Israeli Refuseniks: Occupation's Dark Underbelly Exposed
18 October 2014
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
A letter signed by 43 veterans of an
elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring
their refusal to continue serving the occupation has
sent shockwaves through Israeli society. But not in
the way the soldiers may have hoped.
Unusually, this small group of
reservists has gone beyond justifying their act of
refusal in terms of general opposition to the
occupation.
Because of their place at the heart of
the system of control over Palestinians, they have set
out in detail, in the letter and subsequent
interviews, what their work entails and why they find
it morally repugnant.
Veterans of the secretive Unit 8200, Israel's NSA, say
it is drummed into new intelligence recruits that no
order is unlawful. They must, for example, guide air
strikes even if civilians will be harmed.
The 43, all barred by Israeli law from
identifying themselves publicly, say they avoided
serving during Israel's latest attack on Gaza, fearing
what would be permitted. But their concerns relate to
more than the legality of military attacks.
In a telling admission, one reservist
said he first questioned his role after watching The
Lives of Others, a film depicting life under the Stasi,
East Germany's much-feared secret police. The Stasi
are estimated to have collected files on five million
East Germans before the Berlin Wall fell.
According to the refuseniks, much
Israeli intelligence gathering targets "innocent
people". The information is used "for political
persecution", "recruiting collaborators" and "driving
parts of Palestinian society against itself".
The surveillance powers of 8200 extend
far beyond security measures. They seek out the
private weaknesses of Palestinians – their sex lives,
monetary troubles and illnesses – to force them into
conspiring in their own oppression.
"If you required urgent medical care in
Israel, the West Bank or abroad, we looked for you,"
admits one.
An illustration of the desperate
choices facing Palestinians was voiced by a mother of
seven in Gaza last week. She told AP news agency that
she and her husband were recruited as spies in return
for medical treament in Israel for one of their
children. Her husband was killed by Hamas as a
collaborator in 2012.
The goal of intelligence gathering, the
refuseniks point out, is to control every aspect of
Palestinian life, from cradle to grave. Surveillance
helps confine millions of Palestinians to their
territorial ghettoes, ensures their total dependence
on Israel, and even forces some to serve as undercover
go-betweens for Israel, buying land to help the
settlements expand. Palestinians who resist risk jail
or execution.
The implication of these revelations is
disturbing. The success of Israel's near half-century
of occupation depends on a vast machinery of
surveillance and intimidation, while large numbers of
Israelis benefit directly or indirectly from
industrial-scale oppression.
Unlike their predecessors in Israel's
tiny refusal movement, the soldiers of 8200 have been
uniquely exposed to the big picture of occupation.
They have seen its dark underbelly – and this gives
their protest the potential to be explosive.
Some in the international media have
framed the soldiers' bravery as a sign of hope that
Israelis may be waking to the toll of the occupation
on Palestinians and the health of Israeli society.
The dissenters of 8200 believed the
same: that their confessions might lead to national
soul-searching, investigations into their allegations,
and mass protests like those that greeted news of
Israeli war crimes in Lebanon in the early 1980s. They
could not have been more mistaken.
Israel's prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, set the tone, denouncing the letter as
"baseless slander". The army said the soldiers would
be "sharply disciplined". The defence minister, Moshe
Yaalon, termed them "criminals".
The head of the opposition, Isaac
Herzog, of the supposedly leftwing Labor party,
characterised their protest as "insubordination",
while Smola, a party established this month to revive
the left, called the soldiers' act "evil".
In the Israeli media the group were
dismissed as deluded eccentrics, "trippy" losers and
"spoiled brats". If there is a constituency of concern
among the public, it has kept stoically quiet.
Revealingly, Herzog was himself once a
senior officer in 8200. He must have been party to the
same ugly secrets but used his political influence to
shield the system rather than blow the whistle.
It seems that when the barbarity of the occupation is
at its most transparent, when it is hardest for
Israelis to avert their gaze, they simply shut their
eyes instead.
The wall-to-wall condemnation of the
refuseniks mirrored Israelis' almost-universal support
for the recent attack on Gaza, even as they learnt of
mounting Palestinian civilian casualties.
Over the past decade, one intelligence
veteran lamented: "We've seen a decline in how much
the soldiers and the Israeli public care that innocent
people are dying." That observation was firmly
verified this summer in Gaza.
Thousands of Israelis who have passed
through 8200 did not sign the letter, noted a
commentator. Another pointed out that 43 dissenters
were "insignifcant" compared to the 600,000 who serve
in the military or the reserves.
None of this suggests Israelis are
uniquely evil. Rather, it indicates how deeply
dysfunctional their society has become – as one might
expect after years of being collectively complicit in
the oppression of another people.
Netanyahu is only too aware how to keep
the Israeli public compliant. Last week he warned of
an apparently alarming new threat: Hamas had responded
to the operation in Gaza by waging "cyber attacks" on
Israel, aided by Iran.
The insinuation was clear. Unit 8200 is
all that stands in the way of the Jewish state's
destruction by the mullahs of Tehran. Those who
undermine intelligence work endanger Israel's
survival.
Netanyahu knows it is a message that will find favour
with Israelis. Their military is no callous and brutal
leviathan. And they can continue to sleep easy at
night, still history's victims.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest
books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's
Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website
is www.jonathan-cook.net.