“Sheket, yorim” [“Silence, we’re shooting”]
The authority to wage war is the most important authority in the hands of the government. In the name of the need for effective warfare, the government may act in secrecy, make decisions quickly without an orderly process, and ignore norms concerning human rights. The authority to wage war should, therefore, be subject to supervision and control: in order to ensure that the government conducts the war in a responsible and adequate manner, to prevent inefficiency and misuse of authority, to ensure that the war is conducted in accordance with the requirements of law and international law, and to maintain the democratic legitimacy of the war.
The two interests - the operational desire to conduct the war without limitations and the strategic desire to monitor and guide the work of the government - collide. Carl von Clausewitz believed that war is a phenomenon driven by a paradoxical trinity of three elements: primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; chance and probability; and the subordination of war to rational policy. Clausewitz believed that war is an act of force with no logical limit, but that war is never a self-contained activity, but is always influenced by external factors.
The concept of absolute war was a theoretical construct developed by the Prussian military theorist General Carl von Clausewitz in his famous but unfinished philosophical exploration of war, Vom Kriege (in English, On War, 1832). The subordination of politics (internal and external) to the goal of purely military victory is a notion that Clausewitz would have regarded as nonsensical.
“Sheket, yorim,” [“Silence, we’re shooting”, or "Quiet! They're shooting"] is a headline turned catchphrase coined by Amiram Nir during the First Lebanon War in 1982. What is meant is that during a war Israelis want to focus – and not be distracted by outside noise and considerations. There is a widely held understanding that politics and other distractions should be put aside for the good of the country while it’s fighting.
Amiram Nir worked as a military correspondent for Army Radio, and for Yedioth Ahronoth and for Israel Television news. Nir was counter-terrorism advise who, helped America concoct the scheme to secretly sell arms to Iran, and transfer the income to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On November 30, 1988, a single-engine Cessna plane crashed in Michoacan state in Mexico, killling Nir.
Originally called "Operation Peace for Galilee," the Lebanon War was the first Isaeli military incursion that large portions of the country's population considered unjust. Nevertheless combat raged on, and as the situation began to degenerate into a Vietnam-type morass, where soldiers were being given immoral or outright illegal orders from their superiors, the public's concern turned to protest.
According to Nachum Barnea, "There are two kinds of journalism when Israel is at war. There is journalism with no boundaries or there is patriotic journalism." Barnea, who writes for the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronoth, was one several leading Israeli journalists taking part in a symposium Sept. 14, 2007 on the accountability of the media in the Second Lebanon War, held this summer at Tel-Aviv University. "Between us, I am a Jew," said Barnea. "In wartime, a journalist has an additional obligation [not just to report on events], but to take Israel's security needs into consideration."
Barnea noted that the war last summer was different than earlier wars, when there were no cellphones. "In this war, a soldier made two phone calls, one to his mother ("Emaleh") and the other to "Carmela" (a nickname for the media)," he said. "Practically everyone had the cellphone number of a journalist. The information journalists received didn't arrive in small leaks, but flowed in streams.
Amos Harel, defence correspondent for Ha'aretz, said that the path of patriotic journalism was the correct path for a journalist to follow. "As a journalist, I have to try to tell the truth," he declared. "There are times when I know that, even though Nablus is only one hour away, most Israelis don't know what's going on there. There are times I have to tell them, so they can't ignore it."
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, Israelis came together, united in grief and anger, both politically and among other citizens. By 2024 Israelis were watching a sanitised war. Most Israelis do not see pictures of injured Palestinian women and children or the destruction of Gaza into kilometer after kilometer of rubble to the point where it will be difficult to rebuild it. They will rarely if ever see a child trapped in that rubble, or a mother carrying her dead baby. They don't see the screaming children, or the toddlers who cannot open their eyes. The horrible pictures seen on TV screens are the ones suitable for broadcast. The really gruesome ones never make it to air. Israelis are bewildered at why the world is increasingly uncomfortable at the high civilian death rate.
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