David Shulman in NYRB on how the killing is getting easier:

‘In early May, Breaking the Silence, the organization of Israeli ex-soldiers that is by now well known for its meticulous independent accounts of IDF operations, published a report on the Israeli army’s campaign in Gaza last summer. The result of many months of recorded interviews with over sixty soldiers, including many lower- and middle-level officers, the report revealed that the large number of civilian casualties on the Palestinian side was a consequence, among other things, of military tactics and orders explicitly adopted by the IDF.
The report sparked off an immediate response in the Israeli and international media, with predictable attempts to vilify its authors as “traitors.” Israelis like to think that their army holds to high moral standards, and they react badly to hard evidence that shows this is not the case. There has been particular outrage at the suggestion that there is anything wrong about the new “Gaza rules” and the high civilian body count. Most Israelis simply, and simplistically, blame Hamas for the fighting and its cost, which they also see as the natural result of fighting in the thickly populated urban space of Gaza. As it happens, there were few surprises in the interviews, which mostly confirmed what we knew from reports in the press last summer, as well as from the evidence of earlier IDF campaigns in Lebanon and in Gaza. The deeper significance of the interviews, then, may lie in what they suggest about IDF operations over many years and, indirectly, about longstanding policies in the occupied West Bank.’

(…)

‘For the sake of comparison, we might recall the Israeli army’s traditional rules of engagement, taught to generations of recruits. A potential enemy can, we were told, be killed if he has a weapon, an apparent intent to cause harm, and a realistic capability of doing so. “Gaza rules” were far more lenient, as many of the Breaking the Silence interviews state directly: What were the rules of engagement? 
There weren’t really any rules of engagement, it was more protocols. The idea was, if you spot something—shoot. They told us: “There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot.” Whether it posed a threat or not wasn’t a question, and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal.
The same approach—massive fire, sometimes uncontrolled or indiscriminate—held true at much higher levels of operation, as in the destruction of buildings, indeed of entire neighborhoods, such as Shuja’iyya in the central zone and Khuza’a in the far south, either by ground artillery or from the air. The heavy civilian casualties on the Palestinian side included some five hundred dead children. Destruction of homes and infrastructure in Gaza was immense, some of it clearly meant to teach a lesson, or to take revenge, or to create a passable illusion of military victory or some form of deterrent against future attacks.
We have to keep in mind the setting in which this campaign unfolded. Hamas fired many thousands of missiles, deliberately aimed at civilians, into Israeli territory. There is no question that Hamas is guilty of grievous war crimes. It also deliberately embedded fighters in the midst of the Palestinian civilian population, dug combat tunnels whose entry point was in homes, mosques, or other public buildings, and planned and attempted to use these tunnels for lethal attacks on civilians within Israel. For many Israelis, all this is more than enough to justify the human losses on the Palestinian side.’

Read the article here.

Netanyahu’s excuse is that things are worse in Syria and Iraq, which is true, but it is a rather lame excuse.

And probably it’s an illusion that we can contain war in the mold of the just war and moral warfare.
War will inevitably become immoral and even the truly just war will be fought with unjust means.

But these rather broad statements are no excuse. Where the killing becomes easy dehumanization of the enemy has preceded the killing.

I don’t see much change. The killing will get easier, the justification of the killings will get glibber and the condemnations will become even more toothless.
As Henry Miller wrote: ‘Boris has just given me a summary of his views. He is a weather prophet. The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves.’

We may not be all Charlie, definitely not, but we are all weather prophets.