Israel's moral meltdown
Peter Small | 10.11.2007 12:48 | Analysis | Palestine
The Occupation not only damages the lives of Palestinians. It also corrupts IDF and MaGav soldiers and its Occupation costs are bankrupting the Israeli economy. This corruption is no more apparent than in Hebron.
IDF watchtower in Old Hebron
40 years of West Bank occupation are causing Israel and Palestine to fragment.
The Biblical imperative that settlers use to justify claims to the West Bank, the rejection by Israel of the applicability of the Geneva Convention – all this is now exacting a price Israel can no longer afford to pay, financially, socially or morally. As for the Palestinians - they have long been broken financially and politically and have nothing more to give.
And the moral bankruptcy is nowhere starker than in Hebron.
In this small city in the West Bank, some 5000 Israeli militia may not intervene to curb settler violence against the majority Palestinian population because they are there to protect these 500 settlers. Meanwhile Palestinians in Old Hebron may not use their own front doors to enter their streets let alone drive down them. Recently, when the Army gave orders to forcibly evacuate illegal settlements, soldiers refused to obey the orders. Law and order is as rare a commodity in Hebron as water in the Negev Desert.
In another West Bank settlement – Alfe Manesh, east of Qalqilia, Don the US settler, replete with Stetson hat, check shirt and nickel-plated 9mm browning semi-automatic pistol, explains why not a single UN Resolution pertaining to the settlements has legal force because they are based on UN Charter chapter VI, and not chapter VII. “Laws matter if someone can enforce them” he explains – “and as no-one can enforce the law, the legality or otherwise of this settlement is irrelevant”. Although there is no shortage of water for the plants and the lush greens, Don offers me none to drink. I thank him for his lecture and depart.
5 miles further west are the Palestinian villages of Hajjah and Imateen. The 3,000 villagers of Imateen have access to mains water – but the Israelis ignore all requests to connect the village to the mains supply, an obligation of the Israelis for this Area ‘C’ village. Instead the villagers have to siphon off water into bottles and other portable containers from a standpipe a mile away for which they have no Israeli permit.
In the adjacent village of Hajjah, the Village Elder, Bassam Abu Bilal, explains that their old sewage system has ruptured, causing the drinking water to become polluted. 10% of the village’s 250 children have amoebic dysentery as a result. The authorities have been made aware, but nothing is done to repair the sewage pipes.
The effect of this Northern-Ireland-style cycle of blood-letting is expressed most starkly, not by air strikes or Qassam rockets, but by the moral corruption of those Israeli soldiers now suffering from PTSD because of what they had to do and endure as occupiers in the West Bank, notably Hebron.
The psychological damage caused to countless soldiers, senior NCOs and officers by having to pay the moral price of the occupation, is summed up by Michael, an ex -IDF officer of the Nachal Brigade, who said “Whatever I used to call democracy here in Israel, would simply vanish in Hebron. You give a young soldier so much power that the horrible things he does become the normal things after a time. But the source of all the evil in that city is the power of the settlers over us, the Magav (Israeli Border Guards) and the Police. I lost all sense of moral values and decency - I just lost all sense of all the limits I grew up with – what my family had taught me to believe in – all of this was destroyed in me by Hebron”
Michael and I had met at Café Hillel in the German Colony in West Jerusalem. As he paused for thought, he remarked how this whole sick power game was just taking and taking – he nodded towards the counter some 20 feet away behind new glass panels. 3 years earlier his sister had lost her best friend the day before she was due to be married, killed on that same spot by a suicide bomb attack on the café.
Michael continued:- “In Hebron the fanatical Jews I was guarding, didn’t behave with the same morality or values I was raised on. I reached a point in Hebron where I didn’t know who the enemy was any more – the fanatical Jew settlers who were going crazy and I need to protect the Arabs from him, or whether I need to protect the Jew from the Arabs we were told would always attack, but never did. If the Jews are capable of writing on the Arab’s house doors ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ 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 for me. I think of myself as emotionally damaged’.
The Occupation and the rocket attacks form a rapacious creditor constantly drawing on an emotional bank account already hugely overdrawn. But even if the Israeli authorities turn a blind eye to the moral price of Occupation, what is now emerging is probably the one factor that may cause the Occupation to end – the cost to the Israeli economy.
Superficially things look good – low inflation and unemployment, strong imports and exports, and rising share prices. How, on the face of it, can the Israeli economy be flourishing, yet with no prospect for a durable peace in the offing? Part of the answer is that the economy is rather like an ill woman wearing rouge to look healthy on the outside. The inside picture is chronically different.
Exports are in unpleasant goods – diamonds, pesticides and arms know-how (war is a tradable commodity). Imports are almost all vitally-needed raw materials. Poverty has been rising since the 1970s to an all-time high of 35.2% of children now living under the poverty line. In socio-economic terms Israel is rated is the 63rd most unequal society in the world – lower than Mexico.
And the cost of the occupation is rising. Settler aid ensures that the State pays for 50% of the cost of a house, tax aid reduces taxes for settlers, and vast amounts are channelled into the settlement expansion building programme – and all Ministries have to contribute. The cost of subsidising the settler lifestyle runs at about $3 billion per annum – yet the military cost of maintaining the Occupation Forces is closer to $9 billion a year. This equates to 14% of the yearly State budget. Emigration is rising, immigration dropping and the rate of the Israeli population growth is 2% a year.
To pay for the Occupation the State has had to sell off public sector assets such as El Al, El Al shipping, the oil refineries and other utilities. It has had a trade deficit year on year that has been balanced only by international (mainly US) aid. The 2007 budget is one so stringent in cuts it would make Gordon Brown’s budget a positive cornucopia by comparison. And as long as resource continues to be pumped into maintaining the growing settler population and in subjugating the Palestinians, the economy will worsen.
The corrosive power of the Occupation has now been sowing increasing discord in the Army, with Haredi soldiers refusing to obey orders on the instructions of their rabbis, to evacuate settlers from illegal settlements in Old Hebron. Officers and senior NCOs have lied to cover tracks of their own vigilante actions against innocent Palestinians. Punishment, in the rare cases such actions come to military courts, is weak. In the summer a group of Israeli doctors had to take the Army to the High Court to order the Army to open the Eretz Crossing to tend to civilian wounded. Even when High Court orders are delivered, the Army has ignored them.
The director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Aschermann, is in despair at this moral meltdown across almost all sectors of Israeli society. “For me the real Zionism today is creating an Israel which is not only physically strong, but morally strong and that reaches our highest Jewish values. And yet I look around me and cry out at what is happening to Israeli society - I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people – the home demolitions, the settler violence and I ask myself "Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the State of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?”
Avraham Schomroni is an elderly grandfather who lost his Air Force son in the 1970s. Jamal al Khoudary is a Palestinian who lost his sister to an Israeli air-to-surface missile attack. Together they united in a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved families called ‘The Parents’ Circle’ who have lost loved ones to the violence caused by the Occupation and the resistance to it. It is now some 350 families strong, from each side of the Wall. And membership of the ‘Parents Circle’ is sadly growing.
They talk to school and university students and they petition their respective Governments for another way forward than constant violence and blood-letting and more bereavement. Avraham said “You can’t overcome darkness with more darkness - we need a candle of hope” . Jamal agrees, saying “As long as people are willing to talk, no one needs to be buried”.
Meanwhile in Old Hebron the violence of the settler behaviour blights any change in the moral climate. If both Israeli and Palestinian societies are to stand any chance of recovering enough to cope with the peace their people deserve, then let the Gordian knot of Hebron be untied so that peace can start there rather than be buried there along with Abraham. His many children deserve better.
The Biblical imperative that settlers use to justify claims to the West Bank, the rejection by Israel of the applicability of the Geneva Convention – all this is now exacting a price Israel can no longer afford to pay, financially, socially or morally. As for the Palestinians - they have long been broken financially and politically and have nothing more to give.
And the moral bankruptcy is nowhere starker than in Hebron.
In this small city in the West Bank, some 5000 Israeli militia may not intervene to curb settler violence against the majority Palestinian population because they are there to protect these 500 settlers. Meanwhile Palestinians in Old Hebron may not use their own front doors to enter their streets let alone drive down them. Recently, when the Army gave orders to forcibly evacuate illegal settlements, soldiers refused to obey the orders. Law and order is as rare a commodity in Hebron as water in the Negev Desert.
In another West Bank settlement – Alfe Manesh, east of Qalqilia, Don the US settler, replete with Stetson hat, check shirt and nickel-plated 9mm browning semi-automatic pistol, explains why not a single UN Resolution pertaining to the settlements has legal force because they are based on UN Charter chapter VI, and not chapter VII. “Laws matter if someone can enforce them” he explains – “and as no-one can enforce the law, the legality or otherwise of this settlement is irrelevant”. Although there is no shortage of water for the plants and the lush greens, Don offers me none to drink. I thank him for his lecture and depart.
5 miles further west are the Palestinian villages of Hajjah and Imateen. The 3,000 villagers of Imateen have access to mains water – but the Israelis ignore all requests to connect the village to the mains supply, an obligation of the Israelis for this Area ‘C’ village. Instead the villagers have to siphon off water into bottles and other portable containers from a standpipe a mile away for which they have no Israeli permit.
In the adjacent village of Hajjah, the Village Elder, Bassam Abu Bilal, explains that their old sewage system has ruptured, causing the drinking water to become polluted. 10% of the village’s 250 children have amoebic dysentery as a result. The authorities have been made aware, but nothing is done to repair the sewage pipes.
The effect of this Northern-Ireland-style cycle of blood-letting is expressed most starkly, not by air strikes or Qassam rockets, but by the moral corruption of those Israeli soldiers now suffering from PTSD because of what they had to do and endure as occupiers in the West Bank, notably Hebron.
The psychological damage caused to countless soldiers, senior NCOs and officers by having to pay the moral price of the occupation, is summed up by Michael, an ex -IDF officer of the Nachal Brigade, who said “Whatever I used to call democracy here in Israel, would simply vanish in Hebron. You give a young soldier so much power that the horrible things he does become the normal things after a time. But the source of all the evil in that city is the power of the settlers over us, the Magav (Israeli Border Guards) and the Police. I lost all sense of moral values and decency - I just lost all sense of all the limits I grew up with – what my family had taught me to believe in – all of this was destroyed in me by Hebron”
Michael and I had met at Café Hillel in the German Colony in West Jerusalem. As he paused for thought, he remarked how this whole sick power game was just taking and taking – he nodded towards the counter some 20 feet away behind new glass panels. 3 years earlier his sister had lost her best friend the day before she was due to be married, killed on that same spot by a suicide bomb attack on the café.
Michael continued:- “In Hebron the fanatical Jews I was guarding, didn’t behave with the same morality or values I was raised on. I reached a point in Hebron where I didn’t know who the enemy was any more – the fanatical Jew settlers who were going crazy and I need to protect the Arabs from him, or whether I need to protect the Jew from the Arabs we were told would always attack, but never did. If the Jews are capable of writing on the Arab’s house doors ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ 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 for me. I think of myself as emotionally damaged’.
The Occupation and the rocket attacks form a rapacious creditor constantly drawing on an emotional bank account already hugely overdrawn. But even if the Israeli authorities turn a blind eye to the moral price of Occupation, what is now emerging is probably the one factor that may cause the Occupation to end – the cost to the Israeli economy.
Superficially things look good – low inflation and unemployment, strong imports and exports, and rising share prices. How, on the face of it, can the Israeli economy be flourishing, yet with no prospect for a durable peace in the offing? Part of the answer is that the economy is rather like an ill woman wearing rouge to look healthy on the outside. The inside picture is chronically different.
Exports are in unpleasant goods – diamonds, pesticides and arms know-how (war is a tradable commodity). Imports are almost all vitally-needed raw materials. Poverty has been rising since the 1970s to an all-time high of 35.2% of children now living under the poverty line. In socio-economic terms Israel is rated is the 63rd most unequal society in the world – lower than Mexico.
And the cost of the occupation is rising. Settler aid ensures that the State pays for 50% of the cost of a house, tax aid reduces taxes for settlers, and vast amounts are channelled into the settlement expansion building programme – and all Ministries have to contribute. The cost of subsidising the settler lifestyle runs at about $3 billion per annum – yet the military cost of maintaining the Occupation Forces is closer to $9 billion a year. This equates to 14% of the yearly State budget. Emigration is rising, immigration dropping and the rate of the Israeli population growth is 2% a year.
To pay for the Occupation the State has had to sell off public sector assets such as El Al, El Al shipping, the oil refineries and other utilities. It has had a trade deficit year on year that has been balanced only by international (mainly US) aid. The 2007 budget is one so stringent in cuts it would make Gordon Brown’s budget a positive cornucopia by comparison. And as long as resource continues to be pumped into maintaining the growing settler population and in subjugating the Palestinians, the economy will worsen.
The corrosive power of the Occupation has now been sowing increasing discord in the Army, with Haredi soldiers refusing to obey orders on the instructions of their rabbis, to evacuate settlers from illegal settlements in Old Hebron. Officers and senior NCOs have lied to cover tracks of their own vigilante actions against innocent Palestinians. Punishment, in the rare cases such actions come to military courts, is weak. In the summer a group of Israeli doctors had to take the Army to the High Court to order the Army to open the Eretz Crossing to tend to civilian wounded. Even when High Court orders are delivered, the Army has ignored them.
The director of the Jerusalem-based Rabbis for Human Rights, Rabbi Arik Aschermann, is in despair at this moral meltdown across almost all sectors of Israeli society. “For me the real Zionism today is creating an Israel which is not only physically strong, but morally strong and that reaches our highest Jewish values. And yet I look around me and cry out at what is happening to Israeli society - I look at the suppression of the Palestinian people – the home demolitions, the settler violence and I ask myself "Is this what Zionism has come to? Is this what we created the State of Israel for? To be demolishing the home of this or that person whom we never gave a fair chance to build legally?”
Avraham Schomroni is an elderly grandfather who lost his Air Force son in the 1970s. Jamal al Khoudary is a Palestinian who lost his sister to an Israeli air-to-surface missile attack. Together they united in a joint Israeli-Palestinian group of bereaved families called ‘The Parents’ Circle’ who have lost loved ones to the violence caused by the Occupation and the resistance to it. It is now some 350 families strong, from each side of the Wall. And membership of the ‘Parents Circle’ is sadly growing.
They talk to school and university students and they petition their respective Governments for another way forward than constant violence and blood-letting and more bereavement. Avraham said “You can’t overcome darkness with more darkness - we need a candle of hope” . Jamal agrees, saying “As long as people are willing to talk, no one needs to be buried”.
Meanwhile in Old Hebron the violence of the settler behaviour blights any change in the moral climate. If both Israeli and Palestinian societies are to stand any chance of recovering enough to cope with the peace their people deserve, then let the Gordian knot of Hebron be untied so that peace can start there rather than be buried there along with Abraham. His many children deserve better.
Peter Small
e-mail:
berlinerluft@hotmail.com
Homepage:
http://www.ldfp.eu
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Israel Shaken by Report on IDF Brutality
10.11.2007 19:17
The Israeli people really shouldn't be quite so shocked: they are simply reaping what they have sown, now manifesting as the behavior of the IDF, from the very inception of the Israeli state.
Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians
A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers' bad training, boredom and poor supervision
Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem
Sunday October 21, 2007
The Observer
A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country's soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.
The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: 'At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.'
In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.'
Another explained: 'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'
The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.
The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. 'With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with any more.'
Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.
The disclosure of the report in the Israeli media has occasioned a remarkable response. In letters responding to the recollections, writers have focused on both the present and past experience of Israeli soldiers to ask troubling questions that have probed the legitimacy of the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces.
The study and the reactions to it have marked a sharp change in the way Israelis regard their period of military service - particularly in the occupied territories - which has been reflected in the increasing levels of conscientious objection and draft-dodging.
The debate has contrasted sharply with an Israeli army where new recruits are taught that they are joining 'the most ethical army in the world' - a refrain that is echoed throughout Israeli society. In its doctrine, published on its website, the Israeli army emphasises human dignity. 'The Israeli army and its soldiers are obligated to protect human dignity. Every human being is of value regardless of his or her origin, religion, nationality, gender, status or position.'
However, the Israeli army, like other armies, has found it difficult to maintain these values beyond the classroom. The first intifada, which began in 1987, before the wave of suicide bombings, was markedly different to the violence of the second intifada, and its main events were popular demonstrations with stone-throwing.
Yishai-Karin, in an interview with Haaretz, described how her research came out of her own experience as a soldier at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. She interviewed 18 ordinary soldiers and three officers whom she had served with in Gaza. The soldiers described how the violence was encouraged by some commanders. One soldier recalled: 'After two months in Rafah, a [new] commanding officer arrived... So we do a first patrol with him. It's 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn't so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers.
'He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock...
'The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing."
Yishai-Karin concluded that the main reason for the soldiers' violence was a lack of training. She found that the soldiers did not know what was expected of them and therefore were free to develop their own way of behaviour. The longer a unit was left in the field, the more violent it became. The Israeli soldiers, she concluded, had a level of violence which is universal across all nations and cultures. If they are allowed to operate in difficult circumstances, such as in Gaza and the West Bank, without training and proper supervision, the violence is bound to come out.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said that, if a soldier deviates from the army's norms, they could be investigated by the military police or face criminal investigation.
She said: 'It should be noted that since the events described in Nufar Yishai-Karin's research the number of ethical violations by IDF soldiers involving the Palestinian population has consistently dropped. This trend has continued in the last few years.'
(Of course, there has been less engagement between the two groups during that time. In recent weeks, however, engagements have increased, and along with that, so have reports of IDF brutality.)
www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2196019,00.html
Conal Urquhart in Jerusalem