Page 1 of
3 'It's
mostly punishment …' By Oded
Na'aman
"There is no country on Earth that
would tolerate missiles raining down on its
citizens from outside its borders," President
Barack Obama said at a press conference last week.
He drew on this general observation in order to
justify Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel's most
recent military campaign in the Gaza Strip. In
describing the situation this way, he assumes,
like many others, that Gaza is a political entity
external and independent of Israel. This is not
so. It is true that Israel officially disengaged
from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, withdrawing
its ground troops and evacuating the Israeli
settlements there. But despite the absence of a
permanent ground presence, Israel has maintained a
crushing control over Gaza from that moment until
today.
The testimonies of Israeli army
veterans expose the truth of that
"disengagement." Before
Operation Pillar of Defense, after all, Israel
launched Operations Summer Rains and Autumn Clouds
in 2006, and Hot Winter and Cast Lead in 2008 -
all involving ground invasions. In one testimony,
a veteran speaks of "a battalion operation" in
Gaza that lasted for five months, where the
soldiers were ordered to shoot "to draw out
terrorists" so they "could kill a few."
Israeli naval blockades stop Gazans from
fishing, a main source of food in the Strip. Air
blockades prevent freedom of movement. Israel does
not allow building materials into the area,
forbids exports to the West Bank and Israel, and
(other than emergency humanitarian cases)
prohibits movement between the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank. It controls the Palestinian economy by
periodically withholding import taxes. Its
restrictions have impeded the expansion and
upgrading of the Strip's woeful sewage
infrastructure, which could render life in Gaza
untenable within a decade. The blocking of
seawater desalination has turned the water supply
into a health hazard. Israel has repeatedly
demolished small power plants in Gaza, ensuring
that the Strip would have to continue to rely on
the Israeli electricity supply. Daily power
shortages have been the norm for several years
now. Israel's presence is felt everywhere,
militarily and otherwise.
By relying on
factual misconceptions, political leaders,
deliberately or not, conceal information that is
critical to our understanding of events. Among the
people best qualified to correct those
misconceptions are the individuals who have been
charged with executing a state's policies - in
this case, Israeli soldiers themselves, an
authoritative source of information about their
government's actions. I am a veteran of the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and I know that our
first-hand experiences refute the assumption,
accepted by many, including President Obama, that
Gaza is an independent political entity that
exists wholly outside Israel. If Gaza is outside
Israel, how come we were stationed there? If Gaza
is outside Israel, how come we control it? Oded
Na'aman
[The testimonies by Israeli
veterans that follow are taken from 145 collected
by the non-governmental organization Breaking the
Silence and published in Our Harsh Logic:
Israeli Soldiers' Testimonies From the Occupied
Territories, 2000-2010. Those in the book
represent every division in the IDF and all
locations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.]
1. House Demolition
Unit: Kfir
Brigade
Location: Nablus district
Year: 2009
During your service in
the territories, what shook you up the most?
The searches we did in Hares. They said
there are 60 houses that have to be searched. I
thought there must have been some information from
intelligence. I tried to justify it to myself.
You went out as a patrol?
It was a
battalion operation. They spread out over the
whole village, took over the school, smashed the
locks, the classrooms. One was used as the
investigation room for the Shin Bet, one room for
detainees, one for the soldiers to rest. We went
in house by house, banging on the door at two in
the morning. The family's dying of fear, the girls
are peeing in their pants with fear. We go into
the house and turn everything upside down.
What's the procedure?
Gather the
family in a certain room, put a guard there, tell
the guard to aim his gun at them, and then search
the rest of the house. We got another order that
everyone born after 1980... everyone between 16
and 29, doesn't matter who, bring them in cuffed
and blindfolded. They yelled at old people, one of
them had an epileptic seizure but they carried on
yelling at him. Every house we went into, we
brought everyone between 16 and 29 to the school.
They sat tied up in the schoolyard.
Did
they tell you the purpose of all this?
To
locate weapons. But we didn't find any weapons.
They confiscated kitchen knives. There was also
stealing. One guy took 20 shekels. Guys went into
the houses and looked for things to steal. This
was a very poor village. The guys were saying,
"What a bummer, there's nothing to steal."
That was said in a conversation among the
soldiers?
Yeah. They enjoyed seeing the
misery, the guys were happy talking about it.
There was a moment someone yelled at the soldiers.
They knew he was mentally ill, but one of the
soldiers decided that he'd beat him up anyway, so
they smashed him. They hit him in the head with
the butt of the gun, he was bleeding, then they
brought him to the school along with everyone
else. There were a pile of arrest orders signed by
the battalion commander, ready, with one area left
blank. They'd fill in that the person was detained
on suspicion of disturbing the peace. They just
filled in the name and the reason for arrest.
There were people with plastic handcuffs that had
been put on really tight. I got to speak with the
people there. One of them had been brought into
Israel to work for a settler and after two months
the guy didn't pay him and handed him over to the
police.
All these people came from that
one village?
Yes.
Anything else
you remember from that night?
A small
thing, but it bothered me - one house that they
just destroyed. They have a dog for weapons
searches, but they didn't bring him; they just
wrecked the house. The mother watched from the
side and cried. Her kids sat with her and stroked
her.
What do you mean, they just destroyed
the house?
They smashed the floors, turned
over sofas, threw plants and pictures, turned over
beds, smashed the closets, the tiles. There were
other things - the look on the people's faces when
you go into their house. And after all that, they
were left tied up and blindfolded in the school
for hours. The order came to free them at four in
the afternoon. So that was more than 12 hours.
There were investigators from the security
services there who interrogated them one by one.
Had there been a terrorist attack in the
area?
No. We didn't even find any weapons.
The brigade commander claimed that the Shin Bet
did find some intelligence, that there were a lot
of guys there who throw stones.
2. Naval
Blockade
Unit: Navy
Location: Gaza
Strip
Year: 2008
It's mostly
punishment. I hate that: "They did this to us, so
we'll do that to them." Do you know what a naval
blockade means for the people in Gaza? There's no
food for a few days. For example, suppose there's
an attack in Netanya, so they impose a naval
blockade for four days on the entire Strip. No
seagoing vessel can leave. A Dabur patrol boat is
stationed at the entrance to the port, if they try
to go out, within seconds the soldiers shoot at
the bow and even deploy attack helicopters to
scare them. We did a lot of operations with attack
helicopters - they don't shoot much because they
prefer to let us deal with that, but they're there
to scare people, they circle over their heads. All
of a sudden there's a Cobra right over your head,
stirring up the wind and throwing everything
around.
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