Tohar haNeshek-The Intifada Challenges the Israeli Army's Moral Code
RABINOVICH, ABRAHAM
—Tohar haNeshek Purity of Arms The Intifada Challenges the Israeli Army Moral Code ABRAHAM RABINOVICH As the night patrol made its way through Nablus' empty casbah (marketplace), a cement block...
...We fire only if there is a real danger, but this unit hasn't fired live ammunition yet and I can tell you that it won't...
...This isn't what they are trained for but they understand that at this moment, this mission has top national priority...
...If I had seen this on TV abroad I would say, 'What a cruel army.' We carried out an investigation and established beyond any doubt that the woman had dashed out in the middle of a large demonstration just as the soldier was preparing to fire and that he had not seen her at all...
...I believe it makes them more mature...
...Around 10,000 Palestinians took part in this demonstration against the Israeli occupation...
...thousands have been injured and thousands more jailed...
...In Nablus, G. quickly grasped that he was not involved in a replay of that scenario...
...Say the assailant has run into a crowded grocery store...
...He was on a training exercise with his infantry battalion when the intifada broke out...
...We don't let the troops disperse into alleys without officers...
...No, I don't believe it corrupts...
...Not all officers share G.'s enlightened personal approach or the charisma with which he conveys it to his men...
...But the Palestinians should also be drawing an important lesson for themselves\ They had the idea that Israel has become soft from within, that the country is fundamentally divided between right and left, that it is not prepared to endure hardships over a long time...
...He had been elevated to the post a few months before when his predecessor was killed leading a charge against Palestinian infiltrators on the Lebanese border...
...Rarely have an army's moves been subject to such intensive moral examination by the world...
...They were buoyed by a euphoria sparked by the incident a few days before the uprising began when a young Palestinian crossing the Lebanese border at night on a hang glider shot to death six Israeli soldiers in an army encampment before he was killed...
...The young troops who had to carry out this policy—in the early months, these were entirely conscripts aged 18 to 21—soon found themselves engaged not only in a policing exercise for which they had never been trained but in moral and public relations exercises as well—-with the world's cameras focused on them...
...He half shakes his head and permits himself a smile, sardonic beyond his years...
...Superficially, the situation seemed much worse—the entire population had risen...
...The roads to many of the staging areas where reservists are mustered into their units pass through Israeli Arab areas and could be subject to blockages during the critical hours...
...Lieutenant Colonel G., the battalion commander, ordered his soldiers to gather the local Arab men into the building...
...The military was pleased to leave the long-term political questions raised by the intifada to the politicians...
...This man was white with rage...
...He offered a hypothetical situation: A patrol driving through the crowded heart of Nablus is attacked with a hand grenade...
...Israelis understood this but most of their friends abroad did not...
...friends abroad, particularly the Jews...
...How could I participate in something like this...
...Part of my obligation as a commander is to make sure my soldiers behave according to these values...
...Assemble everybody in one room...
...Thus, the battles against the young rock throwers in Gaza and the West Bank had implications far beyond the question of public order in the territories...
...I felt that I couldn't look at myself in the mirror again...
...The uprising was instinctively understood in Israel not simply to be the political explosion perceived abroad—a subjugated people demonstrating their understandable desire to be free—but a highly dangerous threat to Israel's deterrent posture, with implications beyond the territories...
...But the effectiveness of the rules depends almost entirely on the officers in the field...
...You look for suspects and you make an arrest...
...Regardless of what their personal political opinions might be, the officers and soldiers in the territories are operating under rules of engagement that carefully spell out the need for self-restraint...
...The soldiers tried to absorb these rules amidst a frenzied revolution in which hordes of Palestinians not only hurled rocks at them with intent to maim, but blocked major roads, filled the skyline with the defiant black smoke of burning tires, and showered the soldiers with abuse about their manliness, the moral state of their mothers and the fate of their sisters when the Arab armies march into Tel Aviv...
...With the intifada, the Palestinians challenged this view head-on...
...It was a terrible noise...
...When we entered the village, the • residents broke up and began throwing cement blocks from the roofs...
...A ranking Israeli officer, reflecting a widely held opinion in Israel, said to a journalist a few weeks after the uprising began, "They're doing just what we would be doing in their place...
...This meant to G. that his own troops' reaction had to be restrained...
...The Arab youths hurling rocks at Israeli troops, trying to snatch guns away from patrolling soldiers and leaping at them from alleys with knives, had lost their sense of fear...
...The army's answer during the intifada has remained "yes...
...Our society is sustained by certain values which set us apart in this region," he says...
...They have seen on television Israeli soldiers striking children and deliberately trying to break the arms of Arab youths...
...I made sure none of my men did that...
...I must say this even surprised me, encouraged me...
...But he does not agree with those who maintain that the experience is corrupting, particularly for young troops...
...Political opinions among the soldiers are being shifted by the uprising to both extremes...
...I felt ourselves hardening from day to day...
...But does the concept of self-restraint and sparing innocents remain valid in an ongoing confrontation with an entire civilian population in which there are virtually no "innocents...
...Within a few weeks of the beginning of the intifada, Molotov cocktails were being thrown at Israeli vehicles in the heart of the country and massive demonstrations were being held by Israeli Arabs in support of their brethren in the territories...
...Before moving into Nablus, G. addressed the men about the task before them, touching on tohar haneshek...
...Gis a bearded, kippah-wearmg member ¦ of an Orthodox kibbutz in the Beisan Valley...
...The first night we had to make arrests in a village according to a list drawn up by the security services...
...If Israel's will seemed shaky, the attitude of the Arab world about the feasibility of war could well begin to shift, even if subconsciously...
...The phrase, first used by the pre-1948 military underground, stands for moral standards in war—no massacre of innocents or of prisoners, no looting or vandalism and respect for the humanity of the enemy...
...This time I said to myself, 'Well, what do you expect...
...To the extent that Israel has enjoyed peace with its neighbors over the years, it has been because of its deterrent power...
...Although G. does not go into operational details, it is clear that his unit carries out its mission forcefully—forcefully enough so that its distinctively colored beret is recognized and respected by the Palestinians, and for the regional military command to rely on the unit as an effective troubleshooter...
...Israel's deterrence is based on Arab perception not only of Israel's military might but of its will...
...In the absence of fear on the part of the euphoric Palestinians, ways had to be found to hurt them sufficiently to induce fear...
...I knew from our conversations," said U., "that he was a liberal but, as they say in the States, a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged on the subway...
...With all the clumsiness of a big army chasing after kids, we are showing them that if they choose to hand wrestle, well, we will hand wrestle...
...Our army cannot exist without these values...
...If the government wants to hold on to the territories, then the army will have to be its tool...
...All of the attackers were overcome by force without shooting...
...I wanted to talk to them in the field about how I as a soldier, a Jewish and Israeli soldier, have to operate in this kind of situation...
...Taking to the streets in the scores of thousands, the residents of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem were no longer intimidated by the mere appearance of soldiers debarking from vehicles at the end of the street...
...Even the use of live ammunition, aimed at the legs but often striking higher, had only a temporary effect...
...How to put down the uprising was the most immediate problem...
...I felt ourselves hardening from day to day...
...It conveys a sense of helplessness before a misperception so enormous that it is hopeless to try to understand how it came to be or to try to correct it...
...It had been a no-quarter-given campaign against an armed and determined underground enemy, more than 150 of whom were hunted down and slain...
...They have been shown the spot where four Arabs were partially buried by earth dumped on them by a bulldozer...
...says the visitor...
...Not becoming brutalized—we were never brutal— but it could lead to that or at least to acceptance of excesses that others carry out...
...The burden this distinction places on officers in the field is enormous, acknowledges G. "When we operate against an enemy across the border in Lebanon, things are simple...
...I didn't want to wait until night or the weekend...
...In the popular view, David has become Goliath...
...But he sharpens the dilemma...
...But it doesn't work that way in Nablus...
...It was his last day of reserve duty and he went back to the village that night and scattered pieces of metal with sharp edges on the side streets of the village to give their cars flats in the morning...
...The soldiers know G.'s answer—pursue...
...Unlike G., the ebullient young bachelor officer does not radiate a strong personal moral credo in discussing his mission...
...Rarely have an army's moves been subject to such intensive moral examination by the world...
...Shots in the air quickly ceased to alarm them and tear gas dispersed the crowds only until the gas itself dispersed...
...I spoke about not hurting innocents, about not wantonly damaging cars or other property, about not using violence against someone after he's been captured, about not humiliating...
...This has been shown not to be the case...
...There were 11 incidents where residents tried to stab soldiers...
...If we had gone by the book, we could have legitimately killed them all...
...The soldiers don't ask how much longer this will go on...
...It doesn't say He created the Jew in his image, but man...
...Within a few weeks after the uprising began last December, Israel's image as a plucky, enlightened nation creating a vibrant culture in the midst of enemies had given way in the minds of many to the image of a brutal conqueror...
...The soldiers found themselves confronting not just Palestinian teenagers and young men, but small children, as well as women the age of the soldiers' mothers...
...Although many of the volunteers had held high military rank—some still do—they serve without insignia and are careful not to give orders, only to set an example...
...If we really laid into them [the Arabs], they wouldn't do it again...
...When you touch a nerve, you're going to find them as tough as ever...
...The senior officers never tire of speaking about the danger of [us] becoming a mob, of the fact that we are representatives of the law and the government...
...Beyond this, more than 200 Arabs have died from Israeli bullets...
...We used to be able to rule with a minimum of force and no trouble...
...The] intifada has catalyzed the whole process...
...Tohar haNeshek Purity of Arms The Intifada Challenges the Israeli Army Moral Code ABRAHAM RABINOVICH As the night patrol made its way through Nablus' empty casbah (marketplace), a cement block falling from the darkness hit a soldier squarely on his helmet and he went down unconscious...
...G. believes it necessary to periodically rotate units involved in suppressing the intifada because the accumulation of anger among the soldiers at the Palestinians inevitably erodes the best intentions...
...What has been happening says much about Israel's willpower...
...I think their answers are the correct ones...
...For the health of our future relations, the Palestinians must know this—that their idea of eventually getting rid of Israel is silly...
...It was not just order that had to be restored but Israel's deterrent credibility...
...The effect has been agonizing for Israel's Palestinian demonstrators jeer at Israeli soldiers as the soldiers back off during a Palestinian march in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, on December 21, 1987...
...In the event of war, Israel could no longer be sure that the Israeli Arab population would permit the vital mobilization process, in which the reserves are mobilized within 48 hours, to proceed unhindered as in the past...
...His proudest boast after having spent almost four months in the center of the storm during its most violent period is that his battalion did not kill a single person...
...The next night we did the same thing...
...There are gray areas...
...Then the searching began...
...The youth's heart was pounding at an unnatural rate...
...This happened with our unit...
...It's natural that soldiers in such a circumstance would want to take vengeance— their friend had just been seriously hurt and is still partially paralyzed," said G. "But if you give this sort of thing legitimation once, you'll lose control...
...G. lifted the youth's sweater and put his hand on the Arab's chest...
...Whoever shoots first wins...
...G. scanned the young Arabs among the residents who had been assembled...
...A woman began crying when we arrested her teenage son...
...This was a test of national will, and the ultimate, unspoken stake involved national survival...
...If he had, he wouldn't have fired, despite the stones that were flying...
...I felt terrible...
...Whether or not the Israeli army is the most moral in the world, it probably surpasses any other in the amount of attention it gives to the subject in its training and in its self-image—no small feat for an embattled country...
...Another soldier asks a visitor recently returned from the United States what the image of the Israeli army is like there...
...They understand that victory will go to whoever has the longer breath...
...The soldier who was hit had been carried off still unconscious and his comrades wanted to exact vengeance on the house by smashing furniture and windows...
...As a serving officer, U. refrains from talking politics but his liberal views are soon evident...
...They were poor villagers and they huddled together and tried to protect themselves...
...The grenade misses and the assailant is seen running towards the market place...
...When we left the casbah that day, we passed an open field in the city and I had the entire battalion sit down in a circle...
...They made us realize that there is no such thing as an enlightened occupation...
...But the defense establishment was confronted with major security questions...
...The planes were graded according to how well they followed a complicated series of maneuvers involving sharp directional changes...
...A list of detailed instructions was issued to each soldier spelling out rules of behavior, including when he could open fire with live ammunition—only in a life-threatening situation...
...And in the Lebanon War, despite PLO calls for a strike, the flow of workers to Israel increased and no extra Israeli troops were needed to keep peace in the territories...
...We found large families sleeping together in a room or two...
...He wanted to shoot into the air just to express his anger...
...There is no comparing the intifada to riots in Chicago or violent student demonstrations...
...On a rooftop observation post overlooking the Shatti Refugee Camp at the edge of Gaza, a young soldier obliquely criticizes these restraints...
...You take your weapon off safety, cock it, and anything that appears in front of you, you shoot...
...It is these values which give the society its character...
...This is the background to Defense Minister Rabin's famous exhortation to the troops to "lay into them . . . break their bones...
...In the middle of a riot, if a woman with a baby comes out, any soldier would let her pass even though we know that the Arab youths interpret this as weakness on our part...
...After being pulled out of Nablus to resume our regular training, we were sent one night to a problematic village to arrest 19 people wanted by the security services...
...Or do you pursue, until you're close enough to pinpoint your target...
...The army, to its considerable credit, was flexible enough to accede to this unusual request...
...There are excesses far worse than that, U. notes, but 99 percent are carried out when officers are not around...
...It was not a petty call for retribution but a reflection of grand strategy...
...Some say we have to get the hell out of the territories quick before they ruin us, others say we should put all the Arabs on trucks and send them across the Jordan," says U. "The [political] center doesn't seem to offer any solution that is a real solution...
...Rapidly, the hospitals in the territories filled with Arabs who had broken arms and legs...
...This indeed began to happen swiftly in the Israeli Arab sector...
...For three-quarters of an hour I spoke to them about standards of behavior...
...Never had Israel's power been so openly mocked...
...He offers other solutions, but his bottom line is that if the grenade thrower cannot be weeded out without hurting innocents, the soldiers will have to let him get away...
...The young soldier's response is eloquent though he does not say a word...
...If you take into account the number of soldiers that are out there and the amount and intensity of the contact with the population every day, there are very few excesses...
...We don't put machine guns on jeeps and fire into a crowd like they do in Syria and other countries around here...
...The objective of probably the vast majority, voiced freely by many of them to reporters, was not simply a Palestinian state but the elimination of Israel...
...The battles against the young rock throwers in Gaza and the West Bank have implications far beyond the question of public order in the territories...
...Some weeks after returning to air force duty, U. was assigned as a judge in a navigation contest between Hercules squadrons...
...At 29, S. is one of the youngest battalion commanders in the army...
...In the conquest of East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the Six-Day War and in the war in Lebanon, for instance, there were no rapes, few if any cold-blooded killings and virtually no looting...
...He displays, however, the mindset of a professional officer who has understood his orders and the attitude behind them and is intent on carrying them out as efficiently as possible...
...and when he could use his club— only when rioters use force or resist arrest...
...A few months after the intifada broke out, he organized a group of 10 other desk-bound officers, ranging from lieutenant to colonel, and volunteered their service to the army for a month's intifada duty...
...fi...
...Even if the Palestinians gain their own state in the near future, the intifada will probably remain the purest moment in their national mythos, a period of high purpose and rare unity that a Palestinian state would be hard put to emulate...
...The village was sleeping and it was totally quiet when we began rapping on metal doors with clubs and shouting 'Iftak el bab' [open the door, in Arabic...
...Being here doesn't make them better soldiers or worse soldiers...
...As a junior officer in the early 1970s, he had participated in the rooting-out of terrorist cells in the Gaza Strip under General Ariel Sharon...
...For a poignant moment, the navigator thousands of feet above the ground felt a warm connection to this human reference point, one whose political relevance can still be only dimly perceived...
...Playing policeman to inflamed, rock-throwing mobs, particularly a policeman inhibited in his actions by a strict set of rules, is not much fun...
...That's the way you do it...
...Just be sure you don't hurt people unnecessarily.' The third night it was already routine and when the woman starts to cry you say, 'Oh, God, is that wailing beginning again?' The fourth night you're shouting at the woman, 'UskuC (shut up...
...As the number of Arab casualties rapidly mounted, along with reports of soldiers deviating from the rules of engagement, questions began to be raised publicly about the concept of tohar haneshek, purity of arms...
...We took over the casbah in Nablus easily," says G. "They feared us and we made order there on the first day...
...This is what I teach my children at the kibbutz from the time they are able to read and understand...
...The concept had generally been honored by the Israeli army in its numerous wars, and although sometimes honored in the breach, it has remained the standard that soldiers are taught...
...Soldiers are to beat persons resisting arrest, but how do we define resisting arrest...
...Its rules of engagement are specifically designed to limit bodily harm to the population by a measured series of responses and to avoid vandalism and looting...
...Nevertheless, U.'s intense month as a foot soldier helping suppress a popular uprising has left him curiously optimistic about the prospects for Israelis and Palestinians working out some kind of political solution...
...It is written in the beginning of the Bible that God created man in his image...
...Even the bulk of liberal opinion has found the army's performance not only morally sustainable but, in general, laudable...
...In a future situation they can justify damaging a house by saying 'Remember the time we did it when the battalion commander was there?' " Rarely, if ever, have an army's tactical planning and situational responses been so weighted with moral deliberations as have been those of the Israeli army in dealing with the current Palestinian uprising...
...G. makes it clear that this is not a solution acceptable to him in these circumstances...
...G. kept them firmly in check...
...This view stems from a different perception of the uprising than that held abroad, and from more intimate familiarity with the army's behavior through personal experience or that of relatives or friends serving in the territories...
...Beyond this danger lay an even greater one...
...The sense of national emergency touched off by the uprising led to a surge of such volunteering, particularly on kibbutzim where army veterans, many of them over 50 and no longer subject to reserve duty, offered to serve for up to a month...
...Rubber bullets were tried and proved of limited effectiveness...
...Alarmed by reports of excessive use of force by the troops, they asked to be inserted into units deployed in the territories in order to serve as a leavening force...
...But they were not armed and the terrorist groups among them were wisely refraining from using the arms they were presumed to possess...
...Youths in Gaza, where the uprising began, taunted uncomprehending soldiers with the chant "six to one...
...To Israelis, the situation appears very different...
...There was an incident that received a lot of publicity abroad in which an infant being held by her mother was blinded in an eye by a rubber bullet...
...Another soldier caught a glimpse of a figure on the roof wearing a sweater...
...It is an examination that the Israeli army has failed to pass, at least according to majority world opinion...
...We don't want things to get out of control and for this we need officers on the spot who can exercise judgment...
...Do you take your guns off safety and open fire...
...That's the reason there are so few excesses relatively...
...It had fallen to S., previously deputy commander, to take the battalion to Gaza where it was then charged with securing Gaza city and the troublesome refugee camps alongside it...
...Their reaction is bred into them—partly in their upbringing and in large part by their officers in pre-action briefings...
...Short of shooting them, the only way that worked was physical contact and the use of clubs...
...Under the supervision of their officers, these youths are experiencing something they would never experience elsewhere—a constant confrontation and debate about moral questions...
...It is an examination that the Israeli army has failed to pass, at least according to majority world opinion...
...Take him for questioning...
...One week later they were moved into Nablus, the largest city on the West Bank and often the most violent...
...One day, a reservist sitting next to U. on a jeep passing through an Arab village was painfully hit on the shoulder by a large rock...
...Colonel U. and his group were different in consisting of regulars and in staying together as a platoon, attached to a company of reservists...
...They have seen apartments vandalized by soldiers and houses leveled by bulldozers...
...The scale may seem minuscule—youths with rocks challenging army patrols—but at issue was a psychological attitude with the broadest implications for the Arab-Israeli confrontation...
...My obligation as an enlightened person is to respect all people and their beliefs...
...Many see it as a brutal conqueror using excessive force and beating women and children...
...Not becoming brutalized— we were never brutal—but it could lead to that" As with other units that rotate between active patrol in Lebanon and service in the territories suppressing the intifada, soldiers in the battalion prefer Lebanon duty despite the risks of becoming a battle casualty...
...Soldiers beset with flying rocks cannot be expected to debate comparative morality before deciding whether to wag a finger or shoot...
...Some of the soldiers didn't give a damn and just threw everything around...
...A number of soldiers and officers have been disciplined since the beginning of the uprising for excesses...
...Rules are subject to interpretation but the parameters are narrow...
...If this will were perceived as failing, the whole deterrent posture could begin to unravel...
...It was new to us all," recalls G. "We are trained to fight as an army against an army, not to confront civilians...
...Conventional battle tactics call for throwing in a grenade and then firing inside before entering...
...The route passed over the center of the country and at one point, as U. checked his map against a village well below, which served as a reference point, he suddenly realized that the well was in "his" West Bank village whose crevices he and his colleagues had explored so closely for a month...
...My basic approach is that we are not in a war but in an ongoing struggle and that is a tremendous difference...
...Sensing the power of their own desperation, the Palestinians gave vent to an authentic popular revolution fueled by the deepest instincts of human dignity and national identity...
...Uis an air force colonel, a Hercules ¦ airplane navigator temporarily assigned to ground duty...
...The fact that Israeli Arabs have stayed loyal—in the Yom Kippur War many gave blood for the army and many volunteered to work on kibbutzim—can also be seen as a function of this perception of Israeli power...
...But despite the excesses inevitable in a situation where masses of troops are dealing over a prolonged period with an impassioned civilian uprising, the level of moral awareness in the Israel Defense Forces can be said to be exceptionally high...
...If you do, you're liable to hit 30 or 40 people...
...Commander G. believes the Israelis must rotate the units suppressing the intifada because the soldiers' accumulation of anger erodes their best intentions...
...Several of them wore sweaters and one looked particularly tense...
...Now the Palestinians have made us face for the first time the meaning of being occupiers...
...In his late 30s, he had recently bowed to the army's request that he rejoin the regular army after years in the reserves...
Vol. 13 • December 1988 • No. 9
