Last week, the Israeli dissident organization "Shovrim Shtika" (Hebrew), or "Breaking the Silence" (English), has released a booklet with 111 soldier testimonies from last summer's war on Gaza.
The testimonies are available as a PDF booklet in Hebrew and English, and also online in single stories - again in Hebrew and English. Some testimonies are available in video.
My far more diligent Adalah teammate, subir, has diaried quite a bit about the testimonies, with many excerpts (see his Diaries One, Two and Three). Here I wanted to point out the most glaring aspect of the testimonies as a whole - one that is completely missed because it is an absence, not a presence.
The diary title hints at what I'm referring to. Below the testimony - and the fold - I will elaborate (not for too long). The testimony is also a hint.
The whole ‘roof knocking’ thing (a practice in which a small missile is fired at the roof of a building as an advance warning that it will shortly be destroyed in an air strike) was understood [by Hamas] very quickly. Hamas forces are very light, really, and for them – in contrast to the general [Gaza Strip] population, and this is the great tragedy –‘roof knocking’ gave them enough time to go down into some burrow, or to run between the houses and vanish from the area.
But for a family with a grandmother who’s sitting in the living room, it’s a bit harder. And that, too, is part of the whole thing. ...you would often get a lot of data that says, 'such-and-such a number of uninvolved civilians were wounded'
From Testimony 82, by a lieutenant in the IDF Gaza Division
Following war, it is usually hard to get to the bottom of what really happened. This is especially true with Israel since 2000 - a nation constantly running away from its own mind. Most Israelis really don't want to know.
Since 2000, every couple of years the Israeli military gets embroiled in a conflict that totally disrupts life for most Israelis, and sows much worse death and destruction among its neighbors. But a few months later, no one in Israel seems to remember or to care. It's back to either "Eat, Drink and be Merry", or to the latest domestic scandal or grievance, amplified beyond proportion in order to elegantly channel and diffuse the disquiet in the national subconscious.
This is what makes the Breaking the Silence testimonies so valuable. For the coming few years, these are might be the only substantial snippet of ground truth about what went on from the perspective of one of the fighting sides. Regardless of whether they move anything political or legal (not a huge chance IMHO), the testimonies in themselves have substantial historical and documentary value.
This brave work of whistle-blowing and citizen journalism provides other citizens around the world with more evidence to evaluate the war, not just morally - which, justifiably, is where most of the global attention to the testimonies has gone so far - but also on the military-political front.
Which is where I'll start my first stab at evaluating them.
There was a war, right? The bloodiest conflict in Gaza since 1967 with over 2000 Palestinian dead (mostly civilians, according to most sources). The Israeli side also lost more troops than it had lost in Gaza in decades. Israel called up over 80,000 reserve soldiers, on top of nearly 200,000 active-duty. A big chunk of them actually went into the tiny Gaza Strip, which only 360 sq.km (139 sq. miles for you) - smaller than a typical major American metro region. And stayed there for several weeks.
Now we have testimonies. 111 of them. You would expect to read about battles. I'll save you the search: there are none described. A couple of soldiers mention their unit had been shot at with light weapons. One mentions recognizing "terrorists with Kalashnikovs on motorcycles" and shooting at them during the early entry phase. A couple more think their units were shot at, but aren't 100% sure.
But in the 111 testimonies, covering nearly 40 days that Israeli combat units were there inside the Strip, there is not a single description of a genuine battle.
Sure, there was fire. Almost exclusively IDF fire, unbelievably enormous quantities of it.
The artillery is constantly firing. It’s called ‘retaining tension’ – that is, keeping [Hamas] unsure about when exactly we will be going in – so that they are constantly thinking that we might be about to go in. It’s called ‘softening targets,’ and it’s done also to clear a range for advancing. What this means in practice is, that shells are being fired all the time. Even if we aren’t actually going to enter: shells, shells, shells. A suspicious structure, an open area, a field, a place where a tunnel shaft could be – fire, fire, fire.
From Testimony 96, by an infantry Lieutenant who was in Northern Gaza Strip
...Before a tank makes any movement it fires, every time. Those guys were trigger happy, totally crazy. Those were their orders, I’m certain of it, there’s no chance anybody would just go around shooting like that. [The brigade’s] conception was, “We’ll fire without worrying about it, and then we’ll see what happens.”
[Q:] The fire was directed at places deemed suspicious?
No, not necessarily. The tank fires at places that you know you will need to enter, it fires at those houses.
From Testimony 30, by an infantry Lieutenant who was in Rafah
Of course, you can afford to fire so much at nothing in particular, only when someone else foots the bill. Midway through the war, the IDF actually started running out and "bought" more ammo from the US.
The orgy of fire for fire's sake was accompanied by an orgy of destruction for destruction's sake.
I don’t know how they pulled it off, the D9 operators didn’t rest for a second. Nonstop, as if they were playing in a sandbox. Driving back and forth, back and forth, razing another house, another street. And at some point there was no trace left of that street. It was hard to imagine there even used to be a street there at all. It was like a sandbox, everything turned upside down. And they didn’t stop moving. Day and night, 24/7, they went back and forth, gathering up mounds, making embankments, flattening house after house.
From Testimony 21, by an infantry Sergeant who was in Northern Gaza Strip
We figured out pretty quick that every house we leave, a D9 shows up and razes it. The neighborhood we were in, what characterized it operationally was that it commanded a view of the entire area of the [Israel-Gaza barrier] and also of some of the [Israeli] border towns. ...At a certain point we understood it was a pattern: you leave a house and the house is gone – after two or three houses you figure out that there’s a pattern. The D9 comes and flattens it.
...Not really a neighborhood anymore. And when updated maps were issued after we left [the Gaza Strip], we saw the only two houses that remained standing when we left, marked on them.
From Testimony 09, by an Mechanized infantry Sergeant who was in the Deir-El-Balah area
But no battles. Because - as Israel's vaunted intelligence services knew, or should have known - Hamas has an extensive network of tunnels and can hide inside it and choose when and where to come out and fight. Bombing, shelling, shooting at various buildings - that's great for the pyrotechnic effect and for collective punishment of the population. But it didn't do much to the enemy's fighting power.
So what was the goal of this operation? To raze half of the Gaza Strip and bomb the other half? Perhaps that was the goal. If the goal was to provoke Hamas to come out into a battle of annihilation, then it failed miserably. Or perhaps there was no military goal at all. Perhaps everything was a very bloody, very cynical political theater intended mostly for domestic Israeli consumption.
I don't have fully developed answers right now. This critique - that once again, the IDF lumbers into the Strip like a deranged elephant, with no clear strategic aim, surely none that can be achieved - has been voiced by me and by many on the left. Even quite a few on the right made the same criticism; they, of course, would like to see a full-out invasion and re-Occupation of the entire Strip. Meaning at least 10,000s of Palestinian dead and hundreds of dead soldiers. At least.
Anyway, for me, after reading all the testimonies and taking notes, that was the biggest take-home lesson that's easy to miss if you don't pay attention. In this rather coherent and extensive body of evidence, Where's the war? All we have from the testimonies is an overgrown monstrous toddler, or playground bully, or whatever metaphor you'd like to use, stupidly acting out by demolishing buildings, infrastructure, and the poor civilians stuck in the middle of its tantrum.
I will write more lessons from these testimonies in subsequent diaries.