From: William Gladys <william.gladys@tiscali.co.uk>
Date: Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 6:20 PM
Subject: Fw: 'Our lives became something we'd never dreamt': The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses
To: world_Politics@googlegroups.com
'Our lives became something we'd never dreamt': The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses
Former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses have for the first time given up their anonymity, to make their voices all the harder to ignore. Donald Macintyre gets an exclusive preview of a powerful new book
Sunday, 12 December 2010
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Avichay Stolar is a researcher of Breaking the Silence. He says: 'Young soldiers learn from their officers, they imitate their friends in the unit, and they learn to act in a brutal and insensitive way'
Name: Avichay Stolar
Age: 27
Profession: Researcher, Breaking the Silence
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where and when did you serve? Lavi Battalion, November 2001 -November 2004 Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
In Yatta, after the arrest of a wanted Palestinian named Fathi Najar, from the south Hebron hills, my mates from the unit and I saw the officer from the battalion beating the prisoner and sending one of his officers to cover the prisoner's bottom with thorns. After that, soldiers beat Najar and other prisoners, imitating the officer. The beating continued all the way to the bases in a military truck. This incident became the normal policy for the way we treated prisoners.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
Young soldiers learn from their officers, they imitate their friends in the unit, and they learn to act in a brutal and insensitive way. It happened to me, to my friends in the unit, and to thousands of soldiers.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Doron Efrati
Age: 26
Profession: Student
Where do you live? Tel Aviv
Where and when did you serve? 31 March 2003 ? 20 March 2006, in the Livi Unit
Rank: Corporal
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
One night, we entered a clinic owned by Hamas in Hebron and confiscated equipment worth thousands of shekels ? computers, TVs ? to hurt Hamas economically before the elections to the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Why did you decide to speak out about it? It was published that the Israeli government makes an effort to ensure the PA elections are as democratic as possible. I found out the reality is the opposite.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Dana Golan
Age: 27
Profession: Director, Breaking the Silence
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where and when did you serve? Border police, based in Hebron, 2001 and 2002
Rank? 1st Lieutenant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
The toughest memory was searching the bodies of other women to make sure they were not hiding weapons. I joined the search for weapons as a result of being a curious 18-year-old girl ? I wanted to be part of the guys in the base ? and not because it was my job. From the moment I was ordered to undress a woman in a separate room, I was disconnected from my feelings.
Why did you decide to speak out about it? I didn't decide to speak about it because of a political conscience. I broke the silence because I was educated to tell the truth. In my eyes there is no other way to confront problems.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Inbar Michalzon
Age: 29
Profession: Education worker
Where do you live? Tel Aviv
Where and when did you serve? In the northern Gaza strip and Erez checkpoint, September 2000 - June 2002
Rank? Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
A report came into my hands of the abuse of a Palestinian child. The high-rank officer of the base ordered the contents to be changed. The "fixed" report came into my hands and I destroyed the first report, as I was told.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
I felt that to talk about it is good for everybody; the Palestinians and the soldiers whose lives have become something they never dreamt.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Yanay Israeli
Age: 29
Profession: PhD student of history
Where do you live? Tel Aviv/Michigan
Where and when did you serve? Artillery, 2000 - 2004
Rank? 1st Lieutenant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
Checkpoints, invasions of villages and houses, arrests, repression of demonstrations against the separation wall.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
I believe we need to expose and remember and remind the people what is happening day by day, hour by hour, in Tel Aviv's backyard.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Dotan Grenwad
Age: 28
Profession: Tourist guide
Where do you live? Kfar Usafia
Where did you serve? Nahal Brigade, Battalion 50.
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
Entering houses was what mostly disturbed me. It is an intrusion into the deepest privacy. Sometimes it is combined with nonsensical searches of closets. We could do it ? so we did it.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
Many times in my service I did things that I realised in retrospect were abuses, to show the Palestinians, who is the boss. What is happening there is against the army's ethical codes.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Arnon Dagani
Age: 28
Profession: PhD student of history
Where do you live? LA, US
Where and when did you serve? Intelligence/Golani brigade, 2000 - 2003
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
I commanded the movement of Palestinian farmers north-east of Jenin. The order I got each day was "breathing siege" or "strangling siege". The latter meant no one entering or leaving the city. That meant using verbal threats, physical violence, confiscation of IDs...
Why did you decide to speak out about it? I thought that if Israeli citizens knew what the IDF is really doing, someone would stop it.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Yehuda Shaul
Age: 27
Profession: Spokesman, Breaking the Silence
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where and when did you serve? Battalion 50, Nahal, March 2001 - March 2004
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act you took part in or witnessed during your service?
In Hebron, I used to shoot from a grenade launcher to the empty buildings in the Palestinian neighbourhoods. It was clear we would not only hit those buildings but the whole neighbourhood. This fire was done without identifying the source of Palestinian fire. Later, a decision was taken to carry out preventative shooting every day before darkness ? sharp shooters, heavy machine guns and grenade launchers ? for about 15 minutes. All this before the Palestinians even fired one shot. Of course, it didn't help: after darkness they'd shoot at the Jewish settlements, and we'd shoot back. For four months, this went on.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
All this was described in the Israeli media with a sentence: "IDS forces respond to the source of fire in Hebron." I felt I had to tell the truth.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Amit Lavi
Age: 27
Profession: Group consultant
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where did you serve and when? Engineers unit, March 2003 ? August 2004
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act that you took part in or witnessed during your service in the army?
After an arrest operation we arrived at Ofer prison at night. My platoon officer asked me to take pictures. He took out the detained individuals, shouting and kicking them, and lined them up next to the fence, on their knees, and posing in different positions. After that a group of border police soldiers asked us who we had brought in. My officer?s answer was they are detainees that have some 'terror' links.
The next minutes were a series of punches, kicks, slaps, blows with helmets and sticks and with every possible object that was around, as the arrested ? still handcuffed - were crying and whining, and all the time the soldiers were screaming at them, swearing at them, and asking them if it was enough, or if they want more. After a few minutes my officer decided to stop what is going on, and we took the prisoners inside the prison.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
I felt the need to go public and to tell people what has been done in their names; which abuses and crimes are taking place day by day; from the decisions of the simple soldier to the big policies of the government.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Ayal Kantz
Age: 28
Profession: Educational coordinator, Breaking the Silence
Where do you live? Guivataim
Where did you serve and when? Nahal, 2000 -2003
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act that you took part in or witnessed during your service in the army?
There are many things that I now realise were illegal. For example: when we were with the investigators of the General Security Services, who were investigating using violence to our prisoners, giving small punches under the chin and then punching them again, that made us more aggressive.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
People don't understand what it means militarily to dominate, to occupy, and they need to know.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Mikhael Manekin
Age: 31
Profession: Breaking the Silence employee
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where did you serve and when? Golani Battalion 51, 1998 - 2002
Rank? 1st Lieutenant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act that you took part in or witnessed during your service in the army?
The heavy use of stun grenades to make the Palestinians calm down, or make them do what they have been told. The pressure it created for the Palestinians standing in front of me: the feeling of, ?Ok, now I understand, you are the boss?.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
It?s important to me that people will understand that it is impossible to control a population that doesn?t want you, without being an aggressive human being.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
Name: Itamar Shapira
Age: 30
Profession: Tourist guide and musician
Where do you live? Jerusalem
Where did you serve and when? Nahal Brigade, 1999 - 2002
Rank? 1st Sergeant
What was the toughest illegal or immoral act that you took part in or witnessed during your service in the army?
The collectively-inflicted things were the least moral. For example: the explosion of houses of terrorist suspects, the mass arrests of hundreds of people, handcuffed and blindfolded, tied up at the ankles and put in safari trucks; entering houses and taking out the families, and more.
Why did you decide to speak out about it?
With the help of my testimony and others like it, I hope that moral and political discussion will wake up and a different organization of society - not based on violence, fear and racism - will emerge, putting an end to the conflict.
QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM
For anyone who has covered Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the past few years, reading Occupation of the Territories, the new book from the Israeli ex-soldiers organisation Breaking the Silence, can be an eerily evocative experience.
A conscript from the Givati Brigade, for example, describes how troops in the company operating next to his inside Gaza during 2008 had talked about an event earlier in the day. After knocking on the door of a Palestinian house and receiving no immediate answer, they had placed a "fox" – military slang for explosives used to break through doors and walls – outside the front door. At that very moment, the woman of the house had reached the door to open it. "Her limbs were smeared on the wall and it wasn't on purpose," the soldier recalls. "And then her kids came and saw her. I heard it during dinner after the operation, someone said it was funny, and they cracked up from the situation that the kids saw their mother smeared on the wall..."
A second-hand story, of course; one without names, dates or supporting detail. Except that it stirred a memory I had of reporting the death of a Palestinian UN schoolteacher east of Khan Younis. Wafer Shaker al-Daghma was killed when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) commandeered her house during an incursion in May 2008. Her husband had been out at the time. When we came to the house five days later, another incursion was under way and we could hear, uncomfortably close, the gunfire from Israeli armoured military vehicles while Majdi al-Daghma described his wife's death at the age of 34. When she realised troops were nearby, she'd ordered ' the children, Samira, 13, Roba, four, and Qusay, two, into the bedroom, put on a headscarf and prepared to open the door. "Samira heard a loud explosion and there was a lot of smoke," he explained. "She looked for her mother but couldn't see her."
It was surely the same incident. You have to assume that the laughter alluded to by the conscript was a nervous reaction, a manifestation of delayed shock from the soldiers. They had, after all, had the presence of mind to cover Mrs al-Daghma's mutilated body with a carpet, and to keep the children confined to the bedroom for the five hours they had remained in the house. Samira said she had asked one of them, "Where is my mother?" but had not understood his reply in Hebrew. She explained how, when the soldiers finally left after nightfall, "There were still tanks outside our house... I tried to call my father on my mother's Jawwal [mobile phone] but there was no line. I lifted the carpet and saw a bit of my mother's clothes. She was not moving. I did not see her head."
The point of this is not just that the soldier's story is shocking, but that it is so apparently corroborated. Especially given that the conscript's short account – unlike many others in the book, some every bit as disquieting – is based on hearsay, it is powerfully suggestive of the testimonies' authenticity as a portrait of a 43-year-old occupation. These testimonies, checked and cross-checked, of young Israeli men and women struggling to come to terms, sometimes years after the event, with their military service in the West Bank and Gaza, add up to an unprecedented inside account, as the book's introduction puts it, of "the principles and consequences of Israeli policy in the [Palestinian] territories".
Breaking the Silence is a unique organisation. No other country – including those with recent and problematic military histories, such as the US and Britain – has anything comparable. Since it began in 2004, it has collected 700 testimonies from conscripts and reservists, spanning the decade since the beginning of the second intifada. In July last year, it made its greatest impact by publishing accounts from around 30 combat soldiers involved in the onslaught on Hamas-controlled Gaza only six months earlier, challenging the military's assertion that it had done "the utmost to avoid harming uninvolved civilians".
Breaking the Silence has since taken two more decisive steps. The Israeli military has long complained about the anonymity of its witnesses. In July, the IDF even questioned whether all the testimonies were genuine. Anonymity was understandable; the soldiers risked alienation and heavy criticism from their own communities as well as from the state itself, not to mention the possibility of proceedings brought by the military. Now, for the first time, 27 of those who had testified have allowed the Jerusalem-based photographer Quique Kierszenbaum to take their portraits, and use their names, along with summaries of why and what they testified.
The second step change, having in the past let the testimonies speak for themselves, is that Breaking the Silence has been emboldened by the sheer number of them to offer a broader analysis of what it believes they expose: in part that, while Israeli forces have indeed had to deal with "concrete threats in the past decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens", their operations, especially in the West Bank, extend beyond the solely defensive and "systematically" lead to the "de facto annexation" of occupied territory "through the dispossession of Palestinian residents".
In arguing that Israel exercises a measure of control over Palestinians that extends beyond its own security needs, the book (published in Hebrew on 21 December, with an English version to follow in the new year), takes four technical terms in frequent use by the Israeli military and tries to show in its introductions to the testimonies what Breaking the Silence sees as their real, as opposed to ostensible, meaning.
The first of these terms is "Prevention" [sikkul in Hebrew] which, it argues, has become a "code word" that allows almost every form of military action, offensive as well as defensive, to be classified as "prevention of terrorist activity". It says the principle, first enunciated by the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon of "searing it into the consciousness" of Palestinians that violence does not pay, translates into "intimidation... and indiscriminate punishment of the Palestinian population". The examples given include: sending a military truck into the village of Tubas at 3am in 2003 "with stun grenades and just throwing them in the street, for no reason, waking people up [to say] 'We are here. The IDF is here.'"; shooting ' a visibly unarmed man walking on a roof in Nablus in 2002 ("The company commander declared him a lookout, meaning that he understood there was no threat from the guy, and he gave the order to kill him"); and halting stone-throwing in Tekoa by using a "moving human shield" – a Palestinian man tied to the front of a vehicle – before driving round the village.
The second term is "Separation" [hafradah], meaning the separation of Palestinians not only from Israelis but from other Palestinians (within the West Bank and between Gaza and the West Bank) and their own land by using checkpoints, separation barriers, Israeli-only roads used by West Bank settlers, and a strict permit regime enforcing "isolation" of many communities. While much of this "separation" – including loss of land – is permanent, in the past two years, post-intifada, some obstacles have eased. But Breaking the Silence insists the "paradigm" is unchanged. "It's obvious Israel relaxes its grip when things are easier," says the organisation's Mikhael Manekin. "But it always has the grip. It can relax or tighten it as it chooses."
There was the "separation" of Nablus in 2003 from the surrounding villages: "You have to understand the proportionality. A person between the ages of 16 and 35, who lives in Nablus has not left Nablus in the past four years, even to go to a village next to Nablus." Another example was the Qalqilya area in 2002: "Someone whose fig grove they uprooted came in tears, and he said to me: 'I worked for 30 years to buy the land, I worked this grove for 10 years, I waited 10 years for it to bear fruit, I enjoyed it for one year and they [the IDF] are uprooting it.'"
Next is "Fabric of life" [mirkam hayyim], the term used by the IDF to underline that it does its best to ensure as normal a life as possible for Palestinians – a proposition strongly contested in the book. It claims that Israel controls the passage of civilians and goods into Israel and within the West Bank, the opening of private businesses, transport of school-children, university students and medical cases. "[Property] can all be taken at the discretion of a regional commander or a soldier in the field... troops will burst into the house in the dead of night and arrest one of the inhabitants, only to release him later – all in order to practise arrest procedures."
Among the examples is the story of a Palestinian truck driver trying to bring milk containers into Hebron from Yatta during a curfew in 2002, who was detained, handcuffed and blindfolded on a hot summer morning. He had some 2,000 litres of milk – all of which spoiled as he sat all day, restrained. "When I look at it [now]," says a former soldier, "I feel embarrassed... Did it contribute to the security of the state? No."
Another example concerns illegal workers and their families trying to get into the Wadi Ara of northern Israel from the West Bank. One former soldier recalls "Pouring out the kids' bags and playing with their toys... They cried and were afraid." The adults cried, too? "Of course. One of the goals was always: I got him to cry in front of his kids, I got him to crap in his pants... from being beaten for the most part."
Finally, in examining the term "Law enforcement" [akhifat hak], the book highlights the dual legal regime in the West Bank, whereby Palestinians are subject to military rule and courts while Israeli settlers are answerable to civilian courts. At the same time, it argues, Israeli settlers are effectively allies of the military – and they have a common enemy.
The book's stark – and inevitably highly political – conclusion is contrary to the view that "Israel is withdrawing from the Palestinian Territories slowly and with the appropriate caution and security". The IDF soldiers quoted "describe an indefatigable attempt to tighten Israel's hold on the territories, as well as on the Palestinian population".
Not surprisingly perhaps, Manekin acknowledges that those who have – as he deliberately puts it – "come out of the closet", by allowing themselves to be named and photographed, are among the more activist of the 500 individuals who have testified to the organisation. It is no coincidence that this parallel project has happened at a time when Breaking the Silence has decided to promote its own analysis of the past decade of occupation. Manekin says it wasn't easy to be photographed. "We didn't do this to be heroes," he says. "Really, the political significance is the only reason for doing it."
Donald Macintyre is The Independent's Jerusalem correspondent. For more from Breaking the Silence: shovrimshtika.org
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