Palestinian victims, by contrast, remain nameless; and they tend to be presented as mere numbers rather than flesh and blood human beings whose lives also deserve to be grieved. This, too, helps to perpetuate the myth of the Israeli military as moral.

Ultimately, then, it is not only that those who deploy the weapons of the strong are considered more ethical because they kill innocent people from a distance, but also because the colonial legal discourse constructs the people they kill as “human animals”, “collateral damage”, or as a statistic.

So long as the dead are dehumanised in this way and, consequently, presented as unworthy of being grieved, the death drive will continue unabated. This, I fear, is a recipe for genocidal retribution.

As Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians – many of whom are the children and grandchildren of refugees – to leave their homes in northern Gaza ahead of

Source: The Myth of Israel’s ‘Most Moral Army’ – CounterPunch.org