The occupation has made brutes of us
This posting has two articles by David Shulman, both reviewing Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010, by Breaking the Silence. The 2nd, And No-one Wants to Know, 16th Jan. 2011 appears to have been pulled and replaced by a longer review, 24th Feb. 2011, in which the merits of Palestinian pacifism are stressed rather than the brutalising cruelty of the Israeli soldiers.
Are they playing a game? One of the Israeli soldiers throws a sound grenade at Palestinian protesters during clashes in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Oct. 31, 2015. Photo by Abdelrahman Younis/ Reuters
Israel & Palestine: Breaking the Silence
Reviews: What Is a Palestinian State Worth? by Sari Nusseibeh
Harvard University Press, 248 pp., $19.95
Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010, by Breaking the Silence
Jerusalem, 431 pp., available at jfjfp.com/?p=19918 [sic, see * The evidence, for those with courage to listen]
By David Shulman, New York Review of Books
February 24, 2011
A few weeks ago I was in al-Nabi Salih, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. It wasn’t so easy to get there; the Israeli army had closed off the area on every side, and we literally had to crawl through the olive groves, just beneath one of the army’s roadblocks, before we managed to reach the village. Al-Nabi Salih is a troubled place. The large Israeli settlement of Halamish nearby has taken over nearly half of the village lands, including a precious freshwater spring. Most Fridays there are dramatic confrontations between the soldiers and the villagers protesting this land grab and the other difficulties of life under occupation.
Ali Abu Awwad, L, committed pacifist who has started a new organisation Palestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance, based in Bethlehem.
Yet the first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to nonviolent resistance to the occupation. Particularly eloquent was Ali Abu Awwad, a young activist who runs a new organization, thePalestinian Movement for Non-Violent Resistance, with its offices in Bethlehem and growing influence throughout the occupied territories. “Peace itself is the way to peace,” he said, “and there is no peace without freedom.”1
All of this is, in some ways, rather new in Palestine, although in his latest book the philosopher Sari Nusseibeh, the president of al-Quds University in Jerusalem, traces an earlier stage of organized Palestinian civil disobedience in the popular struggle of the first intifada in 1988 and 1989, in which he had a significant part. In the more recent past, nonviolent resistance in the form of weekly demonstrations and marches has been a mostly local phenomenon, limited to a few villages between Jerusalem and the coastal plain such as Budrus and then more famously Bil’in, and to some extent to a cluster of villages in the Bethlehem area to the south. These demonstrations are invariably violently suppressed by the army with tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, and, quite often, live ammunition. Sometimes they degenerate into clashes, with stone-throwing from the Palestinian side; at other times, as on the day I was in al-Nabi Salih, the demonstrators manage to maintain discipline in the face of the guns.
The army has so far kept these protests from spreading beyond the villages in question—in keeping with the general policy of fragmenting, isolating, and fencing in all Palestinian communities in the territories controlled by Israel. Budrus was a success story—really the only one so far; nonviolent protests by the villagers, with women prominently involved and with the support of Israeli and international activists, forced the army to redraw the path of the separation barrier and to restore the lands initially appropriated by the government.2 Bil’in, in contrast, though it has kept up a weekly protest for some six years now—at the price of many wounded (some critically), hundreds arrested, and two killed3—has been permanently deprived of at least a third of its lands by the construction of the separation barrier despite a decision by the Israeli Supreme Court in favor of the village claims in 2007.
‘Abdullah Abu Rahmah is levied a fine and a suspended sentence for standing in front of a bulldozer. ‘I will continue my struggle and my protest, because it is our right,’ he says. In his sentencing hearing, the military prosecution described Abu Rahmah’s nonviolent protest as an ideological crime.’+972, February 2015.
One of the leaders of the struggle in Bil’in is Abdallah Abu Rahmah, occasionally called the Palestinian Gandhi—an impressive, indeed charismatic man with a proven record of peaceful, courageous resistance to the occupation and the ongoing theft of land. I know him: I had the honor of being arrested together with him when I first came to take part in the Bil’in demonstrations in 2005. He has spent the last twelve months in prison after being arrested and accused by the army of “incitement” and “organizing and participating in illegal protests.”
Protesting the loss of Palestinian land, especially by the disenfranchised owners of the land in question, is, it seems, by definition illegal under the terms of the occupation. By any reasonable standard, the arrest and prosecution of Abu Rahmah, who has been acclaimed throughout the world as an exemplar of nonviolent struggle for human rights, should have set off a wave of outspoken public protest on the part of Israeli academics, artists, public intellectuals, and even ordinary citizens. Nothing like this has happened. Abdallah Abu Rahmah’s case was decided on January 11: the military judge accepted the prosecution’s appeal against the “leniency” of the punishment and extended the jail sentence from twelve to sixteen months, so he’s of course still incarcerated. The judgment is available on the Internet in Hebrew, and it’s quite a remarkable document, disheartening to read. On the face of it, the deafening silence about his case within Israel is a mystery.
Such eloquent silence raises the classic question applicable to many such situations of organized oppression imposed by a government from above. Why are ordinary Israelis apathetic to the fate of Abu Rahmah and many others like him? Why do they evince no interest in the daily suffering caused by the occupation?
Last July I heard Sari Nusseibeh speak at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities at an evening honouring its retiring president, Menahem Yaari. In itself, the presence of a major Palestinian figure—in this case the president of al-Quds University—at an Israeli academic occasion is not unusual: Israeli scholars were also welcome guests at various Palestinian academic venues until recently, when despair over the Israeli government’s policies prompted some Palestinian institutions, including al-Quds University, to close their doors to most Israeli academics. But both professional and personal links remain strong.
Nusseibeh used the occasion of the academy lecture to deliver a damning indictment of the Israeli academic establishment for its truly astonishing passivity over the past forty-three years of occupation. Although, in general, the government is probably right in seeing the Israeli universities as a natural breeding ground for leftist—that is, liberal and peace-oriented—opinion, Nusseibeh is also right. Like everyone else, Israeli academic intellectuals as a group have failed to mount a sustained and politically effective protest against the occupation and the accompanying colonial project of settling Israelis in the territories. Like most other Israelis, with some notable exceptions, they live within the system and tolerate its misdeeds. The large audience at the academy listened to Nusseibeh’s scathing critique that evening with what seemed to me, for the most part, a stony and impassive silence.
Nusseibeh is a gentle, urbane, reflective man, a philosopher and historian of philosophy (he is an expert on the great medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina) who has, perhaps contrary to his natural disposition, found himself deeply involved in Palestinian politics over many years. He is also a courageous and honest person who does not hold back from his own people his view of what is right. I once saw him try to persuade a very hostile Palestinian student at the Hebrew University—in Arabic, and in public—that Palestinians will have to relinquish what is called the right of return in order to reach peace. Some years ago I also heard him deliver another lecture at the Academy of Sciences, no less damning than the one just mentioned, but this time directed against what he sees as negative, narrow-minded, and self-destructive trends among contemporary Arab intellectuals generally
Sari Nusseibeh, a gentle man who attacked the Israeli academy for its ‘extraordinary passivity in the face of injustice. Jerusalem 2004, photo by Agostino Pacciani/Anzenberger/Redux
In 2002 he joined up with Ami Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s General Security Service, the Shin Bet, to advocate a so-called two-state solution based on agreed conditions that today seem axiomatic to a majority on both sides of the conflict: Israel’s retreat to the Green Line border of 1967, a demilitarized Palestine, no right of return to former homes within Israel—which does not exclude compensation for losses—and a divided Jerusalem serving as capital for both Palestine and Israel. Nusseibeh is a Palestinian patriot who, given the developments of the last few years, is no longer at all certain that a separate Palestinian state is worth the effort, as the skeptical title of his new book suggests.
Three Palestinians were killed and 19 others injured as Israeli military forces opened fire at a demonstration by the border fence east of Gaza City, medics said.
There is, of course, a more general question underlying his title. What is any state actually worth? Is it really something worth killing—or for that matter dying—for? If so, just how many deaths might it be worth? Ten, as in Abraham’s bargain with God? Ten thousand? A million, as in the slogan made famous in the Algerian struggle for independence? Such questions have become pressing in the Palestinian case by the continuing consequences of Palestinian statelessness and by the unacceptable reality of ongoing Israeli occupation. States, says Nusseibeh, are “meta-biological entities”—that is, essentially, fictions that take on a life of their own and all too often end up exacting fatal costs from their citizens, who buy into the concocted vision these entities tend to propound.
Like Hobbes, he thinks that states should be seen as instruments to accomplish practical goals, not metaphysical entities, although he recognizes that they sometimes can, under auspicious circumstances, provide the vehicle for expressing a people’s collective identification with its homeland, its landscapes, memories, and hopes. Nusseibeh is also what we might call a moral optimist: he believes—I am tempted to say, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that history is evolving along a “moral trajectory”; that is, that human beings are slowly getting better and that shared, self-evident universal values, based on the irreducible rights of the individual and “our common sentiment for compassion,” are gradually beginning to transform the world.
The two basic values for any society, he says, are equality and freedom (in that order); he thinks that we can all agree on them and that, once we so agree, they should allow for peacemakers to break meta- biological barriers: for Israelis and Palestinians to see each other as human beings, and to forge a common fight for the well-being of the two communities.
Does this hopeful vision imply that there will be two states? Not anymore. Nusseibeh sees the two peoples as already, de facto, part of a single political unit between the Jordan River and the sea.
What, then, does he propose for the future of this political unit? He suggests, at least as a thought experiment,
a single-state but electorally non- democratic consensual arrangement, that is, a mutually agreed-upon conferral by Israel of a form of “second-class citizenship” on all Palestinians currently under occupation who wish to accept it.
What this means is that Palestinians would renounce political rights—such as voting for the Knesset and serving in high government office and in the army—but receive basic civil rights: health insurance, social security, freedom of speech and movement, education, legal self-defence, and so on. They would be subjects but not citizens of the joint Israeli-Palestinian entity, which would be owned and run by the Jews.
As Nusseibeh notes, there is already in place a precedent for some such arrangement: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in East Jerusalem have lived like this for the past forty-three years. The advantage is that the present untenable situation, in which a vast Palestinian population lives without basic human rights, will come to an end; and perhaps eventually another, better model will evolve, as happened in South Africa.
An Israeli soldier standing guard at a checkpoint in Qalqilya, West Bank, with waiting Palestinians visible in the mirror of a vehicle, June 2003.
Photo by Ed Kashi/VII
Nusseibeh’s proposal is clearly meant to challenge the political elites on both sides to think seriously about what lies around the next turn in the road or after the next terrible explosion. Even so, it seems not a little disingenuous. Booker T. Washington famously proposed something rather like it for African-Americans—the so-called Atlanta compromise—in 1895; it was, of course, almost immediately superseded. Can one really separate political from civil rights? Is that what most Palestinians want or need? Practically speaking, were the Palestinian Authority to dissolve itself and demand something along the lines of Nusseibeh’s suggestion, Hamas would surely fill the void that would be created within twenty-four hours. The Hamas leaders are, in fact, ready and waiting for just such an eventuality, as Nusseibeh knows well.
Still, one can easily understand how he, like so many on both sides, has more or less given up on the notion of two states, although at various points in his book he still seems to suggest that the two-state model, were it feasible, would be the optimal solution. Many, both in the peace camp and outside it, think it is simply too late—the extent of Israeli colonization and appropriation of land makes the notion of partition impracticable.
I don’t agree, but I think we are rapidly approaching such a result, and I think the cause is, on one level, entirely clear. It lies in the steadfast reluctance of the Israeli establishment to make a real peace, under any circumstances. What the present government and the Israeli security services clearly want is to continue the occupation under one form or another, maintaining near-total control over the entire Palestinian population. (Whether the Israeli public at large really wants this or not is an open question.)
But surely such a policy, perfected to hitherto unknown levels of mendacity by Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, is irrational and self-defeating, possibly even suicidal, quite apart from being immoral and criminal under international law. Here the mystery deepens. At present, there is on the table—still somehow alive—the Arab League’s peace initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi initiative, which was reaffirmed at the Riyadh summit in 2007. Anyone who has looked carefully at the written document or listened to what the Arab leaders are saying publicly should have no doubt that this route to peace and normalization should be broadly acceptable to Israel. It calls for an independent Palestinian state, with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories; a “just solution,” subject to negotiated agreement, to the problem of Palestinian refugees8; and a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab states.
Had the Saudi initiative been offered to David Ben-Gurion in the 1960s, it would have looked like a utopian dream come true. But the plan has never even been discussed at an Israeli cabinet meeting, and Netanyahu’s government has made it clear so far that it will do whatever is necessary to avoid making such a peace with the 250 million or so Arabs surrounding Israel, to say nothing of the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and beyond. How are we to explain this stubborn refusal? How is it related to the eerie silence about Palestine I mentioned earlier?
Many Israelis, including those who might acknowledge the accuracy of my description, will readily blame the impasse on the cumulative trauma resulting from Arab, including Palestinian, violence against Jews going back to the beginning of the conflict. There is clearly some truth to this claim, though it does not explain the gratuitous cruelty inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians over the last few decades or the enormous and continuing theft of land that must be seen as the true raison d’être of the occupation. To understand the issue more deeply, it’s crucial to see what the occupation really means on the ground—and, apart from actually spending time in the occupied territories, there is no better way to understand this reality than to read the volume of soldiers’ testimonies just published by the Israeli peace group known as Breaking the Silence, a book, in my view, that is one of the most important published on Israel/Palestine in this generation.
Published in both Hebrew and English but so far only in Jerusalem, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010 documents the everyday miseries of the occupation as seen through the eyes of over a hundred ordinary soldiers who served in the territories and who tell us what they saw and did and heard in the course of their service. Some of them were shocked by their experiences; others report almost nonchalantly, in the rich colloquial Hebrew of the army, as if they were detached from feeling, their sensibilities blunted or anesthetized. They were all part of a vast machine—the occupation system, which includes not only the army units but also the police, the military police, the military courts, government bureaucrats, politicians, and, of course, Israeli settlers—and they almost always followed their orders, including orders that were patently illegal, without protest, indeed even without speaking with one another about the crimes they witnessed or took part in.
You have in the book published by Breaking the Silence an account of the whole sordid business that all Israeli activists see week after week in the territories: the routine use of terror against the Palestinian population as a principle of control; the beatings and shootings and arbitrary arrests; the inventive and pervasive forms of humiliation inflicted on innocents; the expulsions from homes and grazing grounds and fields; the farce of the military courts; the occasional acts of pure sadism on the part of senior officers as well as ordinary soldiers and, in particular, settlers; the violent suppression of nearly all forms of protest, including (especially) nonviolent civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations; the premeditated irrationality of the Civil Administration, which controls the lives of the occupied population through a bewildering regime of permits and bureaucratic regulations; and, above all, the intimate interweaving of the army units and the settlers, who regularly and freely assume the authority of telling the soldiers what to do (inevitably at the expense of Palestinian civilians).
Palestinians carry the bodies of fellow Palestinians in Khan Younis, Gaza on August 1, 2014. Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khuza’a fired on and killed civilians in apparent violation of the laws of war in several incidents between July 23 and 25, 2014. Deliberate attacks on civilians who are not participating in the fighting are war crimes. From Human Rights Watch. Photo from Reuters
Some of the most appalling testimonies relate to the years of combat during the second intifada. On the other hand, one could argue that what passes for normalcy under the occupation, as we see it today, is even worse, precisely because of its relentless, daily, dehumanizing grind. Any reader of Occupation of the Territories will soon see how the occupation has become a degrading system of control. I have never accepted Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil (or rather, of the evildoer—which is what she meant), but I have observed the workings of the devastating drug of habituation. I have seen how evil, embedded in a ramified, often impersonal system, can be broken down into small, daily acts that, however repugnant at first, rapidly become routine.
Consider the following, chosen more or less at random from Occupation of the Territories:
During your service in the territories, what shook you the most?
…There was a thing that they [the IDF soldiers] came to a house and simply demolished it…. The mom watched from the side and cried, the kids sitting with her and stroking her….
What does it mean to wreck a house?
To break the floors, turn over sofas, throw plants and pictures, turn over beds, break closets, tiles…. The looks of people whose house you’ve gone into. It really hurt me to see. And after that, they left them for hours in the school tied up and blindfolded. At four in the afternoon the order came to free them. That was more than 12 hours.
Or this, from a soldier sent to guard the fanatical Israeli settlers in Hebron:
[There are Palestinian kids] who die for no reason, innocent, where settlers go into their homes and shoot at them, and settlers go crazy in the streets and break store windows and beat up soldiers and throw eggs at soldiers and lynch the elderly, all of these things don’t even make it to the media…. The people who live in that [settlers’] neighbourhood do whatever they want, the soldiers are forced to protect them. And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it…. People prefer not to know and not to understand that something terrible is happening not far from us, and really no one cares.
It is not surprising that there have been efforts within Israel, including by the Foreign Ministry, to silence Breaking the Silence and to dry up the group’s funding, some of which comes from European sources. The book is painful, and shameful, to read. It is also, incidentally, eloquent testimony to the remarkable freedom of speech that is, for now at least, still the norm inside Israel. The editors’ conclusion, stated in a mild and careful way (milder than I would have put it), is incontrovertible and worth quoting in full:
While it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the last decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, Israeli operations are not solely defensive. Rather, they systematically lead to the de facto annexation of large sections of the West Bank to Israel through the dispossession of Palestinian residents. The widespread notion in Israeli society that the control of the Territories is intended exclusively to protect the security of Israeli citizens is incompatible with the information conveyed by hundreds of IDF soldiers.
One has always to bear in mind that we are dealing with a deeply entrenched system driven by its own internal logic and largely independent of local decisions made by individuals—soldiers, judges, bureaucrats—who are caught up in it, although each such person bears his or her ‘own measure of responsibility and guilt.’
This particular system could not continue to exist without a profound and willful blindness that we Israelis have cultivated for decades, and whose roots undoubtedly predate the existence of the State of Israel itself. I am speaking of blindness not to the existence of millions of Palestinian people—they are there for all to see—but to the full humanity of these people, their natural equality to us, and the parity (at least that, if one can measure such things) between their collective claim to the land and ours. There is also, again, a studied blindness to the cumulative trauma that we Israelis have inflicted upon the Palestinians in the course of realizing our own national goals (and later, in going far beyond any rational conception of such goals).
This is no ordinary blindness; it is a sickness of the soul that takes many forms, from a dull but superficial apathy to the silence and passivity of ordinary, decent people, to the malignant forms of racism and protofascist nationalism that are becoming more and more evident and powerful in today’s Israel, including segments of the present government. I suppose that to acknowledge these facts is too demoralizing, and too laden with potential guilt, for most of us. Often it seems that we will do anything—even risk catastrophic war—to avoid having to look our immediate neighbours in the face, to peel away the mythic mask. Palestinian violence over many years has made it easier for Israelis to make this choice, but it is important to bear in mind that it is, indeed, exactly that, a choice. There is a clear alternative—clearer today than ever before. In the history of this conflict, Israelis have by no means had a monopoly on blindness, but they are the party with by far the largest freedom of action and the greatest potential to bring about serious change.
What does the future hold? Sari Nusseibeh repeatedly expresses his belief that change is possible if people have the self-confidence and faith in themselves to act. He sees his task as an educator to be one of inculcating such faith. And he also describes, in several chapters of his often moving book, a moral basis for political action that can speak to all of us. Like Gandhi, and like Abdallah Abu Rahmah and Ali Abu Awwad, with whom I began, Nusseibeh seeks not to coerce his opponents—in this case the Israeli people along with their political and military institutions—into changing their self-destructive course but to change their will, or their feelings. He wants them to step back from prejudice and an obsession with brute force and to open their eyes. He wants them to find in themselves the generosity of spirit needed in order to take a chance on peace, whether in the form of two states or a single binational entity or, perhaps, some kind of confederation.
Can nonviolent political action have an effect on Israelis? I don’t know. I think a generosity of spirit does exist, somewhere, in the collective, fearful, angry Israeli soul. It might even be hiding under the superficial veil of apathy. Nusseibeh closes his book with a paradoxical observation that he himself characterizes as “astounding.” In a situation like that in Palestine, where there is a vast asymmetry in power, the moral leverage to “draw out the desired attitudinal change in the other party” by the nonviolent exercise of one’s innate freedom, and by holding fast to universal values, belongs to the weaker, not to the stronger, party. Thus
if one defines power as the ability to cause political change to one’s own advantage, it is the Palestinians who hold this power even though (or precisely because) they are being held down by a mighty military force.
Some Palestinians, at least, including the current Palestinian government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have clearly internalized this truth and are putting it to use in practical ways. These days, Fayyad uses every public opportunity to announce unequivocally that violence is not an option, no longer a part of the Palestinian repertory. He is, of course, not the only player in the field.
So here is one answer to Sari Nusseibeh’s question. A Palestinian state that emerges from mass nonviolent struggle, clearly occupying the moral high ground, would undoubtedly have intrinsic worth, quite apart from its practical value in solving the tragic anomaly of Palestinian statelessness. But I don’t expect the Palestinian state to emerge like that. Only immense international pressure, on many levels, can bring the Israeli occupation to an end. Still, at this particular moment the Palestinians have a major asset in Israel’s recalcitrance, its steadfast refusal to make peace. Under current international conditions, and despite the continuing suffering on the ground inside the occupied territories, the more foolish, cussed, and destructive Israel becomes, the better for the Palestinian cause. Maybe someday even the US will no longer be able to swallow further humiliation at Israel’s hands and will choose not to exercise its veto in the UN and other international forums on Israel’s behalf.
A Palestinian state, recognized by all the world except for Israel, would, no doubt, be only a step toward an indeterminate future, replete with old and new dangers. Judging by recent statements by right-wing Israeli politicians such as Michael Eitan,10 one such danger is that Israel may (following the Gaza model) eventually retreat from much of the occupied territories without making peace with the new state—probably the worst of all possible outcomes, but one entirely consonant with the collective blindness I have described. I’d like to think the tortured peoples of Israel and Palestine could do better.
—January 27, 2011
“And no one wants to know” – Israeli soldiers on the Occupation
By David Shulman, Israel Occupation Archive
January 16, 2011
[New York Review of Books – 9 Jan 2011,www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/09/no-one-wants-to-know-israeli-soldiers-occupation/]
The publication in Jerusalem of Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010 —unprecedented first-hand accounts by over one hundred Israeli soldiers of their experiences while serving in the IDF—coincides with an appalling yet unsurprising incident I learned of only a few days ago. On Tuesday, December 28, 2010, at 3:00 AM, Hajja Sara Nawaja, a Palestinian grandmother living in a tent with her family in the arid hills of south Hebron, on the occupied West Bank, woke to the sound of dogs barking. She smelled smoke. She discovered that two adjacent tents, which the family used as kitchens, were on fire. She woke her son Ahmad, who managed to remove the gas cylinders from the tents just in time, before they exploded. The two tents were burned to the ground. A car was seen driving away from the scene in the direction of the nearby Israeli settlement of Susya.
Did the settlers who probably set the fire intend to kill Hajja Sara and her large family? It’s quite possible. Settlers regularly harass the family, whom I know well from previous visits to the area. The previous week Hajja Sara’s brother, Hajj Khalil, was severely beaten by some fifteen settler toughs at the tiny encampment of Wadi Gheish. Will the culprits be arrested? No chance. Settlers act with virtual impunity in the wilds of south Hebron; the police and the army units in the area usually show no interest in violence directed at Palestinians. Their primary goal is to secure the settlements and the Israelis who live in them.
In fact, such events are a natural and enduring part of Israel’s military control of the West Bank, as Occupation of the Territories reveals in systematic and chilling detail. The men and women whose accounts are gathered in its 431 pages have served in the territories over the past decade and have had the courage to come forward and report on what they saw and heard and did there. The testimonies, which are anonymous, take the form of careful interviews that often focus on particular incidents in which the soldier was involved. The book is being published in Hebrew and English (the English edition, also published in Jerusalem, will be available later this month; a nearly final electronic version can be found online) by Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli ex-soldiers with an established record of gathering first-person accounts of IDF operations.
The information was meticulously checked and re-checked for accuracy; there is no mistaking the ring of truth in the reports, which reveal consistent patterns, and thus have a powerful cumulative force. To read them is to see the profound moral corruption of the occupation in all its starkness. They show us ordinary, decent young soldiers, caught up in an impossible situation, sometimes trying desperately to make sense of that situation, but mostly following their orders without question. In a number of cases, those interviewed have clearly been psychologically and spiritually scarred by their participation in horrific events of which they had little understanding at the time.
Some of the testimonies date from the second Intifada (2000–2005). Among the worst is the report of the cold-blooded revenge killing of four (possibly more) innocent Palestinian policemen at a checkpoint near Ramallah in 2001:
All of a sudden our team commander comes … and says, “listen, this is the briefing…. we are doing … the operation is a revenge operation. We are going to eliminate six Palestinian policemen from some checkpoint in revenge for the six they took from us.” … there are like four transfer posts … those who are responsible for them are Palestinian police, and everyone from those posts they sent us … to just eliminate all the police that are there. Right? It was defined to us like, revenge, and when I even hesitated at the moment, like I asked … “What did they do? Who are they?” they said to me, “… There is a suspicion that the terrorist who killed the six went through that checkpoint.” There is a suspicion, like, but they don’t know for certain. And it could be that it’s one of those, but they said to me, “it doesn’t matter, they took six of ours, we are going to take six back.”
Were they armed?
They didn’t fire back at us. They didn’t fire back. No, they didn’t…. We gave a fire strike from afar, we didn’t hit anything..we hit one and he ran, I took him down with another bullet. Another one ran into the thing, it was, like, burning, and we chased after another…. Now, the guy who I killed, who I took down, I shot a bullet at him, he was lying on the ground, we only saw … like we only saw … something was hiding him, and we were four or three people who just put … we just kept shooting at the body.
To verify the killing?
Not to verify the killing, from the hysteria of the excitement … and then I got to him and he was, like, hacked to pieces … And I tried, and I turned him over, like … it was a 55-year-old, if not 60 year-old guy, very old, and he didn’t have a weapon.
Were they in uniform?
They were in Palestinian police uniforms. They were in Palestinian police uniforms without weapons.
But apart from atrocities like that one, what most shocks the reader of these testimonies is the routine, daily terror and humiliation inflicted on an innocent civilian population. Consider, for example, the following report, from 2005, by a soldier stationed at one of the innumerable checkpoints, in this case again in the vicinity of Ramallah:
The abuse at the checkpoint was severe … It was December-January, it was a difficult winter, not like this winter. It’s cold in Ramallah, and it’s unnecessary to point out that it’s an exhausting checkpoint, you stand there for 12 hours on your feet, a bullet in the chamber, it’s considered a dangerous checkpoint…. You are freezing cold and you see them coming in their warm cars. We invented a hobby: the majority of the Palestinian cars were old and the trunk doesn’t open from inside the car, we would tell them to get out and open the trunk, so they would get out into the cold and the rain. It angered me seeing them in their cars until I forgot that they don’t want to see me there.
One time a guy by the name of Amjad Jamal Nazer, I remember him well, I asked him to get out and open the trunk and he asked why, he said he could open it from the inside. There was hail, and I was a bit sick, and I told him to get out and open the trunk. He refused … he said he wasn’t getting out, I confiscated his car, I took the car keys, I told him to step to the side. He mumbled a bit, I hit him in the face with the butt of my weapon, and like that I returned to the circle of violence. My soldiers couldn’t believe it, they were so excited. I was a deputy commander at the vehicular checkpoint and this was “a step up for us,” this incident. The checkpoint became very violent.
Or another prototypical experience, this time from the northern West Bank in 2009:
We did searches in Hares, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They said that there are 60 houses that need to be searched. I said that surely there was some warning from intelligence, I tried to justify it to myself … It was a battalion operation, they spread out over the whole village, took control of the school, broke the locks, the classrooms. One room was the investigation room for the Shin Bet, one room for detentions, a room for the fighters to rest … We went in house by house, knocking at 2 in the morning on the door of a family. They are dying of fear, girls pee in their pants from fear. We knock hard on the doors, there is an atmosphere of “We’ll bring them down,” a fanatical atmosphere. We go into the house and turn the whole thing upside down.
What’s the procedure?
Gather the family in a particular room, put a guard, say to the guard to aim the barrel of his gun at them, and check the whole house. Another order we received, everyone born after 1980 until … an age range from 16-29, it doesn’t matter who, bring him in cuffed with plastic cuffs and a blindfold. They also yelled at old people, one of them had an epileptic seizure. They continue to yell at him more. He doesn’t speak Hebrew and they continue to yell at him. The medic treated him. We did the rounds. Every house they went into, they took everyone between 16-29 and from there brought them to the school, they sat tied up in the schoolyard.
Did they tell you the purpose of this thing?
To locate weapons. And we didn’t find any weapons in the end. They confiscated kitchen knives. What shook me the most was that there were also thefts there…. People [soldiers] went into the houses and looked for things to steal. This was a village where the people are very poor…. There was also a thing where one Palestinian (who was known to be mentally ill) yelled at the soldiers, but the soldier decided that he was going to attack him, then they simply exploded at him with blows. They hit him in the head with the butt of a weapon, he bled and they brought him to the school, to assemble with the rest.
There were a lot of arrest orders ready and signed by the battalion commander, with a blank area. They wrote that the person was detained on suspicion of disturbing the peace. So they just filled in the name and the reason for the arrest. I remember the people in plastic handcuffs, where they had put them on really close to the hands, I cut them off and put on freer ones.
Was there something else you remember from that evening?
There was a thing that they came to a house and simply demolished it…. The mom watched from the side and cried, the kids sitting with her and stroking her. I’m seeing how my mom put so much effort into every corner of our house and suddenly they come and destroy it.
What does it mean to wreck a house?
To break the floors, turn over sofas, throw plants and pictures, turn over beds, break closets, tiles…. The looks of people whose house you’ve gone into. It really hurt me to see. And after that, they left them for hours in the school tied up and blindfolded. At four in the afternoon the order came to free them. That was more than 12 hours. There were security services investigators who sat and went one by one and interrogated them.
Was there a terrorist attack earlier in the area?
No. We didn’t even find any weapons.
Particularly ominous is the far-reaching interpenetration of the army units and the Israeli settlers who, in report after report, are said to give the soldiers their orders. The editors of Occupation in the Territories describe the settlers’ special status: they are “not merely Israeli citizens entitled to protection by the Israeli army and rule of law: in practice they are also partners in the military rule of the Palestinians.” As a soldier says in one of the interviews, “You don’t want to get into a confrontation with a Jewish settlement. They are the people that are closest to you, they are like your operations branch officer, that’s how it works.”
Any Israeli activist can confirm this fact from his or her own experience. Countless times I have watched senior Israeli commanders in the south Hebron hills bow to the demands of local settlers by putting an end to attempts by Palestinian farmers to plow or tend to Palestinian fields, for example, or by agreeing to settlers’ demands that the army drive Palestinian shepherds and Israeli peace activists off Palestinian grazing grounds (usually by declaring such lands a Closed Military Zone—in clear contravention of an explicit ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court).
Throughout the territories, young soldiers interviewed in the book often find themselves protecting rampaging settlers and covering up their violence. For example:
I was guarding, and I see in the middle of my shift, around the afternoon, an old man with a cane coming down, an Arab from Abu Sneina, the old man looked 60 plus, with a cane, he gets to the Abu Sneina intersection, to Gross square, and all of a sudden three 16-17 year-old [settler] kids jump on him, they take him down to the floor within a second. They take a stone, open up his head. They start kicking him on the floor, opening up his head. A 60 year-old man with a stream of blood from his head…. An officer came on patrol, he didn’t know what they did, so he didn’t catch them. They just ran. And immediately the company medic came and started bandaging the old Palestinian, and we took him out in an ambulance…. It shocked me.
Afterwards I went to the officer really with my eyes tearing. A soldier for 7 months in the army, I didn’t understand what was going on here. I said to him that it can’t be like this, that we can’t protect them [the settlers], I didn’t understand how it could be. I was very shocked by that incident, it destroyed everything for me…. The soldiers don’t talk with each other about these things, there is no serious discussion in a company of combat soldiers. The male atmosphere, everything is jokes, and they treat everything with a lack of seriousness and all in all they try to get through the shit together. Because again, I told you, on the scale of unfortunate ones, you are pretty unfortunate as a soldier in Hebron. You are a sacrifice yourself.
I understood that basically everything that goes on there, [Palestinian] kids, 14 years old, 8 years old who die for no reason, innocent, where settlers go into their homes and shoot at them, and settlers go crazy in the streets and break store windows and beat up soldiers and throw eggs at soldiers and lynch the elderly, all of these things don’t even make it to the media. There is a small and isolated world in Hebron, the Avraham Avinu [settler] neighborhood sits alone in Hebron, more soldiers protect it than people live there. The people who live in that neighbourhood do whatever they want, the soldiers are forced to protect them …
And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it, and no one wants to know, and no one reports about it. People prefer not to know and not to understand that something terrible is happening not far from us, and really no one cares. And the soldiers there are unfortunate and the Palestinians are super-unfortunate. And no one helps them.
So it goes, for 431 painful pages. Most painful of all is the inescapable realization that the events reported by the soldiers—in straightforward, unpretentious, searing language—are in no sense unusual. They describe the rule and the norm, the very stuff of the occupation, now forty-three-and-a-half years old and going strong. No one involved in maintaining it gets away unscathed in heart or soul, including the ordinary soldiers who do what they’re told, although only a small number are capable of the kind of articulate reflection on their experience that we find in this book.
But it is not only the soldiers and the policemen and the judges and the bureaucrats who pay a personal price, along with their Palestinian victims. As the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz predicted forty-three years ago, the occupation has brutalized Israeli society as a whole and eroded the moral foundation of our very existence. If there is still hope for Israel, it lies with those remnants of the peace camp that remain active and, in particular, with groups such as Breaking the Silence, who offer a taste of the bitter, but perhaps ultimately healing, truth.
Links
The NYRB link/page below has been removed.
For an expanded series of testimonies from Occupation of the Territories, see the author’s blog post, “‘And No One Wants to Know’: Israeli Soldiers on the Occupation,” NYRblog, January 9, 2011 (www.nybooks.com/nyrblog).
* Confessions: Tales of Savagery by the Israeli Military, for link to downloading book, Hebrew