. Twilight Zone / `I punched an Arab in
the face'
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz
Thu., November 20, 2003
Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just
routinely get on with his life anymore. 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.
On the verge of completing his studies in the design
program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he
decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the
book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought
it to declined to publish it. The publisher that finally
accepted it (Gevanim) says that the Steimatzky bookstore
chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is determined
to bring book to the public's attention.
"You can adopt the most hard-line political
positions, but no parent would agree to his son becoming
a thief, a criminal or a violent person," says
Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented
this way. The boy himself doesn't portray himself this
way to his family when he returns from the territories.
On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone
who is doing the important work of being a soldier. No
one can be indifferent to the fact that there are many
families in which, in a certain sense, there are already
two generations of criminals. The father went through it
and now the son is going through it and no one talks
about it around the dinner table."
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 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. He describes how he and his comrades
forced some
Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was
really something to see these Arabs singing a Zohar Argov
song, like in a movie"; the emotions the
Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs
really disgust me, especially those that try to toady up
to us - the older ones, who come to the checkpoint with
this smile on their faces"; the reactions they
spurred - "If they really annoy us, we find away to
keep them stuck at the checkpoint for a few hours. They
lose a whole day of work because of it sometimes, but
that's the only way they learn."
He described how they would order children to clean the
checkpoint before inspection time; how a soldier named
Shahar invented a game: "He checks someone's
identity card, and instead of handing it back to him,
just tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing
the Arab have to get out of his car to pick up his
identity card ... It's a game for him and he can pass a
whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf
who came to the checkpoint every day on his wagon:
"They forced him to have his picture taken on the
horse, hit him and degraded him for a good half hour and
let him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint. The
poor guy, he really didn't deserve it"; how they had
a
souvenir picture taken with bloodied, bound Arabs whom
they'd beaten up; how Shahar pissed on the head of an
Arab because the man had the nerve to smile at a soldier;
how Dado forced an Arab to stand on four legs and bark
like a dog; and how they stole 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."
Chilling confession
The most chilling of all the personal confessions:
"I ran toward them and punched an Arab right in the
face. I'd never punched anyone that way. He collapsed on
the road. The officers said that we had to search him for
his papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I
bound them with plastic
handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see
what was in the Jeep. I picked him up from the road.
Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him
up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged
against the trunk and he landed inside. We sat in the
back, stepping on the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty
quietly, just crying softly to himself. His face was
right on my flak jacket and he was bleeding and making a
kind of puddle of blood and saliva, and it disgusted and
angered me, so I grabbed him by the hair and turned his
head to the side. He cried out loud and to get him to
stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back. That
quieted him down for a while and then he started up
again. We concluded that he was either retarded or crazy.
"The company commander informed us over the radio
that we had to bring him to the base. `Good work,
tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the other soldiers were
waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in
with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put
the Arab next to the guard. He didn't stop crying and
someone who understood Arabic said that his hands were
hurting from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers went up
to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled
over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I
kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward
just as I'd expected. They shouted that I was a totally
crazy, and they laughed
... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old
mentally retarded boy."
In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is
living now, Furer, 26, comes across as a thoughtful,
intelligent young man. He grew up in Givatayim, after his
parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a
right-wing activist, but he says that their home was not
political. He wanted to be in a combat unit in the army,
and served in two elite infantry units. He did his entire
army service in the Gaza Strip.
After the army, he traveled to India, like so many
others. "Now I was free. The crazy energies of Goa
and the chakras opened my mind ... You stuck me in this
stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with
your rifles and your marches, you turned me into a
dishrag that didn't think anymore," he wrote from
Goa. But it was only afterward, when he was studying at
Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service
really began to affect him.
"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. I started to feel very uncomfortable
with the fact that such a loaded subject was hardly
mentioned at all in public. People listened to the victim
and they listened to the politicians, but this voice that
says: I did this, we did things that were wrong - crimes,
actually - that's a voice I didn't hear. The reason it
wasn't being heard was a combination of repression - just
as I repressed it and ignored it - and of deep feelings
of guilt.
"As soon as you get away from army service, the
political and media reality around you is not ready to
hear this voice. I remember that I was surprised that no
soldier had gone public with this yet. It all somehow
dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of
settlement in the territories, about the occupation - for
or against - and nothing connected to the routine of
maintaining the occupation appeared in the media or in
art."
Not an individual case
Furer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a
collection of isolated, individual cases. That's why he
deleted a lot of personal details from the original
manuscript, in order to underscore the general nature of
what he describes. "During my army service, I
believed that I was atypical, because I came from a
background of art and creativity. 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.
You're tense about it at first, but as you get more
comfortable at the checkpoint over time, the behavior
becomes more natural. People gradually test the limits of
their behavior toward the Palestinians. It gradually
becomes coarser and coarser.
"The more confident I became with the situation, as
soon as we reached the conclusion - each one at his own
stage - that we are the rulers, we are the strong ones,
and when we felt our power, each one started to stretch
the limits more and more, in accordance with his
personality. As soon as serving at the checkpoint became
routine, all kinds of deviant behavior became normal. It
started with `souvenir collecting': We'd confiscate
prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't
stop. It became normative behavior.
"After that came the power games. We got the message
from above that we were to project seriousness and
deterrence to the Arabs. Physical violence also became
normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian who
didn't follow the `proper code of behavior' at the
checkpoint. Anyone we thought wasn't polite enough to us
or tried to act smart - was severely punished. It was
deliberate harassment on the most trivial pretexts.
"During my army service, there wasn't a single
incident that made us understand, or made our commanders
interfere. No one talked about what was permitted and
what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In
retrospect, the biggest source of guilt feelings for me
didn't happen at the checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif
fence, when we caught the retarded boy. I demonstrated
the most extreme behavior. It was a chance for me to
catch one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a
chance to vent all the pressure and impulses that had
built up in all of us. To lash out the way we wanted to.
We were used to giving slaps, to handcuffing, to a little
kicking, a little beating, and here was a situation in
which it was justified to let go entirely. Also, the
officer who was with us was himself very violent. We gave
the kid a real beating and as soon as we got to the post,
I remember having a great feeling of pride, that I'd been
treated like someone strong. They said, `What a nut you
are, how crazy you are,' which was basically like saying,
`How strong you are.'
"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.
We were a group of good boys, a relatively `high-quality'
group, and for all of us - and we still talk about this
sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to test our
personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we
could be - and we thought of that in the positive sense.
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.
"Today, I feel confident saying that even the most
senior ranks - the brigade commander, the battalion
commander - are aware of the power that soldiers have in
this situation and what they do with it. How could a
commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and
tough his soldiers are, the quieter his sector is? The
more complex picture of the long-term effects of this
violent behavior is something you only become conscious
of when you get away from the checkpoint.
"Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father
we humiliated for the flimsiest of reasons will grow up
to hate anyone who represents what was done to his
father. I definitely have an understanding of their
motives now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that
their response is affected by elements related to their
society - a disregard for human life and a readiness to
sacrifice
lives - but the basic desire to resist, the hatred
itself, the fear - I feel are completely justified and
legitimate, even if it's risky to say so.
"It's impossible to be in such an emotional state
and to go back home on leave and detach yourself from it.
I was very insensitive to the feelings of my girlfriend
at the time. I was an animal, even when I was on leave.
It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the
remnants of the syndrome in India - something about being
in the Third World, among dark-skinned people, brings out
the worst of the `ugly Israeli,' which is as Israeli as
it gets. Or the way you react to a smile: When
Palestinians would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got
tense and construed it as defiance, as chutzpah. When
someone smiled at me in India, I immediately went on the
defensive.
"I was an average soldier," he says. "I
was the joker of the group. Now I see that I was often
the one to take the lead in violent situations. I often
was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up
with all kinds of ideas like letting the air out of
tires. It sounds twisted now, but we really admired
anyone who could beat up some guy who supposedly had it
coming. The officer we admired most was the officer who
fired his weapon at every opportunity. Out of everyone
I've spoken to, I've been left with the most guilt
feelings ... A friend from the army read the book 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."
Damian
Hirst,White Cube Gallery, London 2003
.THE PORNOGRAPHY OF VIOLENCE AND
THE JEWISH WOMAN
http://www.ukar.org/ronen14.shtml
The Law of Return
Jewish women attended the
establishment conference [in Israel] from many countries,
including Argentina, New Zealand, India, Brazil, Belgium,
South Africa, and the United States. Each woman had
more right to be there than any Palestinian woman born
there, or whose mother was born there, or whose mother's
mother was born there. I found this morally
unbearable. My own visceral recognition was simple:
I don't have a right to this right.
The Law of Return says that any Jew entering the country
can immediately become a citizen; no Jew can be turned
away. This law is the basis for the Jewish state,
its basic principle of identity and purpose. Orthodox
religious parties, with a hefty share of the vote in
recent elections, wanted the definition of
"Jewish" narrowed to exclude converts to
Judaism not converted by Orthodox rabbis, according to
Orthodox precepts.
In Israel, Jewish women are basically - in reality, in
everyday life - governed by Old Testament law. So
much for equality of the sexes. The Orthodox rabbis
make most of the legal decisions that have a direct
impact on the status of women and the quality of women's
lives. They have the final say on all issues of
"personal status," which feminists will
recognize as the famous private sphere in which civilly
subordinate women are traditionally imprisoned. The
Orthodox rabbis decide questions of marriage, adultery,
divorce, birth, death, legitimacy; what rape is; and
whether abortion, battery, and rape in marriage are legal
or illegal.
How did Israel get this way - how did these Orthodox
rabbis get the power over women that they have? How
do we dislodge them, get them off women? Why isn't
there a body of civil law superseding the power of
religious law that gives women real, indisputable rights
of equality and self-determination in this country that
we all helped build? I'm 44; Israel is 42; how the
hell did this happen? What are we going to do about
it now? How did Jewish feminists manage not to
"take a first step" until the end of 1988 - and
then not mention women? The first step didn't
amount to a feminist crawl.
The condition of Jewish
women in Israel is abject.
Where I live [the United States] things aren't too good
for women. It's not unlike Crystal Night all year
long given the rape and battery statistics - which are a
pale shadow of the truth - the incest, the
pornography, the serial murders, the sheer savagery of
the violence against women. But Israel is
shattering. Sisters: we have been building a
country in which women are dog shit, something you scrape
off the bottom of your shoe. We, the "Jewish
feminists." We who only push as far as the
Jewish men here will allow. If feminism is serious,
it fights sex hierarchy and male power and men don't get
to stand on top of you, singly or in clusters, for
forever and a day. And you don't help them build a
country in which women's status gets lower and lower as
the men get bigger and bigger - the men there and the men
here. From what I saw and heard and learned, we have
helped to build a living hell for women, a nice Jewish
hell. Isn't it the same everywhere? Well,
"everywhere"
isn't younger than I am; "everywhere" didn't
start out with the equality of the sexes as a
premise. The low status of women in Israel is not
unique but we are uniquely responsible for it. I
felt disgraced by the way women are treated in Israel,
disgraced and dishonored. I remembered my Hebrew
School principal, the Holocaust survivor, who said I had
to be a Jew first, an American second, and a citizen of
the world, a human being last, or I would have the blood
of Jews on my hands. I've kept quiet a long time
about Israel so as not to have the blood of Jews on my
hands. It
turns out that I am a woman first, second, and last -
they are the same; and I find I do have the blood of Jews
on my hands - the blood of Jewish women in Israel.
Divorce and Battery
In Israel, there are separate religious courts that are
Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Jewish. Essentially, women
from each group are subject to the authority of the most
ancient systems of religious misogyny.
In 1953 a law was passed bringing all Jews under the
jurisdiction of the religious courts for everything
having to do with "personal status." In
the religious courts, women, along with children, the
mentally deficient, the insane, and convicted criminals,
cannot testify. A woman cannot be a witness or,
needless to say, a judge. A woman cannot sign a
document. This could be an obstacle to equality.
Under Jewish law, the husband is the master; the woman
belongs to him, what with being one of his ribs to begin
with; her duty is to have children - preferably with
plenty of physical pain; well, you remember the Old
Testament. You've read the Book. You've seen
the movie. What you haven't done is live it.
In Israel, Jewish women do.
The husband has the sole right to grant a divorce; it is
an unimpeachable right. A woman has no such right
and no recourse. She has to live with an adulterous
husband until he throws her out (after which her
prospects aren't too good); if she commits adultery, he
can just get rid of her (after which her prospects are
worse). She has to live with a batterer until he's
done with her. If she leaves, she will be homeless,
poor, stigmatized, displaced, an outcast, in internal
exile in the Promised Land. If she leaves without
formal permission from the religious courts, she can be
judged a "rebellious wife," an actual legal
category of women in Israel without, of course, any male
analogue. A "rebellious wife" will lose
custody of her children and any rights to financial
support. There are an estimated 10,000 agunot -
"chained women" - whose husbands will not grant
them divorces. Some are prisoners; some are
fugitives; none have basic rights of citizenship or
personhood.
No one knows the extent of the battery. Sisterhood
Is Global says that in 1978 there were approximately
60,000 reported cases of wife-beating; only two men went
to prison. In 1981 I talked with Marcia Freedman, a
former member of the Israeli parliament and a founder of
the first battered-women's shelter in Israel, which I
visited in Haifa. At that time, she thought
wife-beating in Israel occurred with ten times the
statistical frequency we had here [in the United
States]. Recent hearings in parliament concluded
that 100,000 women were being beaten each year in their
own homes.
Well, women get beaten - and beaten to death - here [in
the United States] too, don't they? But the
husband doesn't get so much active help from the state -
not to mention the God of the Jews. And when a
Jewish woman is given a divorce, she has to physically
back out of her husband's presence in the court. It
is an argument for being beaten to death.
A draft of Israel's newly proposed "Fundamental
Human Rights Law" - a contemporary equivalent of our
Bill of Rights - exempts marriage and divorce from all
human-rights guarantees.
Pornography
You have to see it to believe it and even seeing it might
not help. I've been sent it over the years by
feminists in Israel - I had seen it - I didn't really
believe it. Unlike in the United States,
pornography
is not an industry. You find it in mainstream
magazines and advertising. It is mostly about the
Holocaust. In it, Jewish women are sexualized as
Holocaust victims for Jewish men to masturbate over.
Well, would you believe it, even if you saw it?
Israeli women call it "Holocaust
pornography." The themes are fire, gas,
trains, emaciation, death.
In the fashion layout, three women in swimsuits are posed
as if they are looking at and moving away from two men on
motorcycles. The motorcycles, black metal, are
menacingly in the foreground moving toward the
women. The women, fragile and defenseless in their
near nudity, are in the background. Then the women,
now dressed in scanty underwear, are shown running from
the men, with emphasis on thighs, breasts thrust out,
hips highlighted. Their faces look frightened and
frenzied. The men are physically grabbing them.
Then the women, now in new bathing suits, are sprawled on
the ground, apparently dead, with parts of their bodies
severed from them and scattered around as trains bear
down on them. Even as you see a severed arm, a
severed leg, the trains coming toward them, the women are
posed to accentuate the hips and place of entry into the
vaginal area.
Or a man is pouring gasoline into a woman's face.
Or she's posed next to a light fixture that looks like a
shower head.
Or two women, ribs showing, in scanty underwear, are
posed in front of a stone wall, prisonlike, with a fire
extinguisher on one side of them and a blazing open oven
on the other. Their body postures replicate the
body postures of naked concentration camp inmates in
documentary photographs.
Of course, there is also sadism without ethnicity,
outside the trauma of history - you think Jewish men
can't be regular good ol' boys? The cover of the
magazine shows a naked woman spread out, legs open, with
visual emphasis on her big breasts. Nails are
driven through her breasts. Huge pliers are
attached to one nipple. She is surrounded by
hammers, pliers, saws. She has what passes for an
orgasmic expression on her face. The woman is
real. The tools are drawn. The caption reads:
Sex in the Workshop.
The same magazine published all the visual violence
described above. Monitin is a left-liberal slick
monthly for the intelligentsia and upper class. It
has high productions and aesthetic values. Israel's
most distinguished writers and intellectuals publish in
it. Judith Antonelli in The Jewish Advocate
reported that Monitin "contains the most sexually
violent images. Photos abound of women sprawled out
upside-down as if they have just been attacked."
Or, in a magazine for women that is not unlike Ladies'
Home Journal, there is a photograph of a woman tied to a
chair with heavy rope. Her shirt is torn off her
shoulders and upper chest but her arms are tied up
against her so that only the fleshy part of the upper
breasts is exposed. She is wearing pants - they are
wet. A man, fully dressed, standing next to her, is
throwing beer in her face. In the United States,
such photographs of women are found in bondage magazines.
For purists, there is an Israeli pornography magazine.
The issue I saw had a front-page headline that
read: ORGY AT YAD VASHEM. Yad Vashem is the
memorial in Jerusalem to the victims of the
Holocaust. Under the headline, there was a
photograph of a man sexually entangled with several
women.
What does this mean - other than that if you are a Jewish
woman you don't run to Israel, you run from it?
There is outrage on the part of women at the Holocaust
pornography - a deep, ongoing shock; but little
understanding. For me, too. Having seen it
here [copies mailed to the United States], having tried
to absorb it, then seeing stacks of it at the institute
[in Israel], I felt numb and upset. Here I had
slides; in Israel I saw the whole magazines - the context
in which the photographs were published. These really
were mainstream venues for violent pornography, with a
preponderance of Holocaust pornography. That made
it worse: more real, more incomprehensible. A week
later, I spoke in Tel Aviv about pornography to an
audience that was primarily feminist. One feminist
suggested I had a double standard: didn't all men do
this, not just Israeli men? I said no: in the
United States, Jewish men are not the consumers of
Holocaust pornography; black men aren't the consumers of
plantation pornography. But now I'm not sure.
Do I know that or have I just assumed it? Why do
Israeli men like this? Why do they do it?
They are the ones who do it; women aren't even tokens in
the upper echelons of media, advertising, or publishing -
nor are fugitive Nazis with new identities. I think
feminists in Israel must make this why an essential
question. Either the answer will tell us something
new about the sexuality of men everywhere or it will tell
us something special about the sexuality of men who go
from victim to victimizer. How has the Holocaust
been sexualized for Israeli men and what does this have
to do with sexualized violence against women in Israel;
what does it have to do with this great, dynamic pushing
of women lower and lower? Are Jewish women going to
be destroyed again by Nazis, this time with Israeli men
as their surrogates? Is the sexuality of Israeli
men shaped by the Holocaust? Does it make them
come?
I don't know if Israeli men are different from other men
by virtue of using the Holocaust against Jewish women,
for sexual excitement. I do know that the use of
Holocaust sex is unbearably traumatic for Jewish women,
its place in the Israeli mainstream itself a form of
sadism. I also know that as long as the Holocaust
pornography exists only male Jews are different from
those pitiful creatures on the trains, in the
camps. Jewish women are the same. How, then,
does Israel save us?
All the Other Good Things
Of course, Israel has all the other good things boys do
to girls: rape, incest, prostitution. Sexual
harassment in public places, on the streets, is
pervasive, aggressive, and sexually explicit. Every
woman I talked with who had come to Israel from some
other place brought up her rage at being propositioned on
the street, at bus stops, in taxis, by men who wanted to
fuck and said so. The men were Jewish and
Arab. At the same time, in Jerusalem, Orthodox men
throw stones at women who don't have their arms
covered. Palestinian boys who throw stones at
Israeli soldiers are shot with bullets, rubber-coated or
not. Stone throwing at women by Orthodox men is
considered trivial, not real assault. Somehow, it's
their right. Well, what isn't?
In Tel Aviv before my lecture, I talked with an Israeli
soldier, maybe 19, part of the occupying army
in the West Bank. He was home for Sabbath.
His mother, a feminist, generously opened her home to me.
The mother and son were observant; the father was a
secular liberal. I was with the best friend of the
mother, who had organized the lecture. Both women
were exceptionally gentle people, soft-spoken and
giving.
I asked the son about something that had been described
to me: Israeli soldiers go into Palestinian
villages and spread garbage, broken glass, rocks, in the
streets and make the women clean up the dangerous rubble
bare-handed, without tools. I thought the son would
deny it or say such a thing was an aberration. Instead,
he argued that it had nothing to do with feminism.
In arguing, he revealed that this kind of aggression is
common; he had clearly seen it or done it many
times. His mother's head sank; she didn't look up
again until the end.
He said the Arabs deserved being shot; they were throwing
stones at Israeli soldiers; I wasn't there, I didn't
know, and what did it have to do with feminism
anyway? I said that Orthodox men were throwing
stones at women in Jerusalem because the women's arms
weren't covered down to the wrist. He said it was
ridiculous to compare the two. I said the only
difference I could see was that the women didn't carry
rifles or have any right to shoot the men. He said
it wasn't the same. I asked him to tell me what the
difference was. Wasn't a stone a stone - for a
woman too? Weren't we flesh; didn't we bleed; couldn't we
be killed by a stone? Were Israeli soldiers really
more fragile than women with bare arms? Okay, he
said, you do have a right to shoot them; but then you
have to stand trial the same way we do if we kill
Arabs. I said they didn't have to stand
trial. His mother raised her head to say there were
rules, strict rules, for the soldiers, really there were,
and she wasn't ashamed of her son. "We are not
ashamed," she said, imploring her husband, who said
nothing. "We are not ashamed of him."
Palestinian women came out of the audience to give
first-person testimony about what the Occupation was
doing to them. They especially spoke about the
brutality of the Israeli soldiers. They talked
about being humiliated, being forcibly detained, being
trespassed on, being threatened. They spoke about
themselves and about women. For Palestinian women,
the Occupation is a police state and the Israeli secret
police are a constant danger; there is no "safe
space." I already knew that I had Palestinian
blood on my hands. What I found out in Israel is
that it isn't any easier to wash off than Jewish blood -
and that it is also female.
In Israel, there are the occupied and the occupied:
Palestinians and women. In the Israel I
saw,Palestinians will be freer sooner.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Excerpts from Andrea Dworkin, Israel: Whose Country Is
It Anyway? (Part 2 of 2), the complete Part 2 of the
article being available online at
www.igc.org/Womensnet/dworkin/IsraelII.html, and from
which Part 1 can be accessed by link.
New Profile
Movement for the Civil-ization of Israeli Society calls attention to apparent
mis-information in the “Kolboteq” TV program
(to be aired Thursday, November 27, at 8.30 pm).
Our response, sent to the program,
is as follows:
“Our request to allow a New Profile
representative to comment on the program on the set was
rejected. Therefore, the following response was worded
without our viewing the program and it refers exclusively
to a brief fax sent to New Profile.
New Profile's goals are the
de-militarization of society in Israel and the
promotion of democratic civic norms. In our view,
militarism and the occupation amount to the destruction
of our society. We are proud to have young men and women
turn to us as they strive to realize their fundamental
rights to freedom of conscience and to livelihood
and abode, even if they live in a state that tends to
sanctify the duty to military service.
Freedom of conscience is one of the
fundamental principles of our democratic system, and
Israeli law recognizes the right of conscientious
objectors to act in accordance with their conscience. The
state also recognizes medical, mental and economic
grounds as justifications for exemptions from military
service. These are granted by law after professional
examinations. Israeli legislators did not intend the duty
to serve to be fulfilled at the price of moral
oppression, of suicide, mental damages, or severe
economic damage.
Among the many activities of New Profile,
the movement also provides information and aid on the
existing legal channels for exemption from the army. Many
candidates for military service are unaware of their
legal rights as regards exemptions from the military.
Therefore, New Profile has taken upon itself a vital
public role.
The movement takes action on behalf of
conscientious objectors who have been imprisoned by
military authorities for periods of a year
and more, following their choice to realize the right to
freedom of thought and conscience. We offer support and
aid to young people who are punished for their poverty
and imprisoned for working to support their families
instead of serving in the army.
New Profile operates within the law and
expects anyone who receives its counseling to act in a
similar manner. If ‘Kolboteq’ has portrayed us
as a subversive group with dishonest dealings,
then it is both mistaken and knowingly spreading
disinformation, in an attempt to hinder young people from
realizing basic rights. Today, roughly half the
conscription-age citizens of Israel do not serve in the
army. This is a signal that civic society in Israel
is fed up with military rule.
Apparently, ‘Kolboteq’ has
had to resort to hidden cameras to create a sensation and
generate a misleading image of shady clandestine
actions. In reality, the door is open – New
Profile’s work meetings are open to all. We operate
openly in the public sphere and have given many media
interviews in a loud, clear voice.
There is clearly no factual basis
for “Kolboteq’s” claims that New Profile
members, as it were, “counsel … candidates for
service how to evade serving in the army …
explain various ways such as going to the conscience
committee (even when the motive is not conscientious),
and also how to approach the army psychologist (even when
the candidate has no mental problems) … [and] that
the members provide conscripts with ‘tips’ on
how to avoid service by conducting various workshops on
‘exemptions from the IDF.’”
New Profile – POB 3454, Ramat
HaSharon 47100, Israel E-mail: mailto:info@newprofile.org
Voice box: ++972-(0)3-516-01-19
Website: http://www.newprofile.org/
..Press Release
28 November 2003
..SOMEONE WHO VIEWED THE PROGRAMME :
False Allegations, Illegal Methods and Fabricated Scenes
in the "Kolboteq" TV Program about New Profile
Broadcast Last Night
The New Profile Movement acts legally and legitimately to
demilitarize Israeli society. Among other things, New
Profile assists young women and men whose legal rights
are disregarded by the military. The movement openly
provides information about these rights and about similar
Processes that other people underwent in the past. New
Profile is a political movement serving an important
public interest. It acts openly and transparently.
On the other hand, it appears that the producers of
"Kolboteq" take the liberty of employing
illegal methods in their work.
- A researcher for the program, Ifat Gliek, offered bribe
money to a lawyer active in New Profile, so that he would
sign a false affidavit on her behalf (her offer was, of
course, turned down). Attempted bribery is a criminal
offence.
- The editors of the program have fabricated a scene in
which a search for the contact details of a psychologist
are made on New Profile's website. There neither is, nor
ever was, any such list on our site.
- Things said by members of New Profile were
manipulatively edited so that our actions could be
represented as illegal.
- Kolboteq's candid camera has "exposed" a
movement acting in broad daylight, whose meetings are
open to the public.
The right of all persons, whose conscience, state of
health or any other factor prohibits them from serving in
the army, to refuse to perform such service is a basic
right enshrined in law. Among other actions we perform as
a political movement, we provide information about the
various avenues through which this right can be
practiced. We thus address a vital and legitimate need.
Many times we are approached by young people in a state
of severe mental distress, and in such situations our
work literally saves lives.
The movement of objection to and abstention from military
service in Israel is of considerable political
importance. Our society is led by generals to war time
and time again, but more than half of those required to
perform military service by law vote with their feet.
According to recent data, only some 45% of all Israeli
citizens aged 18-21 complete regular military service as
required by law. The New Profile Movement has made it one
of its aims to become the voice of this quiet majority -
of those not serving in the army. The
"Kolboteq" program broadcast last night was an
attempt to silence this voice and to discredit the entire
public of those who refuse or abstain from military
service. This attempt cannot but fail.
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