The current New York Review includes an article, by David Shulman, on Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies 2000-2010, which is also the subject of a Shulman post at the NYRB blog. The book is a project of Breaking the Silence, an organization of IDF veterans that seeks to draw away the veil from daily life in the occupied territories, and to reveal to Israeli society the details of IDF activity there.
The first-hand accounts do not make for happy reading. One soldier describes being ordered by his team commander to participate in a revenge killing after a terrorist attack had killed six Israeli policemen. He was troubled by the lack of any connection between the perpetrators of the first attack and the Palestinian police targeted for retribution. "[I]t doesn't matter, they took six of ours, we are going to take six back," he reports the commander saying. Despite his doubts, he followed orders:
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.
The interviewer then asks whether they kept shooting 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.
At the other end of some grotesque spectrum, another soldier relates his experience at a vehicular checkpoint during the cold winter months. He and his colleagues had a "hobby." They would make Palestinian men attempting to pass through the checkpoint get out of the car to pop the trunk so that it could be searched. That the trunk could often be opened from the driver's seat did not matter. They wanted the driver to get out into the cold. He remembered one who refused.
[H]e 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.
The book is more than 400 pages long. The Israeli occupation is now in its forty-fourth year. It will be objected that Occupation of the Territories presents a one-sided view. Maybe. But who doubts that the described events occurred? And, considering that the book is the first-hand accounts of Israeli soldiers, to whom should we turn for "balance"?
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