Letter From Israel: Israel's Soldiers Engage In Some Soul Searching

Taken from the International Herald Tribune
Steven Erlanger, March 22, 2007

JERUSALEM: Some of Jerusalem's nicest people gathered the other night to listen to a talk by an Israeli soldier, troubled by how he and some of his colleagues had behaved in the occupied West Bank.

The small crowd was a bit disheveled, with lots of untamed hair and sensible shoes. Largely English- speaking, they were generally somewhere on the left of Israel's wide political spectrum, and they listened earnestly as Mikhael Manekin, 27, spoke quietly about his four years of service with the Golani infantry brigade in the West Bank.

Manekin and his colleagues often manned checkpoints around Hebron and Nablus, controlling Palestinian movement to try to ensure that suicide bombers could not infiltrate Israeli cities. The checkpoints are part of a security network, including the separation barrier, that protects Israel, but also deeply discommodes ordinary Palestinians who wouldn't consider strapping on a bomb.

Manekin, who was a first lieutenant, is the director of Breaking the Silence, a group of former soldiers, shocked at their own misconduct and that of others, who have gathered to collect their stories and bear witness. Since 2004, the group has collected testimonies from nearly 400 soldiers (in English, www.shovrimshtika.org/ index_e.asp).

He spoke of how some soldiers humiliate or beat Palestinians to keep crowds in line, how soldiers are taught to be aggressive, but how most behave within decent moral limits — and of how the fear that hundreds of people could erupt in anger wears at the soul and turns young men callous.

"I don't think this is a problem of the military," he said. "It's a problem of the society. We're sending these kids in our name. And there has to be a space to talk of bad things. It's not enough to say, 'But there's Palestinian terrorism,' which there is, but that's too easy."

In the aftermath of Israel's inconclusive summer war against Lebanon, Manekin's stories struck an ambivalent note even in this audience at the Yakar Center for Social Concern, founded in 1992 to promote debate and dialogue among Israelis and their neighbors. Run by Benjamin Pogrund, a distinguished journalist from South Africa, the center embraces difficult topics like Israeli Arabs, settlements, religious orthodoxy and challenges to democracy.

There is a general gloominess in Israel after the Lebanese war, a sense that neither the government nor the army performed very well.

The government is one thing, but the army is the core institution of this embattled state, and a fine new film about the army's last days in Lebanon in 2000, "Beaufort," is being praised for its depiction of the sensitive Israeli soldier bravely doing his duty despite his fear and the usual political and military confusion.

While criticism of the army is quite acceptable in Israel's democracy, and not just on the left, Breaking the Silence left some raw feelings here.

One man stood and said Manekin and his friends were hurting Israel, especially its image abroad, to salve their own consciences. Many in the audience nodded in agreement. Tall and dignified, about 45, the man said that he, too, had served in the West Bank, "and I'm proud of what I did there to defend Israelis."

It's crucial to intimidate people at checkpoints to keep them cowed, he said, his voice shaking a little, "because we are so few there and they are so many."

Then he said: "These people are not like us! They come up to our faces and they lie to us!"
That was enough for Uriel Simon, 77, a professor emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a noted religious dove.

"As for liars," he said, then paused. "My father was a liar. My grandfather was a liar. How else did we cross lines to get to this country? We stayed alive by lying. We lied to the Russians, we lied to the Germans, we lied to the British! We lie for survival! Jacob the Liar was my father!" he said.

As for the Palestinians, he said, "of course they lie! Everyone lies at a checkpoint! We lied at checkpoints, too."

Many Israelis fled a hostile Europe, Simon said. (His father, Ernst, a teacher and founder with Martin Buber of an early peace movement, Brit Shalom, came from Germany.) "Americans hate liars," he said. "But we came from Europe, the worst place in the world, the place that gave us both Fascism and Communism."

Israelis needed to remember, he said, "Buber's demarcation line: What is necessary is allowed, but what is not necessary is forbidden."

Everyone is afraid of mirrors, he said, readjusting the knitted kippa on his nimbus of white hair. "We hate the mirror. We don't want to look at ourselves. We don't like photographs of us — we say, 'Oh, that's not a very good likeness.' We want to be much nicer than we are. But here there are also prophets who are mirrors, who are not afraid of kings and generals. The prophet says: 'You are ugly,' and we don't want to hear it, but we have to look at the mirror honestly, without fear."

The army is central to Israel, and the problems are complicated, he said. At the beginning of the summer war, as in the beginning of any war, including Iraq, "there's a euphoria that derives from an almost irrational belief in power and force, that the sword can cut through all the slow processes."

It's more enthralling if, like Israel, "you have so much power that you can't use, and suddenly you can."

But the euphoria is always short- lived, he said.

"We bomb southern Lebanon like mad and still they continue to send missiles at us," he said.
The frustration is even more intense "for a people like Israel forced to live on its sword, for who will save this little state?" he asked. "The United Nations? The good will of America? We'd be overrun 10 times before America awakes, even if it wants to awake. So every 10-year-old knows the sheer importance of the Israeli Army, and the more you need it, the more you expect from it."

At the end of the evening, Simon said, he had gone to talk to the tall man who had been so upset.
"He said to me, 'You won't believe me, but I agree with 90 percent of what you said.'" Simon laughed softly. "It just showed how confused he was."