“The perspective we grew up with is that we must defend Israel from terrorism. Not only that — there are settlements there [in the Palestinian territories] and whatever you may think on the political level, the settlers are citizens and you consider they deserve protection as well. So basically, you think that the military is about doing defense. But as we started to sit down, we realized playing defense is actually very little part of the story. What it is really about is offense — this is all against a Palestinian State.”
Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli commander, speaks in an outspoken and direct way: no beating around the bush, no diplomatic jargon, no politically correct explanations. And he calls a spade a spade. He is the co-director of an Israeli organization of former soldiers set up in 2004 called Breaking the Silence, because their aim is “to break the silence about what is really happening in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”
Introducing himself, Shaul, in that same direct way, explains he is 30 years old and a real Jerusalemite, although both of his parents originally come from the United States. “I am a practicing Orthodox Jew and I grew up on the right side of the Israeli society. But right and left in Israel is not about liberalism or the economy; it is rather about settlements and the occupation. I did high school in a settlement and my sister is a settler.”
From 2001 to 2004, Shaul did his 3-year military service, including two years in the Palestinian West Bank, in Hebron. “I went through my service doing what I was supposed to do: obeying orders,” he explains. “But even though I come from the right side of society, I felt there was something not quite right in what we were doing there. As a soldier, though, you find a way to go on: you just follow orders, and then there is the unit, the camaraderie, you know what I mean…“
It was not until the last few weeks of his military service that he started thinking about his return to civilian life: “Taking one step out of the box, you see things differently. And you realize you lose justification for 90 percent for what you did,” he says.
So he turned to the only people he knew — his comrades in his unit. He discovered that they all felt pretty much the same. And that’s how it all started.
In April 2004, he left the army; in June, with a few of his comrades, he organized a photo exhibition about what was happening in the territories, “with our faces on screen, on wall,” Shaul says. “We had no idea of what we were doing. But in a very short time, we found ourselves in the middle of one big mess. We were asked to talk all over the country, including in Parliament; we had to issue press statements … We learned as we wen.”
Out of that mess, Breaking the Silence was born.
Controlling Palestine
The organization essentially provides testimonies from soldiers and ex-soldiers who served as conscripts between 2000 and the present about what is happening in the Palestinian territories. The group checks the information and publish it. It also uses the material as an advocacy tool.
“The people in Israel have no clue of what we are doing in the Palestinian territories in their name. So we decided to bring Hebron to Jerusalem, so to speak,” Shaul explains. “In essence, what we are saying is: you sent us there, we fought for you. Now sit down and listen to what we have done in your name.
“And let me put this clearly: we are against the occupation. We have this weird idea that people should govern themselves.”
The group also takes people on tours in Hebron and elsewhere in Palestine so they can see the situation for themselves.
Then came the 10th anniversary of the second Intifada, of which Shaul says, “We felt that we could say more on how Israel is trying to control Palestine through ground troops – as opposed to intelligence and other services to which we have no access.” The result was a book published in Hebrew.
“This book,” Shaul goes on to explain, “was originally not meant to be more than that. But somehow it took a life of its own, and so it was first translated into English under the title “Our Harsh Logic.” By now, it’s been translated into six different languages.
The book does not speak of political intentions behind the scenes, nor questions of logistics, simply because, as Shaul puts it, “we don’t know what they are. What we claim to know though is what is done on the ground. We listen to soldiers that have been in Gaza in 2001, in Jenine in 2002, in Naplouse in 2003, in Hebron in 2004, in Ramallah in 2006 … If they all talk the same, it means there is something bigger there … and this is what you’ll find in the book.”
The book is divided into four sections, corresponding with four innocuous-sounding concepts that acquire a more insipid meaning in the Israeli army. “They are code names,” Shaul explains. “And when the average Israeli soldier hears them, he thinks of something specific. We try to decode the difference between what the public generally understands and what the soldiers actually hear.”
The first coded word is “prevention.” “This sounds as defensive, right?” Shaul asks. “I mean, this is probably the most defensive thing we can think of. Well, when an Israeli soldier hears this, what he actually hears is ‘targeted prevention.’ And in the media, it is the word used for assassinations. You may now be thinking of someone with a bomb that is going to blow himself up in the middle of a crowd — what you do then is target him and kill him. But in reality the concept of prevention is so wide that almost any act you can think of is prevention.”
Put directly, Shaul says, “it means assassinating people that we cannot arrest, or whose arrest may put the life of too many soldiers at risk, or because we believe that assassinating them will leave a greater impact — or for revenge.”
He gives a precise example: “In February 2002, there was an attack on the Israeli army checkpoint in a small village near Ramallah, and six soldiers were killed. The following night, in Gaza, Naplouse and Ramallah, at two o’clock at night, the Israeli army attacked three Palestinian police checkpoints. The instructions were clear: anyone there should die. In all, 59 people died that night. Fifty-nine Palestinians killed for six Israelis. The people at the Naplouse checkpoint were armed, but those at the other two were not even armed.”
Two of the people that participated in that revenge operation are members of Breaking the Silence. “In others words,” Shaul adds, “there can be no question about what happened. Note that for such an attack, the order must come from very high, at least the deputy chief of staff, or higher. And we registered 12 such similar attacks.”
From assassinations to mock arrests
And then there are the arrests. “Usually it goes like this,” Shaul explains, “the secret services give us the ID and photo of someone they want arrested and we go and arrest him at two o’clock at night. We then also arrest brothers and cousins … or we do a mass arrest, all men between 15 and 50, village after village. The peak idea is making our presence felt. The concept is clear: if the Palestinians have the feeling that Israel is everywhere, they will keep quiet. Additionally, if you don’t know when something is going to happen, you create the feeling of being persecuted.”
Israeli soldiers also organize what Shaul calls mock arrests, a tactic that is increasingly used in the West Bank. “You have a new unit: you don’t want their first arrest to be a real one. So you chose the quietest village you can find, you chose a house at random, you make sure the guy is innocent and then you go in, like any other arrest, you make a lot of noise, arrest the guy, search the house and after a while, you hear on the radio ‘stop the exercise,’” he says. “End of story.”
Shaul explains that this is just another way to make the Israeli presence felt, “because when the people see you arrest someone that is innocent, they wonder why. And then when he is released, they ask even more questions. You know, when things are rational, when rules are clear, you have the feeling you can go around them. But if you don’t know the rules, you are even more scared. There is that concept of ‘collective punishment’ in international law. It is not the result of what we are doing — it is at the heart of what we are doing.
The second coded word is “separation.” “I mean, who would not be in favor of separation? We are here, they are there,” Shaul explains. “But if you listen to the soldiers, what it really is about is between them and them: separating city from city, village from village, a farmer from his land: it is about ‘divide and conquer’. It is about fragmenting a society to a degree it cannot come together.”
The third coded concept, he says, is something very obscure called “fabric of life”: “The official idea is simple: the military tells us that under occupation, life is not so bad if you are a good guy. And when an action is taken, they’ll make sure it has the least possible interruption in your life. After what you have just heard on the two previous concepts, it rather sounds like the opposite, right?”
For the first time, though, Breaking the Silence has had testimonies of people from the civil administration. The civil administration, despite its name, has nothing to do with civilians — it’s actually a branch of the military in charge of civilian issues like education, health and transport in the Occupied Territories. “And this is particularly interesting,” Shaul adds, “because when you listen to them, you understand: ‘Don’t worry about the humanitarian situation, we are not going to die them out, you know, it is not in our interests, so we make sure they have the basics.’
“But let me give you an example: there is a suicide bombing in, let’s say, Rishon-le-Ziyyon. Palestinians very regularly transfer money to Gaza. Well, as a means of reprisal, you stop that for, say 15 days. The banking system will not collapse, nothing really bad is going to happen, the Palestinians still have the basics — but they will feel the difference. In other words, the give-and-take is at the entire discretion of Israel. No other military occupation has gone so deep in administering the civilian life of the occupied.”
Confusing the civilian and the military
The fourth is “law enforcement.” Shaul explains: “This is not like what you may have in any European country or in the States. In the territories, we have two legal systems enforced by two different law-enforcement systems. The Palestinians are under military law and the settlers are under civilian law. Of course, the amounts of rights you have under civilian law are much higher that under military law.”
Shaul has long thought that Israeli soldiers’ lives in the territories would be much easier without the settlers, who are always around, demanding things and interfering with what they do: “I mean, who needs the mess? But when you listen to testimonies, you realize the system has actually found a way to turn the settlers’ issue into just another way of controlling the Palestinians.”
“If I must guard a settlement, for example, who gives me my rules of engagement? The army? No — the settlers’ security officer,” he says. “ And one month per year, the settlers’ regional team serves as intervention squad on alert – a system put in place by the military in case there is a hostage taking. The result is a total blurring of the limits between civilian and military, and of who controls what.”
In other words, the book is a document that tries to tell the real story of the occupation of the Palestinian territories. “For a lot of people, the occupation is a thing of the past,” Shaul says. “But the truth is, in reality, it takes place every minute, in every place. The territories are being re-occupied again and again. Every action you take, you dig in more, each time”.
And he goes on: “We generally think of a military occupation as a temporary situation. The idea is to create political structures and institutions and then to leave the political space for these institutions gradually to take over and create a nation. In Israel, it is the reverse: there is no political space for institutions. The military is everywhere on the ground. There is no need, no existence of an exit strategy. We are not on the way out — we are on the way in.”