Soldiers
Speak Out About their Service in
What follows is a compilation of testimonies by IDF soldiers who served until recently, or are still actively serving, in the
Recently, we were released from active military duty.
The testimonies of dozens of soldiers were captured on video and presented alongside photographs of the town taken by the soldiers themselves, in an exhibit which recently closed in Tel Aviv, but is soon to open in various other sites around the country. Breaking the silence - Shovrim Shtika.
website: www.shovrimshtika.org
contact:
Yehuda Shaul yehuda@shovrimshtika.org phone: +972-50-8266289
First week,
first time at the checkpoint,
at the passage between the Palestinian area and the street where only
Jews can
go. You need to have a fence. Those guys, they have to stop, there’s a
line, then they hand you their ID cards through the fence, you check
them, and
let them through.
There was this guy with
me who… We’d just
finished advanced training, got to the assignment and he yells, “Waqif! Stop!” The man
didn’t quite understand and advanced one more step. One extra step, and
then he yells again, “Waqif!” and the man freezes in fear. He didn’t quite
understand what the soldier said. Actually, it’s a procedure nobody
pays
attention to, stopping them exactly on the line. So he decided that
because the
guy made this one extra step… they should obey us, therefore he’ll
be detained. I said to him, “Listen, what are you doing?” he said,
“No, no, don’t argue, at least not in front of them, what are you
doing, I’m not going to trust you anymore, you’re not
reliable”… Eventually one of the patrol commanders came over, came from up there,
and I spoke to
him. I said, “Listen, what's the deal, how long do you want to detain
him
for?” He said, “Listen, you can do whatever you want, whatever you
feel like doing. If you feel there’s a problem with what he’s done,
if you feel something’s wrong, even the slightest thing, you can detain
him for as long as you want.” And then I got it, a man who’s been
in
Another
thing I remember from
Q:
how long has the
army been there?
A long
time, I don’t know, since
before we got there, we stayed there for months, I’m sure the house was
taken over before that, and held long after that. It’s not just the
family who lived in this specific house who were evicted, but also the
people
living downstairs were evicted, to keep the area sterile for the army,
for the
sake of this
post…
Q: That is
to say, it’s been two years now that this Palestinian family has been
kept from living in its house.
Yes, that’s
it, so conceptually
this was a really crazy thing, you’re in somebody’s house, and you
climb the stairs of a building, everything is littered with shit,
cartridges
and glass on the stairs, so you can hear if anyone is approaching. It’s
simply
a house covered in camouflage
netting so people can’t see what you’re doing inside. You
simply find yourself in a Palestinian neighborhood, in some family’s
home, and it’s totally surreal, because there you are, sitting in the
living room, listening for people coming to attack you. That’s it. And
through the window you can watch people walking in the street by their
home,
and the Jewish cemetery is just a few steps away, sometimes you can see
Jews
coming to the cemetery, to the cemetery area, and sometimes there are
Arabs
wandering in the area, this was one of the strangest things I’ve ever
seen. There was also food left behind, there was a TV, we weren’t
allowed
to turn it on, this would be too much, this would be considered “bad
occupation,”
using their electricity…
*
They used
to send us to do guard-duty
near the battalion headquarters, in Harsina. It was Friday
night, and the auxiliary company came up against a terrorist cell, the
auxiliary company was
also
stationed in Harsina, they eliminated two terrorists, killed two
terrorists.
Friday night dinner was, of course, a very happy affair, two terrorists
exterminated, it was on the news, well-publicized in the media, the
whole base
was jumping. As I was leaving dinner, an armored ambulance arrived with
the
terrorists’ corpses, and the sight which was revealed to me just after
this delicious meal, was of two terrorists’ corpses being held up in a
standing position by three people who were posing for photographs. Even
I was
shocked by this sight, I closed my eyes so as not to see and walked
away, I
really didn’t feel like looking at terrorists’ corpses. I think
your judgment gets a little impaired when everyday… when your enemy is
an
Arab or somebody else who in your eyes… like, you don’t look at him
as a person standing in front of you, but as the enemy, and this is the
word
for him: enemy. He is not a dog, he is not some animal, you don’t think
of him as inferior, he simply doesn’t count. Period. He is not… he
is your enemy, and if he’s the enemy, you kill him. And if it’s him
that you kill, once you’ve killed him, then it seems that there’s
nothing worse you can do to him, but apparently there is.
*
Army
routine during curfew, if
that’s what you mean, is simply standing… if you are in a fixed post it means standing there and
shouting,
“Waqif, ta`al jib al-hawiyya” [Stop, come give me your ID card] there’s a curfew,
go
home, this is it more or less it, and saying, “I don’t care, I
don’t care. No, no, no,” the word we used the most was “No.”
If in the beginning we used to speak with them and tried to understand,
what
happened was that they "passed us off." A child arrives, you tell him
“Listen, I’ll let you pass now, but do me a favor and go
home,” and five minutes later he’s back. Then you tell him,
“Listen here, you said you’d go, now get lost,” and two
months later, I think it’s enough, you don’t need a year, a month
is enough, a week is enough for you to get fed up with this child and
with all
these people, you are on eight-hour guard duty, and you are so tired,
and so bummed, and so burnt
out and you don’t give a fuck about any of this shit, and then a person
comes, and you don’t care if he’s old, if he’s a man, a
woman, an adult, a kid, you don’t give a damn what
species,
race, or color he is, he arrives and you tell him “La, ruh `al
beit” [No, go home]. You
tell
him “turn around and go home.” I’m not interested in any
excuses, I’m not interested in anything. You want to buy vegetables?
What
do I care about your vegetables. There’s a curfew? Period. You
don’t move. Your house is in the other direction? I don’t care,
find another way, you can’t pass from here.
*
Our job was
to stop the Palestinians
at… checkpoint and tell them they can’t pass there anymore. Maybe a
month ago they could, but now they can’t. And we knew there was another
way they could pass, so on the one hand we were not allowed to let them
pass,
and on the other hand there were all these old ladies who had to pass
to get to
their homes, so we’d point in the direction of the opening through
which
they could pass without us noticing. It was an absurd situation, we
couldn’t say “we, the soldiers, did that.” Our officers also
knew about this opening. Like, they told us about it. Nobody really
cared about
it. It made us wonder what we were doing at the… checkpoint. Why was it
forbidden to pass? It was really a form collective punishment. Any
terrorist
could know about and pass through the opening. It was just a form of
collective
punishment. You’re not allowed to pass because you’re not allowed
to pass. If you want to commit a terrorist attack, turn right there and
then
left, but if you do not want to commit a terrorist attack you’ll have
to
make a very big detour or you won’t get there at all, which was really
brilliant …
*
Q: When you
say “close the stores,” where exactly in
In the main
street of the Casaba, always. At some point it became very easy,
there were no more stores left.
Q:
And when there
were, how did it go?
“Sakir,
sakir, sakir, sakir, sakir, sakir, sakir” [close!] making the rounds,
reaching the end of the street, going back, one more round, and that’s
it, everything would be closed, not a living soul in sight. On a
crowded
street, with the skills the IDF has today, ten minutes.
*
I was
ashamed of myself the day I
realized that I simply enjoy the feeling of power. I don’t believe in
it:
I think this is not the way to do anything to anyone, surely not to
someone who
has done nothing to you, but you can’t help but enjoy it. People do
what
you tell them. You know it’s because you carry
a weapon. Knowing that if you didn’t have it, and if your fellow
soldiers
weren’t beside you, they would jump on you, beat the shit out of you, and stab you
to
death—you begin to enjoy it. Not merely enjoy it, you need it. And
then,
when someone suddenly says “No” to you, what do you
mean no? Where do you draw the chutzpah from, to say no to me? Forget for a moment that I
actually
think that all those Jews are mad, and I actually want peace and
believe we
should leave the territories, how dare you say no to me? I am the Law!
I am the
Law here! And then you sort of begin to understand that it makes you
feel good.
I remember a very specific situation: I was at a checkpoint, a
temporary one, a
so-called strangulation checkpoint, it was a very small checkpoint,
very
intimate, four soldiers, no commanding officer, no protection worthy of the
name, a true moonlighting job,
blocking the entrance to a village. From one side a line of cars wanting to get out,
and from the other side a line
of cars wanting to pass, a huge line, and suddenly you have a mighty force at the tip
of your
fingers, as if playing a computer game. I stand there like this,
pointing at
someone, gesturing to you to do this or that, and you do this or that,
the car
starts, moves toward me, halts beside me. The next car follows, you
signal, it
stops. You start playing with them, like a computer game. You come
here, you go
there, like this. You barely move, you make them obey the tip of your
finger.
It’s a mighty feeling. It’s something you don’t experience
elsewhere. You know it’s because you have a weapon, you know it’s
because you are a soldier, you know all this, but its addictive. When I
realized this... I checked in with myself to see what had happened to me. That’s it. And it
was a big
bubble that burst. I thought I was immune, that is, how can someone
like me, a
thinking, articulate, ethical, moral man—things I can attest to about
myself without needing anyone else to validate for me. I thought of
myself as
such. Suddenly, I notice that I’m getting addicted to controlling
people.
*
*
*
Concerning the IDF, the
ease in which you actually do
whatever you want to do unsupervised, that is, enter people’s homes,
conduct random searches. Every officer, every commander can decide now I’m entering a
home, ordering the
family out, ransacking the house... In fact, I think that in
*
At a
certain stage, it was decided that
for the soldiers to fulfill their duty and really check the
Palestinians who
pass there, they should check their ID cards, and so my company commander
initiated a quota of
twenty ID cards per guard
duty, not at night, of course. Twenty IDs per guard
duty. He also ordered,
and this is the attempt
to be enlightened:
that a person who waits more than twenty minutes, a half an hour,
should be
released. After all, as I understood it, the people who are summoned to the police
station are not
terrorists or anything like that, but most probably
collaborators. I suppose if they were terrorists, no one would let them
walk
from there to the police station. In any case, at a certain stage, the
most
exciting thing in the company was to compete who could check as many
IDs as
possible in a given guard duty. And what happened next was that in one case a commander and a
soldier
decided to reach the maximum , to break the quota, and
check as
many IDs as possible, and simply started taking groups of three,
brought them
over, and made them stand on the side while they checked their IDs over
the
radio. After adding other groups of three... the number swelled to
seven,
eight, nine people who were standing there within a space of one by two
meters
more or less, standing and waiting while their IDs were being checked
over the
radio. Now, first of
all, operationally
speaking this is dumb, and this was the first thing that came to mind.
My
company commander came and yelled at them, yelled because operationally
speaking it was a dumb thing to do, when nine people are guarded by two
people,
not only is it unwise, its dangerous. The thing that I managed to
understand
only later, honestly because that place makes you emotionally detached
and you
aren’t really able to figure out what goes on there... I understood how
inhumane it was. How evil it is to do this to people. To take them and
stick
them on top of each other; to make them stand like this for twenty
minutes, and
not because of some security necessity, but because the soldiers acted
out of
inertia and found an interesting way to pass their guard duty.
There is this thing among the guys... I don’t want to define them, but the guys who believe that it’s not right to be in the territories, and nevertheless serve in the territories. There is a tendency to say, “I didn’t do these things, and I don’t do the bad things you hear about on the news or in stories about officer courses or other places.” And many guys pat themselves on the back, saying, “Here here, look they’re nice to us, they smile at us, offer us coffee.” And whenever I’d hear this it drove me crazy. The question is: who is nice to us, who offers us coffee? The Arabs. The Jews are always nice, of course, unless it conflicts with their interests. But on a daily basis they’re nice, and you expect the Arabs to be hostile... and you do what you do, climb up on a family’s roof, and then the owner of the house brings you oranges and coffee. And you start feeling okay with it... You look the man in the eyes and say to yourself, “I can tell whether he’s afraid of me or likes me.” This is bullshit. He may even like you at this point, because you knocked on his door politely and didn’t break it down. But ultimately, if I were them, it wouldn’t matter to me if they told me: get inside your house please or get inside your house with a gun pointed in my face. What difference does it make? You don’t let me walk around in the streets, you don’t let me work, you don’t let me live or breathe, what difference does it make whether it is done politely or by force? What difference does it make if you open the door or break it down, in any case you enter the house... It is self-evident to you. Moreover, a month before you arrived, a month after you’ll leave, it’s all the same. You were the moral soldier, the enlightened soldier, You behaved nicely and properly with each and every human being? Not only toward Arabs, toward every human being. You were decent. After you, someone less decent will come along.
*
About shooting? You hear a shot, someone, a
Palestinian probably, a
terrorist, shot at a
certain post, or maybe not, I
don’t know. There’s
simply a shot... from the other side, the Palestinian side. And gradually,
at first it was more
focused and
they didn’t allow us to shoot back just like that, and
when
it slowly turned routine, this whole business, it simply became like...
A shot
is fired from their side, a barrage follows. We were in the Jewish
neighborhood, and Abu Sneina hill was
in front of us. Simply shooting at the hill. There was the... post, there were...
all sorts of
machine-guns, all sorts of mortars, all these things, a sniper. It was
a
permanent post, and it
was from
there that we shot the most. Each time there was a barrage, we tried to
aim at
certain buildings, and sometimes we fired with no specific targets. On
the
whole it was like this: one shot from their side, a bombardment from
ours.
*
The crazy
thing is that you stand there,
an IDF soldier, okay? You've got a machine gun and it's loaded and the
safety
catch is off. So what, are you an idiot? How dare you not listen to me?
I can
shoot you at any given moment. I can split your head open with the butt
of my
gun and chances are my commander will give me a pat on the back and
say:
"That's showing them. Finally you got it right." Where do you get the
nerve? How come you don't understand? How come you don't see the total
control
I have over you? Like, it's crazy! I'm just a kid. I was born
yesterday. I
derive my power from my uniform and my machine gun, its what gives me
the right
to decide everything. And I do what I'm told to. That's the power I
have and I
use it. I can be the most enlightened and considerate person in the
world but
when I
say:
"mamnu` tajawul, ruh `al beit" [there’s a curfew, go home]
there is a period and
four
exclamation marks at the end of that sentence. It’s non-negotiable. I
don’t care if I'm 18 or 17 or 21. I'm a soldier. I've got a gun and I'm
from the IDF. I've got orders, and they better follow them. They'd
better
follow the orders I give them. I give the orders here. In fact, they're
civilians
unrelated to me, and I'm giving them
orders all the time… and they'll follow them whether they like it or
not.
And if they don't like it, if they make trouble, then I'll force them
to follow
them. Why? Good question. A very good question. I really don't know…
just
because. Because it's shit. That's what it is.
*
*
*
It was in
the middle of an operation in Jabal Johar, actually in all of
Q:
How did you feel
then?
I didn't
like it. It looked like
everybody there thought it was funny, so okay, I just sat there and
kept quiet.
I won't start fighting with my comrades."
Q:
Why did you keep
quiet?
I don't
know. Maybe it wasn't important
enough for me to say anything…
I don't know. You just take a deep breath and keep doing what
you’re doing. It's the duty with which I’ve been entrusted. Right
now I'm just a little cog in the wheel. I do my job and live from one furlough to the next, until my
service is over. That's how it was
all the time.
The great
thing about
If I'm
standing at a checkpoint that prevents people from going somewhere,
somewhere it's
obvious they need to get to, like from the grocery store to their
house, and
they can't get there because I'm standing in their way, it really
doesn't
matter how polite I am. I don't have to behave cruelly for it to be
unjust. I
can be the most courteous person in the world and still be unfair.
Because from
their point of view, it makes no difference if I'm a nice guy. I still
don't
let them go home. What difference does it make if I try to be nice? Or
humiliate them? The very existence of the checkpoint is humiliating. As long as
I’m
doing my duty according to the regulations, something completely legal,
I’m doing something that is inflicting pain on people, harming them
unnecessarily. I guard, or enable the existence of, 500 Jewish settlers
at the
expense of 15,000 people under direct occupation in the H2 area and
another
140,000-160,000 in the surrounding areas of
*
Q: When you
hear the word
I don't
want to go there… I
don’t want to be there… I've really got nothing to do there.
It’s a place I’ll never go near again, it seems to me. I don't want
to remember where I stood or where I didn't stand, where I was, in what
post or on what corner I was
positioned. And this is what
happened here… No… No, I don't want any of it,
I don’t want to remember
anything…
*
Q:
You know that the Border Police did this to
someone
afterwards and he was killed. They murdered someone.
That's very
sad. And, so?
Q:
Did you recognize
any of the murderers, the guys who are standing trial now?
No. I
didn't recognize anyone. I don't
know them. I just heard ‘em talking.
*
I can’t remember exactly
at what stage of the
assignment it was…. I
only
remember that on a certain Friday we went on patrol. On patrol… that is
walking towards… in… Square. We crossed
*
Every day a six-man unit
would cross over the roofs and
enter a house. First they’d search the entrances and exits, order the entire family into a
single room and
get them to talk: ID cards, profession, begin to interrogate them. It
also
serves one of the army’s aims—to make its presence felt. I remember
many of the interrogations, but I recall one in particular where we
asked… we spoke with an older man who, unlike many of the others who
say
things like, “We’ve got no problem with Israel,” “We’re
neither Fatah nor Hamas”…
“All we really want is peace so we can work”… Usually when
they say things like that you can see that they’re just looking at you.
They’re looking at your weapon. They’re all scared, so it’s
only natural that they act so defeated. But this man was not
obsequious, and he
spoke the truth: that his life was a living hell, and that he wanted us
to get
out already. He said that we are to blame for this entire situation,
and all he
wanted was for us to get out. I think someone asked him why he hated
us, why he
supports the opposition fronts. Why he supports killings. I don’t agree
with the man’s opinions, but he told the soldier that he had entered
his
home just like that, and was humiliating him, undermining his dignity.
And I
looked at this man and said to myself: wait a minute, here is this man
in his
own home, and it made me think of my own family home, surrounded by a
garden,
and greenery, a kind of fortress surrounded by a hedge of lantana and hibiscus, and I thought
what if someone were to burst into
our house like that, entering through an upstairs window, and force my
parents
and my younger brother into one of the rooms and start interrogating
us,
questioning us, searching the entrances and exits, and treating us so
patronizingly… If I had not received the kind of education I did, I
think
I would certainly support even … That is to say, this going into
people’s houses, how can you relate to it as something separate? These
are not people of a different kind. The men even physically look like
my
grandfather. … An elderly man, or an old man who has to beg you at the
checkpoint to allow him to pass, who shows you an X-Ray
and you
have no idea why he's showing it to you, or the man who tells you that
his brother in Bab
al-Zawia is ill with
asthma or some other disease
and that he’s has to pay him a visit. That same person could be your
own
father, for whom you have the greatest respect, but do we really
understand
what respect is…
Its hard to
say what I felt at that
moment. On the one hand, I was stationed
there, I didn’t choose to be there. On the other hand, I wanted to
get the hell out of there.
As an
individual who considers himself a nice guy, a moral kind of guy... I
said to
myself, damn I’m really doing something here that I don’t believe
in. I don’t believe in it 100%, and I’m putting myself in a
position where someone wants to kill me because of it. The
question is, where am I? Do I have no choice in the matter? In other
words,
should I refuse? Is refusal the answer? So there I was torn by the dilemma,
pondering. I had lots of time eight by eight [eight hours on-duty eight
hours
off-duty] to think
about it. The
point is that I was faced with a
crazy dilemma where I was
torn between personal freedom and
personal choice. Here lies the contradiction between the military,
which is
undemocratic and the state, which is supposed to be democratic. When
you see
that you are doing things which in your own home could not possibly
happen and
must never be allowed to happen, this is where you cross a certain
line. Okay,
so here you’re in a different state. That is to say, everything you
have
known until now, all the rules by which you and your own family conduct
your
lives, all that does not seem to count here.
*
Be it
during the day or at night,
whenever I feel like it, we choose a house on the map, according to the
geographic position of our unit at the time. We feel like it, that’s
the
one we choose, we go
on in. “Jaysh, jaysh… iftah al bab” [army, army, open the
door] and they open the
door. We
move all the men into one room, all the women into another, and place
them
under guard. The rest of the unit does whatever they please, except
destroy
equipment—it goes without saying—no helping yourself to anything,
and causing as little harm to the people as possible, as little
physical damage
as possible.
If I try to
imagine the reverse
situation: if they had entered my
home—not a police force with a warrant, but a unit of soldiers, if they
had
burst into my home, shoved my mother and little sister into my bedroom,
and
forced my father and my younger brother and me into the living room,
pointing
their guns at us, laughing, smiling, and we didn’t always understand
what
the soldiers were saying while they emptied the drawers and searched
through my
things. Oops it fell, broken... all kinds of photos, of my grandmother
and
grandfather... all kinds of sentimental things that you wouldn’t want
anyone else to see, wouldn’t want them infringing on your privacy, your
home is your place.
*
So I was on
patrol one day, it was the
morning shift, and there was no curfew that day, which means we have
less work,
you don't have to go and close shops and stuff… And then at some point
during our shift they told us that there was a curfew, suddenly, and
that means
we have to go into the Small Shalala [street] and into
HaShoter Square and shut down all the shops and that's a nightmare. So
we
started doing it, we began from the Small Shalala, that's how we
advanced, and
shops are starting to… we shout "curfew" and "mamnu`
tajawul," [there’s a curfew] and so on, and the shops start closing slowly. And then
we get to
the square and we are surrounded by scores of people and lots of
commerce...
you know, business is booming. So we get there and people start telling
us,
that's impossible, they told us there’s no curfew, and, like, there's
nothing I can tell them, I tell them, "There is a curfew. Get lost."
And they start shouting at me… and at some point things there… they
weren't really paying too much attention to us and we decided… we threw
a
stun grenade. So there was mayhem and we started, like…people started,
like, running. The operations commander arrived and he started
yelling curfew and stuff… and
that's it, we started… We took tons of ID cards from people and we detained them
in
*
As soon as
they don't know where you are,
and they just suspect something is up and they don't know what it is,
that's
even scarier, that's why at night you need to fire as many grenades
into the
air as possible. Or else make a lot of noise or yell in Arabic in the
middle of
the night. That's why there were times when we actually got up
in the middle of the night, in
some house that we captured, in the East Casaba, we took some man's house, and there were actually
some nights
when we got up at 2am, went out, took loads of grenades, different
types of
grenades that fit onto your weapon and make a terrible noise, and moved
between
the houses and shot and screamed, and made awful noises and all just to
frighten the enemy… and that’s it. I don't know whether we made a
few kids cry in the middle of the night or whether it really had some
sort of
psychological effect on someone who meant to attack us.
*
Well. This was following…
There was a call-up one
night, meaning we went in with two APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers],
and we started driving
towards Abu Sneina,
this was after there had been too much shooting in town, meaning, the
Arabs
started shooting in the direction of the Jewish settlement and we fired
back.
Well, sometimes we used to go in there to demonstrate, when the
shooting would
get out of hand, we would simply go in, we'd go with the APCs
pay a visit to Abu
Sneina just to make our presence
felt, do all sorts of things,
shoot at some houses, just to intimidate them, so… I don't know…
just so they wouldn’t try again. Anyhow, that night we
went
with two APCs, one of them belonging to the platoon commander, that's the one I was in, and
another one
following us, and what we did, simply, in order to deter them, we
simply moved
through Abu Sneina with two APCs and all we did was
shoot,
shoot…. We were shooting, we stopped by a house, we moved through a street, and we
fired at
houses, not at windows, we fired at all kinds of houses. And I remember
I was
like a slightly better shot, my task was to shatter
streetlights.
And I remember that I fired at car windshields, and one of the soldiers
who was
with me fired a rifle with a grenade launcher right into a shop, simply into a Palestinian
shop, to blow
up the shop. And all of this, for no good reason, I mean, deterrence
and not
one of us asked himself what he was doing in order to, actually, you
know, by
way of a response. I think… I remember myself that night, I really
meant
it when I said that it was me who fired at the streetlights, me who
fired at
the cars, because it
was me, I mean, among all those soldiers, I was shooting. And I
remember that
not one of us, that night… all of us were happy that we got the
opportunity to shoot at streetlights and cars, because there's nothing so cool.
Nothing like
hearing a streetlight blow to bits after you've taken aim at it. And
you know,
I remember us doing it with such determination and with such a smile,
and, I
don't know, I consider myself someone who actually did think of what he
was
doing during his army service, and tried to avoid doing such things,
and, like,
I remember where this reality managed to… how it managed to sweep me
into
doing those things without any… without conscience, without any
thought,
maybe, yes, afterwards, but what good is that. Simply with a
shit-eating grin
on my face.
*
There’s a
very clear and powerful
connection between how much time you serve in the territories and how
fucked in
the head you get. If someone is in the territories half a year, he’s a
beginner, they don’t allow him into the interesting places, he does
guard-duty, he’s not the one to… all he does is just grow more and
more bitter, angry. The more shit he eats, from the Jews and the Arabs
and the
army and the state, they call that numbness but I don’t… maybe
it’s a heightening of the senses, like getting drunk… because
serving in the territories isn’t about numbness, it’s a
“high,” a sort of negative high: you’re always tired,
you’re always hungry, you always have to go to the bathroom, you’re
always scared to die, you’re always eager to catch that terrorist.
It’s a life without rest. Even when you sleep, you don’t sleep
well. I don’t remember even once sleeping well in
*
I remember
an incident when there was
shooting, I’m not sure whether the shooting was from Abu Sneina toward
the Jewish neighborhood, or from the Jewish neighborhood toward Abu
Sneina , maybe it was an exchange of fire, I don’t know exactly who was
shooting at who. It was early evening … we got an order over the radio… that from now on the city
is a to
be a ghost town. Meaning everybody is to get in their houses, and we
start
firing at “locations,” which are points from which shots were fired
at one time, or are suspect and could be used as firing points. I
remember that
we emptied magazines all night long, tons of ammunition, and I remember
that I
personally fired on an empty school, or empty windows or streetlights,
just as
a deterrent, just to instill fear. It was like target practice, but
with real
targets. And this horrified me, because… it wasn’t justified, the
quantity. If they want to deter, I think it was a bit more than a
deterrent, it
was grossly exaggerated.
*
I had a friend
who carried a weapon equipped with a grenade launcher, and everybody with a
launcher got
ammunition for dispersing demonstrations. [And he] got lots of tear gas
grenades, and he really liked to fire this gas, so he would also steal
them
from other guys who were equipped with gas grenade launchers, and he
would fire
them whenever he came on duty and before he went off. He would simply
fire on
groups of people who were just standing around and talking, to see them
running
and coughing, he got a kick out of it.
Q: How
did the guys in his unit react to that?
I don’t know,
even the ones who were bothered by it didn’t lay into him about it
or… I don’t know, everybody just took it as normal.
*
I remember a post called… and it was manned by the
Sahlav
company [military police unit], and
it was a post in the
middle of the street. There really was a pharmacy there, that’s why they
called it
The Pharmacy, and
they would simply stand there and stop people, which was legitimate,
check
their papers and stuff. And somehow, in the evening and at night, there
was
always mayhem. So, from talking to soldiers: how come there’s always
trouble at your post, and word gets around, a rumor circulated, one of
their
soldiers told me that one day they were bored and wanted some action,
so they backed
up a few meters inside to where they couldn’t be seen, and he goes:
“We slammed two or three bullets into the concrete blocks of the post,
to
leave marks, we reported that we were being fired at, and we started to
shoot.
We started throwing stun grenades and all kinds of shit.” They were
shooting there for no reason.
*
The thing that I remember
that affected me emotionally the most
from my time in
*
Eight hours at the… post,
it's hard, real hard, no
fun. I was with… and myself, and the three of us stood at the post. It
was a Saturday when the company commander
wasn't there, so we felt less constrained and more free, we knew
they
wouldn't inspect our balls. Our deputy company commander was there that
Saturday, and we got really, really bored, and started talking, trading
war
stories, who had already thrown a stun grenade, and who hadn't, who
used tear
gas, who shot, who hadn't shot, things like that, and we discovered
that…
had never thrown a stun grenade. So we decided to blow-up an incident,
so as to
throw a stun grenade. We threw a glass so it would break and shatter,
reported that
an empty bottle was thrown at us, and asked permission to throw a stun
grenade.
The operations command showed up, looked at the area, and said there
was no
need to use a stun grenade, they checked the area where we reported
that the
kids were and, of course, the kids weren't there. The operations
command moved
on, and we were pissed off that we hadn't thrown a stun grenade because
we were
still bored and nothing happened except that the operations command
came by and
helped us pass five more minutes of our shift, and we still had
something like
four-and-a half hours to go, only half our shift had passed, and we
decided
that we wanted to throw that grenade, because we were really bored and
wanted
to do something. We started over,
and this time we didn't ask permission to throw a grenade,… just threw it. It's not that I put the
blame on him, we were all there, and I gave him the grenade and
explained to
him how to throw a stun grenade, and that's it, he threw the stun
grenade
towards a group of children that were far away, but they were
frightened and
ran away.
*
Blowing up a house in the
Casaba where two terrorists were
staying, we entered the Casaba that night, took families out of the
houses, and
moved them away. At a certain stage it was decided that from one point
onward
some people could go back home, to a certain building. Four people went
in;
still outside were a three year old kid and his older brother, aged
seven or
eight or maybe even ten. It got tense, soldiers were shouting that the
kids should
get in the house, we were about to begin, or something like that. A
senior
officer showed up, stood next to me and started shouting at the two
kids to get
in the house. The mother of the little kid came out and yelled at him
to get in
quickly, he snapped out of it and ran in, his big brother was a bit…
sort
of froze on the spot, he didn't understand. At a certain point the
senior
officer stood there and started screaming: "kid, go home, get into the
house.” The kid didn't respond, still frozen on the spot. The officer
raised his weapon, held it savagely, turned on the laser and started…
pointing the light on the kids face, on his body, all over, screaming
"get
in, get in." Some of the neighbors shook the child and pushed him in
the
direction of the entrance, and on his way, just before he went in, he
passed
between me and the senior officer, and the officer just… wham! Slapped
him from behind, a serious blow from the hand of a senior officer, and
that's
it, the kid sort of crawled in, and his mother closed the door. The
same senior
officer lit a cigar, and then we heard the explosion.
I personally, sort of had
this inner process, which made me
kind of confront myself. I found myself in situations that I didn't
know how to
cope with. It had me checking myself all time to see how I held on to
my
values, how low I could go, because once it becomes a routine, you
reach a
situation where you can't control it, it's your routine, it's your
day-to-day,
you just get orders and you carry them out without giving them a second
thought, it's like, you're at your post and you say to yourself, "Shit,
today I don't mind getting killed, like, today I… don't mind getting
killed, it's my duty to be here and that's what I’ll do."
Q:
Simply burns into your consciousness…
Yes, exactly, you just
become like a robot, I don't know how
to explain it. There's a stage where… either routine or fatigue when
you
no longer have the strength to be patient, you have no strength to…
Someone
comes and throws a remark which he shouldn't like, "What do you want
from
me?" which is legitimate in his opinion, and even in my opinion, that
person lives there, you know, it not… It's a street where they're
allowed
to pass, and a soldier comes and stops him and checks him and searches
him and
his kids are there and his family is there, and its humiliating for
him, and
there's a stage when you just don't care anymore, old man, not old man,
you
check them all…
*
If there
was any shooting or any chance
of anything happening then, with the permission of the company commanders
or one of the
platoon commanders, we would get into an APC [Armored Personnel
Carrier] and simply go,
one or two APCs, towards Abu
Sneina, the goal was deterrence. In my opinion, there was no real
potential
there for capturing someone or anything like that. We’d go up to Abu
Sneina with coverage, to all kinds of spots in the area. What I remember from those
incursions into Abu Sneina
… deterrent firing at cars, alleyways, shops, without any particular
target. Go in, make a lot of noise, get out. I think we were part of a
system,
and our judiciousness didn’t work very well. It worked very well when
it
came to basic humanity towards humans, I think, especially
in our
company, but not when
it came to
the little things, at least the things that are little to us, but
apparently
aren’t so little. Whether it’s going in and maybe escaping our
daily routine, and instead of doing eight-by-eights [eight hours
on-duty eight
hours off-duty] maybe
getting a
little action, going up, shooting a little. There was no concept behind
it, as
I see it, that we were actually going up there to make an arrest or
anything.
*
The thing
about these stories is that
they’re a matter of daily routine, and there are lots more like them.
And
these stories were an integral part of my daily routine over a six
month period
of active assignment which was total, your whole life. It’s
eight-by-eight. No day and night. It’s constant. And even when you’re
sleeping, it’s very likely they’ll call you up, and you really live
these events. I knew that as a soldier there was no… I didn’t agree
with all these things. It really hurt me inside. There were many
incidents that
hurt even more than these. And I told myself that… my justification for
being there was that afterwards I would take action to change it. The
most
serious problem meanwhile is that as a soldier who has not been there
for a
month now, I notice about myself that while two months ago that was all
I
thought about and I was burning up inside, that is, I really wanted to
take
action, I couldn’t live in that situation. It’s not that I was at
my house surrounded by grass and neighborhoods with French streetlights
and a
car waiting outside… I was living in poverty, in my daily life…
where people dig through the garbage, and there are mice everywhere,
and rats,
and it really bothered me. And now, much as I said it would go on
burning
inside me, I notice that gradually I’m starting to forget about it. And
if at first I couldn’t enjoy a show calmly, or be with a girl, I
couldn’t relax because I kept saying, just a minute, there’s
someone in the… post now, or someone needs
to do eight hours of duty now and he has someone sick trying to get out
of the Casaba to an ambulance and he has to detain him
for an hour. So now I notice that it feels less urgent to me, like the
rest of
the people in the country, who, after all, don’t live this reality, and
it’s really easy for them not to think about it and to detach
themselves,
but the problem is still there.
*
There was
another house called…
that overlooks the entrance to Abu Sneina, at the time there was no IDF
unit
sitting inside
Abu Sneina, today there is, so what the company commanders and two
companies
did was to take… two
reinforced
APCs once every week or so and go up there in a kind of armored
caravan…
to Abu Sneina. There’s a route that’s more or less…
that’s the entrance to it, and then you go up to Abu Sneina and come
down
again to
*
One
incident I remember from
*
When I
served in
There are a
few things that stayed with
me. One, I think my definition of a Jew has changed a little. I used to
think
that anyone who defines himself as a Jew is a Jew, as far as I’m
concerned. Today I’m not so sure. After I saw Jews that… I
don’t know if my definition of Jews even makes any difference with
regard
to the fact that… they’re also human beings, but they don’t
act like… Jews who went through a holocaust, they themselves didn’t
go through a holocaust, but I’m sure that some of them are from
families
that survived the Holocaust. If they’re capable of writing on the
Arab’s doors “Arabs Out” or “Death to the Arabs,”
and drawing a Star of David, which to me is like a swastika when they
draw it
like that, then somehow the term Jew has changed a little for me with
regard to
who’s a Jew. That’s one thing. Another thing that has stayed with
me from
*
Once I was in... in
*