Review by John Pickard, Brentwood Labour Party (personal capacity)
Last Sunday, the Army Chief of Staff warned the Israeli Government that the Gaza Strip was on the verge of collapse because of a worsening humanitarian crisis in this small Hamas-ruled enclave. The politicians, of course, denied that any such humanitarian crisis exists.
But if it is the military that are sounding the alarm, it is because it is the so-called Israeli Defence Force that has to do the ‘dirty work’ of controlling the Palestinian occupied territories, week in and week out. Israel society is highly militarised and the big majority of young people – with the exception of ultra-orthodox Jews – have to serve a period of time in the forces. The experiences of these young people in the military, especially in the occupied Palestinian areas leaves a deep impression, at least on some of them.
Breaking the Silence is an organisation that was founded in 2004 by a group of Israeli military veterans who collected and published testimonies from soldiers who served in the West Bank and Gaza since the start of the Second Intifada. Breaking the Silence aimed to raise awareness about the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories, and to stimulate public debate about the moral price of military control over a civilian population and of ongoing occupation. They have produced a new pamphlet of testimonies, which is available on-line in pdf format and is essential reading for anyone interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
According to Breaking the Silence, all of the testimonies they publish are meticulously verified before publication. The testimonies published in the latest pamphlet are unedited and in their original form, except that names and details are withheld to conceal the identity of specific testimony-bearers. It contains fifteen statements altogether, from all branches of the Israeli army. All of those writing are from the rank of sergeant and above and include officers. The testimonies are from as long ago as 2002, but most are recent, from 2014-16.
One former solder writes, “We broke the silence because we believe it is our moral duty to speak about the injustices we saw and inflicted. Breaking the silence has compelled us to pose questions about things Israeli society taught us there are no questions to ask. Questions about the IDF being the ‘most moral army in the world,’ about Israel as a peace-loving nation simply protecting itself from the enemy, or about how these disagreements must be resolved solely ‘in the family.’ When all these question marks appeared, we found ourselves standing before a huge abyss, undermining the blind faith that shaped our identity as Israelis and soldiers. And yet we still believe it is our duty to break the silence.”
The testimonies bear witness to a relentless process of humiliation and degradation of Palestinians by soldiers, often young enough to be their children or grand-children. The soldiers are drilled to be ultra-cautious and ultra-wary of “terrorists” to the point that they are themselves extremely jumpy.
On soldier described a night operation near Ramallah, stopping and searching vehicles: “…a family arrives. And I’ll never forget that family until my dying day. The father and mother got out of the car, and my soldier had his weapon aimed at the father, and they’re on their way home from a wedding, and three little girls get out of the car with him. As I’m talking to the father, his little girl is clinging to his leg. I’m standing there, next to me a soldier is pointing his weapon at her father, and the little girl is clinging to his leg. We check the car. My soldier says to me, “Can I turn the weapon away?” I answer, “No, you can’t,” because of my understanding that we have to conduct this whole thing professionally, to defend ourselves.”
“The young people don’t plead”
The same soldier graphically illustrated the long-term effect on the population and the seething resentment engendered among young Arabs in particular. “The young people don’t plead,” he writes, “The old people plead…Please, soldier, I want to pass through, I need to work because they’ve already gone through so much occupation that they don’t have any more strength to resist. Because whoever resisted in their generation is probably no longer around.”
A former soldier was asked, why he thought it was important to ‘break the silence’. Because people have got to know what’s going on there”, he replied. “And because people don’t know. A hundred percent of the people I talk to, who haven’t served there, don’t understand”.
The testimony from ‘Sergeant no 2’ gave further illustration of the completely arbitrary and random nature of much of the harassment. No Arab town or village is safe from any incursion by the Israeli military.
“For example, we would enter Zayta. Zayta is a small village without many people. We enter the village, the village centre, set up a flying checkpoint. Traffic spikes. A few vehicles, we drive up a small hill, provide cover. What we do is check vehicles. What is checking vehicles? To look in the trunk, to check their IDs, and let them drive away. Now, I don’t really know what I’m checking [for]. They told me [to] check IDs, but they didn’t give the number of a suspect in the village. And even if Ahmed Yassin was there, I wasn’t told about it. Nothing. “Check them, check their vehicle.” Now, what exactly am I supposed to check in his vehicle? He’s driving in his own village. Even if there were knives there, it’s, you know, it’s like, farmers can also work with them. It’s not…They’re not even in Israel. So you enter the village, you check them, I don’t even know what I’m checking. You cause a traffic jam in a village of about 200-300 residents. You disrupt their daily life. After two hours you just pack up and leave”.
Casual humiliation is something that Palestinians have to suffer day in and day out. Even old men and women, if they are Arabs, are stripped of their dignity. In conversations back at base, some soldiers are surprised and a little shocked to see how common it is even for “young girls” – that is, young Israeli women soldiers – to even slap elderly Arab men, because they were deemed to be talking to them impolitely. ״It ׳s bad being the frightening one, the one they’re afraid of. In general, seeing the people on the streets. Seeing an old women crawl to me on all four just to say:”׳I know there’s a curfew, that ׳s why I’m not walking, but I have to go there, my kid is just here at the neighbour ׳s, and I have to bring him home.”
These everyday humiliations are also dangerous to the lives of ordinary Palestinians. It is common for soldiers to cock their weapons and to point them in the faces of those unfortunates they are trying to intimidate. When asked if he saw anyone cocking a weapon, one former sergeant replied, “Sure, it’s a common thing. Like: where are you going? Chik-chik (sound of cocking a weapon). You don’t shoot, but the chik-chik was…the most basic threat there was. I mean, someone is walking outside: where are you going? Chik-chik…At children. At everyone”.
“To piss off the son, they slap the father”
With some soldiers, there was clearly an element of bad conscience over the way they treated Arabs. Asked directly, if they “feel bad” at times, the answer was, “I felt bad, sure. In these situations, when suddenly a woman crawls on her knees, when a father suddenly gets slapped, when suddenly they want to piss off the son, so they slap his father.”
There was absolutely no mistaking among the soldiers that there was one set of rules for Palestinians and a completely different set of rules for Jewish settlers, even if the settlements were ‘illegal’. The soldiers were always ‘easy’ on awkward settlers, but never so with Arabs, even in their own villages and homes.
“You never need a court order when you search a Palestinian’s home. You just have to want to do it and then you do it. It’s not like when you’re an Israeli civilian and a policeman wants to enter your home, he either needs a well-founded suspicion that you’re committing a crime, or for someone to be in danger, or a court order stating that he has the authority to search and find evidence. In Hebron, if you’re a Palestinian, I’ll enter your house whenever I feel like it, and search for whatever I want, and I’ll turn your house upside down if I want to”.
Settlers are more or less given impunity, whatever actions they do, whether it is vandalising Palestinian property, or attacking cars driven by Arabs. “When you arrive at the area, you get instructions as to what you’re supposed to do if a settler attacks a Palestinian, a herd of sheep, olive trees, stuff like that – what are you supposed to do?”
The settlers are on our side, and the Palestinians are the enemy. It’s very simple, who‘s a friend and who’s a foe. So, by definition, we know: this is an enemy, that’s a friend, and therefore we will naturally handle a settler with kid gloves.
When Gaza was being bombed to rubble in 2014, the Israeli Air Force used to drop non-explosive shells onto homes, to warn families to leave before their houses were demolished by bombing. One Air force captain, commenting on this policy of ‘knocking’ found the whole process inhumane. “Personally, for me, it became very hard,” he wrote, in his testimony. “First of all, the whole concept of taking buildings down and harming people, I saw innocent people, it seems completely useless to me”.
״We see a tsunami in Thailand and we׳reall very saddened by what happens toall the civilians the day after. You know, they don ׳t have a home. But we ׳recarrying out a fucking tsunami 70kilometers from Tel Aviv and we aren’teven aware of it”.
Although the Breaking the Silence pamphlet is limited is size and scope, there is no doubt that the experiences of the Israeli military described in the testimony is a general process.
Addressing his remarks to the political establishment of Israel, one soldier says, “We all are rank and file soldiers, we all experienced it, we all did it, we ׳re all coping with it to this day. Some of us take it harder, and some less, but it ׳s something you sent us to do, so if we continue doing it, come on and answer to that, because you sent us and are continuing to send us there”.
The pamphlet should be read by anyone interested in the Israeli/Palestinian issue. It is a damning indictment of an occupation that satisfies the military-strategic aims of the Israeli state, but which has no political justification whatsoever.
But what the pamphlet cannot not do, and does not set out to do, is offer any way out of the impasse that faces Israeli soldiers on a daily basis. Their brutalisation as part of an occupying force and the experiences they undergo will leave a mark on many of them, as these testimonies show. But it will take more than the publication of their testimonies to make former soldiers draw the necessary political conclusions from their experiences.
Israeli politics is gripped by the awful memory of the Holocaust in Europe. It is entirely understandable that it runs like a thread through all of Israeli society, its culture and its politics. The Israeli state and particularly its political right-wing exploit that history day in and day out, to justify its disgraceful policy towards the Palestinian people.
It is no surprise that many socialists draw a comparison between the modern Israeli occupation of the West Bank with the Apartheid era of South Africa. Taking the whole of Israel and occupied Palestine as one, there are approximately six million Jewish citizens with all the normal rights of a capitalist democracy and there are about six million Arabs with limited rights (‘Israeli’ Arabs), or with no rights at all. Moreover, the Israeli ruling class, has no plan or perspective for ever changing the “separate development” (‘apartheid’) of the Jewish and the Arab populations it governs. That is why they send their young men and women in uniform to permanently police and repress one half of the population.
The ‘leadership’ of the Palestinian movement has unfortunately been part of the historic problem rather than part of the solution. Beset by corruption on the one hand and by Islamic fundamentalism on the other, it has never been able to hold any political attraction whatsoever to Israeli workers and youth, much less the occupying soldiers of the IDF. Every time a Palestinian leader – or another Muslim leader in Iran, Baghdad or Tripoli – calls for the “destruction of Israel” or “driving the Jews into the sea”, it only further emboldens and empowers the Israeli right. Unfortunately, the current leaders of the Palestinians – the corrupt Fatah/Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, will not move the Palestinians one step nearer their goal of emancipation.
How can the log-jam be broken? To have any meaningful political effect on young Israeli soldiers and youth in general, it will take a Palestinian movement, that fights yes for the national and social emancipation of the Palestinians, but at the same time one that clearly offers the right for an Israeli state to exist, within agreed borders, alongside a Palestinian state. In the final analysis, the hopes and aspirations of young Palestinians and young Israelis are not all that different. They are currently on opposite sides of a deep divide. In the longer run, that divide can only be bridged by a class movement that seeks to change society in the interests of all, Jews and Arabs alike.
For more details about Breaking the Silence:
http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/
https://www.facebook.com/BreakingTheSilenceIsrael
Address for cheques (made out to “Breaking the Silence”): P.O.B. 51027 Tel Aviv, 6713206
February 6, 2018
