For IDF brigade, 'Hebron is like Wild West and army is the law'

[Violet_Crumble]

Shooting Palestinian bystanders; illegally commandeering cars and going on joyrides; torturing a youth by pressing a heater to his face and beating cuffed prisoners on their way to custody. These are only some of the reported cases of abuse for which Israel Defense Forces soldiers serving in the West Bank are currently on trial.

"We've been hit by a tsunami," said the commander of the Kfir Brigade, members of which were recently implicated in a rampage through a West Bank town that left two Palestinians wounded, one of them seriously. Kfir is the largest IDF unit in the West Bank. "I suppose every brigade goes through low and high periods, and right now we're in a low one."

Another officer in the GOC Central Command admitted that "the brigade is in a rough patch." But some officers say that the incident, while lamentable, is not unusual; what is different about this case, they say, is that most units involved in such incidents sweep them under the carpet. In any case, Kfir officials are careful not to call the incident a "moral crisis." They do concede, however, that had they reorganized their unit and made changes to the decision-making process than perhaps the headlines would have been different. Last July, soldiers from the brigade commandeered a local taxi, forcibly removing its passengers. The driver, Mohammed Issa Mahrazeh, was also removed, tied up and blindfolded and returned to the vehicle, where he was held for the duration of the incident. He sustained bruises.

While driving through the town of Dahariya, the soldiers noticed a young man approaching the vehicle. According to the indictment, the officer ordered one of the soldiers to "distance" Badham Samamra, 18, from the car with his weapon. The soldier pointed his weapon out the window of the taxi and shot Samamra. The bullet entered Samara's left shoulder and exited through his chest, causing moderate to serious injuries.

<snip>

"Our legacy is the present and the future and there's nothing that can be done about that. The legacy is being slowly built through traumatic events," a senior officer in the unit said. "Low morale is an explanation but it's not an excuse. It shouldn't happen at all."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/957169.html

[Englander]

1. "Something bad is happening to us"

By Haaretz Editorial

Three years ago, the CBS television network broadcast photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The horrifying pictures led to the trials of eight soldiers, dismissals and a storm of outrage in America. At the trial of one prison guard, who was sentenced to eight years in jail, a psychologist gave his evaluation: that the man was an entirely ordinary person, without any particular violent tendencies, who served as a guard for many years in civilian life but never behaved sadistically toward American prisoners. The situation of occupier and occupied, as opposed to that of citizen versus citizen, causes ordinary people to become violent and lose restraint. At Abu Ghraib, the trial found, there was institutionalized contempt at every level. The prison guards understood that "this is the way to behave here."

Last night, the investigative television program "Fact" broadcast pictures of our own Abu Ghraib affair. It is doubtful whether a country that has grown used to 40 years of occupation, and the stories that accompany it, will be shocked. We have become accustomed to treating the Palestinians as inferior people. Generations come and go, and new soldiers abuse the residents of occupied Hebron in almost the same manner. Stories similar to those broadcast last night were exposed by the Breaking the Silence group three years ago. The saying "occupation corrupts" has become a slogan of the left instead of a warning signal to everyone.

This time, it was regular soldiers in the Kfir Brigade. They exposed their backsides and sexual organs to Palestinians, pressed an electric heater to the face of a young boy, beat young boys senseless, recorded everything on their mobile phones and sent it to their friends. One of their "mischievous acts" was to test how long a Palestinian who was being choked could survive without breathing. When he passed out, the experiment was stopped. The soldiers described activities to "break the routine" that consisted entirely of abuse. It was enough for a boy "to look at us the wrong way" for him to be beaten.

Earlier, at the trial of First Lieutenant Yaakov Gigi, officers spoke of burnout, of "something bad happening to the brigade," of a Wild West, of a moral crisis. The commander of the brigade, Colonel Itai Virov, said "we failed on several parameters." His words reflect a denial of the depth of the failure. This continuing routine, far from the eyes of the commanders, must lead to a series of investigations, and perhaps to dismissals as well. It is unconscionable for the head of the Hebron Brigade, the division commander, the GOC Central Command and even the chief of staff to ignore the ongoing behavior of soldiers in the brigade responsible for routine security in the West Bank. Colonel Virov admitted that there was a conspiracy of silence in the brigade - in other words, a norm of abuse and its concealment. To change norms, one has to shock and be shocked, not be satisfied with a few imprisonments and empty words about a loss of values.

Perfectly ordinary people, as the American psychologist said of the Abu Ghraib abusers, are capable of behaving like monsters when they receive a message from the top that it is permissible to abuse, beat, choke, burn, make people miserable and generally do anything that man's evil genius is capable of inventing to others who are under their control. Something bad is happening to us, they are saying in the Kfir Brigade. That "something" is the occupation.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/957536.html

[bemildred]

2. Not just bad, predictably bad.

You ought to read van Creveld on this subject and then compare and contrast. Here, this one will do:

http://www.counterpunch.org/creveld1116.html

Edit: not you in particular, just saying ...

[Englander]

3. Entirely predictable, like Haaretz say, "occupations corrupt".

[bemildred]

5. Well, the problem is what do you do if you get caught up in a real war?

The "failure" in the Second Lebanon War was no accidental thing, and all the happy talk from ignorant dipshits like Barak mean nothing has or will be changed. I have similar concerns with the US military, which has not fought a real war since Korea (sort of), and has been continuously involved in these nasty little attempts to enforce US hegemony on various 2nd and 3rd world nationalist/independence resistance movements.

[azurnoir]

4. Not a surprise at all

A few months back there was an article in Salon written by Aulf Benn describing how since the first Intifada there had been a concerted effort to eliminate all Palestinians from Israeli life -no contact in an everyday sense and the end result of that very "successful" bid by Israel's right wing. For young Israeli's today who have lived most if not all of their lives under this "protection" Palestinians not to be confused with Israeli Arabs who have slightly better standing with Israeli non Arabs, became the ultimate enemy, the other, not human, not real people and these abuses are the very predictable result of that policy.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/11/26/two_state/