"You don't see, you don't feel, and you don't look"

Daniel Sturm: What happened in Hebron?
Yehuda Shaul: Hebron is the second largest city in the Palestinian West Bank, with 150,000 Palestinians. Around 600 Jewish settlers live in the heart of the city, and 450 combat soldiers guard them. Under the Oslo agreement of 1997 Hebron was divided into two parts, with 120,000 Palestinians left under Palestinian authority and 30,000 Palestinians left under Israeli authority. At the beginning of the Intifada, from 2000 until mid-2002, the Palestinians began shooting at night, from the mountains down to the settlements. My company officer told us that if they shoot, we have to shoot back. We had three well-positioned posts in Palestinian neighborhoods. We posted snipers and grenade guns. My post was at a former Palestinian school in Hebron. Our mission was to target Palestinian houses. I remember being shocked when I heard this. "You mean we should shoot into the neighborhoods, where people live?" I thought about the safety rules I had learned during training. In order to shoot live grenades, no one should be within a distance of one mile on each side of the target. And now I was supposed to shoot into a neighborhood where people lived. The grenade gun is not an accurate weapon. One grenade kills everyone within the radius of eight meters, and injures everyone within the radius of 16 meters. At night, after the Palestinians shot, we received the order to pull the trigger. On the first day, during the four to five seconds before the grenades hit, you prayed that you didn't hurt anyone innocent. On the second day you are less tense, and on the third day even less. And after a week, it's a game.

Daniel Sturm: Was this when you became critical of the army's mission?
Yehuda Shaul: Not really. I first began to fully understand the corruption after I was discharged. When you are a combat soldier in the Occupied Territories, you can't see Palestinians as equal human beings. Because then you couldn't hop through a roof in the middle of the night, wake up a family, force the women into one corner and the men into another, and tear apart the place. At least when you stand at a checkpoint you see the shape of human beings: One head, two hands, and two legs. But when I was shooting live grenades into neighborhoods where people lived every night - why, that was a computer game!

Daniel Sturm: Weren't your actions justified, considering the violence the Palestinians were using?
Yehuda Shaul: You can't ignore that the Palestinians were using violence. But what is our moral and legal boundary, as a society or a nation? Can we really condone shooting grenades into neighborhoods, as a way of getting back? When we realized we were unable to prevent the Palestinians from shooting back at us, we started a strategy called "making our presence felt." We conducted silent patrols. We walked through streets, shooting onto houses, and shoot off grenades in parks.

Daniel Sturm: At what point did you begin to sympathize with the victims of this war?
Yehuda Shaul: The terminology of "victim" doesn't apply when you're in the field. When in combat you don't see, you don't feel, and you don't look. The name "Breaking the Silence" therefore refers to two levels of silence. The first is the personal level, where we realize what is really going on around us. The second level refers to the silence of society. As I was sitting in Hebron, firing grenades, my parents were just across the street in Jerusalem, hearing on the radio the sentence that every Israeli knows by heart: "IDF forces returned fire to the sources of fire." Of course, there were no sources of fire! We shot without ever finding any specific sources. But this is how Israeli society and human beings around the world receive information.

Daniel Sturm: How have people responded to your criticism?
Yehuda Shaul: Very ambivalent. Some people understand me, some don't. In the beginning, the IDF military police investigators broke into our exhibition, confiscated some items and brought us into interrogation. The idea was to frighten us and to declare us as an extreme case of "rotten apples." For me, it's no longer a question. I can't see myself acting any other way.

Daniel Sturm: Does the military occupation make any sense at all?
Yehuda Shaul: We all want to think that we are immune, that we can perform an "enlightened" and civilized occupation of Palestine. We want to believe that we are the most moral army in the world. But the truth is, every time you have a case in the press about Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinians, the example is treated as if, "that's a rotten apple." If you were to send every Israeli soldier who has abused a Palestinian during his service to jail, every soldier who has served in the Occupied Territories would have to stand in line. Because you can't serve there without acting like an occupier.

"Breaking the Silence," contact information
Email: yehuda@shovrimshtika.org
Internet: http://www.shovrimshtika.org

Read the full article here

Broken Link? If the link to the original article is broken or has been altered you can view the article by clicking here.