Israeli terrorists wear uniforms; does that make them legitimate?
Legal targets
By Amira Hass
How frustrating, sad and - especially - frightening it was
to read Yedioth Ahronoth's latest weekend supplement.
"Once a sniper from one of the outposts hit a young boy
at a distance of 150 meters," Shuki Sadeh, an Israel
Defense Forces reservist officer, told Haim Tal (Yedioth
Ahronoth, Jan. 25). The meaning of "hit" is not sufficiently
clear in a first reading; however, later on in the article, you
realize that the boy was killed.
"What angered me at the time," Sadeh relates, "was that
our soldiers said `Well, that's another Arab who's
disappeared.'" There is a procedure for firing warning
shots at Palestinian children, explains Sadeh. When a
child is 100 meters away from the outpost, a soldier
must fire 50 meters to the child's right or left. However,
IDF soldiers do not always observe this procedure.
Ariel Shatil, also interviewed in Tal's article, is another
reservist who has served in the Gaza Strip. He is also
one of the signatories on the petition of IDF officers who
refuse to serve in the territories. "People say," Shatil
notes, "that `the Palestinians shoot first and we just
respond.' This is untrue. One officer there told soldiers
doing guard duty in the lookout posts: `If things are too
quiet or if you don't feel certain about the situation, just let
off a few rounds.' Shots were fired every night. We would
start shooting and they would fire back."
David Sonnschein talks about a company commander
(with leftist views) and a sniper who identified a "legal
target" (whom soldiers are permitted to shoot at) at a
distance of 2.5 kilometers. "These are not targets!"
Sonnschein tried to tell his colleagues. "These are
people. Did this person endanger you? Did you see him
trying to do something? How can you tell a sniper, a
young fellow like you or me, to pull the trigger? After all,
you know that you don't really know who's really out
there."
Three soldiers, three incidents that are not isolated but
which are really part of the same set of phenomena. If
the incidents were not part of this set of phenomena,
these soldiers would never have contacted one another.
How frustrating that, apparently, the focus of attention
has shifted to the cyclical denial of the legitimacy of
refusing to serve in the army. There are grounds for the
fear that public and media attention will not even center
on the difficult phenomena these soldiers are pointing to.
The killing of children who did not endanger and do not
endanger the lives of Israeli soldiers; shots fired by the
IDF (which wound, kill and always generate fear) that
have provoked and provoke Palestinian gunfire; false
reports that the Palestinians had initiated the gunfire;
Israeli snipers firing from great distances at people
identified as "legal targets" and subsequently
"recognized as terrorists."
How sad and frustrating that these are not new
phenomena and that they are phenomena that could
have been publicized before the Israeli officers came out
with their stories. From the very first days of the present
Palestinian uprising, one could hear the voices of those
who were pointing out these phenomena. Palestinian
physicians who reported children and young people who
had been shot in the upper part of their body and who
had not presented any danger to the lives of Israeli
soldiers; the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human
Rights, which, well before B'Tselem, paid attention to
Palestinian testimony from the field; European activists
in non-governmental organizations who witnessed
incidents that never found their way into the Israeli media
or which were presented in that media as "exchanges of
gunfire" between combat forces of equal strength;
Amnesty International investigators who were astounded
by Israel's excessive use of military force against
rock-throwers; journalists, primarily foreign
correspondents, who were on the "battlefields" and who
saw at close range the topography and technology that
maintain the IDF's superiority and which could have
prevented the killing of rock-throwers were it the intention
of Israeli policies to extinguish the flames.
How frustrating that reports on these phenomena, which
reached the newscasts and news sections of the
newspapers immediately after they occurred but were
presented in a highly abbreviated form, were pushed to
the margins of the collective Israeli consciousness,
which has been captured by the PR-oriented
manufacturing of reality by IDF personnel, by military
intelligence assessors and by Israeli cabinet ministers.
This reality-manufacturing created concrete molds for
this consciousness, and it was impossible to shake
these molds with reports of any other kind. This
apparently solid information became Knowledge. The
Knowledge that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser
Arafat planned everything after he rejected Israel's
generous gestures at Camp David; the Knowledge that
the "Palestinians are shooting at our forces" (which just
happen to be stationed above and opposite residential
Palestinian neighborhoods); the Knowledge that every
dead Palestinian was killed in compliance with
procedures; and the Knowledge that those procedures
are meticulous and strict. Finally, there is the
crystallization of the Knowledge that every Palestinian
attack is terrorism for its own sake and intended to kill
Jews simply because they are Jews.
How sad, frustrating and frightening to read the words of
the officers who refuse to serve in the territories.
Frightening because it is impossible to analyze the
ever-increasing phenomenon of terror attacks in Israel
without taking into account that the collective Palestinian
memory includes those unarmed, defenseless children,
women and men who were killed or wounded during the
past 16 months because they were "legitimate targets" in
the eyes of Israeli soldiers.
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