US lawmakers push to grant American soldiers serving in the Israeli army the same legal protections as US troops, in a move without precedent for any other foreign army. The bill would place some 20,000 dual citizens fighting for Israel on a legal par with Americans serving the US.

Details of the Israel first carve out was reported in Military.com. The legislation passing through Congress would, for the first time in American history, treat service in a foreign army as legally equivalent to service in the US armed forces — but only where that foreign army is Israeli occupation army.

Under H.R. 8445, an American returning from a tour with the IDF could demand their old job back from a US employer, halt a foreclosure on a US home, and benefit from interest-rate caps on US debt on the basis of foreign military service

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    2·
    16 hours ago

    I am not saying it was, I am not claiming the US is some kind of beacon of righteous militarism, but the reality is that during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars there was generally a systematic approach to applying lethal force, there was usually somebody having to get permission to utilize lethal force. Don’t condescend me by assuming that because I see a difference between the IDF and US military that must mean that I don’t think the US military doesn’t have very serious issues itself and hasn’t committed countless war crimes.

    During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars Obama after Bush kept escalating drone strikes with zero accountability and that began this process of descent into fascism and brutality, but this was still a period of US militarism that was marked by a high degree of bureaucratic management of violence.

    It used to be that unless you were in a particularly fucked up part of the US military you couldn’t just murder a random civilian, you couldn’t even easily kill an enemy combatant who wasn’t posing an immediate lethal threat.

    **The IDF is NOT like that at all, there is no authorization of military force needed, IDF soldiers will just decide to shoot somebody running because they feel “threatened” there is no accountability, there is no attempt to rationalize violence in the context of an identifiable, lucid military goal, the IDF simply murders Palestinians on mass with no further goal than ethnic cleansing.

    I find it so exhausting that any time anyone tries to say “yeah there is a gradation of evil and we just moved much farther up it into evil territory” that reply guys have to pile on and say “WELL ACTUALLY we were evil already!”.

    I know. We all know.