[Peace-discuss] Israel-Palestine or Iraq?

[Morton K. Brussel]

What struck me about this rather long confession is how apt it would 
substitute the word Israel to Iraq, how much the same the occupation in 
Iraq (and elsewhere) is similar to that in Israel-Palestine.

Message: 1
    Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 18:14:10 -0800 (PST)
    From: Mazin Qumsiyeh <qumsi001 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Two items worth reading/forwarding

1) This article below from Haaretz reviews a book about just one
symptom of the occupation as told by an Israeli Staff Sergeant.  As you
read this, remember this is in the good old days before the current
Israeli clampdown in the past tyhree years of the Intifada.  In other
words, the experiences recounted here is many fold less than current
day experiences at checkpoints were many lost their lives (including
women in labor, patients, etc).  Yet even this may give you a feel for
what was happening in the period of the "peace process" (and now they
are talking about another "process" while walls are being builtd to
separate Palestinians from each other and from their lands) at least at
checkpoints (not dealing with land confiscations, random arrests and
jailing for months without charges, destruction of property, and
looting were and are common).

2) Report on a trip to Israel/Palestine by Dr. Hassan Fouda who
traveled their with an interfaith group.  His report is a speech he
gave at a local synagogue. I had a similar experience at the Jewish
Community in Amherst and was heartened by the response. I hope more
Jews will act to open their synagogues to hear such information (in
some cases the truth is being shielded from them).  Please read
Hassan's report in its entirety.  It is well worth your time.

I share these things not to make you mad or depressed but to make you
hopeful and act.  There is so much that is being done and so much that
can be done. While silence is complicity, for those of us who pay taxes
to fund this continuing occupation and tightening apartheid, there is
much more responsibility. I am sure you know what to do to act.  But,
if you like some more hints, visit http://Al-awda.org

Sincerely,

Mazin Qumsiyeh
=========
Twilight Zone / `I punched an Arab in the face'

By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz

Thu., November 20, 2003

Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with
his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of
military service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome
afflicting everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On
the verge of completing his studies in the design program at the
Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he decided to drop everything and
devote all his time to the book he wanted to write. The major
publishers he brought it to declined to publish it. The publisher that
finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the Steimatzky bookstore chain
refuses to distribute it. But Furer is determined to bring his book to
the public's attention.

"You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent
would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent
person," says Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this
way. The boy himself doesn't portray himself this way to his family
when he returns from the territories. On the contrary - he is received
as a hero, as someone who is doing the important work of being a
soldier. No one can be indifferent to the fact that there are many
families in which, in a certain sense, there are already two
generations of criminals. The father went through it and now the son is
going through it and no one talks about it around the dinner table."

Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here
he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High
School of the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent
sadist who beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper
courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing
the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed
on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out
somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually
transforms every soldier into an animal, he maintains, regardless of
whatever values he brings with him from home. No one can escape its
taint. In a place where nearly everything is permissible and violence
is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier tests his own limits
of violence impulsiveness on his victims - the Palestinians.

His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the
blunt and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the
years in which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must
remember, were relatively quiet. He describes how he and his comrades
forced some Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was really something to
see these Arabs singing a Zohar Argov song, like in a movie"; the
emotions the Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs
really disgust me, especially those that try to toady up to us - the
older ones, who come to the checkpoint with this smile on their faces";
the reactions they spurred - "If they really annoy us, we find away to
keep them stuck at the checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole
day of work because of it sometimes, but that's the only way they
learn."

He described how they would order children to clean the checkpoint
before inspection time; how a soldier named Shahar invented a game: "He
checks someone's identity card, and instead of handing it back to him,
just tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing the Arab have to
get out of his car to pick up his identity card ... It's a game for him
and he can pass a whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf
who came to the checkpoint every day on his wagon: "They forced him to
have his picture taken on the horse, hit him and degraded him for a
good half hour and let him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint.
The poor guy, he really didn't deserve it"; how they had a souvenir
picture taken with bloodied, bound Arabs whom they'd beaten up; how
Shahar pissed on the head of an Arab because the man had the nerve to
smile at a soldier; how Dado forced an Arab to stand on four legs and
bark like a dog; and how they stole prayer beads and cigarettes - "Miro
wanted them to give him their cigarettes, the Arabs didn't want to give
so Miro broke someone's hand, and Boaz slashed their tires."

Chilling confession

The most chilling of all the personal confessions: "I ran toward them
and punched an Arab right in the face. I'd never punched anyone that
way. He collapsed on the road. The officers said that we had to search
him for his papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I bound
them with plastic handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see
what was in the Jeep. I picked him up from the road. Blood was
trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and
threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside.
We sat in the back, stepping on the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty
quietly, just crying softly to himself. His face was right on my flak
jacket and he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and
saliva, and it disgusted and angered me, so I grabbed him by the hair
and turned his head to the side. He cried out loud and to get him to
stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back. That quieted him down
for a while and then he started up again. We concluded that he was
either retarded or crazy.

"The company commander informed us over the radio that we had to bring
him to the base. `Good work, tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the
other soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came
in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put the Arab
next to the guard. He didn't stop crying and someone who understood
Arabic said that his hands were hurting from the handcuffs. One of the
soldiers went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled
over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him
really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They
shouted that I was a totally crazy, and they laughed ... and I felt
happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is living now,
Furer, 26, comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent young man. He grew
up in Givatayim, after his parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in
the 1970s. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a
right-wing activist, but he says that their home was not political. He
wanted to be in a combat unit in the army, and served in two elite
infantry units. He did his entire army service in the Gaza Strip.

After the army, he traveled to India, like so many others. "Now I was
free. The crazy energies of Goa and the chakras opened my mind ... You
stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with
your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn't
think anymore," he wrote from Goa. But it was only afterward, when he
was studying at Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service
really began to affect him.

"I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says.
"It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was
serving, which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a
permanent reality. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the fact
that such a loaded subject was hardly mentioned at all in public.
People listened to the victim and they listened to the politicians, but
this voice that says: I did this, we did things that were wrong -
crimes, actually - that's a voice I didn't hear. The reason it wasn't
being heard was a combination of repression - just as I repressed it
and ignored it - and of deep feelings of guilt.

"As soon as you get away from army service, the political and media
reality around you is not ready to hear this voice. I remember that I
was surprised that no soldier had gone public with this yet. It all
somehow dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of settlement in
the territories, about the occupation - for or against - and nothing
connected to the routine of maintaining the occupation appeared in the
media or in art."

Not an individual case

Furer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of
isolated, individual cases. That's why he deleted a lot of personal
details from the original manuscript, in order to underscore the
general nature of what he describes. "During my army service, I
believed that I was atypical, because I came from a background of art
and creativity. I was considered a moderate soldier - but I fell into
the same trap that most soldiers fall into. I was carried away by the
possibility of acting in the most primal and impulsive manner, without
fear of punishment and without oversight. You're tense about it at
first, but as you get more comfortable at the checkpoint over time, the
behavior becomes more natural. People gradually test the limits of
their behavior toward the Palestinians. It gradually becomes coarser
and coarser.

"The more confident I became with the situation, as soon as we reached
the conclusion - each one at his own stage - that we are the rulers, we
are the strong ones, and when we felt our power, each one started to
stretch the limits more and more, in accordance with his personality.
As soon as serving at the checkpoint became routine, all kinds of
deviant behavior became normal. It started with `souvenir collecting':
We'd confiscate prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't
stop. It became normative behavior.

"After that came the power games. We got the message from above that we
were to project seriousness and deterrence to the Arabs. Physical
violence also became normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian
who didn't follow the `proper code of behavior' at the checkpoint.
Anyone we thought wasn't polite enough to us or tried to act smart -
was severely punished. It was deliberate harassment on the most trivial
pretexts.

"During my army service, there wasn't a single incident that made us
understand, or made our commanders interfere. No one talked about what
was permitted and what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In
retrospect, the biggest source of guilt feelings for me didn't happen
at the checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif fence, when we caught the
retarded boy. I demonstrated the most extreme behavior. It was a chance
for me to catch one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a
chance to vent all the pressure and impulses that had built up in all
of us. To lash out the way we wanted to. We were used to giving slaps,
to handcuffing, to a little kicking, a little beating, and here was a
situation in which it was justified to let go entirely. Also, the
officer who was with us was himself very violent. We gave the kid a
real beating and as soon as we got to the post, I remember having a
great feeling of pride, that I'd been treated like someone strong. They
said, `What a nut you are, how crazy you are,' which was basically like
saying, `How strong you are.'

"At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and
using force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more
basic impulse than the political views or values that you bring from
home. As soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded,
the tendency is to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as
possible. To satisfy these impulses beyond what the situation requires.
Today, I'd call it sadistic impulses ...

"We weren't criminals or especially violent people. We were a group of
good boys, a relatively `high-quality' group, and for all of us - and
we still talk about this sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to
test our personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be
- and we thought of that in the positive sense. Something about the
situation - being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from
oversight - made it justified ... The line of what is forbidden was
never precisely drawn. No one was ever punished and they just let us
continue.

"Today, I feel confident saying that even the most senior ranks - the
brigade commander, the battalion commander - are aware of the power
that soldiers have in this situation and what they do with it. How
could a commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and tough his
soldiers are, the quieter his sector is? The more complex picture of
the long-term effects of this violent behavior is something you only
become conscious of when you get away from the checkpoint.

"Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father we humiliated for
the flimsiest of reasons will grow up to hate anyone who represents
what was done to his father. I definitely have an understanding of
their motives now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that their
response is affected by elements related to their society - a disregard
for human life and a readiness to sacrifice lives - but the basic
desire to resist, the hatred itself, the fear - I feel are completely
justified and legitimate, even if it's risky to say so.

"It's impossible to be in such an emotional state and to go back home
on leave and detach yourself from it. I was very insensitive to the
feelings of my girlfriend at the time. I was an animal, even when I was
on leave. It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the
remnants of the syndrome in India - something about being in the Third
World, among dark-skinned people, brings out the worst of the `ugly
Israeli,' which is as Israeli as it gets. Or the way you react to a
smile: When Palestinians would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got
tense and construed it as defiance, as chutzpah. When someone smiled at
me in India, I immediately went on the defensive.

"I was an average soldier," he says. "I was the joker of the group. Now
I see that I was often the one to take the lead in violent situations.
I often was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up with all
kinds of ideas like letting the air out of tires. It sounds twisted
now, but we really admired anyone who could beat up some guy who
supposedly had it coming. The officer we admired most was the officer
who fired his weapon at every opportunity. Out of everyone I've spoken
to, I've been left with the most guilt feelings ... A friend from the
army read the book and said that I'm right, that we did bad things, but
we were kids. And he said that it's a shame that I took it too hard."