The unspeakable horror of the massacre in the Syrian town of Douma has overshadowed the violence along Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip in recent days. The roughly 30 Palestinian deaths in Gaza are nothing more than a statistical blip compared with the number of Syrians killed in their country’s seven-year civil war, which stands at half a million and counting.

Indeed, compared with the mass murder being perpetrated across from Israel’s northeastern border, the daily killings along its southern border seem like nothing more than a training mishap. True, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) do not spray nerve gas over residential neighborhoods. They “only” fire at unarmed protesters on the border of the world’s largest prison. Nonetheless, it is unclear what made Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman reiterate the cliche that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world” when referring to the latest Gaza border incidents. To which army is he comparing the IDF? And how is the term “moral” even remotely compatible with Israel’s military control over millions of people for over 50 years?

Liberman announced that “anyone trying to approach the fence risks their life.” Even shooting dead a Palestinian journalist operating a camera drone 350 meters (383 yards) from the fence does not begin to scratch the IDF’s “moral” image. Not a single commander questioned the live-fire rules of engagement handed down to the troops ahead of the planned Palestinian demonstrations. Not one Knesset member stood by the call of the human rights organization B’Tselem, urging IDF soldiers to refuse to fire at unarmed civilians engaging in nonviolent resistance. Disobeying orders was never an option. I will try to explain why.

Israel’s history of conscientious objection is as old as the state. In June 1948, several pilots, one artillery officer and eight soldiers refused an order to bomb and intercept the Altalena, a ship carrying weapons for Israel’s Etzel underground. In late October 1956, Israeli border guards killed 43 Israeli Arab citizens, among them nine women and 17 children and youths, in the fields of the village of Kafr Kassem. However, seven of the eight company commanders at the scene avoided carrying out the order given by the battalion commander to shoot in order to kill any Arabs found outside their home after the curfew imposed by the military on Arab villages. Responding to the massacre, Israel’s vaunted poet Natan Alterman wrote, “Such an incident must strike every human society as a terrifying nightmare, shake the seats of the supervisors and commanders, both direct and indirect, challenge entrenched concepts, alarm military instructors, and generate a moral reckoning and search for those responsible.”