They feed us sand while calling it water
Apr. 10th, 2010 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eumeliaThis being a personal blog in which I talk about as assortment of stuff, some more interesting to you, dear readers, than others, I feel it's important to disseminate information, even if it doesn't actively concern you.
It actively concerns me, so I suppose that's good enough.
Some of you may know about the gag order placed in Israel regarding an "espionage" case.
I don't want to talk about Anat Kam, journalist who was placed under house arrest since December for handing over "top secret" documents that show the IDF breaking High Court Rullings regarding, among other things, the assassinations of various Palestinian leaders.
She handed over this classified information to Ha'aretz journalist Uri Balu while she was doing her time in the IDF.
Uri Blau himself is now in exile in London because the Shin-Bet (what in Hebrew we call the Shabak, שב"כ, which is the acronym for "General Security Services"... they're not a Secret Police, they have carte blanche to do things the police and the IDF cannot do... like break into homes of activists, tap their phones,allegedly torture "security"/"political" prisoners and recruit via any means necessary Palestinian collaborators.
I want to talk about the fact that during my time in the IDF, I too was privy to classified information but I was too naive, insular, politically unaware and oblivious to actually understand that what I was doing was doing more harm to people's lives, than good.
What do I mean by this?
My life as a middle class Ashkenazi Jewish girl in a middle class town a twenty minute drive westward from Tel Aviv insulated me, totally, to the reality of what was going on a twenty minute drive eastward, across the border - "The Green Line". All I knew, before I was drafted in 2003, was that the West Bank had lots of Settlers and Palestinians blew themselves up from time to time.
I was fucking clueless.
In the Army, I remained clueless, because I was taught that I knew things "civilians" didn't know, shouldn't know, didn't need to know.
It makes you feel important.
I remember knowing weeks in advance about the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.
"Collateral Damage" was not what we talked about in the office, as far as I and everyone else was concerned it was "mission accomplished" and I filed away the Intel.
Keeping secrets in easy for me. What I don't think is anyone else's business is kept very safe within, it helps that I don't particularly enjoy getting drunk or that substance abuse on my part has been so rare that it has never had much effect on me.
So I walked around knowing that we had eyes in the sky, that we knew where The Enemy kept weapon caches, which house in which neighbourhood was commandeered, etc. etc. etc.
One think that did wise me up at the time was that we don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press here. Sure, there are different stances, standpoints and opinions regarding those freedoms, but on the most basic level, the press in not free to report on what happens.
Everything goes through the IDF censor, ostensibly to make sure that no sensitive information is revealed to "the Enemy", in reality, to keep the civilian population in the dark.
Israelis don't need to know that the IDF breaks into people's homes in the West Bank on a regular basis, don't need to know that what is commonly called "Focused Foiling", the tight focused assassination in which used Smart Missiles have a kill zone of an entire building, sometimes a small block.
But another 12 people killed in the tightly focused assassination is a small price to pay and in any event, they were probably terrorists any way.
You know, I enjoyed my time in the IDF. Sure it was constant stress, meetings, yelling at people, being called a "bitch", training people and fixing up outdated Intelligence Software from the fucking 80's, but I liked it.
I had friends, some of them are still friends (though due to my paradigm shift some no longer speak to me and I don't speak to them either) and I almost signed up for more time.
You don't notice the burn out until you crash I guess.
By the end of my two years I was burned out. I was so tired and worn out that I was basically incompetent.
Three weeks later I was discharged on my original release date and thought I never had to look back.
That didn't work out very well.
Back to the point at hand. I was boxed inside a certain view of the world. It took a serious shaking up for me to see what was really going on. It's so easy to ignore, rationalise, deny or simply censor, what is going on and how it exacerbates to underlying dynamic of violence I feel when I walk down the street, when I sit on the train and bus, how fucked I felt when I spent six months in the States and how liberating it was to spend three weeks of summer in England and Ireland a year after the second war in Lebanon opened my eyes and got my heart bleeding.
Israel treats it's citizens as subordinates. Oh, yeah, we get to vote once every two and a half years for the same government over and over again, but all in all, we walk around apathetic, pissed off and not really understanding why.
So, we conform.
There's a moral panic regarding IDF "draft dodgers", which is blatant lie, seeing as anyone released from the duty of serving the IDF is released by the IDF it is pretty fucking hypocritical of the Army to start a witch hunt against the very individuals they themselves release.
Not to mention that they do not draft Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but have no problem drafting the Druze (Men only, of course). The Beduin are allowed to volunteer for the service.
Different categories of Arabs, of course.
Different categories of citizenship, period.
Apartheid is a word that shuts down conversation. Once someone says that word the only think that crosses the average Israeli (most of us) mind is Anti-Zionism which is conflated with Antisemitism. Good luck trying to break through.
Reality is hidden here, under the agenda of defence. We are paranoid, we are taught that we have no friends, we are taught that we must "defend" our democracy - which is always amazing, because the very defence of it, compromises it, of course.
The whole notion of democracy works under a few basic tenants - Majority Rule and Protection of Minority Groups. So here, we have the former, but very little, if any, of the latter. We have democracy formally speaking, but entire stretches of land under martial law, in which people of certain religious and ethnic groups are placed under different systems of law.
Nope, not Apartheid.
People fight the separation fence, no one talks about the "quiet transfer" of Hebron, where over the past ten years the Palestinian population left "willingly", packed up and ran away, because of the continuous abuse they received there.
No one talks about the fact that Liberal Israel that uses gay rights as propaganda to how fucking fantastic it is to be gay here while the Shin-Bet takes advantage of homophobia and uses gay Palestinians as collaborators.
This is so tiring.
Israel is only "liberal" for some people who live here.
Wake up!
It actively concerns me, so I suppose that's good enough.
Some of you may know about the gag order placed in Israel regarding an "espionage" case.
I don't want to talk about Anat Kam, journalist who was placed under house arrest since December for handing over "top secret" documents that show the IDF breaking High Court Rullings regarding, among other things, the assassinations of various Palestinian leaders.
She handed over this classified information to Ha'aretz journalist Uri Balu while she was doing her time in the IDF.
Uri Blau himself is now in exile in London because the Shin-Bet (what in Hebrew we call the Shabak, שב"כ, which is the acronym for "General Security Services"... they're not a Secret Police, they have carte blanche to do things the police and the IDF cannot do... like break into homes of activists, tap their phones,
I want to talk about the fact that during my time in the IDF, I too was privy to classified information but I was too naive, insular, politically unaware and oblivious to actually understand that what I was doing was doing more harm to people's lives, than good.
What do I mean by this?
My life as a middle class Ashkenazi Jewish girl in a middle class town a twenty minute drive westward from Tel Aviv insulated me, totally, to the reality of what was going on a twenty minute drive eastward, across the border - "The Green Line". All I knew, before I was drafted in 2003, was that the West Bank had lots of Settlers and Palestinians blew themselves up from time to time.
I was fucking clueless.
In the Army, I remained clueless, because I was taught that I knew things "civilians" didn't know, shouldn't know, didn't need to know.
It makes you feel important.
I remember knowing weeks in advance about the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi.
"Collateral Damage" was not what we talked about in the office, as far as I and everyone else was concerned it was "mission accomplished" and I filed away the Intel.
Keeping secrets in easy for me. What I don't think is anyone else's business is kept very safe within, it helps that I don't particularly enjoy getting drunk or that substance abuse on my part has been so rare that it has never had much effect on me.
So I walked around knowing that we had eyes in the sky, that we knew where The Enemy kept weapon caches, which house in which neighbourhood was commandeered, etc. etc. etc.
One think that did wise me up at the time was that we don't have freedom of speech or freedom of the press here. Sure, there are different stances, standpoints and opinions regarding those freedoms, but on the most basic level, the press in not free to report on what happens.
Everything goes through the IDF censor, ostensibly to make sure that no sensitive information is revealed to "the Enemy", in reality, to keep the civilian population in the dark.
Israelis don't need to know that the IDF breaks into people's homes in the West Bank on a regular basis, don't need to know that what is commonly called "Focused Foiling", the tight focused assassination in which used Smart Missiles have a kill zone of an entire building, sometimes a small block.
But another 12 people killed in the tightly focused assassination is a small price to pay and in any event, they were probably terrorists any way.
You know, I enjoyed my time in the IDF. Sure it was constant stress, meetings, yelling at people, being called a "bitch", training people and fixing up outdated Intelligence Software from the fucking 80's, but I liked it.
I had friends, some of them are still friends (though due to my paradigm shift some no longer speak to me and I don't speak to them either) and I almost signed up for more time.
You don't notice the burn out until you crash I guess.
By the end of my two years I was burned out. I was so tired and worn out that I was basically incompetent.
Three weeks later I was discharged on my original release date and thought I never had to look back.
That didn't work out very well.
Back to the point at hand. I was boxed inside a certain view of the world. It took a serious shaking up for me to see what was really going on. It's so easy to ignore, rationalise, deny or simply censor, what is going on and how it exacerbates to underlying dynamic of violence I feel when I walk down the street, when I sit on the train and bus, how fucked I felt when I spent six months in the States and how liberating it was to spend three weeks of summer in England and Ireland a year after the second war in Lebanon opened my eyes and got my heart bleeding.
Israel treats it's citizens as subordinates. Oh, yeah, we get to vote once every two and a half years for the same government over and over again, but all in all, we walk around apathetic, pissed off and not really understanding why.
So, we conform.
There's a moral panic regarding IDF "draft dodgers", which is blatant lie, seeing as anyone released from the duty of serving the IDF is released by the IDF it is pretty fucking hypocritical of the Army to start a witch hunt against the very individuals they themselves release.
Not to mention that they do not draft Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but have no problem drafting the Druze (Men only, of course). The Beduin are allowed to volunteer for the service.
Different categories of Arabs, of course.
Different categories of citizenship, period.
Apartheid is a word that shuts down conversation. Once someone says that word the only think that crosses the average Israeli (most of us) mind is Anti-Zionism which is conflated with Antisemitism. Good luck trying to break through.
Reality is hidden here, under the agenda of defence. We are paranoid, we are taught that we have no friends, we are taught that we must "defend" our democracy - which is always amazing, because the very defence of it, compromises it, of course.
The whole notion of democracy works under a few basic tenants - Majority Rule and Protection of Minority Groups. So here, we have the former, but very little, if any, of the latter. We have democracy formally speaking, but entire stretches of land under martial law, in which people of certain religious and ethnic groups are placed under different systems of law.
Nope, not Apartheid.
People fight the separation fence, no one talks about the "quiet transfer" of Hebron, where over the past ten years the Palestinian population left "willingly", packed up and ran away, because of the continuous abuse they received there.
No one talks about the fact that Liberal Israel that uses gay rights as propaganda to how fucking fantastic it is to be gay here while the Shin-Bet takes advantage of homophobia and uses gay Palestinians as collaborators.
This is so tiring.
Israel is only "liberal" for some people who live here.
Wake up!
