No one would have possibly dreamt that genocide and boredom can co-exist, until testimonies collected by +972 Magazine illustrated how the Zionist narrative managed to even construct a new meaning of genocide, or lose it altogether.
With no rules of engagement, the Israeli military created a new form of dehumanization. As the kill toll, estimated by The Lancet to have possibly reached 186,000, Israeli soldiers testified to the carnage and destruction they executed in Gaza. “I personally fired a few bullets for no reason, into the sea or at the sidewalk or an abandoned building. They report it as ‘normal fire’, which is a codename for ‘I’m bored, so I shoot”, an anonymous Israeli reservist stated. This is just a sliver of what lies behind the genocidal kill toll for which Israeli leaders are not facing any political and criminal accountability.
All Palestinians are a target, including women and children, according to the anonymous testimonies. Procedures are created to justify the unbridled shooting – “demonstrating presence” is one such euphemism coined by the Israeli military to open fire even in abandoned places – “even for no reason”, or to force Palestinians, if any, out of any safe haven they might have found among the abandoned dwellings. Yuval Green, one of the reservists refusing to take part in the Rafah incursion, corroborated the anonymous testimonies: “People were shooting just to relive the boredom”.
It takes complete dissociation to equate genocide with boredom. People do not kill out of boredom – there is a plan behind the genocide in Gaza, which is to render it empty of Palestinians. But the dissociation becomes even more bizarre when Green describes how a battalion in Gaza “opened fire together like fireworks” on the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, saying, “It became symbolic”, considering Hanukkah is the festival of lights. Opening fire, for Palestinians, is tantamount to genocide now. Romanticizing weapons of genocide into a colorful fantasy is beyond any rational imagination.
The articles continue with other testimonies of exhilaration at the detonation of buildings in Gaza. “Every once in a while, a building comes down … and the feeling is, ‘Wow, how crazy, what fun,’” an anonymous officer admitted. Crazy, if used in the right context, can well describe the attitude of the army of settler colonists reveling in genocide.
Shooting out of boredom, shooting to kill, demonstrating footage of buildings razed to the ground, and what of the Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. The soldiers testified to killing civilians who were merely looking for scraps of food. Sometimes, bulldozers clear the area of bodies of Palestinians before the humanitarian convoys arrive. And, once again, vindicating The Lancet, “There are more fatalities than are reported”, an anonymous Israeli reservist stated, “most did not carry weapons.”
And elaborating on the gruesome details, the reservists testified to many dead bodies of Palestinians in varying states of decomposition, eaten by animals which survived the bombing. “If they’re in the way, they get moved to the side. There’s no burial of the dead. Soldiers stepped on bodies by mistake,” a reservist explained.
This is a sliver of what genocide looks like, coming from the perpetrators. Are Israeli soldiers shooting out of boredom and the international community is too bored to act? Is the international community as dehumanized as Israel has proved itself to be?
-Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America. Her article appeared in MEMO.
