I recommend Yossi Gurvitz’s summary piece on the shocking new testimonies released by Breaking the Silence, from former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupation. It’s a chronicle of scatological humiliation, theft of workers’ important papers as pranks, and “pointless killings,” with all that phrase summons… Gurvitz begins with this wrenching episode narrated by an anonymous former soldier. How much more do you need to know?
“And my story is we and my story is that one time we grabbed a kid, not a big kid, a 10 or 12 year-old boy, something like that, we explained to him with the help of point with the barrel of the gun what he has to do, meaning waving the gun, showing him what do. The situation that was created was like…there is a little boy behind him, a patrol jeep, and three soldiers aiming their weapon at him and he [the boy] has to go and remove, he has to remove the blockade, these blockades. And he’s working and crying…and removing the blockades, and we go and point our weapons, and he goes to the next one and like that…then the patrol jeep commander that was with me decided that maybe they’d do something like that down the road, something which is of course not logical at all, because you leave the village from there, so there is no chance it would happen, and he says to me maybe there is something down the road, we’ll take him with us. Inside the patrol jeep there is no place to put the boy so what he does is he throws me in back, my friend and I sat in the back of the patrol jeep and the boy is strewn between us on our legs and our equipment and the grenades, and he’s crying the whole time, while he’s lying down on us, and on the equipment and our feet. I felt through his pants that he was peeing out of fear. And he’s crying and lying between two soldiers in the patrol jeep, after 10 kilometers from the village when it was completely clear that apparently they did not walk 10 kilometers with furniture to make a blockade, the commander decided that it was enough, you can take him out, he stopped the jeep, he got out and came to the back, pulled the kid out, threw him on the side of the road, crying again, with wet pants, to walk 10 kilometers back, and we kept going to the settlements that were there.” (Prevention 34, Unit: Armored Corps, Location: Baka A-Sharaqiya, Year: 2000).
Gurvitz writes:
In 1988, a song by Si Heiman, “Shooting and Crying”, caused a scandal precisely because it tried to make Israelis see what happens on the other side of the Green Line. The Israelis didn’t want to know and still don’t. The settlers have their all-excusing ideology. The leftists still demonstrate, uselessly. The soldiers, who until recently have mostly kept silent, or waited a decade or so and turned their memories into a book or a movie, have started speaking out.
Then he gives this testimony about Palestinian i.d. papers, again from an anonymous Israeli veteran:
“Now these cards, what’s amazing about them, is that you already know from the checkpoint how hard they are to get. Because people only show you those that are expired, and they tell you stories about how they are already trying to renew it. And you realize that itself that is almost impossible to get while still valid. So we were shocked to see that apparently the guys that work on the settlement had valid ones. In Yakir, in the Yakir settlement, they had Arab workers. So the few workers leave their documents at the gate, and enter the settlement. So what did the two guys that were with me do? They took the documents and put them in their pocket. A guy without his documents, you can imagine what…
Why did they put them in their pockets?
Because of their ill will. Just because, he went out for a smoke and they played a prank, they hid it from him. Of course nothing would happen to him [the reservist] Like what? It’s just some guy’s travel document. […]I don’t remember how it ended. I only remember it like…I really remember that it was the frst time I realized that an 18 year-old boy with a bit of ill will can fuck up someone’s life. The next day the guy can’t get to work, and you already know that the guy, in order to get the card, went through seven circles of hell.
Gurvitz is enraged, enraged, enraged, he says, by the revelations. He writes:
This ill-will, or rather this power to harm, of an 18 years old is the scarlet thread binding this book together. This is a book about slaves rising to the throne, of little nobodies granted control over the lives of others, and of the automatic tend to sadism in such positions. This is the story of the trigger happy soldiers throwing stun grenades into a marketplace, killing some chickens by the blast (Fabric of Life 1); of MPs who routinely spill out the contents of boxes of produce on the road, randomly selected, and when one of them hears a remark she doesn’t like from a Palestinian, they spill out all his produce (Fabric of Life 3); of Shimson soldiers taking a shit on the sofas in a house they occupy, and pillage the house (Prevention 47); of a paratrooper commander who, out of boredom, decided to fire at every vehicle he passes and defend his action by saying it might have been a car bomb (Prevention 37); of a company commander “whose mind was fucked”, who decided to shoot every vehicle, and a team firing at every ambulance since it may “smuggle terrorists” (Prevention 38); about paratroopers who, in a scene reminiscent of a famous movie, decide to search the entrails of a piano, find a collection of artistic swords, and confiscate them (Prevention 64); about a combat engineer doing all he can to keep his humanity, snapping when some Palestinian gives him lip, while the other soldiers snicker because now we have another criminal in the gang, no more righteous people (Fabric of Life 18); about Border Policemen having a contest about who can humiliate a parent in the presence of his children to the point of making him “shit his pants” (Fabric of Life 16); how…
There are quite a few stories of pointless killings….
Aside from the obvious effects – the creeping corruption of the occupation; the turning of the IDF into a garrison army, incapable of dealing with a real enemy; the burning hatred the soldiers leave behind, which will make ending the hostilities very difficult – there is the unspoken problem. A very large segment of young Israelis have experienced trauma, or, in the more severe case, have internalized it and made it a part of their lives. And what happened there, will return to haunt us here.
