Israel General Tells of Troop Punishment

Maj. Gen. Amram Mitzna, military commander for the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said Thursday that “we had maybe too many” cases of soldiers unnecessarily beating Palestinians, and he acknowledged that the punishment for many soldiers responsible for such beatings has been limited to transfers.

Mitzna made it clear, however, that he believes that the relative calm in the occupied territories now is largely the result of severe tactics against demonstrators, including beatings with clubs.

The 42-year-old general, apparently in keeping with an official effort to reverse the negative reaction to Israel’s policy of dealing with the unrest, said the critics may be right, at least in part.

He told reporters that the main issue now “of course is the behavior of our soldiers” in dealing with the rock-throwing and taunting of the demonstrators.

Referring to reports that Israeli troops have not only beaten demonstrators but physically abused nonviolent Palestinians and detainees to the point of brutality, Mitzna said that “we the Israelis, or Jews, have a very sensitive conscience, (and these incidents) are something against our way of thinking, our way of behaving. . . . They are exceptions to the policy.”

Each of the complaints, many of them from soldiers, is being checked, he said, “and if there is someone we have to punish, we punish them.”

Mitzna said he does not have the details of the investigations. He said he does not know how many complaints have been received or how many men have been disciplined. “Some are court-martialed,” he said, and “some are dismissed from his unit.”

When reporters indicated skepticism that a transfer from one’s unit is punishment, Mitzna said “this is not a prize . . . it is a big penalty” and added that it is “what we always do in our army.”

“For the last 10 days,” he said, “I can say the situation is calming down, (because now) most of the (Palestinian) people understand better that it is better for them not to get involved with the military forces. Fear is one way (to establish that understanding). Even though I don’t like someone to fear me, still it is something you have to achieve.”

Meanwhile, individual soldiers were giving reporters their own views. One, Lt. Yona Rubenstein, who had just returned from duty in the Gaza Strip, said that “rules are fine, but it’s very difficult to behave under this rule.”

“During the worst of the demonstrations,” he said, “I beat them without this order.”

Rubenstein, a business administration student at Hebrew University here, denied using excessive force or beating bystanders or someone under arrest.

“The idea is to beat someone only at a moment of necessity, to avoid getting into a situation where you must shoot,” he said.

A troop commander in the Gaza Strip, unidentified by name, was quoted in the newspaper Maariv as saying: “I don’t know what the defense minister said or didn’t say. . . . I only know what order I gave my soldiers. I ordered them to go straight into the demonstrators, break bones and draw blood.”

A 20-year-old enlisted man identified by the initials Y.Z. was quoted in another newspaper, Hadashot, as saying that after being told that a Gaza village had to be made aware of the army’s presence, “we entered almost every second house.” He said that “we tied up the men outside facing a wall and while questioning them, the soldiers beat them with clubs.”

Gen. Mitzna denied that any such orders had been given or that such behavior was tolerated.