In remembrance of Beit Hanoun, Gaza, 2006. (The result of a missile sent into an apartment building by an Israeli pilot)
On Sunday, October 21, 2007, the British Guardian Observer reported on a study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behavior of the country’s soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian territories, which was said to be provoking bitter controversy in Israel. It “awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.” It reminded one of the days when Rabin ordered Israeli soldiers to break the arms and legs of Palestinian resisters, and videos revealing Israeli soldiers using heavy stones to smash the limbs of Palestinians attest to this policy (See Peace, Propaganda, & The Promised Land with Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, Arik Ascherman, founder of Rabbis for Human Rights, and many others. Part I is here;. Part II is here.).
The results of such a study would never be published by mainstream media in the United States, but political blogs such as Juan Cole’s Informed Consent picked it up.
The study was summarized in the Guardian article, Israel shaken by troops’ tales of brutality against Palestinians, as follows:
A psychologist blames assaults on civilians in the 1990s on soldiers’ bad training, boredom and poor supervision
Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, had interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, which she said was aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.
The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’
In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’
Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’
See the Observer article for additional examples of Israeli brutality against Palestinians.
Juan Cole stated that the report caused a “scandal in Israel over the extreme brutality of its occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank.” Quoting further, he said,
‘ According to Yishai Karin: ‘At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.’. . . One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’ ‘
In response to this crap about “lack of training,” Juan Cole said,
The idea that these sorts of actions derive from ‘lack of training’ is absurd. They derive from hatred and from being able to act with impunity. They are a burden of the strong who have the opportunity to abuse the weak.
The US political elite and media that conceals the brutality of the Israeli occupation for sectional political gains are accomplices to this sadism, and their silence endangers the security of the United States. When we cannot understand why Arab audiences, who are perfectly aware of what the Israeli army has been doing to Palestinians for decades, are outraged, it leads us into policy mistakes in dealing with the Middle East. No one in the US media ever talks about Zionofascism, and the campus groups who yoke the word ‘fascism’ to other religions and peoples are most often trying to divert attention from their own authoritarianism and approval of brutality.
Americans blindly support Israel because we believe that Israel is capable of acting with the same respect of human life and misery as we would. I am reminded here of an Israeli soldier, reported by his friend who subsequently became a Refusnik, who, for no reason, shot a pregnant Palestinian women in the belly in the West Bank. Shortly later, he committed suicide. There is such a chasm between Judaism and Zionism, isn’t there?
