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Chapter 7, “Israeli soldiers’ perceptions of Palestinian civilians during the 2009 Gaza War” by Neta Oren, extends certain themes from Chapter 5 to a critical study of the 2009 Gaza War. Drawing on testimonies from fifty-four Israeli combat soldiers engaged in this war, Oren extracts narratives that capture the soldiers’ wartime experiences of encounters with civilians living in Gaza. For example, the narrative of “better safe than dead” captures the soldiers’ need to protect themselves in the field of battle, distinction between “good violence” and the enemy’s “bad violence,” and the consequences of these practices and perceptions to the fate of Palestinian civilians. The chapter compares the stories of Israeli soldiers with testimonies of US sol¬diers from the Iraq war, and explores the broader implications of this situa¬tion to modern state-sponsored conflicts allegedly guided by international laws of war and set rules of engagement.
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.
Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.
Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.
This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.
