When you speak on campus, what message do you bring that other pro-Israel organizations don’t?
I’m a veteran of the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Most people who speak about Israel are relaying talking points they’ve researched. Very few have actually lived it, breathed it, and seen people die.
I can speak about the restraint of the IDF and I can speak about dynamics that I’ve experienced such as when troops in the IDF are ensconced in particular areas and are fired upon by an enemy combatant from a window who is using a child as a human shield.
I can also talk about the conclusion of wars in which I’ve participated where I have returned to the base and witnessed parents looking to meet their children who are greeted instead by generals bearing the news that their children have fallen in battle. I can talk to you essentially about the human side of warfare that very few people are aware of.
This past year, Brigadier-General Danny Bren went to MIT on behalf of Our Soldiers Speak to lecture on cyber warfare. Can you talk a bit about this topic?
Cyber warfare is referred to as “the fourth front.” And the more technologically advanced a country is, the more susceptible it is to cyber attacks. The difficulty with cyber warfare is the question, thus far unanswered, of whom one targets in retaliation. For example, if there is a cyber attack against Israel from an individual sitting at a laptop in the middle of Italy, where do you launch a retaliatory strike? When is an attack defined as an attack? Can you launch a conventional retaliation in response to a cyber attack? If, for example, China, were to launch a cyber attack against Israel, through what means and methods should Israel retaliate?
When you speak on campus you probably often hear the accusation that the IDF kills too many Arabs. Some right-wing Jews, though, wonder why the IDF doesn’t kill more of the enemy through World War II-like aerial bombing rather than its current practice of going door to door, which risks the lives of Israeli soldiers. How do you respond?
There are different methods through which it is calculated whether a strike is appropriate or not. Some are legal, some are moral, and some are military. So, for example, when it comes to the legal level, it’s very straightforward. A military strike is defined as proportionate if the military advantage gained by the strike is deemed proportionate to the strike itself. That’s something most people don’t understand. Most people think proportionality is determined by how many die on one side of the conflict versus how many die on the other side. In actual fact, under international law and the laws of armed conflict, that has nothing to do with proportionality.
It may well be that in World War II indiscriminate carpet-bombing of countries was deemed justifiable. For example, the Allies killed many more civilians in Germany than the Germans killed in the Unites States and the United Kingdom. That having been said, in World War II we were in the midst of an existential war for global dominance, and there was a race that was being entirely wiped out. That’s not the case today.
As someone born and raised in England, you of course have an English accent. Do you think this accent helps you win over American audiences?
Often there is an expectation that any spokesperson representing the IDF or the state of Israel is going to speak with broken or poor English. Our goal has been to counter that viewpoint, so we always ensure that the verbal communication skills of our speakers are at the highest level. Our goal is to ensure that audiences expect to hear from a soldier and leave feeling that they’ve heard from a diplomat.