Morality is for wimps

I noticed recently that I had been dropped from the link list of a blog I read on a fairly regular basis. I assume, based on other evidence, that this was in reaction to some posts sharply critical of Israel which I had put up shortly before. I regret the loss of the link (and I still read the other blog) but the truth is, I don't see how Israel can continue to claim any significant moral superiority in the face of cases such as this one. It involved a 13-year old girl named Iman al-Hams and occurred near the southern border town of Rafah on October 6. This report is from The Independent (UK) for this past Wednesday:

Israeli soldiers continued firing at a Palestinian girl killed in Gaza last month well after she had been identified as a frightened child, a military communications tape has revealed. ...

It shows that troops firing with light weapons and machine guns on a figure moving in a "no entry zone" close to an army outpost near the border with Egypt had swiftly discovered that she was a girl.

In the recorded exchanges someone in the operations room asks: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?" The observation post, housed in a watchtower, replies: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastwards, a girl of about 10. She's behind the embankment, scared to death." ...

The tape records the commander as telling his men, after firing at the girl with an automatic weapon and declaring he has "confirmed" the killing: "Anyone who's mobile, moving in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

Now, in fairness, I will say that the commander who "confirmed" the murder is being prosecuted for "exceeding his authority." But not, however, for murder or even manslaughter since it supposedly couldn't be proved that the two shots he put into the wounded and possibly still alive girl were what actually killed her. Which means whoever did actually fire the fatal shot(s), whoever it was, will walk.

He's also charged with obstruction of justice because he lied to cover himself: He told senior commanders

that he came under fire from Palestinian gunmen 300 yards away as he approached the girl and shot at the ground to deter the fire.

The point here is that version was accepted uncritically by those commanders until soldiers present at the incident went to the press to complain.

Even more the point is that this is not an isolated incident at the border stations. While shooting terrified 13-year old girls at point-blank range is, happily, still unusual, the daily violence, degradation, and humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints has become part of the routine.

The Christian Peacemaker Teams have seen it. Consider this report from December 13, 2003:

The taxi fills up in Hebron and starts for Jerusalem. At the Etzion checkpoint, CPTer Greg Rollins introduced me to my seatmate - a Palestinian professor of molecular biology who is supervising a group of graduate students working in a genetic engineering lab at Hebrew University.

He translated for us the parts of the conversation that we couldn't understand at the next checkpoint. In the initial questioning at the checkpoint, the Israeli soldier asked our driver for the new newspaper on the dashboard. The driver refused, so the soldier said, "OK, then pull over there to the side and wait."

After about ten minutes, our driver noticed a ranking police officer. Our driver told him, "Those soldiers are making me wait here because I wouldn't give them my newspaper." The officer called the two soldiers and came to our van. In front of the soldiers, the officer began his lecture to our driver: "If a soldier asks you for your paper, you give it to him. If he asks you for your undershorts, you give them to him, then claim for them later. At the checkpoint, the soldier is God, and anything he says to you, you obey. Now, give him the newspaper. OK, now you sit here till he's ready to talk to you." ...

After a few minutes, the soldiers gave the paper back. Then they came around to the side door, opened it, and asked for everyone's ID. At that point, as our passports came forward with the Palestinians' IDs, the soldiers realized that they had two Canadians and two US citizens in the van along with the Palestinians. ...

"Richard Meyer?" I climbed out. "I have an appointment in twenty minutes at the US Consulate," I said to the soldier. "What should I tell them about why we are late?"

"Why didn't you come out right away when I called?" "You called for the Canadians first. I came when you called my name."

Then the soldiers had a short conversation with each other while they looked at Kristin Anderson's passport: "What can we do to get this pretty face out of the van?"

"Ask for her visa."

"But her visa's right here."

"OK, OK."

The soldiers gave us our passports back, we climbed back in, and we drove on. Just a twenty-five minute stop.

"It happens like that every other day," the other passengers said.

Israeli grandmothers have seen it - and have been hated for seeing it - as shown in an article in the November-December issue of Mother Jones magazine:

He Huwwara checkpoint just south of Nablus simmers with routine misery on a sweltering August afternoon. A long line of Palestinians wait to enter the West Bank’s largest city as Israeli troops regard them, stone-faced, from behind a barrier of concrete blocks and sandbags. The troops let the women and children through, but send those Palestinians who've not been granted travel permits - almost all young men - to a fenced-off detention area topped by a corrugated iron roof. The jora, or pit, is a West Bank purgatory: a pen where Palestinians often languish for hours until they have been cleared by Israel’s internal security arm, the Shin Bet. ...

Suddenly, two middle-aged Israeli women walk past the barricade, attracting a mix of curious and hostile glances from the soldiers. Wearing floppy sun hats, khakis, and tennis shoes, Menucha Moravitz, 54, and Roni Klein, 55, look more suited to brunch at a beachfront café in fashionable north Tel Aviv than to this dust-choked bottleneck deep inside the West Bank. ... "This is absurd," Moravitz says. "The soldiers have a list of wanted men, but they don't even bother to check it. It's easier to put young men in the holding pen for hours and deal with them when they get around to it." ...

[A]s conditions in the occupied territories have deteriorated, more and more women like Moravitz ... are joining the ranks of Machsom (Checkpoint) Watch. Founded in 2001 by three veteran women peace activists, the group's volunteer monitors now number more than 400, and their meticulously detailed reports of checkpoint abuses - published daily on its website - have become required reading for both the media and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). ...

Machsom Watch has exposed a pattern of abuses at the checkpoints that the group says feeds the rage that leads to the terrorism they're supposed to prevent. In late July, for example, a 26-year-old university student named Muhammad Cana'an was kicked, beaten, and shot in the arm by an Israeli soldier, apparently without provocation, at a checkpoint near Nablus. ... Two days later, several Machsom Watch women near Qalandiya checkpoint outside Ramallah reported that troops had stoned and smashed the windows of a Palestinian taxi. The army, under pressure from the group, imprisoned two of the soldiers - one for 56 days, the other for 42. ...

Even the IDF brass has come to regard Machsom Watch with grudging acceptance. ...

Not everyone in Israel speaks of Machsom Watch so evenhandedly. Nadia Metar, cochair of the Women in Green, an extreme right-wing group, says that Machsom Watch is a group of "fifth columnists who collaborate with the Arab enemy." Female Jewish settlers are mounting a campaign of harassment of Machsom Watch volunteers at the checkpoints. Monitors have been slapped, punched, and threatened in recent months. In each case, they say, Israeli police and soldiers have stood by and done nothing. In May 2004, two male settlers beat up the Arab-Israeli driver of the van that shuttles the women to the checkpoints and knocked out his false teeth. Daniella Weiss, the mayor of Kedumim, part of a cluster of ideologically hardline settlements near Nablus, admits organizing attacks and says she will carry out more. "I make a lot of effort to stop their activities," Weiss said. ... Asked if she was advocating more violence against Machsom Watch, Weiss replied, "Yes, indeed."

Even the soldiers themselves have seen it and some have come to admit to it: Roadblock (or Checkpoint) Syndrome is a book written by Liran Ron Furer, a former staff sergeant in the IDF, which describes his own experiences over three years as a guard at a checkpoint in Gaza. (The book is published only in Israel and available only in Hebrew; permission to translate it into English for international distribution was denied by Israeli authorities.) Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz (Israel) last December 11, had this account of the book and Furer:

He is haunted by images from his three years of military service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. ...

Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier into an animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with him from home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly everything is permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier tests his own limits of violence [sic] impulsiveness on his victims - the Palestinians.

His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the blunt and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the years in which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must remember, were relatively quiet.

There were the routine humiliations: he and his comrades forcing some Palestinians to sing an Israeli pop song; making children clean the checkpoint prior to inspections; "returning" ID cards by throwing them in the air just to make the drivers get out and pick them up off the ground.

The routine degradations: The dwarf who came every day on his wagon who was forced to have his picture taken sitting on his horse, hit, and degraded for a good half-hour. The one who was made to go on all fours and bark like a dog. The one on whose head a soldier urinated because he'd dared to smile at a guard.

The routine punishments: Deliberately keeping Palestinians at the checkpoint for hours to make them lose an entire day's work. "It's the only way they learn," Furer wrote.

The routine brutalities: Having a souvenir picture taken with bloodied, bound Arabs they'd beaten up. Stealing prayer beads and cigarettes. "Miro wanted them to give him their cigarettes, the Arabs didn't want to give so Miro broke someone's hand, and Boaz slashed their tires." ("If a soldier asks you for your paper, you give it to him. ... At the checkpoint, the soldier is God....")

The routine violence: "I ran toward them and punched an Arab right in the face. ... He collapsed on the road."

"I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says. "It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was serving, which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a permanent reality." ...

Furer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of isolated, individual cases. ... "I was considered a moderate soldier - but I fell into the same trap that most soldiers fall into. I was carried away by the possibility of acting in the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and without oversight. ...

"At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more basic impulse than the political views or values that you bring from home. As soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded, the tendency is to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as possible. To satisfy these impulses beyond what the situation requires. Today, I'd call it sadistic impulses ...

"We weren't criminals or especially violent people. ... Something about the situation - being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from oversight - made it justified ... The line of what is forbidden was never precisely drawn. No one was ever punished and they just let us continue."

In the most telling line of the entire piece, Furer says "I was an average soldier." And so he was. An average soldier corrupted, as so many are, by power and hatred. He, at least, has been able to step far enough back to see it for what it was. Others are not so - I was going to say fortunate, but that's not the right word. "Human" fits better, or at least "humane."

"A friend from the army read the book[," Furer said, "]and said that I'm right, that we did bad things, but we were kids. And he said that it's a shame that I took it too hard."

And just how hard should he have taken it when it is still going on every day?

Thanks to Left End of the Dial for the link to The Independent's piece.

Footnote: Such attitudes toward Palestinians are not limited to the IDF; in fact, they're not even the worst of it. Christian Peacemaker Teams are now active in the area around Hebron, walking Palestinian children to school. The children have been subjected to regular harassment and threats from nearby Israeli settlers. Twice in recent months - in September and again in October - CPT members have been physically attacked by settler thugs.

September 29:

The five settlers, dressed in black and wearing masks, came from an outpost of the nearby Ma'on settlement and attacked [Chris] Brown and [Kim] Lamberty with a chain and bat. All of the children escaped injury by running back to their homes.

The settlers pushed Brown to the ground, whipped him with a chain and kicked him in the chest, which punctured his lung. They kicked and beat Lamberty's legs. She is not able to walk because of an injury to her knee and has a broken arm. The settlers also stole Lamberty's waistpack, which held her passport, money and cellular phone.

Lamberty and Brown were taken by ambulance to Soroka hospital in Beer Sheva for treatment. Hebron Team Support person, Rich Meyer, reports that the two CPTers told him they are receiving excellent care from Israeli doctors.

October 9:

[E]ight settlers with wooden sticks and sling shots attacked CPTers Diana Zimmerman and Diane Janzen, an Operation Dove member (name withheld by request), one resident from Tuwani, two residents from Tuba, and two fieldworkers from Amnesty International, Donatella Rovera and Maartje Houbrechts.

When the accompaniment team saw the settlers, dressed in blue jeans, t-shirts, and masks walking toward them they called the police immediately and began walking quickly away from the settlers. Three of the settlers with sling shots ran after the Palestinians hurling stones at them. The other five settlers attacked the accompaniment team. The masked settlers hit Donatello Rovera and Diane Janzen with wooden sticks. Then the settlers beat the Operation Dove member and stole his video camera. The settlers finally ran away when one of the Amnesty International women yelled at the settlers in Hebrew, "The police are coming. You are not going to get away with this."

The police did not arrive until thirty-five minutes after the internationals called for help.

Operation Dove is an Italian Christian organization that undertakes accompaniment work similar to CPT. So many good people of who you never hear trying to do so many good things. Maybe there is hope yet.