"The Palestinians Make Cynical Use Of Children"

That title comes from a comment an IDF spokesperson made last August, following an incident in which the IDF killed three Palestinian children (shown below) who were initially alleged to be legitimate targets because they were retrieving a Qassam rocket launcher, but who were subsequently found to have been playing tag.

Sarah, Mahmoud and Yehya Abu Ghazal. Photo: PCHR, via ei

The comment is particularly ironic in view of the fact that if you were compiling a list of organizations that have no standing whatsoever to talk about the cynical exploitation of children, the Israeli military would surely be right up there.

When Israel exploits children for military purposes, it's usually Palestinian children on the receiving end: e.g. in the form of children used as human shields, or child prisoners being recruited as informers (link opens MS Word file). But a report I watched this morning on Ha'aretz/Channel 10 - New program to allow mentally challenged to enlist in the IDF, read the print version here or watch the video here - reminded me that IDF exploitation can be a multicultural phenomenon. Today's report is about how the IDF is enlisting about 200 mentally challenged volunteers into the army, in a project designed to allow the participants more "meaningful integration into Israeli society". It highlights the story of Shimrit, who has Down Syndrome, and concludes with her joyful exclamation: "It's fun to be in uniform!".

Now, I should say at the outset that Shimrit is not a child, and all the individuals who enlist in the IDF under this program will be at least 21 years of age. But the recruitment into the armed forces of the mentally challenged raises some of the same issues raised by the recruitment of children. Furthermore, the IDF actually does use children to perform non-combat tasks at its military installations. Israel's New Profile organisation (and here in English) described numerous instances in its report of July 2004, Child Recruitment in Israel (link is to PDF file); including this example first reported in Ha'aretz (Autistic youth find their place in the IDF, by Yulie Khromchenko; Ha’aretz, 24 June 2004):

A different case, involving a different population, is that of the Shikmim special education school in Rishon Letzion, as recently reported by the daily newspaper Ha’aretz:

Some 20 of the school's 60 autistic pupils have been reporting once a week for work at the Ordinance Corps' base in Zerifin camp for the last two years. Dressed in army fatigues, the youth sort out uniforms for laundry, wash dishes and set tables in the dining room, clean vehicles in the auto shop, rake leaves or file documents.

These children are a part of an official military company; they have an officer in charge of them, wear uniforms, etc. They take over the work of other soldiers who serve in that base. While the children are not there to do the work, other soldiers must do it. The news feature also mentions that the initiative for this project came from the army. Indeed, we also know of other similar projects, involving children and adults suffering from various disorders, who “all wear an IDF uniform and perform essential tasks for the Force”.

These children are not only minors, and for that do not carry legal responsibility for their actions, and should not be recruited. In the case of autistic children, there is solid ground to assume that they have never been presented with all the information necessary for them to make the decision of joining the army part-time. Moreover, in most cases these children cannot fully comprehend the meaning of joining an armed force, and the ultimate purpose of what they are required to do. Apparently, they are also under a lot of social pressure to join in. While the Ha’aretz news item cited above refers to these children as volunteers, it seems hardly possible for them to have given their free and informed consent to their recruitment.

Part of that last paragraph - "these children cannot fully comprehend the meaning of joining an armed force, and the ultimate purpose of what they are required to do" - hints at what the recruitment of children has in common with the recruitment of the developmentally disabled, and why both are objectionable.

There is a good reason why it is not commonly regarded as acceptable to recruit the mentally challenged (or children) to join the military, even in a non-combat role. The ultimate purpose of an army is to kill or be killed in the service of the state, and those we recruit should have the maturity and capability to freely assent to doing something with such profound, irreversible implications. (This applies even when we recruit the most vulnerable members of society into a purely non-combat role, as their presence in such a role frees up other soldiers to kill or be killed). We do not generally consider it acceptable to recruit children or the mentally challenged into the military because we are not persuaded that they have the capablility to give informed consent to the ultimate life-or-death function they perform as soldiers.

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. And, as Roy Peled remarked, the exceptions tend to involve people like us being caught up in conflicts that people like us approve of:

In the official website for commemorating IDF casualties, one can find the following entry about Nissim Gini: "He volunteered just like dozens of his young friends to defend his town and homeland, and demanded to play a role…he was tasked with being the liaison between posts, and filled this role with the responsibility and loyalty of an adult, amid a hail of bullets and thundering explosions…after one of the posts was overtaken by the enemy, he was severely wounded and died after suffering much pain…he was 10 years old at the time of his death, the youngest of Israel's war casualties."

The story of Nissim Gini was recounted when we were in elementary school, during a day-trip tracing the footsteps of warriors in the War of Independence. It was recounted as a story of bravery, without anybody daring to say anything to condemn the heroes of the War of Independence who enlisted a 10-year-old boy.

And it's not just Israel. You can see a similar phenomenon at work in photographs of Fleet Week 2007 in New York, where the normally-troubling phenomenon of children with guns becomes a fun and patriotic spectacle, simply because they're our children, our guns, and its our military they're being recruited for.

Generally, however, we understand that we do not recruit the most weak and vulnerable into military service. We certainly had no problem at all understanding this just last month, when we were horrified to hear that two Iraqi suicide bombers were alleged to have had Down Syndrome. As it turns out, they didn't. But our horrified reaction to the claim of Down Syndrome, and the fact that the people who first circulated that claim knew perfectly well just what effective propaganda it would be, shows that we understand on a visceral level that there are some segments of society you simply do not recruit for the military.

And I suppose it's that disconnect - between what we condemn in other people but find perfectly acceptable among ourselves - that bothers me in all this. If the story we see today in Ha'aretz about integration of the developmentally disabled into the military were coming from an Arab or Muslim country, we certainly wouldn't be thinking of it in terms of "personable Down Syndrome lady makes good". We would be clucking self-righteously instead about how "they" cynically exploit the most weak and vulnerable members of society for military purposes, and wondering whether it's something to do with Islam.

I'm tired of hearing that a dead 10 year old Israeli soldier is a military hero but a dead 10 year old Palestinian with a rock in his hand is proof that Arabs don't love their children. I'm tired of hearing that an American child posing with camouflage paint and a rifle is patriotic but a Palestinian child posing with a headband and a gun is proof that Arabs raise their children to hate. I'm tired of hearing that recruiting real-life autistic children into military jobs, or having real-life Down Syndrome adults serve in the military is a laudable way to integrate them into Israeli society, but the recruitment of non-existent Down Syndrome suicide bombers is spectacular proof of how irredeemably evil Arabs and Muslims are. I am just sick to the back teeth of being endlessly bombarded with propaganda that demonizes Arabs and Muslims for being wicked people with a flawed religion, when the things we condemn in them are ignored or even venerated among ourselves.