A Necessary War, Unless You're In The Middle Of It

Itai Haviv is an artillery captain in the Israeli army reserves: "As a fighting officer of the Israel Defense Forces, I served all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip," he writes. "I am not naive. Sometimes you must kill to survive. In the name of the State of Israel, I chased after children who threw stones at me. I patrolled the alleys of refugee camps. I banged on tin doors in the wee hours of the night. I looked for inciting texts between mattresses and blankets. I heard babies cry. I pulled people out of bed to erase slogans off the walls. I enforced curfews. I fought against Palestinian flags hanging on electricity poles. I stopped vehicles. I confiscated ID cards. I transferred handcuffed detainees in the back of my jeep. I shot rioters. I stopped hundreds of cars at checkpoints."

Haviv, along with some 400 others, is a refusinik, an army reservist who refuses to serve in the West Bank, who sees the Israeli army operation against Palestinians not as a war against terrorism, but a war that guarantees terrorism. Haviv’s views are quite different from those of many Jews who live in North America, well away from the fighting, who’ve never patrolled the alleys of refugee camps, have never shot rioters, have never beaten rock-throwers to death, will never sit in cafes that are plunged into a maelstrom of blood and screams and exploding nails and metal by a suicide bomb detonated by a youth whose life is so bleak that a martyr’s death is infinitely more attractive, but are prepared to belligerently back whatever brutality is deemed necessary to defend Israel from terrorists, even if it means the terrorism will get worse, and more Israelis will die, and Israel is irredeemably stained.

If it seems like the IDF has borrowed from the Nazis, it’s because they have. The January 25th edition of Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported that one of the top commanders in the occupied territories recommended the German army’s methods of operating in the Warsaw Ghetto as a model for the IDF to follow.