Breaking the Silence and its slanderers
There
are two sides to the IDF’s conduct during the Gaza war, but only
Breaking the Silence’s soldiers are revealing the dark one.
By Anshel Pfeffer | Jun. 18, 2015 | 8:41 PM | 2
Back
in the days when I was a soldier walking the alleyways of Nablus and
Rafah in the early 1990s, before the Oslo Accord and the pullback from
the Palestinian cities, there was no Breaking the Silence. No outlet to
report the daily cruelties inflicted by our company on the local
civilians with the full knowledge and sometimes encouragement of our
officers. The kid, who may have been throwing stones, dragged back to
camp and left, trussed up, to bake in the sun. Hours later, kicked out
to hobble home, his clothes fouled by his own urine and feces. The young
idealistic officer excited because he had been given a sniper’s
telescopic sights and ordered to shoot live bullets at “trouble-makers’”
legs from the security of a lookout post. The unclear orders for
mounting a “surprise checkpoint,” which had led to a friend shooting and
killing two innocent people, man and wife, one early morning. A trauma
he hasn’t emerged from a quarter of a century later.
Most
of us weren’t even clear on whether there was something wrong about
this normal routine of a four-month posting to Gaza or the West Bank in
the last stages of the first intifada. Those who were bothered kept it
to themselves, or at most unburdened themselves to officers barely older
than them. On leave at home you didn’t want to think about the army,
and there was no one who could understand you anyway who hadn’t been
there himself.
Recently
I’ve been asking myself: If Breaking the Silence had been around when I
was still a conscript or reservist, before I became a journalist and
had my own platform, would I have sat down with their interviewers? I’d
like to think that I would, but I know that I probably wouldn’t have –
the stigma, the bother, breaking the omerta of a close-knit unit, the
desire to just put it all behind you. If one of my sons asked me whether
to speak to Breaking the Silence, I admit that I would be at a loss on
how to advise them. I’m surprised that over the years hundreds of
soldiers and officers have been brave enough to overcome the inbuilt
inhibitions. For some it has been a cleansing and cathartic experience,
but for many the anguish and dilemmas remain.
Some
criticisms of the organization are valid. There’s a serious debate to
be had over whether Breaking the Silence should focus so much of their
operation on the foreign media and hold events abroad. Not because I’m
worried about them “slandering Israel” among the goyim, though that’s
the accusation most often raised against them. It’s a ridiculous
argument in an age where nearly every violent incident in the West Bank
is filmed by someone’s smartphone and immediately posted online. Even if
they never gave an interview to the foreign media and published their
reports only in Hebrew, someone else would translate them. My objection
is that the only people who will ever end the occupation are Israelis
and all the available energies should be focused on that.
However
I understand the fundraising necessity; it would be wonderful if enough
Israeli donors were willing to contribute to the considerable expense
of running a highly professional evidence-gathering operation that
painstakingly researches each testimony, weeding out the fantasists and
provocateurs. There aren’t, and in the same way that the right-wing in
Israel has always used foreign money to promote its positions, since
the arrival of Sheldon Adelson on the scene it is doing so to a much
greater proportion.
On Wednesday
in Brussels, the European Union’s subcommittee on human rights dealt
with Israeli soldiers’ experiences of fighting in Gaza. There was a
representative of Breaking the Silence who presented their report, in
which 60 soldiers and officers detailed the orders they had received and
the ways they were implemented, which, to their minds as military men,
created uncalled-for destruction of homes and loss of civilian lives.
And there was also Matan Katzman, a young man who detailed at length the
procedures taken by the IDF to prevent civilian casualties and the way
Hamas had used Palestinian homes to conceal weapons and its military
infrastructure.
The
only thing I can say in favor of Katzman is that he has actually been
there as an infantry soldier and officer – unlike a lot of the vicious
critics of Breaking the Silence who have never spent a day in uniform
(and neither will their children), and have never woken up a Palestinian
family in the middle of the night and seen children pissing their
pyjamas in fear.
But
Katzman, unlike the hundreds of IDF soldiers who have given their
testimony to Breaking the Silence out of a noble feeling that the
Israeli public must know the truth, is a paid propagandist. He is an
employee of the right-wing Stand With Us group which masquerades as
“pro-Israel” while its real agenda is to serve the current government
(which partly funds it).
Katzman’s
version of how the IDF fought in Gaza is not untruthful – in many of
the operations and stages of fighting the IDF did take major precautions
to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
However,
it doesn’t invalidate the Breaking the Silence testimony in any way.
The narrative told by Stand With Us (or My Truth, the front group it has
set up to smear Breaking the Silence) is a selective one. Both
narratives are selective; they portray two sides of the same IDF
operation. Any honest soldier or officer who was there will tell you
there was caution and moderation alongside wantonness and excessive
fire.
Katzman’s
truth is naturally the only narrative the government wants to project –
an entire hasbara hierarchy is backing him up, with most of the Israeli
media playing along. The IDF Spokesman isn’t going to allow journalists
to interview soldiers who will tell them the dark side of the Gaza
operation. Only Breaking the Silence is doing that, and yet on Facebook,
Katzman despicably calls these men who fought alongside him “a tiny,
anonymous minority” who are trying “to slander the IDF.” They’re
anonymous because unlike him, if they say in public what they saw in
Gaza, they will be packed off to a military jail.
Katzman,
the government-funded mouthpiece, has of course every right to present
selective parts of the IDF’s operation in a way that serves his
paymasters’ political agenda. But his Zionism and patriotism in no way
measure up to those of the hundreds of soldiers who have spoken out and
told the Israeli public the parts the government want kept from view.
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