The New York Times reports a story that originated in the Israeli daily, Maariv (this is the online Hebrew-language version of a longer article published in the hard copy edition), that the IDF carried out an "eye for an eye" indiscriminate reprisal in February, 2002 against Palestinian police officers (some unarmed). The Israelis believed that some of the officers might have been complicit in an attack on their own forces that left six IDF troops dead.
The original material in the Maariv report emanated from the Israeli group, Breaking the Silence ("Shovirm Shtika"). Breaking the Silence was founded by former IDF officers who wished to reveal the extent to which the Occupation has debased the ethical and moral standards of Israeli soldiers.
Several soldiers involved in the attacks came to the organization to tell their story. Here is the Times’ paraphrase of the Maariv story:
The interviews in Maariv refer to an attack by Palestinian gunmen on a West Bank outpost on Feb. 19, 2002. Six Israeli soldiers were killed, and their attackers escaped. The Israeli Army said at the time that it believed that two squads of Palestinian gunmen had attacked the soldiers at an Israeli checkpoint at Ein Ariq, west of the Palestinian-controlled city of Ramallah. One squad opened fire on two soldiers on duty at the checkpoint, wounding two men, the army said. At least one gunman burst into the outpost where six other off-duty soldiers were relaxing and killed them, it said.
The retaliation began that same night and continued through the night, according to the soldiers.
In one of the Maariv interviews, a soldier identified as "D" said his commander described their mission: "Six of our soldiers were killed at a checkpoint, and we are going out on a revenge operation. We are going to kill Palestinian policemen at a checkpoint, as blood revenge for the six of our soldiers who were killed."
"An eye for an eye," the soldier was quoted as saying in Maariv.
He said that he and other soldiers waited in ambush for Palestinian policemen suspected of having operated the checkpoint where the Israelis were killed.
Units were sent to other West Bank checkpoints as well.
Referring to the killing of one Palestinian, the soldier said. "About five of us sprayed him at the same time. I emptied a magazine in him." A member of a reconnaissance unit said they were instructed to go to three checkpoints near Nablus and shoot Palestinian police officers regardless of whether they were armed. "We didn’t raise the issue of how to identify Palestinian policemen," the soldier was quoted as saying. Maariv quoted another soldier as saying: "My conscience is most quiet. As far as I am concerned the Palestinian police committed terror operations, and if the political and commanding echelons decided that the operation was the correct thing to do, then I want to do it."
"I did not go with a knife between my teeth and to suck blood," he said, explaining that he did what he did "only because I had to get back at the Palestinian policemen for what they did."
Maariv’s headline said 15 Palestinian policemen were killed that night.
"My conscience is most quiet." Hmmm. I’d like this soldier to tell me–is this what the IDF taught you in your training, that it is correct and just to attack unsuspecting, and in many cases unarmed Palestinians merely because they wear the same uniform as others whom you suspect of killing your own??? I wish I were Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah and all the other prophets so I could scream from the Judean hilltops: No! This is not the Israeli army founded on the ethical principles of tohar neshek, the purity of arms.
Breaking the Silence quotes an excerpt from the testimony of a First Sergeant in the operation who, after initially questioning the operation and its target, admits of the pursuit of the Palestinian policemen: "I really enjoyed it." He also states clearly that no policeman ever fired upon them at any point in the action. If anyone needed proof of the absolute debasement of the IDF and Israeli society by this conflict it is here right in front of one’s eyes. At first, the officer questions why they are targeting these policemen and whether anyone can proof their culpability for the prior ambush. But once he gets into the thick of the action, his sheer animal instinct for pursuit and felling of his quarry takes over. He has stopped being a sentient human being and become a military machine.
Maariv quotes (these are my somewhat rough translations) R. a 25 year old soldier in the engineering unit Yael and another named D. who describe their general attitude toward military service and how it was expressed that night:
R: You want to be a hero. So that they’ll look at you and say: "He’s a special soldier, salt of the earth." In order to attain that status you have to get under your belt a few big actions. The objective isn’t important. The reason for the operation isn’t important. There’s no such thing as Left or Right. All that’s erased. When they told us this was a revenge operation ("avenging blood") we thought only that we’re going to kill people. What could be more sexy than that? What could be higher quality? We’d never done this [type of operation] before.
D: They told us it was a revenge operation and that we would take an eye for an eye against three or four checkpoints. Not more.
Everyone was "lit up" on the idea that we were going to liquidate people. We were satisfied. From the beginning of the Intifada, we’d never had the chance to do something with "honor" [their usual tasks as engineers were to raze Palestinian homes related in some way to terror]. No one had looked through a gunsight.
R. [responds to the question of whether he was absolutely sure their purpose was to be revenge killing]: The commander said that the checkpoints manned by Palestinian police might have allowed the terrorists to pass. He said our mission was to liquidate them. He mentioned the soldiers of Ein Arik [the six dead Israelis]. We knew why we were going there.
D: We were committed to the mission with a sense that "I’m a member of the Yael Brigade and this is the most important mission there is." We blackened our faces and got this John Wayne look in our eyes and that was it. We went on our way.
R [describing the attack on the Palestinians]: They [the policemen] gathered in a group drinking coffee. Maybe there were seven or eight. Only two were armed. All the rest were unarmed civilians. We looked at them. We didn’t think, ‘here’s our objective, go kill.’ At the moment we knew we were going to liquidate them we didn’t see them as human beings. Again, we very attuned to our objective.
D: …This was the first time that I killed and the first time I saw someone dead. It was a day of pleasure.
R: I still think of this. This will not leave me ever. It made me lose a lot of sleep. I think I was part of something problematic. I don’t see any difference between this and between slaughter. There was no just objective. I wanted to kill. Afterward, I felt very uncomforable with this.
Apparently, the IDF has no quarrels or qualms about what happened that night of February 19, 2002. Maariv quotes an Army spokesperson as saying: the Palestinian policemen were "implicated in terror." Howso? When you lie in ambush and indiscrimately murder policemen how can you tell?
Further, the Times describes the Army statement:
…"On Feb. 19, 2002, Israeli forces operated against Palestinian Authority targets in the West Bank."
"Among those targets were checkpoints manned by Palestinian policemen who facilitated the passage and actively assisted the terrorists who passed through this checkpoint to carry out murderous attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers," it said.
No investigation ensued [according to the IDF statement] regarding the events described in the Maariv article because it was part of a series of operations against terrorism in line with Israeli Army orders and procedures. "It took place during the year in which Israel was hit hardest by terrorism," said the army.
I suppose one can hardly point the finger at the IDF alone when the behavior of our own military at Abu Graib was so repulsive AND hardly a single U.S. soldier (and certainly no upper echelon officers) will be held culpable for such horrendous abuse. Even so, the blithe IDF response seems more than a little outrageous even for Israel’s typically lax attitude toward violations of its military code when it comes to Palestinians.
If the Army refuses to investigate itself, perhaps the Attorney General or some other body will do so. This incident might not rise to the level of a MyLai, but it certainly sounds like a war crime to me. The problem of course is that Israel is so fixated on security that it often forgives such lapses saying that the IDF is entitled to break rules once in a while as long as it does so in the interests of protecting Israel’s security (sound like any other government you know??).
Another interesting aspect of the IDF’s response is this:
…The army was instructed by the political echelon to change the mode of operation and adjust it to the harsh reality on the ground.
In plain English: "The Defense Minister ordered IDF officers to attack that night and they only followed orders." The IDF doesn’t need to hide behind fig leaves as Don Rumsfeld has done regarding Abu Graibh. The IDF assigns responsibility for the massacre to the Defense Minister and he clearly accepts it willingly. It is simply shocking.
Haaretz published an editorial today about this incident calling for an independent judicial inquiry since the current Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, was the IDF chief of staff at the time of the massacre and presumably issued or knew of the orders for this odious action.
