Twenty years on from the start of the al Aqsa Intifada, I find myself thinking back to when I served in the IDF. I remember the first time I was shot at. It was in the Northern West Bank city of Nablus. A volley of bullets kicked up dirt just next to my leg. I remember the lesson learned one night while looking through my scope at several people flashing torches in my direction. The pings of ricocheting bullets on the rocks around me taught me that I was seeing muzzle flashes from rifles through the green on green lens of my night scope, not torches. That was Jenin.
Stories about gunfights are always the ones people seem to want to hear when I’m talking about my service in the IDF. Far more time was spent traipsing through Palestinian homes searching for weapons or lying in an ambush waiting for a target who never showed up than was spent in actual combat.
As a soldier I had a microscopic view of the conflict. Time and distance offers a macro perspective. By sending suicide bombers into the heart of Israel the terrorists were sending a message that the battlefield was as much Tel Aviv as Ramallah. They would advertise their successes by pasting thousands of posters on walls in Palestinian towns and cities. Each had a huge image of the ‘martyr’ and photos of the carnage he or she had caused in a filmstrip at the bottom.
Throughout the intifada the IDF set about forcing the lid of the pressure cooker back onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The arrests, firefights and duties of occupation I engaged in were part of that process. It wasn’t pretty. The first time I arrested a person preparing to become a suicide bomber I stared at him, asking myself how many people would live because we’d prevented him from blowing himself up? Arresting him felt like a holy act.
I pondered a lot of questions that had no answers. Once I was in a jeep patrol at dusk in the Northern West Bank and a warning that a terrorist was on the move near us came in over the radio. We set up an impromptu roadblock and stopped the few cars who came our way. My squad leader then waved a car through without checking it. I went mad at him, he answered, “He’s just a guy trying to get home to his family”. Five minutes later the radio squawked, the alert was cancelled. Maybe he was right; why stop someone unnecessarily?
Once we stopped an ambulance. Feeling guilty I explained to the crew we’d had a specific warning about an ambulance transporting a terrorist. An officer went crazy, “Now they’ll radio everyone what we’re looking for!” Lessons like that teach you that nice people rarely make good soldiers. I wanted to be a nice guy but only a fool lets terrorists murder civilians in the name of being nice.
If a checkpoint stops ten thousand people, humiliating them and causing untold disruption but stops one bomber, was it worth it? What if 100,000 people’s lives are disrupted? What if it’s all Palestinians? How many lives are you prepared to lose to stop the checkpoints?
Israeli commanders grapple with these issues every day. Sometimes they make good calls, sometimes they make bad ones. There is rarely right and wrong, just grey.
Looking back I see that the robust approach Sharon took was the only one possible. With bombs going off on the streets and an Arafat who later became implicated in that carnage, I can’t see how there was a choice. But by the end of my service in 2004 I was sure that every operation I participated in resulted in the creation of more terrorists. All these years later I’m certain that if we hadn’t been carrying out all those operations more Israelis would have died. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
The occupation will continue, maybe for another 20 years, maybe for 200. The Israelis will keep building — settlers will keep moving over the green line. Israeli actions will be based on one word: viability — the viability of the plan under which they leave or stay.
The soldiers who served just before me fought in South Lebanon. Those who replaced me fought in Lebanon in 2006, those who replaced them fought in Gaza in 2009/10, those who replaced them fought in Gaza again in 2014. Every combat soldier has “their” conflict and has to make their choices as to who lives and who dies. Each of us put our lives on the line for what we believe in. Some never lived to tell the tale.
Marc Goldberg served as a Paratrooper from 2002-04. His memoir of his service, Beyond the Green Line, is available in paperback or to download from Amazon
