Tour of duty in The Isrseli Occupation Forces

Article of interest on the experiences of a British Jew who served in
the Israeli Occupation Forces for 15 months. It is an interesting first
hand account of the brutality of the Occupation.

Ed Corrigan

Seth Freedman describes his is experiences policing the occupation on
the West Bank

This article appeared in the Guardian on Saturday September 27 2008 on
p60 of the Features & comment section. It was last updated at 00:03 on
September 27, 2008.Seth Freedman was full of fervour and idealism when he left London to join the Israeli Defence Force. Here he describes his experiences policing the occupation on the West Bank - and his disillusion. What resentments are festering among the new generation?



Night fell over the village, though it made no difference to us, lying slumped against the walls of the nagmash (armoured personnel carrier). Ten of us were crammed into a space not much bigger than a double bed, flung back and forth every time we hit a boulder in the road. We shared the space with the remains of our lunch, as well as tomorrow's breakfast. The sweat pouring down our faces was black with dirt, and our shirts were stuck fast to our backs. Gabe looked like a melting snowman - if it weren't for his moaning quietly from time to time, I'd have thought he'd passed out in the back.

Occasionally, I'd muster the energy to stand up and peer through the small panes of bulletproof glass at the top of the nagmash to try to get my bearings. The windows were far too thick to see anything clearly, but we'd already been through the centre of Tulkarm once and now seemed to be circling the deserted backstreets over and over.

Having been stuck in this cauldron for 15 hours, I couldn't have cared less whether or not we caught the terrorists - I was all for calling it a draw, and arranging a replay in two weeks' time.

Not so our platoon commander. He stood up at the front of the vehicle, urging Shai to drive ever onwards towards God knew what. He manned the machine gun mounted on the roof, swivelling it in the direction of any unfortunate who was sharing the cobbled roads with our mini-tank. Eventually we noticed that we were slowing down, and it sounded as though we were now driving off-road, which was usually a sign that we were looking for a place to park up and rest.

Perking up momentarily, we debated whether this was a five-minute pit stop or the couple of hours' sleep we'd been promised. We piled out of the back door and surveyed our surroundings. We seemed to be in the back garden of a mansion-sized house on a residential backstreet, and the owner's family were peering at us from the porch with a mixture of bemusement and disgust.

We took positions - everyone covering one another, guns locked and loaded, as we edged forward. The squad from the other nagmash were also here, approaching from the other side of the garden, and we were now 20 strong as we descended on the house that we were going to commandeer for the night.

The platoon commander delivered curt instructions in Arabic to the family members sitting on chairs on the veranda. Taking Matan with him, he disappeared inside the house and set about locking the family in the basement, before letting the rest of us in to search the building. Once we'd declared it clear, we all gathered in the lounge to receive our orders. We were to guard in pairs, everyone doing 20-minute shifts over the next four hours while the others slept. We stripped off our shirts, rolled them up as pillows, and crashed out on the tiled floor of the living room.

We were under strict orders not to touch anything in the house; not even to use the bathrooms. The place was a palace compared with some of the shacks we'd been used to searching - it turned out the houses we took over were always big, to avoid embarrassing poorer folk who would be ashamed of their meagre possessions. It still felt as if we were taking liberties, half-naked and sprawled all over the floor of this family's lounge. I could hardly argue; we could not drive all the way back to our side of the border every time we needed to sleep. And if we dossed down in the nagmash here on the West Bank, we'd be sitting targets for anyone with a rocket-propelled grenade who might fancy his chances. On the other hand, keeping the family locked in the basement smacked of human shields to me. I passed out and went to sleep anyway - the thought in my mind that there was no way we were winning the peace with this particular clan.

It all began in the comfort of my London home as I watched the second intifada unfold on the TV news. I felt the piercing stare of an Israeli Lord Kitchener: my country needed me. With every bus that exploded in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the feeling grew stronger - I should be playing my part. I had a religious affiliation to Israel, the land of my forefathers, and a more personal attachment to the modern-day Jewish state thanks to twice-yearly childhood holidays and a gap year spent travelling the country.

So it was that in November 2004 I found myself in a barracks on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, struggling to pull on eight-holed combat boots and staring at my olive-clad reflection in the mirror. Within a matter of months, I would be on my first tour of duty in the heart of the West Bank.

Our first placement after completing training was guarding Rachel's Tomb, a site of pilgrimage for Jews, situated on the edge of the al-Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. At that time, the Bethlehem stretch of the security wall was unfinished, which meant extra troops were required to provide protection for the thousands of visitors who thronged daily to the site. We rode the bulletproof buses from the checkpoint to the tomb, as much to calm the nerves of the tourists as to provide any practical assistance. Rock-throwing youths dispersed long before we could dismount the buses and give chase, and the shatterproof glass in the windows was more than sufficient to repel the sporadic attacks.

However, we were required to carry out regular patrols of the Muslim cemetery behind the tomb, as well as the narrow alleys of the refugee camp, where our presence did nothing to abate the tension that was palpable on every street corner. Decked out in full combat gear, with words of encouragement from the pilgrims ringing in our ears as we left the tomb, we would march towards al-Aida and straight into a scene from CNN. A teeming refugee camp, piles of rubble everywhere, Arab men lounging on half-built walls and us: six heavily armed Israeli soldiers.

On one roasting hot summer's day, during a routine patrol, the inevitable happened - a group of youths, screaming "Allahu Akhbar", greeted us with a hail of stones, and we took cover behind a nearby building. The sergeant said that he and Shtricks would hide behind a wall while the other four of us walked in a snake-like formation in view of the youths. The aim was to draw another barrage of rocks, at which point the sergeant would arrest one or two of them. It was too easy - we walked, they threw, we retreated, the sergeant leapt out and slammed a boy against the wall, holding him by the neck. He was a sullen, scruffily dressed boy of maybe 14. The sergeant asked us if he'd been one of the stone throwers; I said yes, without being 100% sure - it hardly mattered, since the objective was to make a point to his friends.

We marched him to our base. There was a dodgy moment when a group of men, maybe 25-year-olds, ran towards us, shouting; we trained our guns on them and made them back off. We delivered the boy to one of the squadron commanders. It was our first unplanned arrest (as opposed to arrests made on a raid), so everyone swarmed around the kid as if he was a rare butterfly we'd netted. He was made to sit in the sun against a wall and, cursing and shouting, he threw the cup of water he was offered all over the commander.

The sergeant was strutting around, beaming gleefully - a bit overly proud, I thought, considering he'd nabbed a teenager, with five armed soldiers behind him as backup. After about 20 minutes, we marched the boy out to hand him over to his parents, who had been summoned to meet us. The father had to lift his shirt to prove he wasn't wearing a bomb belt before we allowed him anywhere near us. The boy went home and the patrol was over.

The debriefing was interesting; we sat in the same positions in the sergeant's room as we had before. Only an hour had passed, but we were older and wiser - we dissected the experience as if it were simply another part of training, and not as though we'd been in a very real, very dangerous situation that nearly became a riot.

Was this really the best way to keep the peace and ease tension, I asked the sergeant. He maintained that the boy would learn his lesson and it was all for the best; I said that was wishful thinking - the boy was plainly now a hero among his friends. Did he expect us to take pride in what we'd done?

Once the debriefing was over, we discussed the incident among ourselves. Why did our merely being on patrol - not beating someone or damaging property - cause such a violent reaction? Why did young kids, who had been playing with kites and footballs until we arrived on patrol, suddenly become mini-terrorists? It was clear that several of us weren't comfortable with our seemingly over-the-top reaction to the stone-throwing. If the David and Goliath overtones of the situation were clear to us, how much more so would they be to those on the other side of the divide?

As the weeks wore on, and we spent more and more time dealing with the locals through the sights of our guns, it became increasingly apparent that we were never going to win over hearts and minds - not when we were barking, "Stop or I'll shoot" at women approaching us on the checkpoint. Wasn't there a way to engage with Palestinians that wouldn't compromise our security?

Another patrol on Route 60 made it very clear that our commanders were interested only in the here and now. We were going through the usual stop and search of random pedestrians and vehicles when an incident just as we were leaving turned nasty. Six of us stopped a man and his son in their BMW; we ordered the father out at gunpoint while the five-year-old child silently watched. The platoon commander dealt with him very curtly, making him stand, sit and so on, at whim. This went on for about 25 minutes, with passersby watching, until the squadron vice commander rocked up in his Jeep and treated the detainee, a family man of about 35, even more brusquely. The suspect was becoming visibly upset. Once the commanders finally got bored with tormenting him, we headed back, stopping to force another man and his six-year-old son to lift their shirts on the way.

During the debriefing, it all came out as we took on the platoon commander for his fierce handling of the situation. Several soldiers were upset at an event earlier in the week, where they'd been made to surround a house at 1am and wake all the residents, a large family, and order them out into the cold, simply for a practice exercise. All this led to some heated debate. I asked the platoon commander if he would have been happy if his own dad had been treated in the way he'd dealt with the man in the BMW. As usual, he batted away all criticism with a flat statement that everything we did was "for security reasons", plain and simple.

The discontent in my unit grew with every unsavoury incident that we witnessed or in which we were forced to take part. My friend Shai, who was assigned to accompany two prisoners en route to Shin Bet interrogators, told me that the interrogators ordered the soldiers to finish their meals and put the remains from the plates into a sandwich for the Palestinians. Shai refused - "Are we Nazis?" - and gave them half his meal. He also told me that when the Palestinians offered some of the food back to the soldiers, the Shin Bet men tossed it out the window, saying, "Don't eat food after an Arab's touched it."

Our next posting was in the nearby village of Bet Jalla, where our base was a disused hotel on the edge of town. One morning, out on patrol, we got a call from the "eye in the sky" camera crew, who directed us to drive to a local school where students were apparently hurling rocks at Jewish cars. That was music to the ears of our Yemenite commander, Shoko, who morphed into A-Team mode all of a sudden, ramming a magazine into his gun and checking his grenades were in his vest. A bit strong, I thought, seeing as we were going to be at least 10 years older than our opponents.

We flew along the Bet Jalla backstreets, nearly upending a donkey and cart when we tore around one blind corner. We drove with the back doors of the Jeep open, and Arthur and I kept our guns trained on anyone who stared at us for too long. Arthur turned to me as we sped along: "You know, I'm much less scared of being around Palestinians than I used to be." No shit, mate - you're in a bulletproof Jeep with three other soldiers and enough firepower to turn the whole town into Swiss cheese.

As we approached the school, we parked hurriedly on the grass and split into pairs. Arthur stayed with the driver in the Jeep, so I was Shoko's zug (partner), which meant that wherever he went, I trailed in his wake, Marlboro-coated lungs protesting at the pace at which I was running. As we rounded the final corner, we were confronted with 15 10-year-olds holding rocks bigger than their heads, which they tossed off the side of the hill into the path of the cars below. Even more disturbing was the sight of their 50-year-old teacher standing to one side, supervising them as he puffed languidly on a cigarette. When Shoko shouted at him in Arabic, asking what the kids were doing, he shrugged and replied, "It's their break time."

After Shoko warned him he would bring the children to order himself if necessary, the teacher ever so slowly turned towards his charges and told them to go inside. We piled back into the Jeep, depressed - the other three because there had been no action, me because we hadn't had time for a cigarette break. I turned on my iPod and ignored Shoko's debriefing. There were plenty of political and emotional issues to discuss after seeing a class of infants throwing missiles with their teacher looking on, but the present company wasn't the ideal forum. Dror, the (reservist) driver, was more concerned with phoning his broker to check on his trades than listening to the two-way radio. Shoko looked genuinely sad that he wouldn't be adding to his kill-count today, and Arthur's idea of philosophical discourse was dissecting Tupac's lyrics as though analysing Baudelaire.

The next day I was again on Shoko's squad, and once more the women monitoring the cameras put out a call for us to head to the school. I was starting to feel like an Ofsted inspector. The brief this time was that a boy wanted for a recent Molotov attack had been spotted in the playground, and we needed to bring him in for questioning. Our team played with the same formation as the day before: Shoko and me up front (to make the arrest), Arthur and the driver shoring up the defence (or, more accurately, gorging themselves on the remains of breakfast in the back of the Jeep).

This time I was much more aware of the danger. Every corner we rounded, we did so guns first, since we had no idea who was lying in wait or where we were going. It was eerily quiet as we went round the perimeter of the school; I could just about make out the dull tones of classroom chanting from an upstairs window, but otherwise the only sound was our guns smashing against our bulletproof vests as we ran. We finally found the playground where a football match was taking place. Twenty kids in their mid-teens were hurtling around the concrete pitch in hot pursuit of a worn-out leather ball.

As we edged up to the fence, one or two of the players noticed us, but barely looked twice. Finally, Shoko got word over the radio of which kid we wanted and, after shouting at the children in Arabic, he marched determinedly into their midst and grabbed his quarry. The other students literally turned their backs on the scene without a word, continuing their match, unperturbed that one team was now a player down. Was it really such an everyday occurrence for them that it didn't bother them in the slightest? I tried to imagine what would have happened if a couple of marines had arrested one of my classmates. Then again, I couldn't imagine our headmistress allowing us to throw rocks at passing cars either.

As Shoko manhandled the boy towards the Jeep, one of the boy's teachers struggled to catch up with us, shouting something indecipherable in Arabic. (Actually, everything in Arabic was indecipherable to me. All I could say was "Stop or I'll shoot", "Give me your ID" and "Lift up your shirt" - the sum total of the army's language training.) She pleaded with Shoko, who didn't like being interrupted in the middle of his "mission". Eventually the camera crew told us to let the boy go since he was too young to hold overnight and it would have been more trouble than it was worth to have to return him to the village at sundown.

As we walked back to the jeep, Shoko turned to me and said, "Did you see that? I swear, the little fucker was about to start crying."

"Yeah, Shoko - he's barely 13 and staring down the barrels of two semi-automatics," I said, surprised at the look on my commander's face. Perhaps, growing up a dark-skinned Yemenite surrounded by Ashkenazis (European Jews), he'd had rough times - now he was getting his moment in the sun.

It was raiding the house near Tulkarm that was the last straw for me; looking into the eyes of the children as we screamed at their father and wrested from him command of his own house. That was when it dawned on me what the effect of our actions would be - the next generation were guaranteed to end up hating us when all they saw was us herding them like cattle.

There was another episode, too, a few days later, when our unit was called upon to bolster the forces massed in Homesh, a West Bank settlement scheduled for evacuation during the disengagement. Despite the threats of the settlers that they would fight tooth and nail to defend their homes, our commanders decided that we would ignore their words, down tools, and deal with them without our weapons to protect us. This was, they said, to douse the tension between the two camps; it was a far cry from the way we dealt with Palestinians who made similar threats. I tackled the platoon commander: if this softly-softly approach was the best for one group of "enemies", why would it not be similarly effective in calming hostilities with the local Palestinians?

The Palestinians, he said, were a different kettle of fish entirely, for whom kid-glove treatment would be out of the question. In the event, the settlers attacked and wounded dozens of soldiers, but the incidents were brushed under the carpet by the authorities, who were keen to paint them as "peaceful protesters", in contrast with their ever-violent, ever-aggressive Palestinian counterparts.

The more I banged my anti-occupation drum, the more I was confronted with the accusation that "you don't know what you're talking about - you haven't been in the country long enough to realise how much they hate us". But I believed 15 months in a combat unit more than qualified me to counter that claim.

In order to be taken seriously in this country, you have to jump through hoops to prove you know what you are talking about, and also show that you are prepared to do your bit for the society in which you live. But doing your bit for society didn't have to mean donning combat boots and marauding the West Bank, making Palestinians' lives a misery - this was a view shared by ever-increasing numbers of ex-combat soldiers in Israel. A study by Haifa University concluded that "over the course of their military service, combat soldiers become less rightwing, adopt more dove-ish political views and are more open to compromise on security matters".

It was easy for the armchair warriors to urge Israel on to ever more combative lengths. Experiencing first-hand the unpleasantness of occupation - and carrying out the orders - opened our eyes to the truth of what was happening more than a lifetime of blindly cheering on the IDF from the sidelines ever could.