Amira Hass :Israeli soldiers in West Bank: Raiding, arresting, mapping and getting home for Shabbat
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haaretz.com
Our forces carried out 32 raids in Palestinian neighborhoods and villages in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)
on the night of January 23 alone. On the previous night our soldiers
were said to have carried out 24 raids. On Sunday night, January 21,
there were only 19 raids. In the early hours of that Sunday morning, 22
raids. That’s the list of the latest daily summaries published by the
Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Department, based on
the reports of the Palestinian security agencies.
There
are other passages in the daily reports that outline the routine of
administering our garden-variety apartheid and maintaining Jewish
colonialism: arrests, short detentions, mobile checkpoints, armed
attacks, settler violence, home demolition, confiscation of property.
Every week thousands of soldiers, flesh of our flesh, create these
statistics, which our amnesia devours.
The raids are so routine that if there are no
wounded or dead, even the Palestinian media doesn’t interview the
residents of the homes broken into by our soldiers: old people who have
difficulty getting out of bed, frightened children, women who have
barely left the bedroom. And what is the purpose of these raids and
break-ins? Detentions, scare tactics, handing out Shin Bet summonses,
searches. And as the members of Breaking the Silence teach us in their
new booklet, “Why I Broke the Silence,” the routine raids are also used
for “mapping.”
A
staff sergeant from Battalion 50 of the Nahal Brigade gives testimony
about the mapping mission he carried out in Hebron in 2010: “The purpose
of the mapping is to take some house and map it from inside – how many
rooms, which room overlooks what all the technical details of the house.
The ultimate goal is to create a kind of better understanding of how
the Palestinian area of the city looks inside the houses, so that
afterwards, if there’s a need for ‘straw widows’ [ambushes from inside
houses] or such things, then there will be an option to do that. We did
quite a few mappings. It happens quite a lot.”
Was
mapping the purpose of the raids in the Jenin area on Friday? Or are
our forces still looking for Ahmed Nasser Jarrar, who is suspected of
killing Raziel Shevach of Havat Gilad, the outpost that finally achieved
its goal and is in the process of being “laundered”? The Palestinian
news website Sama reports that the forces of the Israeli occupation
broke into the city of Jenin from all directions and searched the
houses. Likewise in Yamun village in the Jenin district.
How
many houses in all? It doesn’t say. It’s not clear from the Sama report
whether the residents of the houses were taken outside in the middle of
the night into the freezing cold and the rain, or whether the stormy
weather was mentioned because the writer was tired of using dry,
telegraphic language. In the southern West Bank too – in the
neighborhood of Jabal Johar in Hebron and the Al Aroub refugee camp –
our 19-year-old soldiers were engaged in scaring 8-year-old children and
humiliating men.
Another
staff sergeant, also from Battalion 50, tells about his part in a
routine raid in 2014: “We had a night of handing out summonses and
carrying out detentions. We went to two villages. When we arrived in the
second one I tried to remember what had happened about an hour ago in
the first village, I didn’t remember whom I had detained, whom I had
summoned, and it ate me up. Here I had ruined the night, or the week,
for four families, how was it that I didn’t remember their faces? You
really suppress it, you suppress the entire situation. You wear a mask,
you’re the toughest guy in the world. ‘Army, jish,’ I would knock on the
door, suddenly I realized the tough image I was putting on, and that’s
not me at all.
“All
I wanted was to get out of there fast. You know, you finish at 6 A.M.,
get up already at 8, then you’re already awake until the next arrest,
and then it turns out that by 4 A.M. you’re already half asleep. It
turns out that you’re asleep standing up inside someone’s home, and
you’ve got your gun aimed, and then you also don’t even remember things,
you’re dying to get out of there. So you do what’s necessary as fast as
possible. But you enter a family’s home at 3 A.M. and a soldier comes
to a Palestinian and speaks to him in this poor Arabic, they don’t
really know Arabic, the interrogators. So how stupid is it that some
soldier goes in, starts to threaten you in broken Arabic, but because he
has the power there’s nothing you can do. [The Palestinian] is at a
complete disadvantage and you have the upper hand.”
A staff sergeant from the Engineering Corps,
searching for a “fellow” in 2002, also found a way to repress things:
“You start going into the houses for no reason, and you have nothing to
say. I remember that at the time I repressed the whole thing by thinking
of it as an anthropological survey, we’ll see the houses from inside.
It was Friday night, a day off for them too, all the families are at
home. They’re all watching television with their satellite. You barge
into the middle of their life, out of nowhere, go into their home, see
their bedroom.”
Q: You didn’t care that this was an invasion of privacy?
A: “I cared more about getting home for Shabbat.”
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