The war of words over Gaza has begun in earnest. In the wake of the revelations by some of the veterans of the Gaza war, the burning question is “Did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza?”

Of course it did. No armed conflict in history has been fought without war crimes being committed, by all parties. War is an ugly business, not given to being run by a rulebook. And these days, with conflicts increasingly being characterized by poorly armed militias battling regular armies in populated urban areas, it’s getting a lot uglier.

But that’s the wrong question. The right one is that raised by the testimony given by those Israel Defense Forces soldiers: were the breaches of both international law and Israeli military regulations and norms the result of individual soldiers going beyond their bounds, or were they due to an atmosphere created by, or because of directives handed down from the middle and upper echelons of the Israeli military?

This question is not likely to be answered any time soon. Israel is contenting itself with pronouncements that it has “the most moral army in the world” rather than responsibly examining whether that still holds true. Meanwhile, pundits are eagerly savaging the officer who runs the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon, Danny Zamir.

Far from being the “notorious ultra-leftist” he is being painted as, Major Zamir is a 20-year veteran of the IDF, a deputy commander of an elite reserve battalion, and his academy, which he’s run for over a decade, has trained many IDF officers. He did serve a month’s detention in 1990 for refusing to guard a settler procession, so he obviously has some tendencies in anti-settlement directions. But to paint this man as anything other than a dedicated soldier is simply absurd and counter-factual.

The Need For Credibility

Of course, Israel stated that it intended to investigate the allegations raised at Oranim. The problem is the nature of the investigation and the identity of the investigators.

The inquiry was carried out by the IDF. This is problematic; it should be obvious that one cannot legitimately investigate oneself. Even if the investigation was indeed sincere and thorough, it still won’t be seen as unbiased. Only an external investigation can provide that credibility. The IDF can and should be involved in the investigation, but it must be led by credible civilian experts.

The public, both in Israel and around the world, needs to know whether the Israeli armed forces as a whole took proper care to avoid killing or injuring civilians, and to minimize damage to both civilian people and property.

Serious Allegations, Insufficient Responses

The discrepancies between the numbers of civilian casualties reported by Palestinian human rights groups in Gaza and those calculated by the IDF are to be expected. But they also reflect differing views of who is a civilian. For instance, some 250 Palestinian police were killed. Israel considers them combatants; Palestinians and human rights groups do not. Under international law, civil police are not legitimate targets, but Israel says they were also part of Hamas’ militia. If it’s true that the police were engaged in military activities, they lose their protection as civilians. But evidence to support this claim has not yet been presented.

The points Israel has raised in its defense aren’t convincing. They repeatedly say that they dropped leaflets, and even placed phone calls directly warning civilians to abandon certain areas. The trouble is that, in Gaza, there was nowhere to go. The absolute seal on the borders of Gaza, a densely populated but small area, left people nowhere to flee, a fact Israel must have been aware of. That makes the steps the Israel Defense Forces took look more like cover for Israel than an expression of genuine concern for Palestinian civilians.

The issue of white phosphorous illustrates the problem. Human Rights Watch issued a stunning report on Israel’s use of phosphorous. In contrast to the recent report by Amnesty International, which was long on rhetoric and disturbingly short on evidence, HRW’s report makes a strong case that Israel used phosphorous weapons improperly. Israel insists it used the weapon “in accordance with international law.” But, since this weapon is only permissible in open areas when used to illuminate a battlefield, and expressly forbidden in populated civilian areas, Israel’s statement is factually impossible.

More likely, Israel’s meaning is that it was not trying to use white phosphorous as an incendiary weapon to harm people, but rather for its intended purpose of illumination. That the terrain forbade the use for this purpose is likely seen by Israel as the inevitable consequence of fighting Hamas while they took shelter in civilian areas.

This question illustrates the key points we must get at in Gaza: Did Israel take the proper care to avoid harm to civilians as defined, not by Israel, but by international humanitarian law? And to what extent did Hamas’ use of civilians and civilian infrastructure compromise Israel’s ability to comply with the law? Both these questions must be answered credibly, and one cannot be answered unless the other is given equal weight.

An Atmosphere That Leads to War Crimes

Asa Kasher, a professor at Tel Aviv University, drafted the IDF ethical code of conduct. Recently, in Ha’aretz, Kasher said “If it's between the soldier and the terrorist's neighbor, the priority is the soldier.”

Many may agree with that concept. But it flies in the face of the laws of war, and the international norms that Israel has repeatedly vowed to uphold. The testimony of the Gaza veterans indicates that the lives of soldiers were prioritized well ahead of sparing civilians as much as possible.

Mere days after the beginning of Operation Cast Lead, Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Brigadier-General Dan Harel made it clear that Israel was not limiting itself to military targets, but was targeting the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, as it was part of the Hamas government. The fact is that Hamas controls the systems that civilians need for day to day life, and those parts that are not military in nature cannot be targeted.

Therein lies the rub, and the need for a full and impartial investigation. Israel doesn’t deny that it hit many civilian targets in the war. Israel has claimed that Hamas made extensive use of civilians and civilian sites for military purposes, and there is significant evidence to support this claim. When an army deliberately targets a civilian site, the burden of proof is on it to demonstrate that the site was, in fact, being used for military purposes, or the army at least had very good reason to believe so. Israel has offered no such proof beyond its good word.

Israel Itself Needs A Credible Investigation

In 2002, Israel was accused of killing hundreds, even thousands of civilians in the Jenin refugee camp. Impartial investigations, acknowledged as such by Israel and carried out by the UN, showed the total number of Palestinians killed was 52, of which perhaps half were civilians. The report did not, by any stretch, exonerate Israel. It spoke of serious crimes and violations, but these were far less than what Israel had been accused of. In 2009, something similar is the most likely outcome of a sincere investigation. It is in Israel’s interest to pursue this.

Israel’s current responses to accusations of war crimes in Gaza are convincing no one outside of those who dismissed the allegations out of hand in the first place. This is to be expected when the investigations are conducted, in essence, by the accused and the results exonerate Israel completely. Many, this writer included, would very much like to see Israel exonerated of as many accusations as it can be. But this can only happen if the truth can be established by a credible body, and if we are all prepared to deal with whatever that truth may turn out to be.

I’ve got war refugees in my home today. I mean my daughter’s fellow second-year students from the animation program at Sapir College, located right next to Sderot. The campus is under fire and has shut its gates, so these budding cartoonists are unable to work on their projects or attend their classes. The studies are so intense, and the creative energy so high, that they all look like lost souls when they are denied their storyboards and cameras.

Their displacement is nothing compared to the suffering the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been enduring since Saturday, nor compared to that of the permanent residents of Sderot and other southern Israeli towns near Gaza, those who don’t have homes up north to flee to.

When my daughter and her classmates enrolled at Sapir, they knew they’d be studying under fire. But that advance knowledge doesn’t mean that they don’t long to study and draw in peace.

Israel’s attack on Gaza is unlikely to achieve that. Israelis should be wary by now of national leaders who promise that this war, finally, will end Palestinian (or Hezbollah, or whatever) attacks on Israel. It’s unlikely to bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza, as Tom Segev noted in yesterday’s Ha’aretz. Gazans aren’t the prisoners of Hamas tyranny—this is the government they chose, and pressure and suffering simply reinforces their solidarity and their loyalty to their leadership. And as my South Jerusalem blogging partner Gershom Gorenberg noted yesterday, we shouldn’t necessarily want Hamas to fall. A chaotic, leaderless Gaza Strip will be even worse for Israel than one ruled by Islamic militants.

The current operation is the bloodiest one Israel has ever launched against its Palestinian neighbors. Inevitably, in a place as densely populated as the Gaza Strip is, the civilian death toll is high. That will increase Palestinian and Arab resentment against Israel and lead again to charges from foreign governments and human rights organizations that Israel is guilty of war crimes. The death and destruction that Israel is wreaking on Gaza, they have already begun to charge, is incommensurate with the damage to property and only occasional loss of life inflicted by the missiles and mortars that Palestinian fire from Gaza into Israel.

Continue reading...

Tamar Yarom’s 2007 documentary To See If I’m Smiling is a fascinating, yet disturbing study of the effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Israeli psyche. The film is comprised of interviews with six female military veterans, who did much of their active duty in the Occupied Territories, in Judea and Samaria and in the Gaza Strip prior to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the territory.

Ever since Israel’s became independent, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) have been celebrated for implementing mandatory military service for women. Universal military service was deemed a sign of the inherent equality that characterizes Israeli society and the progressive character of both the state and Israeli women. Still, for decades, military service for women was limited to auxiliary, mainly clerical positions. In the 1980s, the IDF began assigning female recruits to technical and instructional roles, but only in the past ten years or so, after a lengthy campaign that ended in an appeal to Israel’s supreme court, has the army revised its policy in regards to women and started assigning them to combat duties.

Notwithstanding the unequal position of women within the IDF, filmmakers generally depicted military service in Israel as empowering women, and the changing attitude of the army towards women as a mark of a growing equality in Israeli society. Few ventured to show the travails of women within an environment that is still very much dominated by men and by male-chauvinist values. Fewer still, if any, have explored the effect of the violence experienced during military service on women, in particular the violence linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These two issues became obvious once women were allowed to serve in combat roles from which they were previously excluded.

Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling examines the experience of women in an army at a time of conflict. But it should also be viewed in the context of what is by now a well-established tradition of portraying the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Since the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987, left-wing intellectuals have turned to the testimonies of soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories, soldiers who were willing to expose both the atrocities committed in the attempt to squelch Palestinian resistance and the traumas they themselves have experienced during their service, to critique the effect of the occupation on Israeli society.

Yet, the soldiers who were questioned and provided the ground for such critique were all men, and so the violence and atrocities committed were inherently gendered and perceived as effecting, first and foremost, Israeli men and Israeli masculinity and only secondarily and indirectly, Israeli women. By focusing exclusively on female recruits, Yarom’s film raises the question whether one can hold to such a clearly gendered division of trauma. What are we to learn when the soldiers in question are not men, Yarom seems to ask, but women? What does a gendered perspective add to our understanding of what is taking place in the Occupied Territories?

Yarom approaches these questions not from “above,” from the level of general political and sociological observation of the circumstances in which women find themselves, both in the context of military service and of the Israeli occupation. Rather, she approaches it from “below”: from narratives of the actual experience of individual women who found themselves—in fact, some willingly placed themselves—in these circumstances. To See if I’m Smiling’s impact lies in the accumulated effect of the particular incidents her six subjects recount for the director, and from their manifest struggle to come to terms with the role they themselves played in these incidents. The outcome is a nuanced and unsettling statement about what happens to human beings (in general, not just women) under these circumstances.

From these six interviews emerges a portrait of a conflicted and contradictory experience. They reveal the difficulty of maintaining one’s image as a woman in a military environment that is still a predominantly male environment. On the one hand, women soldiers are urged to conceal their femininity. As one interviewee notes, women would adopt the speech mode, the high volume and coarse military language, of the male recruits; moreover, they would conceal their body within big clothes. At the same time, she remarks, all a woman has to do to gain favor with the male soldiers is to display her feminine side: the smell of her shampooed hair, her affection and care for male soldiers, etc. Their military service creates a continuous conflict between the need to repress and to display their femininity.

But more than that, Yarom’s film is about the struggle of her six subjects to relate their self-image as moral human beings with their evaluation of themselves and their actions during their military service. As the six recount, initially they were taken by what is commonly associated with the romanticized masculine perception of military service and combat: with the rush of adrenalin that are part and parcel of military action. More than that, they found service in the Occupied Territories to provide them with an exhilarating sense of power and control over the local population. It was like the Wild West, comments one woman.

Yet, as they are co-opted by their environment, the film's subjects find themselves taking part, or even initiating, actions that they deem to be utterly immoral and in contradiction with everything in which they believe. Indeed, all tell of atrocities of which they were part: about abusing Palestinians civilians, concealing the brutality of Israeli soldiers in handling the Palestinian population, and even taking part in a pursuit that results in the death of a Palestinian boy. All six women thus struggle with questions about why they condoned what, in retrospect, they deem immoral; not only why they failed to protest and to report to the IDF's Military Investigation Unit or the press when crimes and atrocities were committed but, much more disturbingly, why they themselves were willing to take part in such actions in the first place.

Increasingly, the six women relate, they found it impossible to find a bridge between their experiences in the Occupied Territories and at home. These seemed to be two wholly distinct worlds governed by different rules. Indeed, each world seemed to demand of them a different identity: one, the moral self of a presumably civil and free society, the other, an individual that willingly participate in oppression and cruelty. They don't know who they are anymore.

Yarom’s film reflects this contradictory, conflicted narrative formally. To See if I’m Smiling is subsequently divided into two clear layers: a layer of interviews, in which the women, now discharged from the military, reflect in the comfort of their home upon their military service,interspersed with a second layer of footage from the Occupied Territories of encounters between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. Some of the footage is of the women during their military service. The viewer is thus presented with the demand to relate the apparent anguish of the six interviewees to the images of military action and, in particular, to the footage of the women during their military service, footage that shows them content, smiling and even laughing.

The title of the film, To See If I’m Smiling, is taken from the words of Meytal, who served as a Medic and Medical Officer in Hebron. Shaken up, Meytal relates that one of her duties was to wash the bodies of dead Palestinians, to conceal signs of what was done to them by the Israeli security forces before the bodies are handed back to the Palestinians. One time, she recalls, one of the corpses had an erection, a fact that brought about embarrassed laughter from the soldiers who were washing it. A group of soldiers was passing by, and one had a camera. Meytal then asks a woman to take her photo with the body. The photo is no longer in her possession, but she is now eager to find out whether her face betrays dismay of the situation in which she found herself or whether she is smiling.

The power of Yarom’s film inheres in the willingness of her interviewees to expose themselves so and to examine their experience in front of the camera. At the same time, however, the very fact that the film absorbs the viewer raises another extremely disturbing question. For what is held back, even forgotten by the progression of the interviews is how one is led to identify with the traumas of perpetrators of war atrocities. Indeed, such identification is possible only inasmuch as the misery of the Palestinians remains concealed. To show abused and tormented Palestinians would have made identification with the anguish of the perpetrators impossible. From this perspective, Yarom’s film reenacts the elision of Palestinians as human beings, an elision that is the basis of Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories. The question whether such an elision can be avoided remains open.

For more information on To See If I'm Smiling, check out the CBC News Sunday profile of the film.