Mutiny in the Israeli air force challenges Netanyahu's war

Make no mistake, this is not a peacenik revolution fuelled by empathy for Gazans, writes Paul Kearns

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dismissed the signatories of an open letter calling for the end to the war in Gaza as a ‘disconnected group of pensioners’. Picture: Tibor Illyes

It may be an exaggeration to call the recent public demands by reservists in the Israeli air force, calling for an end to the war in Gaza, a mutiny.

Still, the ripples of discontent are deep and spreading. Hundreds of air force reservists, both current and past serving, put their names to a letter demanding “the return of the hostages without delay”.

Perhaps most critically, the letter accuses the government of pursuing a war that only serves “the continuation of the war will bring about deaths IDF soldiers, the hostages, and innocents”.

Last week, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the signatories a “small, noisy, anarchistic, and disconnected group of pensioners”.

I spoke to one of the signatories on condition that his name remain anonymous. We have changed his name here to Yonathan.

I first asked him why he was doing this.

“I agree 100% with what is written,” Yonathan says. “Our government is not managing the war for the right reasons, and for a long time now, the objectives of the war are not clear, but from a military perspective, we already won.”

Hostages 'paying the price'

“The government knows when the war will stop, they will have to go to election and they will lose that election. The hostages are paying the price.”

Yonathan is the father of young children and lives just outside Tel Aviv. He has been in the Israeli air force for 20 years and is now a reservist, reporting for duty just one or two days a week.

When asked about Netanyahu’s criticism, his response is withering of the prime minister.

“It’s the same propaganda, same labelling from Netanyahu, everyone who speaks their mind, and doesn’t align with the government is immediately labelled anarchists. It’s a lie, there is no left and right on the hostage  situation,” he says.

Palestinians inspect the damage after an Israeli army airstrike on Yaffa School in Gaza City on  Wednesday, April 23. Picture: AP/Jehad Alshrafi

While there is a cryptic reference to the “innocents” in the air force letter, the reported death of 50,000 Palestinians, including an estimated 18,000 children, doesn’t seem to have weighed much on the signatories.

This is no peacenik revolt.

The letter states that “bringing home all of the hostages back is a supreme ethical commandment, even at the price of temporarily ending the fighting”.

That is no anti-war statement. A not unreasonable interpretation of those words is, bring home the hostages, “even if it means we need to stop military assaults that have resulted for months now in the deaths of civilians".

When asked if the Palestinian death toll, particularly the high number of dead and wounded children, weighed on his consciousness, Yonathan is candid: “Look, war is bad, obviously you get a lot of unintended targets.”

He argues that “part of the reason the war should be managed by the highest standards is because wars create big death tolls, we don’t want the war managed by the wrong agenda”. 

'We didn't want this war'

Yonathan adds: “I am aware of the death toll. I’m very sorry for this. We didn’t want this war.”

But his message is clear. The Hamas terrorist attack of October 7, 2023, has fundamentally changed Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians. There is now little empathy for their suffering.

“We are all in a post-trauma situation, not only what happened, it was the way it happened [1,200 Israelis were murdered in a few hours].

"The trauma of October is so immensely huge; I don’t think any footage of Palestinian suffering would affect any change of view.”

It is the conscious othering that is perhaps most revealing of our conversation.

"We are dealing with a different culture,” Yonathan says.

Maybe it is apt to quote 20th-century Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt here, who wrote: “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

Yonathan’s equivocal sentiment on Palestinian suffering is not uncommon. In my experience living in Tel Aviv, and as a dad of two young girls, I struggle when I hear close friends, parents themselves, express little real pity on the death of Palestinian children. 

“There are no innocents in Gaza,” is a frequent refrain here.

That lack of empathy, I presume, is informed by the fact that Israelis do not see what Irish viewers have seen almost nightly now for a year and a half.

The harrowing images of blood-soaked dead or dying small children draped in the arms of grieving parents are never shown on the mainstream television news channels.

I imagine many Israelis who might agree with the insight of Hannah Arendt would not be thinking of Gaza, but instead remember the euphoric celebrations on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza in the immediate days after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, when it had become clear over 1,000 Israelis had been murdered.

Paul Kearns is a freelance journalist from Dublin who lives in Tel Aviv