There is something uniquely demented, inhuman and robotic in Israeli Occupation Forces soldiers — in their targeting of Palestinian babies, children, teens, elderly, mothers, women — it’s important to not use the tepid term “civilians” for all of these dead, injured or maimed human beings.

Doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.

Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops.

Chris McGreal: ‘Not a normal war’: doctors say children have been targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza, The Guardian

The closest comparison to the IOF (aka IDF) seems to be the SS (Schutzstaffel) of Nazi Germany — the SS was a “volunteer” paramilitary organization for almost its entire existence, yet the Nazi nationalist, wholly antisemitic ideology had been indoctrinating and concretizing in the decade preceding its creation in 1933.

That concretization allowed once-ordinary Germans to collectively perpetrate or look away from inhuman horrors that will reside in the collective human conscious for many centuries, possibly millennia.

For the last 76 years, since the devastating creation of the State of Israel in 1948 atop an already-existing Palestine, Jewish Israeli men and women have been conscripted for a mandatory 2 years and 8 months of military service — generally at 18 years of age.

Is it during that tenure that they are collectively indoctrinated and dehumanized into the savage settler-colonial Zionist nationalist ideology — wholly anti-Palestinian, that would enable them to snipe individual children, murder entire families and also obliterate hospitals and target “safe zones” with mass killings?

When does the indoctrination of Israelis start — as there are virtually no military conscientious objectors in Israel (there are those who receive religious exemption who must then serve in alternative Zionist national service projects and programs). And in the contemporary era, approaching two decades of political social media — especially with the ubiquity of meme-photo-video-based and teach-in style social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok — that lack of self-awareness, that lack of “woke-ness”, — that lack of objection and resistance to serve a brutal settler-colonial state among Israeli young people is just flat-out astonishing.

And that may indicate a much earlier indoctrination into a very cohesive, or rather adhesive, cult-like, settler-colonial Zionist mindset — maybe not organized quite like the Hitler Youth Camps, but similar— I don’t know enough about Israeli public secular primary and secondary education curricula — or, if there is community/peer/familial relegation to pariah status upon one’s rejection of the Zionist ideology and conscription that reinforces a near unanimity — a groupthink of disregard for Palestinian lives, homes and land.

Nearly every adult Jewish Israeli is a soldier of the Zionist state – conscripted at 18 and remains eligible for mandatory reserve service until age 40.

And that, is an indelible, foundational, and formidable identity — exceedingly to difficult to independently evolve from.

The conscripted citizen essentially becomes an eternal political soldier for the state.