- TEL AVIV -- Even if
you didn't know who had taken the pictures, it would be a remarkable exhibition.
A record of two short periods in Hebron, the images linger obstinately
in the mind's eye long after you have turned away: the comradely group
portrait of the smiling, hopeful, young men, 18 and 19 mostly, in an Israeli
army unit; the Palestinians blindfolded by the side of a deserted street
at night; the grim-faced Jewish settler with a Galil assault rifle slung
casually over his shoulder; the stone memorial to Shalhevet Pass, a 10-month-old
baby killed in a shooting attack in March 2001 by Palestinian militants,
with an epitaph that reads: "Here the innocent baby Shalhevet was
murdered. God will avenge her blood"; the white-painted sign scrawled
on a wall which says - in English - "Arabs to the gas chambers";
the Palestinian children playing a game in which one pair are Israeli soldiers
lining the others up against a wall, just as they have seen their fathers
and brothers lined up.
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- But what makes the exhibition Breaking the Silence, on
show at a college in Tel Aviv, so out of the ordinary is that it is the
work not of professional photographers but of soldiers. It is a work that
has stirred concerns and drawn admiration at the highest levels of Israeli
society.
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- Yesterday military police raided the exhibition, confiscating
items from it. An army spokesman insisted that the raid was not to stop
the exhibition or to punish the soldiers for going public, but to see if
there is a case for court-martialling soldiers who mistreated Arabs.
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- On Sunday the exhibition will move to the Knesset at
the invitation of Ilan Shalgi, chairman of the parliamentary education
and culture committee. Forty photographs will be on show there, with full
approval by the parliamentary authorities, until 5 July.
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- The pictures were taken by young Israeli conscripts as
they conducted daily, dangerous patrols of Hebron. Five hundred Jewish
settlers, some of the most extreme in the West Bank, live in three enclaves
in the city, surrounded by 130,000 Palestinians in a relationship of mutual
hatred and frequent violence. They look to the army for protection.
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- The idea of the exhibition did not occur to the soldiers
until they had left the army (for most of them that moment came earlier
this year). The photographs were taken strictly for private consumption.
"Some pictures I took because I knew I couldn't handle what I was
seeing at the time and I wanted to think about it later," says Jonathan
Boumfeld, 21, "and some I took just as souvenirs."
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- But, in the words of the leaflets they sent out to advertise
the show, they then discovered that the memories captured in these "souvenirs"
were "common to all of us who served together ... In coping daily
with the madness of Hebron, we couldn't remain the same people beneath
our uniforms. We saw our buddies and ourselves slowly changing.
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- "We were exposed to the ugly face of terror. A suicide
bomber who doesn't hesitate to try to kill a group of children. An innocent
family killed while at the Sabbath table. Countless engagements, bereaved
families, innocent civilians injured, chases and arrests ... The settlers
whom we were meant to protect rioted, occupied houses, and confronted the
police and army both physically and verbally."
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- To understand the photographs fully you have to join
one of the daily tours of the exhibition with one of the soldiers who took
them. They have decided against interviews with foreign reporters, because,
says Micha Kurz, who left the army three months ago, "we think it's
more important to speak to the Israeli public about what is happening".
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- Mr Kurz, 20, stops in front of a charming-looking picture
of small Jewish children playing happily in the street and describes how
he relieved the boredom one day by watching three girls of about six or
seven playing hopscotch. When the girls saw two Palestinian women carrying
their shopping home, they began throwing stones at them. "When I asked
why they did it, the kids said: 'You know what they did in 1929.' "
The children, parroting a reference to a massacre of Jews by Arabs in Hebron
that year, could hardly have understood what 1929 meant. Yet, adds Mr Kurz,
"when the soldiers complained to the settler parents that we are supposed
to be looking for terrorists and we end up chasing your kids, they would
say: 'We agree. Stop chasing the kids.' "
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- A settlers' wall slogan on one picture exhorts: "Know
the difference between right and wrong. Know the difference between friend
and enemy." But, says Mr Kurz, neither distinction is so easy if you
are an Israeli soldier in Hebron.
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- The soldiers weeded out pictures of bloodshed because
the idea was to encourage the Israeli public to think about the routine
of its army presence in the West Bank, what Mr Kurz calls "the soldier's
life on a daily basis".
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- One shows Baruch, a smiling, hippyish-looking settler
with a guitar slung over one shoulder and an Uzi over the other. "In
the morning he would come and kid around with us, and play Bob Dylan songs,"
Mr Kurz said. "In the winter he would bring hot soup and in the summer
cold lemonade. Then in the afternoon we would be chasing him because he
would be throwing stones at Palestinians."
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- In front of another picture of a young Palestinian seen
through telescopic gun sights, he says it was disturbing the first time
he had a target in his power like this, "but by the third time you
don't even think about it". All this, he says, is part of a process
of moral "attrition", in which the allegedly clear distinction
between right and wrong becomes "foggy".
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- He points to another photograph, a wide-angled view of
the Palestinian district of Abu Snena, taken from the military post that
overlooks it. That Abu Snena harbours militants is not in doubt. This is
the base from which, as well as shooting at soldiers, the murderers of
Shalhevet Pass fired their weapons.
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- Mr Kurz points to one of the empty buildings used by
militants, at which, strictly speaking, the army is supposed to confine
its fire. "You are quite likely to miss first time; you might hit
houses to the left or right before you hit the target." Again, he
says, "after a while you don't think about it any more".
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- Much of this sense of moral attrition is reflected in
a series of anonymous testimonies by soldiers published (in Hebrew) with
the exhibition:
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- "I'd go into a [Palestinian's] house and say, 'Look,
I want all the children to go into one room now, I want to check out your
house.' And I think: if it was the other way round, I don't know what I'd
do. Really. I'd go nuts if anyone came into my house [like that]. I tried
to imagine my parents, my family, what they'd actually do, if people with
guns came into a house with little kids [in it] - little kids, four or
five years old - and pointed weapons at them and said, 'OK, get moving
everyone!' I found that part really hard... ."
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- "The day I understood that I simply enjoyed the
sense of power, I was ashamed of myself. I don't believe in it, I don't
think it's right to do anything [bad] to anyone, and certainly not to someone
who hasn't done you any harm. But you can't help but enjoy it. People do
what you tell them. You know it's because you've got a gun. You know that
if you didn't have a weapon and if you didn't have your comrades beside
you, they'd jump on you and beat you up and stab you and kill you - [but]
you begin to enjoy it. Enjoy is not even the word. You need it. Then, when
someone suddenly says 'no' to you, [you think], what do they mean, 'no'?
Where did you get the cheek to say 'no' to me? Forget for the moment that
I think that those Jews [the settlers] are crazy, and that I want peace
and for us not to be in the territories - what do you mean by saying 'no'
to me? I'm the law! I'm the law here! It's then you begin to understand
that you like it ...."
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- "And this is where a soldier's maturity and discretion
comes in - something I'm not sure always exists. There are a lot of catastrophes
here, because the moment you give an 18-year-old such power, he can do
dreadful things... ."
-
- "The crazy thing is that you're standing there,
a soldier in the Israel Defence Forces, OK? You've got a gun, loaded and
cocked and what - are you an idiot? How dare you not listen to me? I can
shoot you at any moment. I can just beat you with my gun butt, and chances
are my platoon commander will pat me on the shoulder and say, 'Man, finally
you've done something properly.' I'm just a kid, I hardly know anything
about life, the only power I've got is my uniform and my gun, and because
of this, I get to decide."
-
- "What I'm used to here, that's to say, democracy,
vanished in Hebron. The Jews did what they liked, whatever they liked,
quite simply, there are no rules."
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- "What I understood in the end, after six months
there, [was] that actually we have to protect the Palestinians from attacks
by the Jews there, not protect the Jews... ."
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- "The people whose houses you go into, there's no
difference, they're not people of a different kind. These people are even
physically like my grandfather ... the old man who has to beg you to let
him through the checkpoint, or who shows you an X-ray picture and you don't
understand why ... ."
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- Yehuda Shaul, 21, a bearded ex-soldier whose original
idea the exhibition was, said that others in the military who had seen
the photographs had told him: "You have taken the words out of my
mouth." But Mr Kurz admits that many others after their military service
"travel, smoke a lot of grass, put everything behind them as fast
as they can."
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- During a group discussion at the exhibition with - mainly
sympathetic - members of the public, the soldiers were several times asked
why they hadn't complained at the time if they were being asked to do unacceptable
things - a point also made officially by the Israeli military.
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- Noam Arnon, a prominent settler from Hebron, went even
further when he sought to take over the discussion, accusing the soldiers
of engaging in a "sick process of self-exposure" and attempting
to pursue a political goal, which was "to expel the Jews from Hebron".
He added: "You failed if anyone failed."
-
- But these criticisms surely miss the point of the exhibition,
which is to try to confront the Israeli public, as the soldiers confronted
themselves only after their service in Hebron, with the day-to-day issues
arising from the Army - and settler - presence in the West Bank. "This
is not political opinion," says Mr Kurz. "We are not left or
right. These photographs are facts."
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- He adds: "My mother didn't even understand. And
if my mother didn't see it, then Israeli society can't see it." What
had his mother said when he started to recount his experiences of Hebron?
He pauses and replies: "She said: 'Oh.' "
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=534226
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