“He matured and changed in the army. I sent them a nice kibbutznik and got back an Arab-hater.”
U.S. soldiers continue to be trained in Israel, taught by these nice kibbutzniks to also become Arab-haters, so they too will be able to execute savage, inhumane tactics against them.
Dorothy Naor writes:
Thanks to Victoria Lichtman and Ha’aretz, you now have in English the entire interview that in Hebrew was called Hamedovavit [i.e., someone who gets others to talk].
[Read the rest of Dorothy’s commentary]
Parallel Lives [Hebrew title: Hamedovavit]
By Dalia Karpal
Translated by Victoria Lichtman
From a young age Nufar Yishai-Karin was interested in war crimes. During the days of the first intifadah, she had a chance to experience such issues – up close and personal – during her service in the army infantry company near Rafah. After her service she studied psychology and then turned to her acquaintances in the company in order to understand what leads them to violent behavior. They recounted the pleasure they derived from the abuse, yet Yishai-Karin still believes that they, the soldiers, are also the victims.
She was in the 5th grade when she accompanied her father on a tour of the Golan Heights, where he described how he lost his best friend during a battle on the Tel Fahar position on June 9, 1967. “For years, this battle was for him a very emotional and unapproachable subject”, says clinical psychologist Yishai-Karin, that the years in the shadow of her father’s trauma over the battle had a formative impact on her consciousness, leading her to her ultimate profession.
“As a youngster the war preoccupied my thoughts”, she says. During her high school years she read many books on the Second World War, and quite quickly, also became drawn to the Vietnam War. She devoured each book, she said, and did not miss a movie dealing with this war: “but I did not yet realize that my real interest was in soldier’s war crimes”. After her army service, she began her studies at Hebrew University where she dedicated seven years to researching the processes that lead Israeli soldiers to commit injustices and abuses during the years of the first intifadah Her research work, which was her thesis for her Master of Clinical Psychology degree focused on the soldiers’ testimonies about violent acts which they participated in. Her thesis which was revised as an article was published this month in the journal “Alpayiim” (2000), as a joint work with her thesis advisor at the university, Professor Yoel Elizur.
The article, entitled: “How does a situation arise” disguises the soldier’s names, the dates and locations, to protect the interviewees’, who were chosen from a sample from two infantry companies (Ashbal and Ash’har) and were stationed for an extended period of time in Rafah. The article provoked a response from the author David Grossman, who commented that this suggests that this is not a case of an isolated few, but of hundreds and thousands of others, “who carried out a large-scale inventory of evil”.
Therapy on the dunes
The story begins therefore with the ordeal of that battle in 1967 in which her father, Yair Yishai, now about 70, fought. It dragged on for an entire day and in part consisted of hand-to-hand combat using knives as well. Twenty-two Golani infantry brigade soldiers were killed and many others wounded. “For years my father would grow silent and sad when people talked about the blunder there – the soldiers made the ascent to the outpost from the wrong side, and many were killed.
“When I was in 10th grade, one of the founders of the Golani museum came and visited our home to interview my father on his army service and on the battle. That opened him up. After that he instructed Golani soldiers and also made a study of the battle, which contributed a great deal to his mental health.”
When Yishai-Karin was drafted in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in ’89, almost two years into the intifadah, it became clear to her that she would be enlisting in combat like the rest of the guys. She was raised in Moshav Beit Sha’arim, where she also lives now with her son, aged six, and two cats in a spacious house – at the entrance of which hangs an Israeli flag. She studied in elementary school in Moshav Nahlal, and in high school in Kibbutz Yafat.
She did not relish her first year in the army. She completed a service conditions course, in which she focused on soldiers’ rights, and also took part in psychology workshops and learned how to conduct interviews. Then she was posted to the Induction Center in Tiberias.
“At that time it was as today, no one in Beit Sha’arim or its environs wanted to become a “jobnick” (pencil pusher, administrative aide), and sitting in the enlistment center devastated me.” Her dream was to meet in the IDF people from different places, “I wanted to see up close what the concept of the ‘melting pot’ meant.” She requested a transfer to the Golani Brigade and eventually transferred to Ashbal Company, an armored infantry unit. For about 15 months she lived on a base in the southern Gaza Strip, not far from the former settlements of Rafah Yam and Pe’at Sadeh.
“There were then four companies”, she says. Two in Judaea and Samaria and two in Gaza. “I arrived in Gaza in ’90 and joined a unit which had enlisted in February of that year. There were about 55 soldiers, including many staff people who had been transferred out of combat units To be a service-conditions noncom was a type of social work. The mission was to assist soldiers with problems, which meant mainly listening to them. I used to talk to them during night duty, because they were the most communicative then.” There I conducted a sort of emotional therapy. I remember myself sitting on the dune talking with someone, behind him someone else was waiting, and – as patients in a hospital – a line of additional soldiers formed.”
For a year and a quarter she was on the base in the southern Gaza Strip, not far from the settlements of Rafiah Yam and Peot Sadeh. “Like all the soldiers on the base, I lived in a tent, together with an education NCO and two sports instructors. We shared the showers with the boys; one of us would have to keep a lookout while the other showered, because there were holes in the stalls and even the wood in the floor had cracks. The toilet was a lime-covered hole. There were no cell phone yet at the time, and there was only one phone for a tent. The bus would arrive twice a day.”
Immediately upon her arrival an incident occurred that shook her. A few of the soldiers had arrived about a week before her “and had already managed to mess things up. They arrested someone and forgot him for three days in the shower. They told me about it and didn’t know how to deal with it.” Her thesis quotes one of the soldiers who was involved in the incident: “After they built showers with a generator, so we would have hot water all the time … the shower with the ‘geyser’ was abandoned and people decided that it would be like a detention cell. We brought some guy there and forgot him for three days … He was handcuffed and had a piece of flannel over his mouth, and he couldn’t talk, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything. After three days, someone, I don’t remember who, happened to go by there and remembered.”
She maintains that her encounters with the soldiers were positive. At the time, she remained unaware of most of the soldier’s destructive acts included in her thesis. “The guys were wonderful”, she says “I saw Rafah once. There was an officer who was kicked out of the company, and before he left he gave me a tour, so that I could see the narrow alleyways the soldiers always spoke about. It is important to understand that in the first stage of my service, the soldier’s did not commit many appalling crimes. However the situation deteriorated, especially after I left. This was largely a function of time and wear and tear. Only twice during the time that I was there did I see prisoners handcuffed, and at the checkpoint I saw the tendency to make people stand and wait. I would ask the soldiers to let the people pass, and they would.”
That said, she also felt the wear and tear. “I would come home sometimes shocked, yet had no one to talk to. Even my mother told me that she didn’t believe me.”
Yishai-Karin left the Gaza Strip “shocked by what I had seen but mostly concerned by the army’s helplessness, by the fact that they took a unit and wore it down in a way that made violence part of the soldiers’ lives. After that I spent seven years of my life in attempts to investigate and understand what had happened.”
They shoot as if deranged
In October ’91, Yishai-Karin went to study psychology at Hebrew University. “Already during my army service I knew this would be my research, and I was especially interested in discovering why there are always a few people in a group who strive to do good, what is it in their personality characteristics that makes them this way and what happens in such a situation.”
One of her teachers, Prof. Yoel Elizur, was a reservist in the army’s mental health unit. According to Elizur, the unit had a good research branch in the 1990s but could not get authorization to conduct a study on soldiers’ violence. “The prevailing tendency then was to silence the whole thing and say that the soldiers were generally all right,” he says.
Yishai-Karin, who knew of Elizur’s expertise in the subject, approached him with her research idea, and he jumped at the opportunity. The study included interviews with 18 soldiers and three officers who served with her in two armored infantry units. She knew most of them from her military service. She interviewed each of them personally in his home for a few hours and recorded the interviews; she still has the tapes. Her prior acquaintance with the soldiers led them to trust her implicitly, and they opened up fully, readily telling her about crimes they themselves had committed: murder and killing, breaking the bones of children, inflicting humiliation, destroying property, stealing.
What characterizes the 21 interviewees? The list includes everything. About half the 21 interviewees are Ashkenazim, half Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent). Most are native-born and most are from middle-class families. There are members of moshavim (cooperative farming villages) and kibbutzim, residents of mixed cities such as Jerusalem, Acre and Ramle, but also some from Tel Aviv and the upscale communities of Herzliya Pituah and Ramat Hasharon. The Alpayim article focuses on one of the companies, from which 14 of the interviewees came.
The article describes the brutalization of some of the soldiers, even as others remained passive and a minority tried to struggle against the wrongs that were being perpetrated. Among the brutalized group was the impulsive type of soldier, who used the opportunity to let off steam, sometimes enthusiastically.
Testimony: “I went out on my first patrol … Others on the patrol were just shooting like crazies … I also started shooting like all the others … It was … look, I won’t tell you that it wasn’t cool, because suddenly for the first time you come and hold the weapon seriously, you’re not training in some drill or in some dugout in the dunes, or I don’t know what, or you have some commander who is looking over your shoulder in the firing range. Suddenly you are responsible for what you are doing. You take the gun. You shoot. You do what you want.”
One of the study’s most shocking findings is that the soldiers enjoyed the intoxication of power no less than the kick they got from the violence. “At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed [inflicting] violence,” Yishai-Karin observes in the thesis. “They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.”
Testimony: “The truth? When there is commotion and like that, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah and if there isn’t some kind of disturbance once in some week, I go nuts.”
Another soldier: “The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides … As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.”
A little four year old boy
The callousness of some of the soldiers produced extreme indifference to the Arabs’ suffering: “We were in a weapon 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 sidewalk and we keep going, uninterested. No one gave him a second look.”
There were some tough soldiers who developed an ideology holding that even minor events necessitated a brutal response. “A 3-year-old kid, he can’t throw, he can’t hurt you no matter what he does, but a kid of 19 can. With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with anymore.”
Some of the soldiers were singled out in the study as “prone to being led” – that is, they were swept up in the wake of their officers and buddies – and there were some who had never lifted a hand against anyone before their army service. “The moment the red line is broken, it is not just broken, it is smashed to smithereens, and from that moment everything is permitted,” one soldier testified.
These soldiers believed that the intifada was a war, and that they had to be professional and maintain “purity of arms” – morality in warfare. But the reality of the situation and the fraternity of fighters prompted some of them to cover up for their friends, even if they stole from homes where they conducted searches or sexually harassed or provoked Arab women.
Most of the soldiers who were interviewed vividly recollect their first encounter with brutality. In one case, while still in basic training, they served as escorts for a group of suspects. “They took the Arabs, the commanding officers did, and put them on the bus between the back door and the last seat, put them only between the seats. On their knees. Then they told us: Within two minutes – and this is still just basic training – within two minutes everyone is on the bus. No one steps on the seats … And everyone started to trample them [the Arabs] and step on them on the run … It was a really bad winter. Minus 4 degrees [Centigrade] and rain and hail … They each went out in the middle of the night … They weren’t given time to dress. Some of them had clogs, short-sleeved shirts … Everyone opened the windows deliberately. People poured water on them from the canteens, so they would freeze from the cold. And the whole way they were bombarded with blows … and I mean the whole way.”
Another soldier describes one of the first times he entered a house to arrest an Arab, “an absolute giant, around 30, maybe. Rampaging. We shout at him to lie down, we hit him, but he doesn’t lie down, he wants to escape … These four guys show up and throw stones at him from all sides, and we are beating up on him … Lie down! Lie Down! Lie down! Until in the end he lies down … We get to company headquarters and it turns out he lost consciousness … and a few days later he is dead.”
Some junior commanders encouraged the brutality and even endorsed it. “After two months in Rafah a [new] commanding officer arrived … So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6 A.M., 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. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers. We all run with him. He grabbed the boy. Nufar, I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist. Broke his hand at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. 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 three that dared to oppose
An incident that fomented a crisis began when a squad commander from the hard-hearted group maltreated three bound teenagers. A soldier of conscience summoned another squad commander who was a paramedic. He told Yishai-Karin that by the time help arrived the three Palestinian boys were already “completely covered with blood, their clothes were saturated with blood and they were shaking with fear. Their hands were tied and they were afraid to move, they were on their knees.”
The conscience-driven squad commander and soldier reprimanded the brutal squad commander, but were not backed up by the platoon commander. “You should know that what the two of you did is very serious,” the platoon commander told them, “talking to him like that! You should know that you’re in for punishment.”
The two soldiers who received this tongue-lashing told another soldier what had happened, and he decided to tell the story the next day at a meeting of the brigade with the division commander. After hearing him out and asking to hear the testimonies of the two other soldiers, the division commander asked the brutal squad commander what he had to say for himself. But he refused to respond in front of the soldiers. The division commander removed him from the sector and ordered the Military Police to investigate the incident. The squad commander was sentenced to three months in prison.
Recalling this incident, which broke the conspiracy of silence in the company, Yishai-Karin notes that all the other soldiers supported the brutal squad commander, even those who thought he had gone too far and deserved punishment. In the face of the sacrosanct creed of the fraternity of fighters and unit loyalty, the soldiers of conscience were considered traitors, because “no soldier should have to go to jail because of some Arab.”
How do you explain this behavior?
“Ash’har Company, which was drafted before us, was a deviant, extreme unit at the human level. The absence of supervision from the commanding level left its mark on them, and things they did before we arrived were extreme. Take the story about the boy and the kick to the crotch, for example.
“The soldiers of Ashbal Company,” she continues, “were of a higher quality. There were those who had been kicked out of a pilots’ course. A fierce struggle ensued between the two companies, which was actually a struggle between cultures and even a socio-economic struggle. There is a connection between a person’s background and his behavior. It’s something like Assi Dayan’s film parody ‘Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer’: a reflection of the diverse forms of Israeliness, including, for example, the delicate Iraqi with the spectacles who doesn’t understand what he is doing there and plans to become an accountant.*
“The two soldiers of conscience were from homes that invested a great deal in the children. One was the son of a psychologist and a factory manager, and the other the son of a career officer, a lieutenant colonel. In both cases the mothers were involved, meaning they received big parcels every week. The two were superb soldiers. They hustled through basic training and had enough time to think about what was right and what was not in the company’s operations in Rafah. Their commanding officers had far narrower horizons and came from a different background, and that is where the cultures clashed. The squad commander who went to prison got the shock of his life that of all the things he had done, he was doing time for beating bound youngsters. He now lives in the United States. Most of the soldiers I interviewed left the country, apart from five or six.”
How did you manage to prevent revenge from being taken on the “traitors” who snitched?
“They came to consult with me – the soldier who is described as a paramedic and the one who spoke out to the division commander. The latter was distraught and deathly afraid. After the division commander left, I went over to the sergeants’ quarters and met the squad commander who had inflicted the beating. Everyone was consoling him. I hesitated for a minute, and then I told them that if anyone dared to do anything I would not keep silent. I didn’t have to ask: I knew they were planning revenge. Before I finished the sentence they all jumped up – how did I dare? It was clear to me that I had to draw my line. My status was so good that they forgave me. Someone said right away, ‘She is the service conditions noncom of us all.’
“In my thesis I likened this situation to a family in which there is sexual exploitation or incest or violence, and it is kept secret. That’s how it was in the unit. You don’t inform on a member of the family. That is a basic mechanism that exists in all of us, and these soldiers represent us all.”
Caveman instincts
The two soldiers of conscience – the eyewitness to the beating of the helpless youths and his paramedic buddy – were transferred out of the company. The former was sent to a snipers’ course, the latter to an advanced course for paramedics, and afterward both of them took an officers’ course. The soldier who revealed the story to the division commander was ostracized. Everyone boycotted him and hounded him, until he finally transferred out of the company and was assigned to a rear-echelon post.
The first two soldiers returned to the company as officers and initiated a process geared to “inculcate a professional culture.” In their opinion, the company underwent a metamorphosis and the soldiers generally refrained from brutal behavior.
In her study, Yishai-Karin examined how the wrongs the soldiers committed affected them mentally. She found that the two soldiers of conscience “were the only interviewees in the sample with a narrative of personal growth, moral victory and a sense of meaningfulness about their military service. They both felt that this was because they had no doubts about what they were doing.”
Yishai-Karin continues to view the soldiers she interviewed as good people. “From the point of view of the army’s structure, we were in infantry companies with no battalion, connected directly to an armored brigade which for most of the period was stationed on the Golan Heights. There was no battalion commander to supervise things, and the brigade commander was also from the Armored Corps. No one understood what was really going on in the company, and there was no one to check things out. The GOC Southern Command, Matan Vilnai, [now a Labor MK and deputy defense minister] visited the company a lot and took ordinary soldiers for man-to-man talks, but the mechanisms of denial and concealment were at work and he didn’t hear anything about what happened, even though he tried. One of the conclusions of the study is that the mechanisms of concealment have to be taken into account, because they are natural and will always appear. The Lebanese War showed the extent to which good leadership and command protect against emotional damage.”
Do you see them as victims and casualties of post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, despite the war crimes they committed?
“Different kinds of recruits yielded different sorts of armored infantry units. There were significant differences in the level of command among the different units, because of the different recruits that they drew. My company, Ashbal, was less violent than Ash’har and Ashuach. With regard to initial classification, for example, one of the soldiers who served in jail for his violence against Palestinians, was assigned to such a unit despite his having had a conviction on a civilian assault charge. They told him that if he would be a good soldier, they would erase his assault charge, yet in the end, he also served time in military jail, and ended up with two convictions on his record.”
“It is important to note that this was not a volunteer unit like Duvdevan or Shimshon. The soldiers in the armored infantry units didn’t want to be in the intifada. It was a horrible exploitation of their volunteer spirit and their obligations to the army and to their country. They didn’t sufficiently understand the importance of a person saying something [in opposition to an act]. No one defended the soldier who exposed the incident. They deserted him. He left the country in a state of post-trauma and shock. He did something so important for all of us, and didn’t receive any recognition for it.”
The soldiers claim that this is betrayal and treason.
“The say what every infantry soldier would say. Reliability is a value in itself, and in the infantry you really learn what it means. Others see it in movies, but don’t experience it like these soldiers did. Loyalty is also an important value. Their questioning was worthwhile, and they did arrive at a certain conclusion.
“The army did not give that unit regular training and hardly gave them leaves. They did not get the opportunity to recover with a bit of a holiday. Training builds the unit in the direction of a regular army rather than a militia, but the unit got only a third of the training it was supposed to get. The soldiers claimed that the longer the unit spent in the field, the more violent it became and the more it was prone to impose order. They claimed that the army was aware of the drift toward violence, and encouraged it, because that way they could allocate less manpower.
What does this tell you?
In high school I was an activist in a youth movement called “youth sings a different song”, a Jewish-Arab movement. I was also involved in the “group movement” of the United Kibbutz Movement, and as a result I did a year’s service. It was a very socialist youth movement, whose mission was to live in communes and cooperation among people.
“There are two means the army adopts to steer the violence in war in appropriate directions,” she continues, “namely battle heritage and training. Those means were not utilized in the intifada. The two officers of conscience thought of it by themselves and introduced ‘intifada drills’ before going into action. If a soldier trains, he knows what is expected of him, so his behavior will fit the army’s norms and not caveman instincts.
“As for battle heritage, I brought that to the army from home. My dad told me about the [first] Lebanon War. He was the commander of a reconnaissance company. On one occasion a large number of angry Shi’ites gathered at the entrance to the base and the soldiers got uptight. My father and a few other soldiers daringly waded into the mob, talked to people and calmed them down. My father told me at the time that anyone who didn’t know Arabs and felt pressured by the event was liable to shoot them. That’s a story I heard as a girl, in 1983.
“After that, in the intifada, I saw time and again how pressure causes reactions that are more extreme and more violent. There was a company commander who used to get stressed and cause a big hullabaloo every time. What’s missing is battle heritage, like my dad’s story, in which courage is tested by your not resorting to fire. Battle heritage is something inbuilt, which is transmitted by the Education Corps, and it is lacking.”
Can you sum up the message of the study?
“The message might be too complex for a newspaper article. Freud talks about the destructive aggressive instinct. In a letter to Einstein in 1932, Freud wrote, ‘Musing on the atrocities recorded on history’s page, we feel that the ideal motive has often served as a camouflage for the lust of destruction.’ That has existed in everyone, in all languages and in all religions, across all the hundreds and thousands of years of history, and probably even before. There are some cultures that are more violent, yes, but violence appears in every culture. There are situations that provoke it and cause the violence to well up to the surface.
“There is nothing surprising about the reaction of the soldiers who were sent there,” Yishai-Karin continues. “In a situation of neglect, without supervision of the senior command, without genuine psychological research, without any examination, they operated on the basis of instincts and emotions. But despite everything that happened there, not a few soldiers acquitted themselves honorably, thanks to values, support from home, professionalism and self-restraint. Political opinions had no influence on behavior at all; political opinions changed in accordance with behavior, not vice versa.”
They gave us batons and we hit
One soldier from the company agreed to be interviewed and to have his full name disclosed. Ilan Vilandia, a bachelor of 38, who lives in a moshav in Emek Ezraeli. He was born in Kibbutz Morhavia to two immigrants, his mother from France, his father from Holland, who met during their volunteer activities at the kibbutz in 1967. Vilandia was drafted in 1988, and served in the Givati Brigade. Because of disciplinary transgressions, he was sent to jail four times, and was transferred to the Southern Command to the Ash’har armored infantry unit, a short time after its soldiers rebelled and drove off to Elat. He did a routine operational stint in Deir el-Balah with the company, was sent to a squadron-leader’s course, and then asked to be transferred to the company of Ashbal.
When he arrived to the Ashbal base near Rafah, Yishai-Karin was already there. He was the sergeant in command of operations and remained until the end of the Gulf War. “It was like ‘Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer’–tents in the desert, regimental guards at the gate, barbed wire, and you could see the sea and Tal Sultan, the northern neighborhood of Rafah. We did police work: we patrolled and tried to impose order. If Palestinians threw stones we used methods as tear gas, rubber and plastic bullets, and wooden batons that we used to hit with. I saw some vicious things and heard about others.”
“Our responsibility was to deliver blows. It was like a sort of battle without weapons. They staged their ambushes and it became a cat and mouse game. I myself gave it to a kid here and a kid there with my hand or the baton. The adults would really get beaten. One guy had this TV, and during our regular patrols we would go and watch the Mondial games, until he got so frustrated that he told us to take the actual set. We were like cops without law, not in the sense that we were corrupt, but in the sense that we do what we want to, because we are the law and we rule the street.”
How do you explain this?
“Performance in the territories creates itself. No one had a set of guidelines for combat in the territories. We wanted to be combat soldiers and we fought in the way we thought right. Finally, we came to understand that we needed rules and not just to hit without cause. It wasn’t realistic. I’d go home by bus, sit next to an Arab, and a quarter of an hour would pass, and I didn’t demand his ID or beat him up. I lived in two separate worlds, and the transition came when I took off my uniform and got on the bus home. And then you found a different world, in which no one wants to kill you and you don’t want to hit anyone. At first I would return to the base and all would begin anew. Odd, but we didn’t deal with feelings and with emotions. We just did our work.”
So you’re saying it didn’t affect your civilian life?
“Obviously my behavior in the kibbutz is not my like my behavior in Gaza. Those were my two parallel lives. It was a single personality that reacts differently to two extreme situations, yet you remain the same person. We developed that personality to do that type of work. In the beginning of my service, I identified with Mapam [an Israeli political party] and no matter what the situation would never hit a soul. But in Rafah, after one stone after another hits you, you accumulate such anger, that you explode into acts of violence. That was also meant to be our reaction. We were there to give it back to them. Maybe it made me aggressive. My political views changed in the army. I became right-wing and I vote for Mafdal [the National Religious Party]. I finished my service in ’91, worked for half a year in the kibbutz and traveled to Holland, where I worked a bit in the tourism industry and made cheese and wooden clogs. I also smoked drugs freely there. In ’95 I traveled to India.”
In ’96 Vilandia and five other soldiers were detained in Goa for the possession of marijuana and LSD. After a year in custody, they were convicted and sentenced to ten years imprisonment. They appealed for a shortened sentence, and within a year, with the help of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Israeli President Ezer Weitzman, were released and Vilandia returned to Israel.
“I still haven’t found my place”, he says” but then I was odd even before I was in the army. As a kid I was hyperactive. I wanted to serve the country – that was my job. The entire army is clearly an illegitimate command. Not that we were anything out of the ordinary in Rafah. I never doubted the military missions we carried out. You convince yourself that this is what you are supposed to do, and you’re full of adrenalin, and you find the reason for doing it. A lot of times I thought – whoa – what I am doing is not right, but on the battlefield a soldier kills another soldier– that’s even worse.
Are you disappointed?
We served three years in the military. We didn’t get any preferential jobs, nor were we granted conditions to go to university; we didn’t wait in Israel for some miracle to happen. A lot of those in the company left Israel. I am a farmer, and when I came back from India, there were millions of Thai workers here. Nobody exactly waited for us to return to the kibbutz. I don’t feel that we were being used; I hope I’m right. I came to the army of my own volition, and I would not serve in any other army in the world.”
His mother said this week: “he matured and changed in the army. I sent them a nice kibbutznik and got back an Arab-hater.”
* For information about the comedy movie Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Givat_Halfon_Eina_Ona
or http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808564394/details
or other websites on Google.