About Us Israelis - No Black and White

Dressing them in uniform and exposing our innocent sons and daughters, young 18 year old high-school graduates, to one of the world's most complex conflicts, has a price beyond comprehension for both parents and children. It is a difficult thing to explain to those around the world, as they sit in the comfort of their homes and watch international news coverage from Israel. Most people have never had to experience the dread Israeli parents feel when they send their children to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, or the physical strain and the moral dilemmas our children face on a daily basis as soldiers.

Some years ago, attending a lecture in Oslo given to Norwegian journalists by Amos Oz – one of Israel's leading authors and intellectuals – I heard him say something that left a big mark on me: "In the conflict with the people sharing the land of our fathers with us," he said, "there is no black or white, no wrong or right, no good or bad, and no villains. There are only good and innocent people on both sides, which circumstances have led to claim the right to the same piece of land. These people have the same feelings, desires, hopes and dreams that you have here among the beautiful fjords of Norway. So don’t be quick to judge them harshly."

As a young IDF soldier during the first Intifada, I, as many of my soldier friends, experienced some very complicated situations. I described some of them in one of my novels, titled Fate's Open Arms. To give you some sense, in a nut shell, of some of the dilemmas, I offer you relevant excerpts:

The first days of the first Palestinian “intifada” caught me as a young squad commander. A year later, after completing a service period of seven months in the Gaza strip and another five in several other Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, my innocent view of the world was not so innocent anymore.

The Palestinian animosity toward us in our everyday police work was beyond my capacity to comprehend. Here was one of the strongest and most sophisticated armies in the world standing helpless against hundreds of small children and teenagers, who threw stones, metal objects, and Molotov cocktails at its young soldiers. And this world-renown and respected army did not know how to effectively respond to it. This scenario was never fully anticipated. The IDF was not equipped or trained, for that matter, to execute police work. We were trained to win wars using tanks, battleships, and jet fighter planes. The international media documented this fact with its cameras every single day and screened it, to our embarrassment, twenty-four hours a day for the whole world to see.

The worst parts of it were the morality aspects. There we stood, fully equipped to overrun any army in the Middle East, any terrorist group, or any other enemy who endangered our civilian population; and in front of us, most of the time, small children and young teenagers were throwing stones and other objects at us. We did not want to be there. We all had brothers and sisters that age back home. It was an impossible and unfair situation for us, the young foot soldiers. Circumstances and past mistakes of our country’s leadership were affecting us, the innocent children of Israel, with the worst consequences.

It was a time of great despair for me, a young officer doing dirty jobs in the refugee camps and in the streets of the Palestinian towns and villages. Our commanders were no less at a loss. Time passed, and we grasped that our actions did not calm the situation and maybe even made it worse. Like the mythological Greek monster Hydra, who grew two heads for every one it lost, the intifada intensified regardless of our actions or reactions, and nothing we did could bring it to a halt. (Ofer Mazar, Fate's Open Arms, Eloquent Books, New York, NY, 2010, pp. 19-20)

Consider all of that, if you will, when forming your opinion about us Israelis.