Stories from an occupation: the Israelis who broke silence
A
group called Breaking the Silence has spent 10 years collecting
accounts from Israeli soldiers who served in the Palestinian
territories. To mark the milestone, 10 hours' worth of testimony was
read to an audience in Tel Aviv. Here we print some extracts
Children of the occupation: growing up in Palestine
group called Breaking the Silence has spent 10 years collecting
accounts from Israeli soldiers who served in the Palestinian
territories. To mark the milestone, 10 hours' worth of testimony was
read to an audience in Tel Aviv. Here we print some extracts
Children of the occupation: growing up in Palestine
Israeli soldiers
arrest a Palestinian after clashes at a protest against a Jewish
settlement in the West Bank near Ramallah, January 2014. Photograph:
Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
arrest a Palestinian after clashes at a protest against a Jewish
settlement in the West Bank near Ramallah, January 2014. Photograph:
Mohamad Torokman/Reuters
The young soldier stopped to listen to the man reading on the
stage in Tel Aviv's Habima Square, outside the tall façade of Charles
Bronfman Auditorium. The reader was Yossi Sarid, a former education and
environment minister. His text is the testimony of a soldier in the Israel
Defence Forces, one of 350 soldiers, politicians, journalists and
activists who on Friday – the anniversary of Israel's occupation of
Palestinian land in 1967 – recited first-hand soldiers' accounts for 10
hours straight in Habima Square, all of them collected by the Israeli
NGO Breaking the Silence.
When
one of the group's researchers approached the soldier, they chatted
politely out of earshot and then phone numbers were exchanged. Perhaps
in the future this young man will give his own account to join the 950
testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence since it was founded 10
years ago.
In that decade, Breaking the Silence has collected a
formidable oral history of Israeli soldiers' highly critical assessments
of the world of conflict and occupation. The stories may be specific to
Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories
but they have a wider meaning, providing an invaluable resource that
describes not just the nature of Israel's occupation but of how
occupying soldiers behave more generally. They describe how abuses come
from boredom; from the orders of ambitious officers keen to advance in
their careers; or from the institutional demands of occupation itself,
which desensitises and dehumanises as it creates a distance from the
"other".
In granular detail, the tens of thousands of words
narrated on Friday told of the humdrum and the terrible: the humiliating
treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, shootings and random
assaults. Over the years the Israeli military's response has been that
these stories are the exceptions, not the rule, accounts of a few bad
apples' actions.
"What we wanted to show by reading for 10 hours
is that the things described in the testimonies we have collected are
not exceptional, rather they are unexceptional," says Yehuda Shaul, one
of the founders of the group and a former soldier himself.
Shaul
breaks off to greet the European Union ambassador and a woman soldier
who served in his own unit whom he has not seen for years. We talk about
the solitary soldier in the square, now talking to the researcher.
"We'll get in contact. See if he wants to talk. Perhaps meet for coffee.
Then, when we interview people, we ask them to recommend us to their
friends. We might get 10 phone numbers, of whom three will talk to us."
It
is not only word of mouth that produces Breaking the Silence's
interviews. At the annual conferences that soldiers leaving the army
attend to prepare them for the return to civilian life, researchers will
try to talk to soldiers outside. Shaul explains why he and his
colleagues have dedicated themselves to this project, why he believes it
is as necessary today as when he first spoke out a decade ago about his
own experience as a soldier in Hebron. "In Israeli politics today the
occupation is absent. It's not an issue for the public. It has become
normal – not second nature; the occupation has become part of our
nature. The object of events like today is for us to occupy the public
space with the occupation."
His sentiments are reflected by the
Israeli novelist and playwright AB Yehoshua, who gets on the stage to
read a comment piece he had written the day before to mark the event.
"The great danger to Israeli society," Yehoshua explains, "is the danger
of weariness and repression. We no longer have the energy and patience
to hear about another act of injustice."
A man appears holding a
handwritten sign that condemns Breaking the Silence as "traitors". Some
of those attending try to usher him away while others try to engage him
in conversation. A journalist asks Shaul if the man is "pro-army". "I'm
pro-army," Shaul answers immediately. "I'm not a pacifist, although some
of our members have become pacifists. I'm not anti-army, I am
anti-occupation."
Nadav Weiman. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT NADAV WEIMAN
2005-08, Nachal Reconnaissance Unit, Jenin
We'd
spread out above Jenin on "the stage", which is a tiny mountain top.
That evening an arrest mission was in progress, there were riots inside
the refugee camp, and we sat above and provided sniper cover for the operation. Things got rolling and there were arrests, some rioting began in the city.
There
was random peripheral fire so there were generally no people on
rooftops. Some time in the middle of the night, we detected someone on a
roof. We focused our sights on him, not knowing for sure whether or not
he was a scout. But we targeted him and got an OK to fire because he
was on a rooftop very close to one of our forces.
We were several
snipers, and we took him down ... Later when we got back to Jalame, it
started: "Was he armed or not?" But we'd got our OK from the battalion
commander. He was also the one to come and speak with us when we got
back to the base in Jalame. We were with the guys with whom we sat to
debrief after the action, and it was wall-to-wall, "You don't realise
how lucky you are to have actually fired in an operation. That hardly
ever happens, you are so lucky."
And according to the way we
implemented the rules of engagement, we declared him a target by
documenting him. We thought the Palestinian had been speaking on the
phone, he seemed to be raising his hand to his head, looking sideways,
going back and forth, just like a person scouting and sending
information back. You could see the angles of his body, his whole
conduct facing the soldiers who were north of him, in the alley below, a
few metres away.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Undisclosed Reservist unit, Gaza Strip 2009, Operation Cast Lead
The
actual objective remained rather vague. We were told our objective was
to fragment the Strip, in fact we were told that while we were there,
not knowing how long, we would have to raze the area as much as
possible. Razing is a euphemism for systematic destruction. Two reasons
were given for house demolitions. One reason was operational. That's
when a house is suspected to contain explosive, tunnels, when all kinds
of wires are seen, or digging. Or we have intelligence information
making it suspect. Or it's a source of fire, whether light arms or
mortars, missiles, Grads [rockets], all that stuff. Those are houses we
demolish.
Then we're told some will be destroyed for "the day
after". The rationale is to leave a sterile area behind us and the best
way to do that is by razing it. In practical terms, it means you take a
house that's not suspect, its only transgression is that it stands on a
hill in Gaza. I can even say that in a talk with my battalion commander,
he mentioned this and said half smiling, half sad, that this is
something to add to his list of war crimes. So he himself understood there was a problem.
Tal Wasser. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT TAL WASSER
2006-09, Oketz (canine special forces), Nablus
Standing
at the roadblock for eight hours a day puts everyone under this endless
pressure. Everyone's constantly yelling, constantly nervous, impatient …
venting on the first Palestinian to cross your path. If a Palestinian
annoys one of the soldiers, one of the things they'd do is throw him in
the Jora, which is a small cell, like a clothing store dressing room.
They close the metal door on him and that would be his punishment for
annoying, for being bad.
Within all the pressure and the stress of
the roadblock, the Palestinian would often be forgotten there. No one
would remember that he put a Palestinian there, further emphasising the
irrelevance and insignificance of the reason he was put there in the
first place. Sometimes it was only after hours that they'd suddenly
remember to let him out and continue the inspection at the roadblock.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Nablus Regional Brigade, Nablus, 2014
"Provocation
and reaction" is the act of entering a village, making a lot of noise,
waiting for the stones to be thrown at you and then you arrest them,
saying: "There, they're throwing stones."
Lots of vehicles move
inside the whole village, barriers. A barrier seems to be the army's
legitimate means to stop terrorists. We're talking about Area B [under
civilian Palestinian control and Israeli security control], but the army
goes in there every day, practically, provoking stone throwings. Just
as any Palestinian is suspect, this is the same idea. It could be a
kid's first time ever throwing a stone, but as far as the army is
concerned, we've caught the stone thrower.
Avner Gvaryahu. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT AVNER GVARYAHU
2004-07 Orev (special anti-tank unit), Nablus
It
was when I was a sergeant, after we had finished training. 200 [the
number of the commander] said to us unequivocally: "That's how you're
ranked. With Xs. Every night I want you to be looking for 'contact' [an
exchange of fire] and that's how you'll be ranked."
At some point I
realised that someone who wants to succeed has to bring him dead
people. There's no point in bringing him arrests. [The message was:]
"Arrests are routine, the battalions are making arrests. You're the
spearhead, the army has invested years in you, now I want you to bring
me dead terrorists."
And that's what pushed us, I believe. What
we'd do was go out night after night, drawing fire, go into alleys that
we knew were dangerous. There were arrests, there were all kinds of
arrests. But the high point of the night was drawing fire, creating a
situation where they fired at us.
It's a situation, totally
insane, you're in it, it's hard to explain. You're looking through the
binoculars and searching for someone to kill. That's what you want to
do. And you want to kill him. But do you want to kill him? But that's
your job.
And you're still looking through the binoculars and
you're starting to get confused. Do I want to? Don't I want to? Maybe I
actually want them to miss.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Kfir Brigade, Tul Karem, 2008
There
was one checkpoint that was divided into three lanes: there's a
settlement, a checkpoint, and then Israeli territory. In the middle,
there's a Palestinian village, so they just split the checkpoint into
three lanes. Three lanes, and the brigade commander ordered that Jews
should only wait at the checkpoint for 10 minutes. Because of that we
had to have a special lane for them, and everyone else, the Palestinians
and Israeli Arabs, had to wait in the other two lanes. I remember that
settlers would come, go around the Arabs, and just did it naturally. I
went over to a settler and said: "Why are you going around? There's a
line here, sir." He said: "You really think I'm going to wait behind an
Arab?" He began to raise his voice at me. "You're going to hear from
your brigade commander."
Gil Hillel. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
GIL HILLEL
2001-03, Sachlav (military police), Hebron
On
my first or second day in Hebron, my commanders asked me to go on a
"doll", a foot patrol that we conduct in the casbah and Jewish
settlement. I agreed, it seemed cool. It was my first time in the field,
come on, let's do it. We went on patrol, into the casbah, and I think
that was the first time I sensed the existential fear of living under
constant threat.
We started the doll and I started feeling bad.
The first time in the field is not simple. One of my commanders, the
veteran among them, took an old Palestinian man, just took him aside to
some alley and started beating him up. And I … it wasfine by all the
others … I sort of looked at them and said: "What is he doing? Why is he
doing that? What happened? Did he do anything? Is he a threat? A
terrorist? Did we find something?" So they said: "No, it's OK." I then
approached my commander, the [one] who trained me, and asked: "What are
you doing?" He said: "Gil, stop it."
And that really scared me. I
was scared of their reactions, of the situation we were in. I felt bad
with what went on there, but I kept quiet. I mean, what can I do? My
commander told me to shut up. We left there and went back to the company
and I went to my commander and said: "What are you doing? Why did you
do that?" So he said: "That's the way it is. It's either him or me and
it's me and …"
They took him aside and just beat him up. They beat
him up, they punched him. And slapped him, all for no reason. I mean,
he just happened to walk by there, by mistake.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Nachal Brigade, 50th Battalion, Hebron, 2010
The Jewish settlers of Hebron constantly curse the Arabs. An Arab who passes by too closely gets cursed: "May you burn, die."
On
Shuhada Street there's a very short section where Arabs may walk as
well, which leads to Tel Rumeida neighbourhood. Once I was sent there
and we found three Jewish kids hitting an old Arab woman. Another man
from the Jewish settlement happened along and also joined them in
yelling at the woman: "May you die!" When we got there they were mainly
yelling, but there had clearly been blows dealt as well. I think they
even threw stones at her.
I believe the [policeman] was called but
ended up not doing anything. The general atmosphere was that there was
no point in summoning the police – the policeman is a local settler from
Kiryat Arba who comes to pray with the Hebron settlers at the Tomb of
the Patriarchs on Fridays.
Nadav Bigelman. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT NADAV BIGELMAN
2007-10, Nachal Brigade, 50th Battalion, Hebron
During
patrols inside the casbah we'd do many "mappings". Mappings mean going
into a house we have no intelligence on. We go in to see what's inside,
who lives there. We didn't search for weapons or things like that. The
mappings were designed to make the Palestinians feel that we are there
all the time.
We go in, walk around, look around. The commander
takes a piece of paper and … makes a drawing of the house, what it looks
like inside, and I had a camera. I was told to bring it. They said:
"You take all the people, stand them against the wall and take their
picture." Then [the pictures are] transferred to, I don't know, the
General Security Service, the battalion or brigade intelligence unit, so
they have information on what the people look like. What the residents
look like. I'm a young soldier, I do as they say. I take their pictures,
a horrible experience in itself, because taking people's pictures at
3am, I … it humiliated them, I just can't describe it.
And the
interesting thing? I had the pictures for around a month. No one came to
get them. No commander asked about them, no intelligence officer took
them. I realised it was all for nothing. It was just to be there. It was
like a game.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Paratrooper, 2002, Nablus
We
took over a central house, set up positions, and one of the
sharpshooters identified a man on a roof, two roofs away, I think he was
between 50 and 70 metres away, not armed. I looked at the man through
the night vision – he wasn't armed. It was two in the morning. A man
without arms, walking on the roof, just walking around. We reported it
to the company commander. The company commander said: "Take him down."
[The sharpshooter] fired, took him down. The company commander basically
ordered, decided via radio, the death sentence for that man. A man who
wasn't armed.
I saw with my own eyes that the guy wasn't armed.
The report also said: "A man without arms on the roof." The company
commander declared him a lookout, meaning he understood that the guy was
no threat to us, and he gave the order to kill him and we shot him. I
myself didn't shoot, my friend shot and killed him. And basically you
think, you see in the United States there's the death penalty, for every
death sentence there are like a thousand appeals and convictions, and
they take it very seriously, and there are judges and learned people,
and there are protests and whatever. And here a 26-year-old guy, my
company commander, sentenced an unarmed man to death.
stage in Tel Aviv's Habima Square, outside the tall façade of Charles
Bronfman Auditorium. The reader was Yossi Sarid, a former education and
environment minister. His text is the testimony of a soldier in the Israel
Defence Forces, one of 350 soldiers, politicians, journalists and
activists who on Friday – the anniversary of Israel's occupation of
Palestinian land in 1967 – recited first-hand soldiers' accounts for 10
hours straight in Habima Square, all of them collected by the Israeli
NGO Breaking the Silence.
When
one of the group's researchers approached the soldier, they chatted
politely out of earshot and then phone numbers were exchanged. Perhaps
in the future this young man will give his own account to join the 950
testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence since it was founded 10
years ago.
In that decade, Breaking the Silence has collected a
formidable oral history of Israeli soldiers' highly critical assessments
of the world of conflict and occupation. The stories may be specific to
Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories
but they have a wider meaning, providing an invaluable resource that
describes not just the nature of Israel's occupation but of how
occupying soldiers behave more generally. They describe how abuses come
from boredom; from the orders of ambitious officers keen to advance in
their careers; or from the institutional demands of occupation itself,
which desensitises and dehumanises as it creates a distance from the
"other".
In granular detail, the tens of thousands of words
narrated on Friday told of the humdrum and the terrible: the humiliating
treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, shootings and random
assaults. Over the years the Israeli military's response has been that
these stories are the exceptions, not the rule, accounts of a few bad
apples' actions.
"What we wanted to show by reading for 10 hours
is that the things described in the testimonies we have collected are
not exceptional, rather they are unexceptional," says Yehuda Shaul, one
of the founders of the group and a former soldier himself.
Shaul
breaks off to greet the European Union ambassador and a woman soldier
who served in his own unit whom he has not seen for years. We talk about
the solitary soldier in the square, now talking to the researcher.
"We'll get in contact. See if he wants to talk. Perhaps meet for coffee.
Then, when we interview people, we ask them to recommend us to their
friends. We might get 10 phone numbers, of whom three will talk to us."
It
is not only word of mouth that produces Breaking the Silence's
interviews. At the annual conferences that soldiers leaving the army
attend to prepare them for the return to civilian life, researchers will
try to talk to soldiers outside. Shaul explains why he and his
colleagues have dedicated themselves to this project, why he believes it
is as necessary today as when he first spoke out a decade ago about his
own experience as a soldier in Hebron. "In Israeli politics today the
occupation is absent. It's not an issue for the public. It has become
normal – not second nature; the occupation has become part of our
nature. The object of events like today is for us to occupy the public
space with the occupation."
His sentiments are reflected by the
Israeli novelist and playwright AB Yehoshua, who gets on the stage to
read a comment piece he had written the day before to mark the event.
"The great danger to Israeli society," Yehoshua explains, "is the danger
of weariness and repression. We no longer have the energy and patience
to hear about another act of injustice."
A man appears holding a
handwritten sign that condemns Breaking the Silence as "traitors". Some
of those attending try to usher him away while others try to engage him
in conversation. A journalist asks Shaul if the man is "pro-army". "I'm
pro-army," Shaul answers immediately. "I'm not a pacifist, although some
of our members have become pacifists. I'm not anti-army, I am
anti-occupation."
ISRAELI SOLDIERS' OWN WORDS
Nadav Weiman. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT NADAV WEIMAN
2005-08, Nachal Reconnaissance Unit, Jenin
We'd
spread out above Jenin on "the stage", which is a tiny mountain top.
That evening an arrest mission was in progress, there were riots inside
the refugee camp, and we sat above and provided sniper cover for the operation. Things got rolling and there were arrests, some rioting began in the city.
There
was random peripheral fire so there were generally no people on
rooftops. Some time in the middle of the night, we detected someone on a
roof. We focused our sights on him, not knowing for sure whether or not
he was a scout. But we targeted him and got an OK to fire because he
was on a rooftop very close to one of our forces.
We were several
snipers, and we took him down ... Later when we got back to Jalame, it
started: "Was he armed or not?" But we'd got our OK from the battalion
commander. He was also the one to come and speak with us when we got
back to the base in Jalame. We were with the guys with whom we sat to
debrief after the action, and it was wall-to-wall, "You don't realise
how lucky you are to have actually fired in an operation. That hardly
ever happens, you are so lucky."
And according to the way we
implemented the rules of engagement, we declared him a target by
documenting him. We thought the Palestinian had been speaking on the
phone, he seemed to be raising his hand to his head, looking sideways,
going back and forth, just like a person scouting and sending
information back. You could see the angles of his body, his whole
conduct facing the soldiers who were north of him, in the alley below, a
few metres away.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Undisclosed Reservist unit, Gaza Strip 2009, Operation Cast Lead
The
actual objective remained rather vague. We were told our objective was
to fragment the Strip, in fact we were told that while we were there,
not knowing how long, we would have to raze the area as much as
possible. Razing is a euphemism for systematic destruction. Two reasons
were given for house demolitions. One reason was operational. That's
when a house is suspected to contain explosive, tunnels, when all kinds
of wires are seen, or digging. Or we have intelligence information
making it suspect. Or it's a source of fire, whether light arms or
mortars, missiles, Grads [rockets], all that stuff. Those are houses we
demolish.
Then we're told some will be destroyed for "the day
after". The rationale is to leave a sterile area behind us and the best
way to do that is by razing it. In practical terms, it means you take a
house that's not suspect, its only transgression is that it stands on a
hill in Gaza. I can even say that in a talk with my battalion commander,
he mentioned this and said half smiling, half sad, that this is
something to add to his list of war crimes. So he himself understood there was a problem.
Tal Wasser. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT TAL WASSER
2006-09, Oketz (canine special forces), Nablus
Standing
at the roadblock for eight hours a day puts everyone under this endless
pressure. Everyone's constantly yelling, constantly nervous, impatient …
venting on the first Palestinian to cross your path. If a Palestinian
annoys one of the soldiers, one of the things they'd do is throw him in
the Jora, which is a small cell, like a clothing store dressing room.
They close the metal door on him and that would be his punishment for
annoying, for being bad.
Within all the pressure and the stress of
the roadblock, the Palestinian would often be forgotten there. No one
would remember that he put a Palestinian there, further emphasising the
irrelevance and insignificance of the reason he was put there in the
first place. Sometimes it was only after hours that they'd suddenly
remember to let him out and continue the inspection at the roadblock.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Nablus Regional Brigade, Nablus, 2014
"Provocation
and reaction" is the act of entering a village, making a lot of noise,
waiting for the stones to be thrown at you and then you arrest them,
saying: "There, they're throwing stones."
Lots of vehicles move
inside the whole village, barriers. A barrier seems to be the army's
legitimate means to stop terrorists. We're talking about Area B [under
civilian Palestinian control and Israeli security control], but the army
goes in there every day, practically, provoking stone throwings. Just
as any Palestinian is suspect, this is the same idea. It could be a
kid's first time ever throwing a stone, but as far as the army is
concerned, we've caught the stone thrower.
Avner Gvaryahu. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT AVNER GVARYAHU
2004-07 Orev (special anti-tank unit), Nablus
It
was when I was a sergeant, after we had finished training. 200 [the
number of the commander] said to us unequivocally: "That's how you're
ranked. With Xs. Every night I want you to be looking for 'contact' [an
exchange of fire] and that's how you'll be ranked."
At some point I
realised that someone who wants to succeed has to bring him dead
people. There's no point in bringing him arrests. [The message was:]
"Arrests are routine, the battalions are making arrests. You're the
spearhead, the army has invested years in you, now I want you to bring
me dead terrorists."
And that's what pushed us, I believe. What
we'd do was go out night after night, drawing fire, go into alleys that
we knew were dangerous. There were arrests, there were all kinds of
arrests. But the high point of the night was drawing fire, creating a
situation where they fired at us.
It's a situation, totally
insane, you're in it, it's hard to explain. You're looking through the
binoculars and searching for someone to kill. That's what you want to
do. And you want to kill him. But do you want to kill him? But that's
your job.
And you're still looking through the binoculars and
you're starting to get confused. Do I want to? Don't I want to? Maybe I
actually want them to miss.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Kfir Brigade, Tul Karem, 2008
There
was one checkpoint that was divided into three lanes: there's a
settlement, a checkpoint, and then Israeli territory. In the middle,
there's a Palestinian village, so they just split the checkpoint into
three lanes. Three lanes, and the brigade commander ordered that Jews
should only wait at the checkpoint for 10 minutes. Because of that we
had to have a special lane for them, and everyone else, the Palestinians
and Israeli Arabs, had to wait in the other two lanes. I remember that
settlers would come, go around the Arabs, and just did it naturally. I
went over to a settler and said: "Why are you going around? There's a
line here, sir." He said: "You really think I'm going to wait behind an
Arab?" He began to raise his voice at me. "You're going to hear from
your brigade commander."
Gil Hillel. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
GIL HILLEL
2001-03, Sachlav (military police), Hebron
On
my first or second day in Hebron, my commanders asked me to go on a
"doll", a foot patrol that we conduct in the casbah and Jewish
settlement. I agreed, it seemed cool. It was my first time in the field,
come on, let's do it. We went on patrol, into the casbah, and I think
that was the first time I sensed the existential fear of living under
constant threat.
We started the doll and I started feeling bad.
The first time in the field is not simple. One of my commanders, the
veteran among them, took an old Palestinian man, just took him aside to
some alley and started beating him up. And I … it wasfine by all the
others … I sort of looked at them and said: "What is he doing? Why is he
doing that? What happened? Did he do anything? Is he a threat? A
terrorist? Did we find something?" So they said: "No, it's OK." I then
approached my commander, the [one] who trained me, and asked: "What are
you doing?" He said: "Gil, stop it."
And that really scared me. I
was scared of their reactions, of the situation we were in. I felt bad
with what went on there, but I kept quiet. I mean, what can I do? My
commander told me to shut up. We left there and went back to the company
and I went to my commander and said: "What are you doing? Why did you
do that?" So he said: "That's the way it is. It's either him or me and
it's me and …"
They took him aside and just beat him up. They beat
him up, they punched him. And slapped him, all for no reason. I mean,
he just happened to walk by there, by mistake.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Nachal Brigade, 50th Battalion, Hebron, 2010
The Jewish settlers of Hebron constantly curse the Arabs. An Arab who passes by too closely gets cursed: "May you burn, die."
On
Shuhada Street there's a very short section where Arabs may walk as
well, which leads to Tel Rumeida neighbourhood. Once I was sent there
and we found three Jewish kids hitting an old Arab woman. Another man
from the Jewish settlement happened along and also joined them in
yelling at the woman: "May you die!" When we got there they were mainly
yelling, but there had clearly been blows dealt as well. I think they
even threw stones at her.
I believe the [policeman] was called but
ended up not doing anything. The general atmosphere was that there was
no point in summoning the police – the policeman is a local settler from
Kiryat Arba who comes to pray with the Hebron settlers at the Tomb of
the Patriarchs on Fridays.
Nadav Bigelman. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum
SERGEANT NADAV BIGELMAN
2007-10, Nachal Brigade, 50th Battalion, Hebron
During
patrols inside the casbah we'd do many "mappings". Mappings mean going
into a house we have no intelligence on. We go in to see what's inside,
who lives there. We didn't search for weapons or things like that. The
mappings were designed to make the Palestinians feel that we are there
all the time.
We go in, walk around, look around. The commander
takes a piece of paper and … makes a drawing of the house, what it looks
like inside, and I had a camera. I was told to bring it. They said:
"You take all the people, stand them against the wall and take their
picture." Then [the pictures are] transferred to, I don't know, the
General Security Service, the battalion or brigade intelligence unit, so
they have information on what the people look like. What the residents
look like. I'm a young soldier, I do as they say. I take their pictures,
a horrible experience in itself, because taking people's pictures at
3am, I … it humiliated them, I just can't describe it.
And the
interesting thing? I had the pictures for around a month. No one came to
get them. No commander asked about them, no intelligence officer took
them. I realised it was all for nothing. It was just to be there. It was
like a game.
SERGEANT, ANONYMOUS
Paratrooper, 2002, Nablus
We
took over a central house, set up positions, and one of the
sharpshooters identified a man on a roof, two roofs away, I think he was
between 50 and 70 metres away, not armed. I looked at the man through
the night vision – he wasn't armed. It was two in the morning. A man
without arms, walking on the roof, just walking around. We reported it
to the company commander. The company commander said: "Take him down."
[The sharpshooter] fired, took him down. The company commander basically
ordered, decided via radio, the death sentence for that man. A man who
wasn't armed.
I saw with my own eyes that the guy wasn't armed.
The report also said: "A man without arms on the roof." The company
commander declared him a lookout, meaning he understood that the guy was
no threat to us, and he gave the order to kill him and we shot him. I
myself didn't shoot, my friend shot and killed him. And basically you
think, you see in the United States there's the death penalty, for every
death sentence there are like a thousand appeals and convictions, and
they take it very seriously, and there are judges and learned people,
and there are protests and whatever. And here a 26-year-old guy, my
company commander, sentenced an unarmed man to death.
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