The reservists of Unit 100 are not the only victims of the military advocate-general’s scandalous conduct. One could add to the list dozens of helpless soldiers who find themselves in lengthy detentions for taking a foolish souvenir from a house or a weapon part from the battlefield. Public trust in our so-called gatekeepers has also been severely damaged, and will not return to what it once was, after the justice system exposed itself as manipulative, self-interested, and willing to mislead the courts like the worst offenders.
Yet all of these constitute only a fraction of the enormous damage caused by the Military Advocate-General’s Corps, damage that nearly every fighter has encountered during the past two years of combat. The message, from the MAG Corps downward, is that every soldier is a potential war criminal.
The mindset of the legal echelon in the IDF, as repeatedly conveyed to the fighters, is that anyone engaged in warfare and defending the country might be judged as a criminal, at home or abroad, if they deviate even slightly from the rules of engagement. Anything later deemed unjustified by people sitting under fluorescent lights in the prosecution’s offices can immediately be classified as a war crime.
Reforming the MAG Corps
In other words: we are all criminals until the prosecution declares otherwise. Protection must be extended not only to the Unit 100 fighters who were falsely accused, and not only to the unfortunate soldiers detained over trivialities such as taking unauthorized souvenirs. Reforming the MAG Corps must include the demand to protect those whom we have grown accustomed to viewing as automatically guilty: those who, in the fog of war, deviated from the rules of engagement.
This is crucial to understand: a soldier fearing for his life, and certainly a commander responsible for the lives of many, cannot sit in Gaza and compute the considerations weighed in an air-conditioned headquarters. Decisions often must be made in an instant, with incomplete information and unclear assessments of the danger to the force or the nature of the enemy.
Too frequently, the IDF encourages soldiers and commanders to be stringent in safeguarding the enemy while being lax in protecting our own people. Fighters in the field know that if they err, even under extreme pressure, with an unclear picture, they may face trial. The prosecution’s conduct creates incentives for hesitant, unsafe combat.
Cutlivating timid commanders
The message is that any forceful action taken in good faith under extreme conditions may later be judged not as a mistake or tragedy, but as a war crime. We are cultivating a culture of timid commanders, afraid to apply force in the fog of battle.
This is not, of course, a call to ignore the rules of engagement or to allow soldiers to act without accountability.
There are actions so clearly wrongful that they are plainly criminal. However, today’s problem is not those rare cases.
It is the pursuit of the gray areas, such as what happened to the Nahal soldiers who mistakenly fired on aid workers they believed to be involved in terrorism, and who were expelled from the army in disgrace. Commanders across the IDF observed how those soldiers were treated and internalized the lesson.
Ultimately, the IDF must change the equation that frames battlefield decisions as either “correct” or “potential war crimes.” It must provide unequivocal backing to the fighters who risk their lives for all of us, place trust in our soldiers, and recognize that judgment of those in combat cannot be entrusted to people with no battlefield experience – and certainly not to those who, as the recent MAG scandal revealed, place their organizational image in the media above the lives and futures of the soldiers who they are meant to serve.
The writer, an attorney, is a member of the Reservists-Generation of Victory movement.