1) A shooting in Hebron shakes the Israeli society
The following article is due to be published in German by Internationaler Versoehnungsbund, the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR).
On
March 24, 2016, a young Palestinian named Abdel Fattah al-Sharif tried to stab
the soldiers guarding an enclave of extreme-right Israeli settlers in the heart
of the city of Hebron on the West Bank. The soldiers shot and severely wounded
him. Eleven minutes later, another Israeli soldier arrived on the spot, named
Elior Azaria. A medic by training, Azaria did not try to give medical help to
the severely wounded man lying on the ground. Instead, Azaria deliberately pointed his gun
at al-Sharif’s head and shot at point blank, instantly killing him.
A
field worker of the B’Tselem Human Rights group was able to photograph the
entire event, on a hidden camera. The footage was later that day released to
the Israeli and international media. Faced with this unequivocal evidence, the
military authorities had no choice but arresting Azaria and starting military
judicial proceedings against him – which they probably would not have done had
this video footage not existed.
This
was by no means the first case in which an Israeli soldier or policeman deliberately
killed an unarmed or disarmed prisoner. Nor was it the worst such case.
Nevertheless, the Azaria Affair marked a very disturbing first in Israeli
history. Never before did such a big part of the Israeli society rally to the complete
and unequivocal support of a soldier who had killed an unarmed prisoner.
Extreme-right
groups held incendiary demonstrations outside the military court when Azaria
was brought there, chanting “He is a hero! Release him – kill the Arabs!”.
Alarmingly, this was no fringe phenomenon. Opinion polls indicated that a great
part of the Israeli public – a majority in some polls – failed to see anything
wrong in what Azaria did.
It
was of no avail that the Army Chief of Staff and the entire IDF High Command
reiterated, again and again, that soldiers are authorized to shoot only in face
of a threat, and that a disarmed opponent
must not be harmed; that soldiers are given unequivocal orders to that
effect, and therefore a soldier acting otherwise must be punished for his
disobedience.
Israelis
have a habitual, deep-seated admiration for the country’s armed forces, usually
tending to place greater credence in army generals than in civilian politicians.
Not in this case, however. Whatever the generals said, large parts of the
public continued to hold to an opposite doctrine – i.e. that “Arab terrorists
deserve to die” and that soldiers could and should kill them “without the formality of a trial” and regardless of
whether they are armed or disarmed.
Outside
the military court building, the extreme-right mobs started with chants jeering
the IDF high command and sometimes voicing explicit threats against the life of
Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot and other high-ranking officers.
In
the Israeli peace movement we had our own intensive debate. There were those
who thought we should have our own strong presence outside the court building. Others felt it would be a mistake to be
perceived as hounding one specific young man, however guilty he was, and that
we should rather treat this affair as an indication of what prolonged
occupation and oppression of the Palestinians is doing to the Israeli society.
Elior
Azaria was born when Israel’s occupation rule over the Palestinians had already
lasted for three decades - and when he was put on trial, the occupation was
nearing its fiftieth anniversary. There were good reasons to regard Azaria as a
pawn in the game of much greater forces, and not to endorse uncritically the High
Command’s ’ position. After all, it was the generals who daily maintain the
occupation, rather than a lowly Sergeant in Hebron.
Moreover,
the generals were well aware that there were other soldiers, more than a few of
them, had also killed disarmed prisoners – only without a camera present. The
high publicity around the Azaria Trial helped create a far from accurate image
of a morally upright army, holding its soldiers to high standards of behavior
and making an example of a single “rotten apple”.
All
of these bring me to reflect on the changes which fifty years of occupation had
wrought in the Israeli public discourse and specifically in how Israelis
perceive and refer to the Palestinians.
Shortly
after the Six Day War ended in 1967, a book came out which at the time made
quite a bit of a stir in Israeli public opinion. Called “Siah Lohamim” (“Talk
of the Fighters”) it included the record of extensive interviews and
discussions with dozens of young soldiers who had participated in the June 1967 fighting.
A
significant number of those interviewed – especially young Kibbutzniks, who at
the time comprised a significant part of the IDF combat troops – spoke of nasty
scenes and acts which they had witnessed, and in many cases participated in
themselves. Many of them engaged in prolonged soul-searching, grappling with
moral dilemmas over what they had witnessed or taken part in.
At
the time, people further to the political left used to jeer at such
soul-searching conducted after the war was over, using the term “Yorim Ubochim”
(“Those who shoot and then shedding a tear”). Yet these fighters of the 1967
generation, grappling with moral dilemmas and a sense of guilt, compare
favorably with later crops of combat troops who can be characterized as “Those
who shoot and afterwards laugh”.
“When
the bomb is released, I feel a slight blow against the plane’s wing. Nothing
more”. So did Dan Halutz, Commander of the Israeli Air Force and afterwards
Chief of Staff of all the Armed Forces, comment on the 2002 bombing in Gaza
when a one-ton bomb was dropped in order to kill Salah Shehade, a senior Hamas
man – and ended up killing fourteen civilians living in the same building.
Halutz refused to express any regret or remorse. “A slight blow on the wing”, a
phrase emblematic of complete and callous disregard for moral considerations,
entered the Israeli public discourse side by side with the often-repeated
sanctimonious assertion that “The IDF is the Most Moral Army in the World”.
All
this can be traced to the corrosive influence of fifty years of occupation. It is
now more than forty years since the Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s armed forces
were last engaged in a “classical” war of army against army; none of the
soldiers and officers now serving can recall taking part in that. Since then,
Israel made peace with some Arab countries (Egypt and Jordan) while others
disintegrated, and their armies with them (Iraq, Syria, Libya). The Israeli
army was left with the primary task of maintaining military rule over an
occupied, restive population which again and again bursts out into all-out
rebellion. The tasks which Israeli soldiers are given consist primarily of
“restoring order” by violently dispersing Palestinian demonstrations and
protests, and the capturing or outright killing of various
terrorists/guerrillas/freedom fighters (or whatever name one may attach to
them).
To
this should be added the army’s role as facilitator or protector of settlement activity on the West Bank. It is
the army which declares parcels of land to be “State Lands” and hands them over
to the settlers. It is the soldiers who arrive to enforce the decree, who stand
guard as the land in question is made into “a closed military zone” and who lob
tear gas grenades at the Palestinians who hitherto considered themselves its
owners. And once the new settlement has been completed, soldiers stand guard at
its perimeter day and night. Soldiers are instructed, whenever encountering a
confrontation between settlers and Palestinians, to first of all come to the
settlers’ help and only afterwards inquire what the quarrel was all about.
The
up to date heroes, to whom new Israeli recruits are expected to look up and try to emulate, are mostly those who had
fallen in fighting “Palestinian terrorists” of one kind or another. And such a
massive indoctrination does not fade off also when has ended the three years of
obligatory military service. Attitudes and opinions acquired during military
service often remain with a person in civilian life, too.
2)
How hope turned into bitterness
There
had been one great opportunity to fundamentally change Israel’s relationship to
the Palestinians, break through the enemy images and indeed end the enmity itself. It was totally missed,
and indeed in many ways made things worse. In September 1993, Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzchak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White
House lawn, signing an agreement which was supposed to lead to peace (and which
many mistook for a peace agreement itself). At the time, there was a
groundswell of support for peace, in both the Israeli and the Palestinian
society – of which only a sad memory now remains.
It would take an article longer than the
present one to analyze in detail how and why the Oslo peace process failed. Suffice it to say here that Oslo
envisioned an interim period of limited Palestinian self-government, starting
in 1994 and ending in 1999, which was supposed to end with a Comprehensive
Agreement. Palestinians fully expected that this Comprehensive Agreement
would include an end to the occupation
and the creation of a fully independent Palestinian state; Israelis expected a
complete end of any manifestation of Palestinian and Arab hostility to Israel.
This
might or might not have become a reality had Prime Minister Rabin not been
assassinated. As it was, there never was any Comprehensive Agreement; the
“interim” situation which should have ended in 1999 remains in 2017, and at
least the present Government of Israel has no intention of ever changing it.
Instead
of an independent state, the Palestinians are stuck with an almost completely
powerless Palestinian Authority, a military occupation maintained with all
severity, settlements continually expanding at the expense of Palestinian land,
and a tight siege which suffocates the Gaza Strip’s economy and social
life. Instead of achieving peace,
Israelis are faced with an intense hostility from the occupied Palestinian
population, which on occasion bursts out into deadly violence, and which
increasingly takes up religious themes and becomes mixed up with Islamic
radicalism.
If
remembered at all, the handshake of Rabin and Arafat which aroused so many
hopes, is nowadays remembered as an act of deception and perfidy. That is,
Israelis and Palestinians alike think of it as representing the deception and
perfidy of the other side. “We wanted to make peace with them. We tried so
hard, we made so many efforts, such huge concessions. But it was all in vain.
They don’t want to make peace, they just want to kill us and take our land”.
That is how both an average Israeli and an average Palestinian would likely sum
up the last twenty years.
The
creation and elaboration of monstrous enemy images is part of making war. Most
human beings do have some basic reluctance to kill other human beings. In order
to efficiently overcome such scruples and engage in the organized killing of
others, human beings need to find some kind of justification. To have a way of
convincing themselves that “we” are the Good Guys and “they” are the Baddies,
that they are nasty people doing nasty things while we are good and righteous
people who do good things – and therefore, it is right for us to kill them
while it is a monstrous wrong for them to kill us.
Such
a creation of enemy images has always been a necessity of war. Whether fought with bows and arrows or with
intercontinental ballistic missiles, the
enemy image is an indispensable munition of war. Israel is certainly no exception.
Israelis have largely come to accept Netanyahu’s version: Peace with the
Palestinians is impossible; the Palestinians seek to gain the entire land
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, and they will never accept a
Jewish state in whatever borders; manifestations of Palestinian violence are
just part of a worldwide “Islamic Terrorist
Wave”, no different than attacks in Paris, Manchester or Barcelona; therefore,
giving up territory is of no avail, and the evacuated land would simply be used
to launch missiles at Israeli cities.
Accepting
this view of the situation leads to regarding the conflict as a matter of
survival – “It is either us or them”. And of course, human beings who perceive
themselves as fighting for survival can become more callous and unscrupulous.
Even with Israel possessing the strongest army in the Middle East (and one of
the strongest in the world), Israelis often tend to call up images of the Holocaust, of gas chambers and
crematoria. Young Palestinians who try to stab Israelis (and in most cases get
killed before even getting near to an Israeli soldier) are magnified into the
harbingers of “fanatic hordes, coming to
slaughter us all”.
3)
Is oppression Feminist?
One
of the most significant implications of the creation of enemy images concerns
young Israeli women. Already at its foundation, Israel had enacted conscription
of women, but until the 1990’s most women soldiers were simply uniformed
secretaries. However, in the past
decade, the Israeli armed forces are making a considerable effort to involve
female soldiers in combat duties - which includes, very prominently,
involvement in maintaining military rule over the Palestinians. In the
so-called “Border Guard” – the militarized police force charged with maintaining
the day to day routine of the occupation
– women already constitute more than a third of the troops, and their
proportion continues to rise every year.
Two
women Border Guard officers had been killed in incidents at the Damascus Gate
of the Old City of Jerusalem – a perennial “trouble spot”. A massive propaganda campaign is conducted in
the mainstream media to make these two fallen women soldiers into matchless
heroines, the role models which young Israeli women should seek to emulate.
Serving in the Border Guard and “fighting the Arab terrorists” is depicted as a
the new form of “Women’s Empowerment”.
It
is an effective propaganda, and a considerable number of young women are indeed
induced to fill the ranks of the Border Guard. But there is also a growing
number of young Israeli women who reject out of hand this form of “Feminism”
and “Empowerment”. There is an
increasing number of young Israeli women who declare their total refusal to
join and army of occupation and take part in the oppression of millions of
Palestinian men and women.
Such
refusers face the normal routine meted out by the Israeli army – being called
up, declaring their refusal and being sent to a month in prison, then released
and again ordered to enlist and again sent to another month behind bars and so
on and on and on. Eventually, the army would get tired of it and let them go –
but there is no way of knowing when that will be.
As
I write, the latest two such refusers - Noa Gur Golan and Hadas Tal – are
undergoing this process of repeated, open-ended imprisonment. “I know that my refusal,
in itself, will not end the occupation” said the 18-year old Hadas Tal on the
eve of going to prison. “I refuse because it is important not to let this oppressive
system continue existing without offering resistance, in order to raise awareness and create a public discussion.”
So
long as the Israeli society can produce such young people, hope is not lost.
Elior Azaria, imprisoned for killing a disarmed, severely wounded Palestinian.
Hadas Tal, imprisoned for refusing to join an army of occupation and take part in acts of oppression.
