If you look at virtually any mainstream media outlet this morning (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Forward, Fox News, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, etc.), you’re likely to encounter a story about the “murder” of one Rabbi Zvi Kogan in Dubai. Apparently, Kogan was abducted on Thursday and killed sometime between then and now. His body was found early this morning, Dubai time. Every “Western” outlet I’ve looked at his played this story in an identical way, one that essentially follows the PR line of the Israeli government: Kogan was a rabbi, a man of religion and peace. He was in Dubai to do outreach work on behalf of Israel–hence The Jewish People–to the Arab world. For this the good man was slain. His murder was a vile act of anti-Semitic terrorism, and that’s all it was. Let us all condemn the act, and let us all weep for the loss of the deceased, an innocent civilian lost to the murderous Jew haters of the Arab world.

One relevant fact is systematically, consistently being omitted from all of these stories. You can find it in the Wikipedia entry on Kogan:

“Before moving to the UAE, he served in the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati Brigade.”

The Givati Brigade has a long and illustrious history of conquest and massacre stretching back (like so many things in Israeli history) to the founding of the State itself. None of this is mentioned in the lachrymose tales of Kogan’s demise.

The Wikipedia entry cites two sources for Kogan’s IDF service:

אייכנר, איתמר; ארי, ליאור בן; פריד, שילֹה (2024-11-23). “שירת בגבעתי, שימש כעוזר הרב הראשי בדובאי: זהו שליח חב”ד שגובר החשש שנרצח”. Ynet (in Hebrew). Retrieved 2024-11-24.
^ “Chabad emissary to UAE Zvi Kogan murdered in ‘antisemitic terrorist attack'”. Chabad.org. 2024-11-24. Retrieved 2024-11-24.

I guess American reporters can’t read Hebrew, and can’t read relevant sources even when they’re in English. Kogan was a Chabad rabbi, but it didn’t occur to anyone to read the Chabad.org entry about him. 

According to Israeli rules of engagement, any member of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, Hezbollah or any similar or allied organization is and indefinitely remains a military target regardless of their current state of membership or activities. Membership, past or present, combatant or non-, is sufficient to make someone a target. (On Israel’s rules of engagement, see–for the tip of the iceberg–Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza, +972‘s reporting on Lavender, and Suzanne Schneider’s “Does Israel Target Civilians?”)

In other words: If you once were a member of any of these organizations, but no longer are, you remain a target for as long as you live. If you once were a member but never engaged specifically in combat operations (“terrorism”), you remain a target despite that. Beyond this, if you are loosely associated with anyone of the preceding description, you remain a target.

Beyond this, according to Israeli rules of engagement–according to the so-called Dahiya Doctrine–it is perfectly justifiable to annihilate whole populations that live anywhere near anyone of the preceding description simply because doing so might have deterrent value: if a whole population ex hypothesi innocent of any wrongdoing knows that they can be killed because one former Hamas clerk lives somewhere nearby, members of that population have a strong incentive to rat out the one Hamas clerk, or rat out someone who might pass as one. If they don’t, they can all be killed–without remorse, regret, or apology. Thus speaks the IDF, the “most moral army in the world,” by words and by deed. (For more on the Dahiya Doctrine, see this and this.)

The innocent civilian at work

If it now occurs to you that this is a great way to erase the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, to target non-combatants, and then to pretend that any non-combatants you kill are “collateral damage,” you’ve made a valuable realization, albeit one that’s about 80 years late in coming, since Israel has been doing just this since its founding in 1948. And doing it with American assistance. That’s why Israel was attacked on October 7, 2023 in the first place (and why we’ll be attacked, soon enough). The October 7 attack was not the “beginning” of any “war” begun by Hamas, but the continuation of a war, by Israel’s victims, that began decades ago and has never been resolved. To belabor the painfully obvious: the “Arab Israeli conflict” refers to an ongoing state of war that began in 1948 and has yet to be resolved. It does not refer to a mythical “war” that began out of the blue on October 7, 2023. 

But then, the United States is a country–while theologically invoking the name of a figure from the Hebrew Bible in justification–that claims the right to equate any assistance to Palestinian society as “material assistance to terrorism” without even the pretense of due process of law. If I send $1,000 to a friend in the West Bank, and a dollar of that ends up, downstream, in some place that the Americans or Israelis regard as “terrorist”–regardless of the absurdity of their definition, regardless of the absurdities of its application, regardless of the presence or absence of evidence one way or the other–then I become a “terrorist.”

The only people who aren’t terrorists by this definition are people who wholeheartedly support whatever Israel wants done, regardless of what it is. Feel one ounce of sympathy for Palestine, and send one dollar there, and you become a material supporter of terrorism. But serve in the Givati Brigades, do whatever you wanted there–whether you were ordered to or not–and you remain an innocent civilian, no matter who you killed, how, how many, when, or why. The people willing to treat me as a terrorist insist on treating a former member of the Givati Brigades as an innocent civilian. The people willing to exterminate whole neighborhoods are expecting us to accept their right to do so, then expecting us to grieve the loss of a single targeted killing. 

Imagine that a Palestinian or Lebanese man had recently served in Hamas or Hezbollah, but then finished his service, and, being an imam, decided to do outreach work in–oh, I don’t know–Dubai. One day he’s abducted; a few days later his body is found. The suspicion is that the Israelis did it. Would any American reporter just happen to forget that Imam So and So had served in Hamas or Hezbollah, treating his death as a “murder,” and then serve as stenographers for Hamas or Hezbollah PR, conveying the message that Imam So and So was an innocent civilian victim of vile Orientalist Islamophobia? To consider the possibility is to see the gallows humor in it. But this is the way “Western” reporters report on events in the Middle East, expecting us to take them seriously–and being taken seriously for their blatant, obvious journalistic fraud. If you can fill in the gaps in mainstream news coverage by reading Wikipedia, you’re being fed bullshit. But more often than not, you can.

I acknowledge that it’s distasteful for any military outfit (Israel, Palestinian, or Lebanese) to kill a former combatant no longer in combat. But I also acknowledge that doing so has obvious deterrence value. If a combatant knows that he can be killed after his service ends, he knows that he can’t simply serve, escape the battlefield, and then receive perpetual immunity for whatever he did when he was “on the clock” by making his departure. We don’t treat ordinary criminals that way, so why treat war criminals that way? Better to think of it this way: once a soldier enters battle (particularly if he does so voluntarily), the battlefield follows him in perpetuity. That’s a good way of disincentivizing entry ab initio. If you enter the battlefield, you stay on it forever. If you don’t want to be a target, don’t enter. But don’t complain when you’re targeted after you thought you’d clocked out, when your enemy thought otherwise.

I have no tears to shed for Rabbi Zvi Kogan, for the Givati Brigades, for the IDF, or for the State of Israel. As far as I’m concerned, all of them are or were military targets, and all should be dealt with accordingly. I object to the dishonesty that induces people to seek sympathy for a Rabbi Kogan. Don’t tell me he was “murdered.” Don’t tell me his killers were presumptively motivated by “anti-Semitism.” Don’t expect me to feel the slightest sorrow for him, his family, his life, or his mission. I don’t. This is not because I’m unfamiliar with the pain of loss, but because I know it all too well.

I don’t claim that Rabbi Kogan “deserved” to die. I claim that he was a legitimate military target. And I refuse to be gaslighted by the hand-wringing bullshit artists who want to pretend that he wasn’t. If you don’t want to be targeted for your IDF service, don’t join. If you’re already in, get out. But don’t come crying to the rest of us with your genocidaires’ tales of woe. Human tears are in short supply. We should save them for the innocent, not the guilty.

Thanks to Roderick Long for the Intercept article cited above.