Organizational roles, moral disengagement, and genocide: Reflections on “Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War”

Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel's War" is a special feature documentary directed by Ben Zand and produced by ZANDLAND for ITV, which was released in November 2025 and was nominated for a BAFTA this year. 1 This documentary offers a rare, first-person account of the experience of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers in Gaza.It is not an easy piece to watch, as it documents in vivid detail much of the brutality of the genocide in Gaza; 2 but it is an important piece of work, which reveals perspectives that are often not as prominent, and that could help to inform public debate on the actions of the Israeli state.Moreover, this documentary offers management and organization studies (MOS) scholars an opportunity to reflect on a much less visible dimension of genocides: the way that professional roles, and the organizational structures that define them, shape individuals' experience of participation in such atrocities.In "Breaking Ranks" we are invited to follow the personal trajectories of IDF soldiers through their education in Israel, their military service, their experience of Hamas' atrocious attacks on October 7, and their deployment in Gaza.The soldiers interviewed for the documentary share their intense emotional journeys, their desire for revenge, at times their hatred of Palestinian people, but also their first encounters with Palestinians as actual human beings and not objects of propaganda.Most importantly, these soldiers tell us how they came to "break ranks."To understand why their stories are quite literally about "breaking" something that is deep-seeded in their identity, and the role dynamics behind that rupture, we will use Mota and Morrison's (2024) account of moral disjunction.Through this lens, we are able to explain how these individuals come to experience their own enactment of violent roles, how such enactment is psychologically and morally harmful, and what role-related processes would contribute to a breaking down of the organizational dynamics that enable genocide and other atrocities.