NOTE: This post originally hosted an image by Gideon Rimmer, an Israeli student at Israel’s Bezalel Academy. I saw his powerful image featuring suicide notes of IDF victims at Eishton’s blog. He has taken issue with my interpretation of his image and demanded that I remove the image. This is the second time an Israeli has demanded that I remove such images for political reasons. This again seems to be part of Israelis’ limited conception of artistic and political freedoms.
An 18 year-old IDF recruit with outstanding educational credentials was assigned (Hebrew) to a top-secret air force training program. During the course, instructors warned the students that they must guard the secret materials they were studying, not lose them, not divulge their contents to anyone. If they did, they were threatened with prison and warned with specific examples of previous students who were imprisoned for their indiscretions. One of those certainly might’ve been Anat Kamm, the women who leaked top-secret documents from the Central Command to Uri Blau, who is now serving a 3 1/2 year prison sentence for her trouble.
The female draftee, who had no previous record of mental trauma or dysfunction, suffered tremendous anxiety, could not sleep, and even took to searching through trash cans on the base to ensure none of her secret materials had gone missing. Eventually, she suffered a breakdown and was discharged from the army. She protested that she wished to complete her service, and she was allowed to enroll in a unit which had not access to secret documents.
The soldier eventually turned to lawyers who applied for her to be considered disabled due to her military service. The defense ministry objected, claiming that none of the other recruits suffered a similar disability and that the woman had not reported her troubles to anyone during the course. Her application was denied. But then her lawyers appealed to a judge, who agreed that the woman had been in perfect health before she joined the IDF and that the training had induced obsessive-compulsive disorder and a nervous breakdown. This will make her eligible for special health services available for those soldiers wounded in combat or otherwise disabled.
There may be some (and even I tended to believe this) who will argue that she must’ve harbored some proclivity or sensitivity to the stress that she faced in the IDF. This sensitivity would’ve preceded her service and made her more apt to have a breakdown. There are indeed conditions like schizophrenia which do not develop until young people reach the age of 18-21 and leave home for the first time to go either to college (in the U.S.) or the army (in Israel).
But when I read the judge’s opinion that she’d been in perfect health before she joined the army, I had to concede that it must’ve been the extreme stress under which her instructors put her when they threw the fear of God into her about compromising the secret material they entrusted to her.
I have in the past written here about Israelis who are sacrificed on the altar of the national security state. This young woman, who entered her air-force training course with a sterling academic reputation, and was capable of making a great contribution to the nation–had this squandered when she was thrown into the maw of the security machine. It grinds up the young people are thrown to it. It turns some of them into zombies patrolling the streets of Hebron looking for Palestinians to harass, beat or even kill. It turns others like our soldier here into basket cases when they can’t hack the pressure. Finally, it even turns some like Ben Zygier into the ultimate sacrificial victim.
Our soldier is by no means the only one who suffers such breakdowns. Israeli blogger, Ishton, got into a major donnybrook with the ministry of defense because it refused to acknowledge that over 100 soldiers had committed suicide during military service. These too are victims on this altar.
OK, OK, so Israel’s mental illness over “security” causes casualties among — Israelis. Maybe among the best. But why fret? Israel has secured its security. And that was the point. The only point. And, along those lines, please do not tell us (as you seemed to do) about the hardships of the Palestinians, because, as is well known and universally admitted, nay claimed (well, universally among warriers), you must break some eggs to make an omelette, and guess whose eggs those inevitably are (and whose omelette)?
Oh! You say that Israel’s security comes from its great and ever-so-well-equipped army, etc., and not from the mental fierceness of its troops? Yes, without the overwhelming equipment, there would be no security. And (as far as anyone can see) the security that the army secures to Israel from attack (e.g., from the UNSC), comes from the politics of big money, and not from the mental hardness of Israeli soldiers.
But a hard-as-nails military surely depends on a training that can destroy the mental health of at least a few recruits. If you don’t destroy a few soldiers in training, the training is not hard enough.
Israel’s security mistake is made very clear in this example: Israel failed to see to it that the contract with recruits, deemed to be “signed” upon recruitment, is deemed to read that no-one can sue the military, the government, their trainers, or anybody at all, irrespective of intentional, grossly negligent, merely negligent, or other behavior by anybody at all for any injury or health impediment caused or believed to have been caused as a result, in whole or in part, of such recruitment and/or of any event which follows therefrom, and anyone who suggests publicly, after any recruit’s (such) recruitment, that such recruit has suffered any injury or health impediment from recrutment or any event which followed therefrom shall be imprisoned for 75 years.
That would serve to prevent Israelis, at any rate, if not American bloggers, from making the dastardly suggestions contained in the above blog essay. (And any American who made such suggestions better not travel to Israel after such a law has been enacted.) BTW, does Israel enact any secret laws (or secret military or judicial regulations), or are they all public? And how about the regulations which governed Palestinian Arabs in Israel before 1966 and Palestinians ion the occupied territories after 1967?
What? There are many a word in that pile of text, yet nary an idea.
There may be more to it than stress.
Depends whether they were simply hectored about the need not to divulge secrets, or if this was backed up by training in some of the techniques used to avoid giving secrets away in conversation or even under interrogation. (These involve creating a fictional persona for whom the “right” answers are true, and can trigger mental illness if there’s any susceptibility at all.)
If it’s simply the stress of keeping secrets: Not only was this problem encountered at Bletchley Park during WW2, but one of the lesser known technical breakthroughs made there involved a simple and effective way or treating the sort of mental and physical collapse which the staff were prone to:
Malfunctioning codebreakers were put to bed in a quiet room with a big jug of fresh water by their bed, and kept lightly sedated for at least a week, during which time they did nothing except sleep, drink the water and go to the toilet. After that, they were gradually brought back and fed heartily, before being sent on leave for a fortnight.
This was almost always sufficient, and preferable to the sort of security panics which occurred when staff were sent home and treated by family doctors rash enough to listen to their patient’s ramblings…
Basically, all that’s needed is for the top bosses to care enough to provide resources for a cure, and for that cure to be implemented largely by nurses and general practitioners.
It may also be that the legal status of the Park itself, as Admiral Sinclair’s personal property*, protected staff from some of the knee jerk reactions of military psychiatrists, whose ability to worsen tens of thousands of stress cases is documented in “Where Have All the Bullets Gone?” by Spike Milligan.
Treating nervous breakdowns as a form of exhaustion rather than a mental illness was an act of enlightenment which would have been very difficult to continue with if any eminent psychiatrists had ever got to hear of it, and I think it would probably be harder for the Israeli military to adopt than for the armed forces of most other countries, except possibly America.
Something like this may actually have been tried before at the military convalescent home at Wrest Park during the Great War, which was previously the country home of the De Grey family, one of whom had a senior role at Bletchley Park in WW2, as well as breaking the Zimmerman Telegram in the Great War. So it MAY have been Nigel De Grey’s idea to simply subject jittery or collapsed staff to enhanced sleep.
*The Admiralty and the Treasury failed to process the necessary requisition and purchase in time for the War, so the Admiral took a deep breath and purchased the estate with his own money. In 1987, the Thatcher government, typically, attempted to sell the Park to property developers, only to be discover that it wasn’t theirs to sell.
So, apart from the wrongs and rights of the young lady’s case, there is a method for putting people back together again after this and it’s simple and cheap. But you need to keep the shrinks away (at gunpoint if necessary) and employ nurses instead.
Is it possible she was traumatized by the kind of secrets she was expected to keep? We all know there are many former IDF soldiers who are permanently traumatized or even become suicidal because of things they are commanded to do during their time of service in Palestine. Maybe she was just a nice young woman who became horrified when she learned what was behind some of the IDF secrets.