A moral crisis in the IDF

Friday, November 26, 2004

The case of Captain R., the company commander who ‘verified the killing’ of 13-year-old Imam Alhams, which was graphically reported this week on Channel 2’s most popular documentary show, Fact, has opened a floodgate of reports about widespread abuse of power by Israelis soldiers towards Palestinian civilians.

A few days after R. was indicted in military court on charges that could add up to at least 10 years in military prison – including charges that he tried to suborn witnesses and obstruct justice during the Military Police investigation – another no less graphic image appeared in the Israeli media: At a packed checkpoint in the West Bank, a soldier made a Palestinian who was carrying a violin to play it for him. The associations for Israelis of a certain age and older were obvious – the Jews in the concentration camps forced to play music for the guards and the prisoners on their way to the gas chambers. Particularly chilling was the way the Palestinian man – who really did not play very well – dared not look the soldier in the eye, knowing that eye contact only would worsen his situation.

For four years, it’s been well-known that Palestinian civilians are routinely killed during operations and that there is widespread abuse of power by soldiers against civilians. When civilians are killed as ‘collateral damage,’ the army and government officials explain that in effect it is the Palestinian’s fault, ‘because the terrorists hide among the civilians.’ Occasionally, in fact very rarely, the army apologizes for particularly tragic incidents. But given the large number of Israeli civilians deliberately killed by suicide bombers, it is difficult to muster much protest on the Israeli side against the ease with which soldiers are allowed to shoot at Palestinian targets. Israelis, at least judging from the tabloid press reporting (not the commentary in the oped pages) preferred a ‘don’t tell us, we don’t want to know’ approach to stories about abuse of power in the territories, while the army insisted on treating each case that did make it into the press ‘rotten apples,’ signifying that abuse is hardly policy, and that it does all it can to root out the problem.

But the case of Captain R. has already revealed to the public that what is wrong in the army goes far beyond the individual case of the captain, who was trained to efficiently ‘neutralize the threat’ and was taught that the threat comes from anyone – even, as he was heard saying on the radio network, ‘a three-year-old’ -- moving in the empty dunes exposed by military bulldozers around the military outpost on the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza.

It’s not merely Capt. R.’s faulty judgment that has gone wrong, it’s an entire system by which the army investigates itself – when it even bothers to investigate cases when Palestinian civilians are killed – and more often than not whitewashes the incident rather than getting to the truth.

During the first intifada, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were two trials of Givati soldiers and officers, charged with deliberately breaking the arms and legs of the able bodied men in a southern West Bank village. Their defense was that then-defense minister Yitzhak Rabin said that he preferred soldiers ‘break bones’ than shoot demonstrators, if necessary. The military tribunals threw out that line of defense, soldiers were punished, a number of officers, including a colonel, were demoted. The cases opened a window for Israelis into what the army was doing in their name in the territories. It did not lead to mass demonstrations against the army – that is practically unthinkable in Israel, where everyone, except Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens are expected to do some form of national service – but it did erode some more of the confidence in Israel’s ability to hold onto the territories. Now, the case of R. is threatening to open a similar window with regard to the second intifada and if it does, it might reveal to an Israeli public already eager to withdraw from Gaza, that the objective circumstances of a soldier’s existence in the Palestinian territories is rife with a kind of moral ambiguity that makes it impossible to prevent cases like R.’s. In short, it is entirely possible that by the end of the trial, R. will be presented to be as much of a victim as little Imam Alhams.