Anyway, I'm posting this from the Jewish Voice for Peace website. It features transcripts of some of the interviews. There are more on the website: <http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resources/breaksilence.html>.
*** First week, first time at the checkpoint, at the passage between the Palestinian area and the street where only Jews can go. You need to have a fence. Those guys, they have to stop, there’s a line, then they hand you their ID cards through the fence, you check them, and let them through.
There was this guy with me who
We’d just finished advanced training, got to the assignment and he yells, “Waqif! Stop!” The man didn’t quite understand and advanced one more step. One extra step, and then he yells again, “Waqif!” and the man freezes in fear. He didn’t quite understand what the soldier said. Actually, it’s a procedure nobody pays attention to, stopping them exactly on the line. So he decided that because the guy made this one extra step
they should obey us, therefore he’ll be detained. I said to him, “Listen, what are you doing?” he said, “No, no, don’t argue, at least not in front of them, what are you doing, I’m not going to trust you anymore, you’re not reliable”
Eventually one of the patrol commanders came over, came from up there, and I spoke to him. I said, “Listen, what's the deal, how long do you want to detain him for?” He said, “Listen, you can do whatever you want, whatever you feel like doing. If you feel there’s a problem with what he’s done, if you feel something’s wrong, even the slightest thing, you can detain him for as long as you want.” And then I got it, a man who’s been in Hebron one week, it has nothing to do with rank, he can do whatever he wants. He had been there a week, he was hardly even there, like
Really, he had no idea what was going on there, he didn’t have a clue! He’d been there a week! But everyone can do whatever they want, it’s like there are no rules, everything is permissible. *** [...] The officer, he was the... approached the funeral and wanted to disperse it. As I see it, a funeral is a very... the actual burying of someone who has died is something that must be done... it is the most humanitarian thing possible, it is beyond question. When approaching the mourners and trying to disperse the funeral, he had, I was near him, a look of hatred in his eyes as he approached the mourners
who only wanted to bury their loved one, and came to disperse them with hatred and shouts and gun threats and turned his weapon against the mourners and the people near him, and after realizing that they were determined to bury their loved one, he insisted on taking advantage of every measure at his disposal... he even cursed, cocked his weapon, and approached an eighty-year-old man who could hardly move and pointed his gun at his face, and there were really more than a hundred people who watched this scene of an officer dispersing with such hatred. And through this hatred and insistence on dispersing a funeral, I could really see that he didn’t consider them equal human beings. I’m still mad at myself for not saying anything [...] *** (...) The officer, he was the... approached the funeral and wanted to disperse it. As I see it, a funeral is a very... the actual burying of someone who has died is something that must be done... it is the most humanitarian thing possible, it is beyond question. When approaching the mourners and trying to disperse the funeral, he had, I was near him, a look of hatred in his eyes as he approached the mourners
who only wanted to bury their loved one, and came to disperse them with hatred and shouts and gun threats and turned his weapon against the mourners and the people near him, and after realizing that they were determined to bury their loved one, he insisted on taking advantage of every measure at his disposal... he even cursed, cocked his weapon, and approached an eighty-year-old man who could hardly move and pointed his gun at his face, and there were really more than a hundred people who watched this scene of an officer dispersing with such hatred. And through this hatred and insistence on dispersing a funeral, I could really see that he didn’t consider them equal human beings. I’m still mad at myself for not saying anything. As in other incidents, I simply lowered my eyes and didn’t know what to do with myself [...] *** In a patrol in Abu Sneina a commanding officer and three soldiers, patrolling the area. We make a check post. Its a station where you stop cars and check ‘em out. We stop a guy whom we know, who always hangs around, doesn't make trouble
and no, personally, I never had a run-in with him, in short, a guy who looks all right, it happens. Connections are made, even if we don't speak the same language and even if it's hard to explain. The commander stops him, the guy with the car, two soldiers on one side. "You cover the front. You cover the back." So I cover the front. The commander goes to him: "Do you know the commercials for Itong?”Go on, get going." "Get out your jack." The guy just stands there and stares. He doesn't understand what they want from him. So the commander yells at him that he should get out his jack and begin to take the wheels off. I'm standing near a stone wall and the guy comes over and takes a stone to put under the car, and then another stone. At that point, the commander comes over to me and says: "Does it look humane to you?" He has this horrible grin on his face. It's awful. I can't do anything. I don't have enough air to say anything. I take my helmet and fall on the stone wall, still covering from the front, and I cry. There's nothing I can do. *** That morning, a fairly big group arrived in Hebron, around 15 people or so, of Jews from France. They were all religious Jews, French Jews, they didn't really know Hebrew, and spoke half English, half Hebrew, and half French. They were in a good mood, really having a great time, and I spent my entire shift following this gang of Jews around and trying to keep them from destroying the town. In other words, this is what they were busy doing for hours. They just wandered around, picked up every stone they saw off the ground, and started throwing them in Arabs’ windows, and overturning whatever they came across. A gang of Jews from France simply came along, to the area we were responsible for, and did whatever they wanted. And there’s no horror story here
he didn’t catch some Arab and kill him or anything like that, but what bothered me about this story is that along came a gang of people from France, and I have no idea how in tune they are with what's going on here, and without
maybe someone told them that there’s a place in the world where you can just, I don't know
that a Jew can take all of his rage out on the Arab people, and simply do anything, do whatever he wants. To come to a Palestinian town, and do what ever he wants, and the soldiers will always be there to back him up. Because that was actually my job[...]
Simon
* (see http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24403.shtml for his excellent piece about the Zionist left and a subsequent piece about an anti-war rally http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/laor01_.html)
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