Israeli Unrest May Leave Emotional Scars on Troops

Ten weeks after the Israeli army started using its force to quell the Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel is beginning to show concern about the brutalizing effect the army’s rough tactics are having on the soldiers themselves.

For the most part, the training of the young draftees has not prepared them to contend with the moral ambiguities encountered in policing a restive and resentful civilian population.

“Our soldiers are trained for fighting a conventional war, not for coping with a confusing situation in which children hurl stones and insults at them,” notes Dr. Hanoch Yerushalmi, a psychologist and army reserve officer who has counselled a number of soldiers.

Yerushalmi, who stressed that he was speaking in his capacity as a private psychologist and not as an officer, said that soldiers in this situation face the choice of either reacting in the only way they have been trained to react or of not reacting at all, which ultimately may be worse because it creates anger and frustration that harden into hate.

At least 55 Palestinians have been killed in violent confrontations with Israeli troops since the uprising began Dec. 9, and there are persistent reports of savage beatings and midnight raids on villages to smash furniture and terrify inhabitants. Most of these reports come from Arabs who, as the army notes, deliberately exaggerate them. But many of the accounts have also come from doctors, U.N. personnel, journalists who have witnessed beatings and, increasingly, from the soldiers themselves in interviews with both the Israeli and the foreign press.

Their testimony suggests that the policy of “force, power and beatings,” adopted last month to quell the uprising without the use of lethal weapons, is not only being abused with alarming frequency but has led, in the words of a team of American doctors who visited the territories recently, to “an uncontrolled epidemic of violence by the army and the police in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Doctors’ Warning

Last month, 489 psychiatrists and psychologists from across Israel signed a petition warning of the “social, mental and moral damage” being inflicted upon young soldiers “placed in morally untenable situations.”

Many painful questions are being asked, but what they boil down to is: How can nice Jewish boys behave like this?

A team of 300 army psychologists has just returned from the occupied territories after conducting interviews with the troops to try to determine the reasons behind the soldiers’ behavior in stressful situations and the overall psychological effect of such stress. The results are expected to remain confidential, but interviews with psychiatrists and with soldiers themselves suggest at least a partial answer.

In a conventional war, the enemy is something of an abstraction seen through a gun sight from afar, and thus, hatred for the enemy is a more abstract feeling. But in the crowded and disheveled refugee camps of Gaza, in the narrow, winding alleyways of Nablus and other towns on the West Bank, hatred is much more immediate and personal and therefore difficult to deal with, Yerushalmi and other experts note.

‘Just Grab the First Guy’

“We’d be on night patrol, and some kid would throw a stone,” said Menachem, a 27-year-old Israeli soldier. “We’d chase him, but you hardly ever catch those kids, especially at night. So after a while, whenever somebody threw a stone, we’d just grab the first guy we saw and beat him up. We figured if he hadn’t thrown that stone, he’d probably throw one sooner or later.”

This comment, from a soldier who recently completed a tour of duty in the Gaza Strip, is typical of the remarks of a number of young soldiers who agreed to talk to reporters anonymously. Menachem is a soft-spoken and thoughtful young man, an intellectual who says he will someday be a university professor, and is someone who believes deeply in the humanistic values with which he was raised. Most of the members of his Gaza patrol were like that too, he said.

“And yet I must confess that the only dialogue, the only human interaction between us and the Arabs, was hatred. Our hatreds nourished one another and flourished together,” he said.

“The stress of the situation found its outlet in hatred. We did not like what we were doing to them, and we blamed them for making us do it, and so we hated them even the more,” he said. “I was not mentally prepared for this . . . and I never want to go back there again.”

Cases Called ‘Deviations’

Israeli officials insist that instances of brutality and excessive force are “deviations” from the norm and that, by and large, both soldiers and commanders have shown exemplary self-restraint in quelling the Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Last month, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced that troops would begin using physical force--beatings--as a less lethal alternative to the use of live ammunition to quell the protests. Of the 55 Palestinians killed thus far, most died in the first few weeks, when soldiers responded to barrages of rocks with volleys of gunfire.

But it seems clear now that many officers and soldiers have interpreted the policy less as an alternative to a more violent response than as a license to vent anger, an anger which has been brought to a boil by the present uprising but which has been simmering for far longer.

Sorrow Put Aside

“You go into one of the camps and you see the miserable conditions in which these people live, and maybe you start to feel sorry for them,” said one soldier who, like all the others interviewed by The Times, requested anonymity in line with military rules prohibiting soldiers from talking to reporters. “But then you remember that the terrorists who attack buses in Jerusalem don’t come from Saudi Arabia. They come from here, in the West Bank and Gaza, and you don’t feel so sorry any more.”

“I have no problems beating these people up,” said another soldier, who told of how his patrol caught a curfew violator “and had a lot of fun beating the (vulgarity) out of him.”

Only one member of the patrol stood back, shocked by what was happening. “He didn’t understand that we had to relieve the tension some way,” the soldier said.

“The need to employ violence against a civilian population over time produces two kinds of psychological reactions,” Dr. Reuven Gal, the army’s former chief psychiatrist, told the Tel Aviv newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

Reactions Vary

“On the one hand,” he said, “it produces symptoms of insensibility and the inability to distinguish between violence justified by the circumstances and violence for the sake of violence. On the other hand, it leads to confusion, inner conflict, lack of motivation and depression.”

Although there has been no public poll of soldiers’ feelings, conversations with a number of conscripts and reservists suggest that most soldiers serving in the territories fall somewhere between these two extremes and into an area of moral ambivalence.

At least four Palestinians have died from the injuries they suffered during beatings. Hundreds of other casualties, including some children and some men in their 70s, crowd the hospitals, most recuperating from multiple fractures. This, along with an incident in which soldiers buried four Palestinians alive, clearly suggests that some soldiers have been driven to sadistic extremes.

But if they are a small minority, as the army insists, so are the soldiers who have been so morally affronted by the beatings that they have refused to take part.

‘Very Few’ Refuse

“There are very few who have actually said, ‘No, I won’t do this,’ ” said Yerushalmi. “Their numbers are negligible.”

“Nobody in my unit wanted to do it, but you could not stand back and just watch,” said Menachem. “You could not leave it to the others, because you knew they felt just like you.”

“Maybe if you’re a liberal and you don’t beat somebody up, you’ll feel better with your conscience,” added a young lieutenant serving in the West Bank. “But you’ll be disobeying an order, which is worse. The orders are to beat, so we beat.”

It is this emotional ambivalence, arising from a conflict between individual values on the one hand and, on the other, the need to obey orders and not set oneself apart from the group that deeply worries psychologists, for it has dehumanizing and morally corrosive effects.

“A person who has committed violence has to justify it,” said Yerushalmi. “He has to find a way of living with what he has done. So he convinces himself that what he did was right. Then maybe he does it again.”

Emotionally Scarred

People affected by these experiences come home emotionally scarred. Their wounds may be invisible but are nevertheless real. These wounds fester and “ultimately manifest themselves in complex symptoms,” said Yerushalmi, who treats a number of patients suffering from emotional disorders that he says trace back to their service in the Lebanon war.

Lebanon was, in many respects, Israel’s first “dirty war,” a militarily unwinnable and morally confused conflict that has frequently been likened to an “Israeli Vietnam.”

Most Israelis have not yet served in the occupied territories long enough to feel the same impact. But there will be “severe behavioral damage, both to individuals and to society as a whole, if the situation continues,” warns Gal.

A grim joke is circulating in Israel these days to the effect that there are only two kinds of Jews any more, hand-wringers and hand-breakers--an allusion to the fact that some soldiers have used their rifle butts to deliberately break the hands of Arab demonstrators.

‘Occupation Is Our Vietnam’

Yerushalmi is what some would call a hand-wringer. “More than Lebanon, the occupation is our Vietnam,” he says. “The only solution is to end it. It can’t go on like this. It is a time bomb in our midst.”

But the “polarizing effect that the occupation is having on Israeli society” complicates the search for solutions, he notes. Fear and hatred have their own dynamics that, once set into motion, are difficult to arrest.

“We’d find a pro-PLO slogan written on a wall, and we’d go through the camp, determined to find out who put it there,” said Menachem. “The slightest provocation triggered military action. It was a cat-and-mouse game that many of us felt was superfluous, but neither side could stop.

“Both sides are locked into this,” he added. “Both sides are trapped.”