets the individuals wash their hands of it.
They talk to remorseful soldiers about the trauma they "witnessed," never about the trauma from what they "did."
It lets them be passengers to their own villany, unwitting stooges to the mass murder of civilians. There is probably some truth in that, in that all war machines are designed to destroy everyone, including its own soldiers, but they still pulled the trigger and rammed the fleeing women and children with their tanks.
The talk of trauma like it just happened to them instead of being caused by them is a problem, and frankly too kind.
I do wonder how much "fuck you" I could get away with in the IDF today. I'd happily go to jail and lose all the respect of my friends and family before knowingly committing war crimes. I wouldn't put up with one second of torture.
So...would I be committing war crimes, too? I can't know.
