It’s interesting what happens when the rhetoric used is applied to both sides.
Why don’t the citizens of Israel stand up against their governments war crimes?
If the citizens of Israel didn’t all want to be complicit in their government’s war crimes, why haven’t they risen up to outlaw mandatory military service?
Why don’t the citizens of Israel do anything about the settlers committing terrorist acts in plains clothes, and instead just let them blend with the rest of the population?
Why do the citizens of Israel not stand against their military protecting, supporting, legitimizing the terrorist acts of the settlers?
The list goes on…
The onus of responsibility lies on Israeli’s leadership and all that support the kinds of rulings and actions that have blurred the lines between combatant and non combatant.
Compulsory military service needs to go. Willing or unwilling, every citizen is forced into this conflict because they are required by law to do what their leadership asks them to, even if it means continuing the cycle of oppression. As we have seen with the Nuremberg trials, “Just following orders” is not an excuse.
There have also been numerous cases of the Israeli military protecting settlers in plains clothes as they commit terrorist acts against the indigenous populations. Doing so allows Israel to further its goal while officially creating plausible deniability for numerous humans rights violations.
These two factors alone heavily blur the lines between combatant and noncombatant, guilty and innocent, and fascist and non-fascist. It is very possible that this was done by design to force every Israeli citizen to have a stake in the conflict regardless of whether they want to. Israel knows Hamas does not have the luxury nor the technology to sift through potential targets to identify the legitimate ones. In a sense, the Zionist leadership is using the entirety of its population as a human-shield, and this placement of a civilian festivity near a military facility in a hot zone was a strategic one, such that when the legitimate target is attacked, others are caught in the cross-fire, and Israel can then use this to justify collective punishment against innocent civilians.
I mean… they kind of already did that in the October 7th attack. They would rather their people be dead than be used to release Palestinians imprisoned without trial.
Maybe it depends on the type of Israeli too. There is a lot of inter-Israeli racism and Arab-Israelis which were historically set near borders to act as buffers, aren’t as valued as their European counterparts.