war crimes!!!!!

I heard on the news that Israel is now accused of war crimes against Palestine.  That horrified me.  How could a nation that became--or rebecame a nation after sort of surviving the most horrible war crimes I could have imagined.  Surely they did not become the monsters.  Surely they have not forgotten so soon what it is like to be a people that is homeless and without acceptance.
But being no Pollyanna, I accepted that the people of Israel, the people that survived the Holocaust after surviving 2000 years of wondering after the loss of their own country was not made of wimps and wusses.  Of course they are capable of war crimes.
Then the term--war crimes--struck me.  What about war is not a crime.  There is no good in a war.  Wars could all be avoided, but they aren't because one group always decides that someone else has something they want, and they want it enough to send their young people at risk of life and limb, to get it.  Their is always an aggressor.  And the aggressor always wants something.  Something that is currently not theirs but that could be if they kill enough of the other people to make them decide keeping it is not longer worth it.
We have grand and patriotic terms for war.  We always are fighting for freedom here in this country.  I'm not sure how we always know which side to take to be fighting for freedom.  I haven't not noticed much freedom in the Ukraine, or Afghanistan, or Iraq or anyone of those countries that we want to fight for or against.  I didn't see much in Vietnam either--France left after years of colonialization---read long term pillaging of another countries resources, and two factions went at it.  As usual, the poor on both sides lost.  I don't know that anyone won.  Or that anyone ever wins.
Same with Korea, we fought with the South, and I do think the dictatorship in the North is pretty scarey, but no one won.  Maybe buying some peacetime is all war ever does.  And we humans should figure out that if we don't go to war, its all peacetime.
But back to war crimes.  What part of war is not a crime and therefore how does one determine what is a crime.  I personally find that there have been many atrocities, but during war and during peace.  I wasn't sure we Americans wouldn't commit our own atrocities upon those children at the border.  They are certainly raising the hackles on many of our people.  We watch the news, hear the spins placed by our personal favorite newscaster, and take side.  We haven't had a war on our soil in over 100 years so its almost like cheering at a tv football game.  Choose your side, be loyal, be supportive when they are doing good, don't boo when they aren't doing so good.  You know, be a good cheerleader.  but those things our there that are loud on our TV screens, those are people, and in many of those places, they have lived lives similar to ours, this is just as horrifying to them as if suddenly found ourselves in the middle of an invasion of aliens.  When suddenly your home isn't safe, your children could be killed, not as a rare accident but by a gun or bomb or for smiling or not smiling at the enemy soldier now inhabiting your town, then what isn't a war crime.  If your son or daughter is conscripted into the war, with no desire to go to war, with a new spouse, plans for a career, wanting children, and they are sent in to shoot at people they don't know and those people are shooting back and kill them.  Is that not a war crime?  If your five year old doesn't know not to walk through the empty field by grandma's because it is now a minefield, is that not a war crime?  If you family business of 6 generations is taken as a temporary headquarters for the newly arrived allies and they tear up the walls and throw out the supplies to make room for their own needs, how is that not a war crime?
Perhaps all war is a crime, and then all warmongers are war criminals.  Who would be on that list.  The weapons manufacturers, the developers of technology that has no use but to kill large numbers of people, the people that want war, that profit from war, that start wars for their own gains.
Our own country is full of war criminals.  The politically connected, the rich and powerful, the greedy and military powers that know their only purpose is war, they are war criminals.  The 18 year old that snaps and strangles a kid in a village when they startle him, the soldier that suddenly sees "enemy" with every person that looks like the peoples that have been shooting at him and blasts a group of teenagers that were out trying to party in  their blasted city that is not surviving in a war,  the mother that throws a grenade into a jeep after watching her toddler run over by the same kind of jeep.  Those are the true fruit of war.  PTSD, missing limbs, traumatic brain injury, family trees that suddenly end, those are the fruit of war.
This is where everyone brings up Hitler.  "We had to stop Hitler"  Agreed, but why would so many people follow him.  Why was it so easy for him to make so many people kill for what he believed.  Hitler was one man, who gave him the power to start a war?  We did.  Just like we do now.  Just like we do now.  Hitler did not personally kill all those people.  It is estimated that WWII lead to 60,000,000 dead world wide counting military and civilians.  Over 50 countries lost people in that war.  And everyone blames one man---Hitler.  A small man with a bad moustache.  There is no way he could have killed 16,000 people a day by himself.  We didn't have that kind of technology back then.  (we might be able to do it now, but reality is, the people giving orders usually can't even run the equipment, so one man couldn't do it alone now, either)
Yet, every single person that fought in that war saw themselves as a patriot, a hero, doing their duty, from every side, from every position.
We all need to do a better job teaching our children.  The problem is not that we need wars to protect our freedoms.  We need to all know that no one can take our freedom.  No ONE person, no ONE idea can make us do what we know is wrong, no ONE desire for possessing what does not belong to us can be used as an excuse to kill.  We all matter, we all have a right to live in safety, with personal freedoms (that end at the tip of the other person's nose) and enough food/water/medicine/shelter to keep from being on constant want.  Acquisitiveness is not a right to take from others, power hunger is not a right to tell others what to do, and personal beliefs are not a right to make others live by our rules.  That is freedom for all.  And real freedom doesn't kill people, people kill people---and calling it war doesn't making it any less a crime.