Gideon Levy has today excellently responded to Aluf Benn’s horrendous self-revelation. I thanked Levy. Had been thinking of writing an op-ed or at least a letter on the subject. But Levy made that unnecessary. His response is the first of the 3 items below.
The 2nd item shows how even in a Druze village attempts are made to militarize education .
The 3rd and final item reports that building is going on all through the West Bank. Nothing unexpected, nor are the shootings. A solution is unlikely to emerge from the meetings going on now in Washington. But as bds grows, and as more Jews shun Israel, we should begin to see a glimmer of the light at the end of the tunnel.
Pfc. Aluf Benn spent his years in the army in the Military Police in Lebanon. Yesterday, with commendable courage, he revealed his military routines in these pages (“When I was Eden Abergil”). He handcuffed and blindfolded people countless times and led many detainees to their cages. He saw detainees eating like dogs, as he put it – crouching with their hands tied behind their backs – and smelled their sweat and urine.
Benn tried to argue that everyone did this, thousands of soldiers of the occupation army for generations, and that is why he was not shocked by the acts of soldier Eden Abergil. That is a twisted but frightingly banal moral explanation: Everyone does it, so it’s okay. I never saw aberrations, Benn wrote, immediately after describing the detainees’ horrendous doglike meal. The occupation did not corrupt me, he added later, without batting an eyelash.
Well then, my excellent editor and good friend, Aluf Benn, your article is unequivocal proof of how much you have been corrupted after all – and, more seriously, how unaware of it you are. You didn’t know and didn’t ask who the prisoners were and why they were detained that way. Even their crouching to eat in handcuffs was deemed by you, a soldier who read Uri Avnery in his youth, to be normal, not a monstrous moral aberration. But really, what can you expect from a young brainwashed soldier?
The problem is that even today, with mature hindsight, you still don’t consider this an aberration. Why? Just because everybody did it.
The occupation did not turn us into lawless criminals, you write with a pure heart. Really? You handcuffed thousands of people for no reason, without trial, in humiliating conditions, causing them pain that made them scream, according to your testimony. Is this not a loss of humanity?
You didn’t return home to riot in the streets and abuse innocent people, you write, and that’s all very well. But you were silent. You were a complete accomplice to the crime, and you don’t even have a guilty conscience.
Try to think for a moment about the thousands of detainees that you handcuffed, humiliated and tortured. Think about their lives since then, the traumas and scars they carry, the hatred you planted in them. Now think about yourself, the soldier who has matured, become a family man and a respected columnist, a liberal editor to the bone, with independent and enlightened opinions. Could it be that you are blinder today than you were in your youth?
So that’s what everybody did. You have made an important contribution to Breaking the Silence, providing proof of what the occupation does to the occupier, who doesn’t even notice the ugly hump on his back anymore. The occupier you described is a grave development. An occupier who feels so good, so at peace with his past actions, is in need of profound self-examination.
“When I was Eden Abergil” is an important article. It honestly exposes what most of us don’t want to admit. It can’t be called false propaganda, and no one would dare accuse its author of being an anti-Semite. He was a dedicated soldier in the defense forces that committed (and still commit) such criminal deeds.
But the lesson Benn took away from his military service is perhaps the most chilling of all: It is better to be the one taking the prisoner, not the prisoner. It is better to be the one placing the handcuffs, not the handcuffed. It is better to guard the detainee and then go to the dining room than to eat crouching, hands cuffed, in a stinking hall. This is the binary world of the former Israeli soldier: either a brutal soldier, or his victim.
And what about the third possibility, which is neither one nor the other? The world has plenty of these – neither torturers not torture victims, neither occupiers nor the occupied. But they have been entirely erased from the narrow and frighteningly distorted image of the world that Israel plants in its soldiers’ minds.
Benn and his fellow soldiers just wanted to be on the strong side, and to hell with being on the just side. But those who forced people to eat like animals are not the strong side. Even the mighty, who once read the leftist Haolam Hazeh and now edits the op-ed page of Haaretz, has fallen.
Pfc. Benn certainly did not deserve a medal for his army service. Years later, he doesn’t even understand what was wrong with it.
The families of the Arab-Druze students at the ONLY high school in the Beit Jann village in Israel will start their fight on Wednesday Sept. 1 2010 “a battle” against the militarization of their school and children by the Israeli Education Ministry. The inhabitants of Beit Jann suffer under harsh discrimination in the civil rights, social, economical, and financial development of their town when compared to the jewish squatter colonies, towns and cities which were established nearby on the land of Arab since 1948.
Beit Jann is a Druze village on Mt. Meron, in northern Israel. At 940 meters above sea level. Beit Jann is one of the highest inhabited locations in the country. In 2007, the population was 10,300.
Under these hard conditions of discrimination and inequality in their civil rights which the Arab inhabitants of Beit Jann live, Israel intends to open a military air force class in the village and force the students who choose to learn physics, electronics and scientific subjects to enroll in the class of the Israeli Air Force. It is compulsory for every student to go to school wearing military uniform and to stand in the morning singing Israeli military songs and raising the Israeli flag.
During a telephone interview with Mohand Naffa, Secretary-General of the Communist Party and an Arab leader he said that the Israeli intelligence is behind the management of the Beit Jann school conflict and the council of the village, who are collaborating with the aim of destroying the Arab identity and community sense of the village inhabitants. He added that the people of the village will face this Zionist project which targets their children and their national identity. Naffa added that the village of Beit Jann is the only one among many Arab villages which is always victim of injustice from the Israeli government, and that the people there have never received necessary services and facilities like other villages.
On Saturday the members of the town youth and elders held a meeting in order to announce their strong rejection of the Israeli military project at this Arab school. The military project was approved behind the students and their families back by the director of the school Ali Slalha and the President of the council of Beit Jann, Baian Kaplan, a “retired” IDF colonel.
The organizers of the meeting stated that their meeting was held to respond to the draft of the air force class, what means to implicitly create a military base in the comprehensive school, the ONLY school in the village of Beit Jann. The project aims to consolidate military education in our student’s mentality, and thus paved the way for institutional malignant aims to recruit our Arab girls from Druze and integrating them into the Israeli military institutions.
Sheikh Yusuf Slalha, a well-known and respected person in Beit Jann, stated during the meeting that the idea of opening a military air force class was rejected in full by all the village elders and the families of the students who signed the petition as a position paper of a unified political body in Beit Jann. He added that wearing military uniforms in the school “does not strengthen our students understanding or bringing us equality with the jewish colonies surrounding us, but it will cause great harm to our identity and our children as part of the Arab community”. He added: “however, on Wednesday Sept.1 2010, the village inhabitants, the youth and the elders in Beit Jann will hold a sit-in at the entrance to the school and prevent the opening of the military air force class in the morning”.
The speakers sent their statements to the president of the local council in Beit Jann, Baian Kaplan, and urged him to reverse his decision; they said that Kaplan is not allowed to decide on such sensitive and crucial issues on behalf of all the residents of the village. Kaplan was a former IDF colonel and he served in the IDF military occupation in the West Bank. He was disowned by his relatives, some of whom choose being jailed instead of serving with IDF. Last year, a bomb was left at the entrance of the house of Baian Kaplan. The bomb caused damage to the entrance of the house and the car which was parked in the yard.
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Haaretz Thursday,
September 02, 2010
Settlers defy peace talks with new construction across West Bank
Yesha council says settlers will start building in at least 80 settlements, breaking a government freeze that ends on September 26.
Hours before peace talks were set to begin in Washington, Jewish settlers defiantly announced plans on Thursday to launch new construction in their West Bank enclaves in a test of strength with Palestinian Islamists.
Naftali Bennett, director of the settlers’ Yesha council, said settlers would begin building homes and public structures in at least 80 settlements, breaking a partial government freeze on building that ends on September 26.
“The idea is that de facto it (the freeze) is over,” Bennett said, criticizing the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks as aiming for a “phony peace” and rejecting Palestinian demands for a halt to settlement building on land they want for a state.
“Once they understand Israelis are here to stay and only growing stronger day by day, they will give up,” Bennett said.
The settlers, who have threatened to depose Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he does not let them resume building after September 26, ended the freeze unilaterally on Wednesday, the day after gunmen killed four settlers in the occupied West Bank.
Pro-settler parties are a majority in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition and a number of cabinet ministers have already backed demands to resume settlement construction.
Earth-moving vehicles and cement mixers went to work in several settlements on Wednesday, breaking ground for homes and community centers.
Bennett said settlers had decided to double the number of building starts after news that two Israelis had been wounded in a separate West Bank shooting on Wednesday evening. The Islamist Palestinian group Hamas claimed both attacks.
“The real test between the Palestinians’ radical Islam and Israel is the on-the-ground test of who is stronger and who is here to stay,” Bennett said.
“Once they (Palestinians) understand Israel is here to stay and only growing stronger day by day, they will give up …”
Many settlers oppose the two-state solution backed by the United States and see the West Bank, captured by Israel from Jordan during the Six Day War in 1967, as Israel’s biblical birthright.
Settlement building is a key issue in negotiations starting in Washington later in the day between Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, their first direct talks in nearly two years.
Palestinians have demanded a complete halt to expansion of these enclaves, where about 500,000 Israelis live and which the World Court regards as illegal.
Settlers had been lobbying Netanyahu before the Hamas shootings against extending the partial building freeze in the West Bank, imposed by Netanyahu a year ago as part of the drive to resume direct talks with Abbas.
Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party told Reuters this week an extension of the settlement building freeze might make the Israeli government fall apart and lead to new elections.
But some analysts in Israel say Tuesday’s West Bank attack by Hamas has put Netanyahu in a stronger position to press the Palestinians to improve security before he yields any ground on settlements.
Bennett said he hoped Netanyahu would approve construction of at least 3,000 new homes for West Bank settlers in the coming year.
