CAIRO — Israeli soldiers enjoy torturing Palestinians, both men and women, and many of them use it to discharge energy, according to a recent study by an Israeli psychologist.
“At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence,” Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University, told The Observer on Sunday, October 21.
Interviewing 18 Israeli soldiers and three officers, Yishai-Karin heard confessions of brutal assaults troops routinely commit against Palestinians.
All of the interviewees were among those serving with her at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
After finishing service, Yishai-Karin spent seven years investigating soldiers’ abuse of Palestinians during the first intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Some of the interviews soldiers revealed how they enjoyed the intoxication of power when they abuse helpless Palestinians.
“It’s like a drug,” one solider told her.
“If I don’t go into Rafah and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some week, I go nuts.”
God
For some of the Israeli soldiers, bashing the Palestinians made them feel important.
“You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides,” another soldier said.
“As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.”
With such pleasure in power, soldiers said, nothing was prohibited.
One soldier described an incident when a Palestinian passer-by was shot for no fault of his.
“We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason – he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing – bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic,” he recalled.
“No one gave him a second look.”
A fourth soldier revealed how he had “no problem” abusing Palestinian women in particular, recalling when he brutally beat one woman for throwing a clog on him.
“I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children.”
Another woman’s fault was to spat at him.
“I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.”
Culture
Yishai-Karin found that soldiers start abusing Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of training.
Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers engage in violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training.
Soldiers described how their commanders encouraged brutality against helpless Palestinians and even endorsed it.
They recalled how one of their commanders began the first days of his leadership with beating up a four-year-old Palestinian child.
“So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand,” one soldier remembers.
“He is building a castle in his yard.”
Once spotting his target, the Israeli commander suddenly started running with his soldiers around him.
“He grabbed the boy. I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left,” said the soldier.
“We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock.
“The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”
The report findings, which recently found they way to mainstream Israeli media, sent shock waves in Israel, where new recruits are usually taught they are joining “the most ethical army in the world”.
Israeli author David Grossman said Yishai-Karin’s research is not about individuals but rather about hundreds and thousands “who carried out a kind of ‘privatization’ of a vast and general evil.”
Erlik Alhanan, the public face of Israeli refuseniks, has said that the number of soldiers who defy army orders to serve in the occupied territories is on the rise due to illegal army practices.
At least 80 percent of reservists who refuse to do their military service in the occupied Palestinian territories have lost confidence in the declared moral principles of the Israeli army.
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