Published: 29 January 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Thus began the introduction to a pamphlet, titled Why Have I Broken My Silence, a stark, disturbing collection of testimonies of former soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories during their compulsory military duty.
"Questions about the IDF being the 'most moral army in the world,'" the pamphlet continued, "about Israel as a peace loving nation simply protecting itself from the enemy, or about how these disagreements must be resolved solely 'in the family'."
The pamphlet was published by Breaking the Silence, a group established in 2004 to encourage soldiers to talk about human rights violations they witnessed or participated in during their military service.
Last week, an audience of several hundred crowded into the T’muna theatre in Tel Aviv to mark the launch of the 35-page pamphlet. Although the audience was sympathetic to the subject, Breaking the Silence is hardly popular in the Israeli public. It is the bete noir of right-wing politicians and organisations because, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on his Facebook page, “Breaking the Silence lies and slanders our soldiers around the world.”
The government has proposed legislation (which has not yet been passed) to require organisations to report foreign funding and, specifically citing Breaking the Silence, to shut down any organisation that seeks to harm IDF soldiers or try IDF soldiers in international courts (which Breaking the Silence does not do.)
I was in a reality that no-one outside of that reality could understand. You go home on leave, and your mother doesn’t ask what you have been doing.
In April, 2017, after German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel met with members of Breaking the Silence during his trip to Israel, Netanyahu cancelled a scheduled meeting with him.
Indeed, the government attempted to prevent the launch last week. In a letter to the Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, the Minister of Culture and Sport, Miri Regev, noted that the T’muna Theatre, which receives public funds, was sponsoring an event that would be “praising the slandering of Israel, undermining our sacred values and symbols, and attempting, through falsehoods, to tarnish the image of the IDF, which is the most moral army in the world.”
The Attorney General, who has frequently criticised Regev’s attempts to withhold funding from left-wing organisations, did not intervene.
At the launch, which was moderated by Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan, a panel of four, three men and one women, discussed why they broke their silence about what they had done during their military service. While the pamphlet details clear violations of human rights and numerous incidents of unnecessary, even wanton, violence, the panellists spoke mainly of the banality of the occupation and its numbing routine.
Dean Issacharoff, a former combat soldier and officer, currently a university student and spokesman for Breaking the Silence, spoke of two incidents that motivated his decision to give his testimony.
Following the abduction and murder of three Jewish teenagers in 2014, Issacharoff recalled, the army instigated particularly harsh measures against Palestinian civilians, including forcibly breaking into homes at night, conducting mass arrests, and detaining and blindfolding civilians without due cause.
During a brief furlough, he went out with friends. “I was in a pretty lousy bar, drinking beer and eating a hamburger, and I knew that my pals back in the army were going into house after house. But all the people in the bar were watching the World Cup and for them everything was sababa (Hebrew slang for chill). And I knew that besides those of us who are doing it, no one really knows what is going on in territories.”
Later, he recalled, he had a telephone conversation with his younger brother, who was also about to serve in the territories. “And I knew that someone I love would have to do the same things that I had had to do.”
The problem, he continued, “isn’t with the individual soldier – the problem is the checkpoint, the routine. The moral burnout is inevitable. Because the soldiers’ military job in the territories isn’t to be combat soldiers, or to defend our borders. It’s to control a civilian population.”
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HILLEL ASSAF, 25, also a former combat soldier and currently a student, recalled that during his military service, he also felt that he was “in a reality that no-one outside of that reality could understand. You go home on leave, and your mother doesn’t ask what you have been doing.
“And even if she did ask, what could I tell her – that I broke into ‘this many houses’? That I did this or that? So you don’t say anything. Your friends don’t want to know – or they think it’s cool, because after all, they, too, are only 19 or 20 years old. But after a while, the emotional pain builds up.”
The panellists said the routine of the occupation drains the soldiers’ sensibilities and moral judgement. Assaf: “There is an army jargon, and it wears at you. For instance, Palestinians are never referred to as innocent; even if they aren’t part of something, they are referred to as ‘uninvolved.’ And 24/7 you hear that language. Here in Tel Aviv, it sounds awful. But in the territories, all day, every day, you always have to be on guard and be suspicious – and it gets to you, like a post-trauma, so you no longer see people.”
Issacharoff also spoke of the totality of the military environment. “After five minutes, everything starts to seem normal, and you don’t ask questions. It’s numbing, and most of your shift is actually just passing time. The central thing is the power you have. I could stop any car, any Palestinian. You try to be as nice as you can – and make no mistake – most of the time we are nice and polite. But the minute you begin to see numbers instead of people, you are facing a different situation.”
“Why didn’t you refuse to do these things?” numerous people in the crowd asked.
Alona Livneh, 26, served as a combat intelligence officer. As a woman, she noted, she wanted to prove that she was “one of the guys.”
The army, she said, “is a machine that provides you with a sense of meaning...You feel that you are doing a mission for the Jewish people and for all the generations that yearned for the State of Israel. You feel that you are the emissary in uniform, wearing a Jewish star, and that is the reason that most of us think of breaking the silence only afterwards.
You feel that you are the emissary in uniform, wearing a Jewish star, and that is the reason that most of us think of breaking the silence only afterwards.
“Each military ceremony, every award you receive, every time you stand in formation – you know that you are a soldier in the Jewish army of the people of Israel. It’s hard to realise that what you are doing is not so meaningful and not so pure.
“I came into the army with a whole moral backpack, but I never had the chance to open it while I was there.”
Do you continue to do reserve duty?” the audience asked.
Uri Erez, a 31-year-old kibbutznik, who serves as a mid-level officer in the reserves, said that, “If I don’t do reserve duty, someone else will. And statistically, he will be more right-wing than I. I’m not trying to be a martyr. I believe that because I am advancing along the ranks, less evil is done in the army.
“My unit has done terrible things – although no one was ever killed or really hurt. But I have always tried to do the lesser evil, to do things as morally as I could...I do believe that there are real enemies and that, in the end, we do have to defend our borders, and that is part of my job.”
Breaking the Silence’s Executive Director, Avner Gvaryahu, explained that the organisation does not call for refusal to enlist or to serve in the reserves. “We want to reveal the truth. We come from different backgrounds, and we have made different choices in our lives. We come together for one purpose – to expose the reality of the occupation.”
"In concluding the evening, Gvaryahu read from the pamphlet: “We broke the silence as we believed that no change were to be possible without acknowledging the responsibility we have toward the reality of the occupation – a reality that deeply disrupts the lives of millions of people under our rule. Without such change, Israel will never become the beacon of truth and justice that we strive for it to be.”
READ THE BOOKLET HERE
Main photo: cover of the pamphlet
