I knew from a very young age that I am not only going to be a soldier but I wanted to
be a paratrooper. My dad was a paratrooper; I’m named after
paratrooper who was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. So it was really not if but when. One of my first operations ever was entering
a Palestinian home. You take over a house and use the house as a
military point. And I remember the feeling of entering someone’s
house in the middle of the night, waking an entire family up, locking them in the rooms, and
the house was ours. I tried to find justifications for it. I tried
to convince myself that this is OK. I just, I couldn’t convince myself anymore. Breaking the Silence is an organization of
former Israeli soldiers. We basically have come together to do a pretty
simple thing. To let people know what it’s like to maintain
military occupation over millions of Palestinians and to talk about it from our own experiences. When I joined the military in November 2004,
I came in with a lot of enthusiasm. I thought I could be this good guy in a shitty
situation. But when I started my actual service and I
started the real duty, which was maintaining the occupation, I not only realized that this
was happening and that I was part of it, but I felt that I have a responsibility to let
my society know about this. The feeling that I’m coming in to protect
my society, together with the feeling that I’m actually destroying another, just couldn’t
fit together. What drives me and what I think is the drive
behind Breaking the Silence is very simple: we’re trying to pick up a mirror to our society
and say, hey look, this is a reflection, this is what you sent us to do, this what you’re
sending us to do. I think specifically the voice of soldiers
is important for sure for what we’re trying to achieve, is to create this awareness and
debate. What we’re doing now is still serving our
country because we were sent there and we know what it’s like. So it’s much more difficult to dismiss. There’s an opening here, there is a possibility
of actually building a community that looks the reality straight in the eye and says this
is not the way we want to continue living.
