<
snip>
"First we saw the destruction of Gaza on TV, then we heard about it from Palestinians, then from journalists (mainly foreign), then from the world's leading human rights organizations. We didn't believe it, or we found ways to justify it, but at any rate, we, the Israeli public, made sure the images and words went in one ear and out the other.
Then in March some of our own boys, IDF soldiers, talked about it - the orders that amounted to "when in doubt, shoot," the sniggering contempt for Palestinian life and property, the exhortations to holy war from IDF rabbis. That seemed to make a small dent in our consciousness for a couple days. But then the IDF conducted its brief, naturally closed investigation, announced that the stories were all hearsay and rumor, there was nothing to the accounts of an old woman and a mother getting shot deliberately, nothing to worry about, you can all go back to sleep now, and, of course, we did.
Now comes "Breaking the Silence," an organization of IDF combat reservists, with the testimonies of 26 soldiers who served in Operation Cast Lead, and the stories are very, very familiar, only they're much more detailed than what we've heard before. Over 100 pages of testimony about the extraordinary scale of destruction ("like in those World War II films where nothing remained"); the vandalism ("In one house we entered I saw guys had defecated in drawers"); the shoot-'em-up spirit ("The atmosphere was not one of fear but rather people too eager to shoot other people"); the elastic definition of "legitimate target" ("suspects, lookouts, people standing on roofs and looking towards our forces, making suspect movements on the roof, bending down, looking out beyond the rim"); the firing of napalm-like white phosphorous in thickly-populated areas; the killings of unarmed civilians in no-go zones; the rabbis' anti-Arab pep talks; and much, much more."
<
snip>
"I don't know what depresses me more - these stories or the IDF's reaction to them. You would think that after reading 100-odd pages of such testimony from 26 veterans of the war - 14 conscripts and 12 reservists - the IDF brass would at least say it was disturbing, troubling, something.
No way.
"How do you know it's true?" an IDF spokesman told me over the phone. The soldiers' identities are hidden, there's no way the army can check their stories. Remember the accounts by the soldiers in the Rabin academy? They all turned out to be false. Breaking the Silence has an "agenda," said the spokesman.
I asked him if the IDF considered these fighters' accounts of the war to have any meaning, any value. The spokesman couldn't think of any; instead, he just repeated what he'd said about how the stories couldn't be checked, how Breaking the Silence was "hiding behind the anonymity" of the soldiers, how it has an agenda.
HE'S RIGHT. Breaking the Silence has an agenda - to tell the truth about what the IDF is doing to the Palestinians, worst of all during Operation Cast Lead. The IDF has an agenda, too - to hide it."
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443820082&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
