The evidence, for those with courage to listen

Masked Israeli soldiers make their presence felt in the Palestinian city of Nablus, ostensibly searching for a Palestinian gunman. Photo by Abed Omar Qusini / Reuters

Confessions: Tales of Savagery by the Israeli Military

By Hasan Afif El-Hasan
November 30, 2015

For outsiders, it is hard to sense the real character of Israel through all the artificial identity that has been imposed on it by its supporters without serious discussion about the Palestinians’ tragedy.

Israel has imposed and tightened the harshest blockade and the brutal assaults and incursions on top of accumulated injustices against the Palestinian refugees in Gaza where thousands of civilians including children perished and many were injured, while the survivors are starved and their homes destroyed.

Israel builds settlements on confiscated Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Jerusalem, enacted Jewish law of return for world-wide Jews, but it would not allow even one refugee from the Palestinian villages it had destroyed after 1948 to return to his/her home. And according to members of the Israeli military, the occupation soldiers practice torture and killing of the Palestinian civilians who do not threaten them just for fun and entertainment.

The Israeli governments and their Western supporters want the outsiders to believe that the Israeli military in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza is essentially aimed at safeguarding the country from terror. And the notion in Israeli society is that the control of occupied lands is aimed at protecting its citizens from Palestinian terrorism. But human rights organizations and Israeli peace advocates and Israeli soldiers who had been stationed in the occupied lands tell completely different stories about how they treat the civilian Palestinians. They all report killings, arrests, raiding homes, demolishing houses, punishing the people collectively, and interrupting their daily life. They describe barbaric actions that do not seem to serve military needs or promote hope for peace.

A bulldozer demolishes a Palestinian home in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Bet Hanina. Why? Because it can. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/AP

A little known organization called “Breaking the Silence” compiled testimonies of more than a hundred ex-military members of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) who had served in the occupied lands. In its published book, “Our Harsh Logic,” the ex-soldiers describe in their own words and personal memoir a broad Israeli policy that is extremely inhumane and offensive against the civilians. The soldiers reveal the ugliness of Israel’s rule over the Palestinians, and offer a gripping and immediate record of oppression, brutality and hatred. These are a few examples of their testimonies in their own words:

A soldier who served in 2003 stated:

We went into the town of Tubas at three in the morning in a Safari and threw stun grenades in the street, for no reason except just to wake people up. This happened every day- a different force of my company did it each time, it was just part of the routine, part of our lives.

Another soldier said about his experience when serving in 2004,

We called it ‘happy Purim’, to stop people from sleeping. It means going into a village in the middle of the night, going around throwing stun grenades and making noise to demonstrate the presence of the military.

The rationale behind that kind of operation:

If the village initiates an operation, then we are going to initiate a lack of sleep. In general, maybe this creates the impression that the IDF is in the village at night, without having to do too much.

Another soldier said one of the many things that shocked him during his service in the territories in 2009 was the midnight searches. He described a search he participated in, in a small village called Hares at two after midnight. “They [the military battalion commander] said there are sixty houses that have to be searched. We spread out over the whole village, took control of the school, smashed the door locks of the classrooms. One room was used as the investigation room for the Shin Bet, one room for detainees, and one room for the soldiers to rest. We went house by house, knocking on the families’ doors. They were scared to death, girls peeing in their pants with fear. We went into the house and turned everything upside down. We gathered the family in one room, put a guard there, the guard was told to keep his gun on them, and then we searched the whole house. We received another order that everyone born after 1980, doesn’t matter who, bring him in cuffed and blindfolded. We yelled at old people, one of them had an epileptic seizure. He did not speak Hebrew and they [soldiers] continued yelling at him. We did the rounds. Every house we went into, they took everyone between sixteen and twenty-nine and brought them to the school. They [detainees] sat tied up in the schoolyard. The commander told us the purpose of all this was to locate weapons. But we did not find any weapons in the end. We confiscated kitchen knives.”

A night-time raid by the IDF on the Aida refugee camp, August 2015. Purpose? Intimidation – and, say the refugees, pilfering of their scant possessions.

“What shocked me the most was that there was also stealing. One soldier took twenty shekels. This was a very poor village. At one point, soldiers were saying, ‘What a bummer, there is nothing to steal.’ That was said in a conversation among the soldiers, after the action. There was a lot of joy among the soldiers at people’s misery; they were happy talking about it. There was a moment where a Palestinian they knew was mentally ill, yelled at us, but one soldier decided to beat him up anyway, so he smashed him. Then he hit him in the head with the butt of a gun, he was bleeding, and he was brought to the school along with everyone else. There were a pile of arrest orders signed by the battalion commander, ready, with one area left blank. They’d fill in that the name of the person was detained on suspicion of disturbing the peace. They just filled in the name and the reason for arrest. They smash the floor, turn over sofas, throw plants and pictures, turn over beds, break the closets, the tiles. And after all that, we left them for hours tied up and blindfolded in the school. The order came to free them at four in the afternoon. So that was more than twelve hours.”

Another soldier described the murder of a Palestinian who was not armed and had not posed a threat in 2002. He said, “We took over a central house, set up position, and one of the sharp shooters identified a man on a roof, two roofs away, I think he was fifty and seventy metres away, not armed. I looked at the man through the night vision-he was not armed. It was two in the morning. A man without arms [weapon], walking on the roof, just walking slowly around, perhaps meditating or praying. The company commander said: ‘Take him down [kill him].’ The sharpshooter fired, took him down. The company commander,–, ordered via radio, the death sentence for this man! A man who was not armed. The man was no threat to us, and the commander gave the order to shoot him. We’d laugh about it, we had code names for this incident: ‘the lookout,’ ‘the drummer,’ ‘the woman,’ ‘the old man,’ ‘the boy,’ and other ones.”

Another ex-soldier described his experience at a check point in 2005: “It was in Elkana, at a fence that separates the Jewish and Palestinian houses, and there’s still one Palestinian house on the Jewish side. They [the Israeli fence builders] made a mistake with the fence there, and because there’s a checkpoint, their whole family access was through the checkpoint. It was forbidden to cross if they don’t have this document or that permit. There was someone coming from the other side, we did not allow him to go in. He had a bag of grocery and documents and did not know why he could not go into his home. He really annoyed us by keep asking us to go to his family, and we decided to punish him, so we put him in a corner, with his bags, blindfolded and handcuffed as he sat there for four or five hours, just like that. When I was released from the army, I feel ashamed; I’m ashamed when I think about it.”

Another soldier talked about his experience while serving at a checkpoint in the West Bank in 2006: “We were four guys, three privates and a young commander, who’d never been at a checkpoint. You stand there, in the middle of the night between a village … it was north of Ramallah-Anata, I think. A checkpoint which all the students went through to Birzeit and whatever. I didn’t really understand why we were checking them, because they were crossing from a Palestinian side to a Palestinian side. They’re not going to Israel. They put me at a small guard post nearby and I see lot of students going to university and I am pointing my weapon at them. They are late to work but they had to wait until we allow them to go. What frightens me isn’t that we’d really do things like that to them, but we never treated them with respect and they no longer have the same worth to us as other human beings.”

Another soldier from Nahal Brigade unit stationed in Hebron in 2004 said, “Our battalion was there to uphold a certain status. One of the most frustrating things in Hebron is that the settlers don’t care, they do whatever they want, even if they are just a meter away from you [the soldiers]. We put up partitions in the middle of the road, the Palestinians crossed on one side and the Jews on the other. Now, the number of the Palestinians crossing the road was ten times more than the number of Jews who crossed them. I am talking about hundreds, every morning and went on their side. There was one Palestinian woman who tried to cross the road on the Jewish side. I came and said to her, ‘Madam, lf you cross I will shoot you, and I had my weapon pointed at her.’ The other Palestinians shouted at her stop stop come back. She got quiet and went back.

On the same day, there was a family of something like ten or fifteen Jews and they walked in the road, like free style on both of the crossings. And I go there and say to one of the Jews, ‘Listen, sir, we partitioned the road for some reason, I’m asking you to wait.’ He[the Jewish man] said’ Who do you think you are? This is my road, this is my town. I do whatever I want’.”
“That one, and another situation in the same place where a Palestinian father on the Palestinian side of the road with his son at his side, and then four settler children showed up. They picked up a rock, threw it at the Palestinian boy. I yelled at them, but I cannot lift a hand against settler children. I cannot threaten them with my weapon. If the situation was the reverse and an Arab boy picked up a rock against a Jewish boy, then we’d have to handcuff him, blindfold him, send him wherever, follow the orders. If a Palestinian boy started not doing what I told him, like the Jewish guy who said, ‘who do you think you are,’ I‘d have to start shooting in the air, then at his feet, all kinds of things like that. There were incidents like that in Hebron.”

After choosing to stay in endless wars and turning into a militaristic chauvinist state, the threat to Israel is not the Palestinians or the Arab states; it is the moral threat of denying the Palestinians’ elementary rights and eradicating their history and existence. The desire for peace never existed even on the fringes of Israeli society. The ongoing occupation and the fear of the growing Palestinian population that has created xenophobia, racism and savagery has taken its moral toll on the Israelis. The fascist ideas that attracted many right-wing Europeans in the 1930s and victimized Jews in Europe are being endorsed by most leading politicians in the ruling Israeli circles. Israel’s claims to democracy are not supported by its terror actions. Its policy toward the vulnerable occupied Palestinians casts a dark shadow over Israel’s democracy and history.

Hasan Afif El-Hasan, Ph.D. is a political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York), now available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Soldiers’ Testimonies on the Occupied Territories

The main significance of the testimonies published by Breaking the Silence is not in the descriptions of the acts of horror but rather in the documentation of the destructive effects of the occupation not only on the Palestinian inhabitants but also on the soldiers themselves.

Ilana Hammerman, Haaretz
August 05, 2011

On the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Camus, last year, I was invited to discuss him on the morning talk show “Mah Bo’er” on Army Radio. The host, Razi Barkai, asked me about the writer’s personal relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. But I had other things to say about Camus in the short time that had been allotted to the conversation, and I responded to Barkai that gossiping about the relations between Camus and de Beauvoir wasn’t what I had in mind.

“Don’t tell me that all you have in mind now is the occupation,” was the sharp and surprising response from the interviewer, with whom to the best of my recollection I had never spoken before in my life, neither about the occupation nor about anything else.

This response made a deep impression on me. Again and again I have asked myself in its wake the following question, to which I have yet to find an answer: How do you talk to people about what they so badly don’t want to hear that they will hasten to gag you even when you are intending to speak about something else? About Camus, for example.

True, not about Camus and the Parisian bohemia, but rather about Camus and his involvement in the political discourse of his day, about his complicated view of the French occupation of Algeria, about his committed writing. For these, after all, were the things he had in mind, the intellectual, writer and commentator Albert Camus. That is what preoccupied him, that pragmatic humanist, whom in my youth I saw as a guide and who in the meantime, not necessarily to his benefit, had become an almost mythological figure. A kind of modern saint whose heritage many people claim as their own without considering that it does not accord with their own disengagement from the current political reality.

Okay, so maybe Razi Barkai was right. An interview with me about Camus really was liable to lead us, if only by implication, to the “occupation” – that is, to the state of Israel’s control for 44 years now over the lives and fate of about 4 million people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (yes, also in Gaza, despite the “disengagement” ) – and to the silence of most Israeli intellectuals in the face of this reality. And he didn’t want that, the popular interviewer. He didn’t want to hear it and he didn’t want to expose his listeners to hearing it, even by implication.

And to tell the truth, most probably his listeners weren’t especially keen to hear it, either. And like them, the television viewers, who want neither to see nor to hear, and the newspaper readers, who prefer not to read. And the media indulge them all and do not report to them, or if they do, do it in a measured, moderate and cautious way, lest the numbers of listeners and viewers and readers drop, and with them the number of advertisers, and with them the revenues.

Thus, in “the only democracy in the Middle East,” where there is a large measure of freedom of information and of the press, in recent years a self-censorship has developed that is infinitely more effective than any official censorship could be, because its roots go very deep: into the consciousness and the subconscious of Israel’s citizens. They do not want to know. And when it comes to looking reality straight in the face, the worst of them are members of the middle class, whose daily routine is good and pleasant, and for whom it is convenient not to know what maintaining that reality entails.

Israeli officer throws a stun grenade at an 11-year-old boy. Photo by Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images, from Electronic Intifada, July 2015.

These satiated Israelis – much more than those Israelis who are living in poverty and distress – not only have a moral obligation to know, it is also worth their while to know, very much worth their while. Because the danger threatening their comfortable routine is growing. Because five minutes from Kfar Sava their countrymen – soldiers, police and civilians – are constantly fanning embers under barrelfuls of gunpowder. Because it isn’t for the security of the satisfied middle-class Israelis that these people are concerned, and for which they have been embittering the lives of millions of people for decades now, but rather they are committed to realizing an ideology most Israelis do not support at all. It is an ideology of annexation that has already been realized on the ground to the extent that almost certainly there is no way back and the entire public discourse about “the peace process” is “fake, fake.” The diametric opposite of the bullets that hit Yitzhak Rabin, who perhaps wanted to and could have rectified something in the next to last minute.

The logic of the absurd

If so, how do you get readers to pay attention to books that are trying to reveal this reality to them? For example this book, which is called simply “Occupation of the Territories” and is thick and black – both its binding and its contents – and contains the transcribed testimonies, not always comfortable and fluent reading, of 101 male and female Israeli soldiers who served in those territories during the course of the past 10 years.

One of the soldiers whose testimonies are presented in the book says he has been reading the book “Lords of the Land,” by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar. “That’s exactly how it is,” he says in his testimony about the improvised roadblocks he and his buddies would put up on “the Jewish roads” in the West Bank. “The Lords of the Land decided: ‘This one you don’t let cross, and he’ll wait until we decide.’ When we go to eat, they fold up the roadblock and everyone leaves.”

I wondered what that fellow would have done had he read “Lords of the Land” before his military service, and now I am wondering what the young people who read his testimony and the other testimonies in “Occupation of the Territories” may do. Will they take a stand or even do a deed after having read the book? Will they open their eyes and take in a more comprehensive view of what is happening in the territories? Will they be more aware, will they refuse to obey certain orders while they are serving there?

For it is impossible to read these two books, “Lords of the Land” (first published by Dvir in 2004, and available from Nation Books in an English translation ) and the recently published “Occupation of the Territories” (partially downloadable in English for the time being at http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/publications ), without discovering what a big and dangerous lie we are living in here. “Lords of the Land” relates and documents in detail the history of Israeli settlement in the territories and the explicit and implicit policy employed in the taking over of the lands of the West Bank. This policy has continued uninterrupted since 1967, under the leadership of all of Israel’s governments to this day. Its inevitable outcome will be to thwart the possibility of the establishment of another state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, although this is completely contrary to the protestations of the desire for a peace agreement to be based on the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel.

“Occupation of the Territories” completes the picture with its documentation of the army’s conduct in the occupied territories during the past decade. It firmly establishes “Lords of the Land’s” clear survey and demonstrates the extent to which the military control of these territories – like the gigantic settlement project – is aimed mainly not at defending the security of the citizens of the sovereign state of Israel, but rather at deepening Israel’s civilian, political and economic control there.

This is the logic of the absurd things that happen in the territories. Indeed, logic and not madness; rather, a consistent, practical and effective system of which even the arbitrariness is an inseparable part. The system has already entirely changed the face of this piece of land, to the satisfaction of those who stand with a clear mind behind the ideology of the Greater Land of Israel, who are pulling the strings and are acting on its behalf devotedly and decisively – and to the distress of those who know that the realization of this ideology is a disaster, but to whom this knowledge is so painful that they lower their heads and shut their eyes so as not to see things as they are.

This logic also rules in the ostensibly absurd reality depicted in the soldiers’ testimonies. The Israel Defence Forces are present in the territories of the West Bank in order to remain there, in order to make it clear to the Palestinian inhabitants “who’s the boss here” (as the soldiers put it ).

To this end the IDF conducts daily policing activities there, which are assigned to very young soldiers who spend weeks, months and even years in the very midst of a civilian population. Armed from head to toe, they stand at the barriers, race around in jeeps and armoured vehicles on the roads, in the streets and in the alleys of towns and villages or patrol them on foot with their weapons cocked, banging on doors of homes in the middle of the night, entering them and searching, arresting men and teenage boys before the eyes of their families who have been rousted from bed. And in doing all these things, they have been maintaining, whether they want to or not, a routine of humiliation and abuse, damage to body and soul and property of civilians, a routine of a Wild West way of life in which neither the abusers nor the victims have any thorough knowledge of the laws and the rules that apply to them.

For in this stretch of land, despite the many fences and walls and barriers of all sorts that scar its landscape, the borders are not clear and they are not permanent – not only the physical borders between one power and another and between one authority and another, but also the mental and moral borders between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between good and evil, between stupidity and wickedness, between the humiliated and those who humiliate.

‘We’ll make your life bitter’

“We are here. The IDF is here” – as one of the givers of testimony in the book says. “In general they told us that some terrorist, if he were to hear the IDF presence in the village, then maybe he would [emerge]. He never appeared. It seems that the objective was just to show the local population that the IDF is here, and it’s a policy that repeats itself: ‘The IDF is here, in the territories, and we’ll make your life bitter until you decide to stop the terror.’ The IDF has no problem with it. We, the ones who were throwing the grenades, didn’t understand why we were doing it. We threw a grenade. We heard the ‘boom’ and we saw people waking up. When we got back they said to us: ‘Great operation,’ but we didn’t understand why. It was every day. A different force from the company each time, part of the routine. Not an especially positive way of life.”

This testimony by a soldier from a paratroop unit, who was called upon with his buddies to throw stun grenades within a village at 3:00 A.M., comes off as modest and innocent, in comparison with many other testimonies that describe acts of harassment and real crimes: sowing destruction in private homes, acts of looting, murderous beatings, shooting to injure and even to kill. You read those and you are truly shocked, and you don’t want to believe.

But while reading the book, I often had the thought that maybe the testimonies of that sort are too numerous, and that it is precisely the ostensibly milder testimonies that are more significant. Indeed, the lines of resemblance among the grave testimonies, despite the distance in time and place, show that these things do not involve unusual people or unusual deeds, but rather are in the very nature of bullying military activity within a civilian population. This is so especially when the power is in the hands of such young people, still boys and girls, who have been taught to see each and every person in this population as an enemy, as a terrorist and as an immediate danger to themselves and their families.

But the main significance of this collection of testimonies is not in fact in the descriptions of the horrible deeds included in it – other occupying armies have done the same and even worse – but rather in the destructive effect of the soldiers’ daily and constant presence not only on the inhabitants but also on the soldiers themselves.

“The standards of good and evil deteriorate there,” says one of them. “I think that’s the thing that is most difficult … the day to day is very gray … I can’t tell you what’s good and what isn’t, because I don’t have all of the tools.” And another soldier says: “It was difficult. Look we’re … the majority are good people. It’s not that most are problematic, there is a problematic minority. The problem is that then it was legitimate. So beating up an Arab, cursing, degrading him … pointing your weapon in his face and then shooting in the air a second later, those were legitimate things … there were people who knew that they would beat someone up every day. They talk about it freely, they photograph.

“I remember from there the nuances at the roadblock, not the extreme incidents of abuse, but what this causes,” relates another important testimony. “This feeling of ‘I am above them,’ which won’t help, you are above them. You say to them when to cross and when not to, they are not disciplined so you get annoyed, and you have the power to get annoyed because you have a weapon and you can close the checkpoint. barrier on them … it penetrates you, this supremacy … the most difficult part for me is the annoyance towards them, it’s not just getting annoyed for no reason, it’s the annoyance of an educator: ‘You aren’t doing what I’m telling you? I’ll show you [what’s what]’ … I’m convinced that the arbitrariness was an approach. The approach to undermine their confidence, their stability, so they won’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I don’t think it’s some kind of stupidity of someone from above, I think it was a policy…”
Who is your enemy?

The book is edited very intelligently in terms of its ability to convey the information in it. Yes, information, not statements of a political stance, though there is no doubt this information necessitates the taking of a political stance. It has four chapters, each of which places the emphasis on a different aspect of the policy of military control in the occupied territories. Taken together, the four chapters, with their precise and factual introductions, do a fine job of mapping out well and thoroughly the whole of this policy.

But they also do something else, which is equally important: They show the huge gap between the official terminology of the Israeli authorities, along with the public discourse that usually accepts this lexicon of terms almost without question, on the one hand, and the reality on the ground, on the other.

The authorities and the public discourse in Israel talk about “prevention,” about pinpointed thwarting of terrorist activity, whereas the testimonies describe in minute detail actions whose entire aim is to intimidate an entire population by means of the massive, noisy and threatening presence of soldiers, provocations, arbitrary arrests and collective punishments. In Israel they talk about a policy of “separation” between the Palestinian population and Israeli citizens, to protect the latter, whereas the testimonies clearly demonstrate that the walls and the roadblocks do not separate between Palestinians and Israelis, but rather between Palestinians and Palestinians, between their villages and between their towns; between people and their lands; between people and roads – and their aim, in the long term, is to enable not a policy of defence but rather a policy of robbery, expropriation and annexation of lands.

The Israeli establishment talks about a proportional, considered policy intended to preserve the civilian population’s “fabric of life,” that is, to ensure a routine that is as normal as possible despite the abnormal circumstances. The testimonies, however, describe the diametric opposite: Incessant damage to this routine. The official language talks about enforcing law and order in an egalitarian manner among all the inhabitants of the territories, the millions of Palestinians and the hundreds of thousands of settlers. The book, however, documents from the mouths of the soldiers a dual regime, aimed at enabling and advancing the settlers’ political aspirations at the Palestinian population’s expence.

There’s another reason why it is impossible, in reading this book, not to wonder and be angered by the silence and the silencing and the indifference: After all, it isn’t the soldiers of a mercenary army who are serving there, but rather we ourselves, our neighbours, our friends, our acquaintances, our sons, our daughters, our grandsons and our granddaughters. For three generations now. So, why is it that people talk so little about these things?

Even without much media coverage, people know, and many more could know. A few of the soldiers who testify in the book do talk about the repression, the silence during the time of service itself and the pressing need to shake it all off and forget upon the return home, to civilian life. Nevertheless, there is no satisfactory explanation here for the ignoring and the denial. Almost certainly the deeper and far more frightening answer is to be found in the changes seen in public opinion surveys conducted in Israel in recent years.

Thus, for example, a recent survey of young people aged 15 to 24, conducted by the Dahaf Institute for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Macro Center for Political Economics, shows a clear shift to the right: Young people prefer strong leadership to the rule of law, and Jewish nationalism to liberal democracy. Most of them do not aspire to peace with the neighbouring countries and do not believe in the possibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence. At the same time, the number of supporters of violent resistance to government decisions concerning the peace process has increased. This trend is strong among young people aged 21 to 24 – that is to say, graduates of military service – more than among the youth.

From this survey it is possible to learn that more and more of the young people now serving in the territories are doing their job wholeheartedly, and that they have no interest or need to shake up public opinion in this country. One can also gather that there is an unambiguous connection between the control of those territories during 44 of the state’s 63 years of existence and the ruination of its inhabitants’ democratic civil awareness.

And the tens of thousands of liberals and humanists in Israel who stand off to the side should not say they know all this. Real knowledge, which is the basis for a sober and educated stance, and perhaps also for action, is in the details and not in general cliches like “The occupation corrupts,” “The occupation destroys” and “End the occupation.” Thus there are two possibilities: Either you go out to the West Bank and see and hear for yourself what the army and the other state authorities are doing there and how the settlements are expanding non-stop with their knowledge and their active help – or you read closely the books that document this for you. And then perhaps you too will ask, as does one of the soldiers who testifies in the book: “But who is your enemy in this war?” – and you will ask yourself whether it isn’t worth your while, too, to reconsider the extent of your public involvement in what is happening here.

Ilana Hammerman is editor of the Teuda series at the Am Oved publishing house and a political activist.

 

 

Links
* Breaking the Silence – new book published, December 2010, link to downloading the book.

Soldiers on a Mission to Expose Israeli Army’s Dark Side  Haaretz, November 2013

Who’s the boss here? What well-off Israelis refuse to know about their rule, review by Ilana Hammerman, August 2011

Breaking the Silence opens International Year of Solidarity with Palestinians, January 2014

Occupation and military rule, July 2012