Can you quote the part where it says these shirts were popular? I'm having trouble locating it. I'm sure you didn't just make it up, right?
That shirt is not only "not popular", there probably weren't 30 copies of it printed.
In the IDF, people who finish a course traditionally buy a "course shirt" -- only for those who
finished that particular course at that particular time in a particular platoon. Such shirts are traditionally full of infantile gallows humor, typical of 19-year-olds in the army. One combat engineers' course I've seen had a paratrooper going down meeting a course's graduate going up (after an explosion). This shirt no more shows an actual desire to shoot Palestinian babies than that shirt an actual desire to get blown up.
I disagree with Mycroft slightly about the Israeli reaction being one of outrage. Many were outraged, yes, but the average Israeli thought this shirt is too infantile and tasteless to even be
worth outrage, much like one isn't outraged by a four-year-old using a "bad word". His reaction was that of eye rolling: "well, sniper course X sure had
its share of prize idiots".
It makes about as much sense to use such a shirt to "prove" anything about Israel than to use a tasteless illustration on a graduation shirt of some small middle school from 1992 to "prove" America is deeply racist. Oh wait -- far-left loons regularly do
that, too, don't they? Meanwhile, mass rallies shouting "death to the Jews", or a constitution that tells of the happy day when Allah will kill them all, somehow show
abolustuely nothing about racism to these folks...