NYU Students for Justice in Palestine Host Two Events on Israeli Occupation

By Jane Adas


	Former Israeli soldiers Noam Chayut (l) and Avichay Sharon of Breaking the Silence (Staff photo Jane Adas).

STUDENTS for Justice in Palestine of New York University presented two separate programs critical of Israel’s occupation—the first from a perspective of soldiers who served in the territories and the second from a Palestinian who lives there. Noam Chayut and Avichay Sharon, former Israeli soldiers, presented an Oct. 18 slide show and discussion on “Breaking the Silence: Israeli soldiers reflect on their role in the occupation.” On Nov. 15, Zleikha Muhtaseb, founder of the Ibrahimi Center for Social Development in Hebron, gave “A Palestinian Perspective from Hebron: Coping with settlers and the soldiers who guard them.”

Nearly two years ago, Israeli soldiers who had served in Hebron selected photographs from their personal memory albums and videotaped testimonies for an exhibition in Tel Aviv. They called their organization “Shovrim shtika”—“Breaking the Silence”—and entitled the exhibition, “You need to define right and wrong.” Chayut and Sharon explained how, after serving in the territories, teenaged soldiers who had grown up thinking Israel has the most ethical army in the world came to feel that all their values were put in a blender. The message they wanted the exhibition to convey to Israeli society is “Wake up! The occupation corrupts and has a price.” As Chayut pointed out, the same person who flattens a Palestinian car with an armored personnel carrier drives in Tel Aviv traffic.

The first slide showed then-Lieutenant Chayut and his soldiers smiling and lounging in a well-appointed Palestinian home. The family members are absent. The soldiers had broken in the door to search for weapons and were taking a break. Chayut, now 26, asked what brought him to such a corrupt situation. How would he feel about foreign soldiers relaxing in his family home? Another slide is of a Palestinian teenager on the roof of his home, feeding pigeons. But the photo was taken through an M16 rifle scope, with the cross hairs directly on him. Sharon explained that aiming at Palestinian youths is so routine that it becomes a game. Another slide shows a smiling 19-year-old soldier in Chayut’s unit armed with an M16. He is standing in the rubble of a small store that an Israeli bulldozer demolished by mistake. The soldiers then looted the shop. Yet another slide showed Israeli settlers, including women and children, destroying a Palestinian shop while the Palestinians were under curfew. The soldiers are not allowed to touch the settlers; their orders are, after all, to protect them from Palestinians. Today the place where the shop stood is a parking lot for settlers. The final slide was of settler graffiti in English: “Arabs to the Gas Chambers.”

Nearly 8,000 Israelis visited the Tel Aviv exhibition. Some soldiers who saw it said there were only a few rotten apples, and that such things didn’t happen in their units. But, Sharon said, when asked if they had flattened cars with tanks, or shot at water tanks, or opened “deterrent” fire, or broken into Palestinian homes, they had to answer yes. They justified their actions because they never wanted to be there in the first place and want to forget about it once they’re out. For this reason, Chayut said, breaking the silence and taking responsibility begins with the soldiers themselves. He went on to stress that it is not possible to occupy in an ethical way, and that opposing the occupation is not failing to support Israel.

Since the Tel Aviv exhibition, Breaking the Silence has expanded to include soldiers who served in other Palestinian areas. In the last year and a half, members of Breaking the Silence have given more than 150 lectures in Israeli high schools, universities, homes, and to anybody willing to listen. Their Web site, <www.breakingthesilence.org.il>, now includes hundreds of photographs and more than 300 testimonies. In the beginning the former soldiers focused on the effect of occupation on Israelis back home and chose not talk to the foreign press. But when Minister of Foreign Affairs Silvan Shalom said, “The most important weapon we have in Israel is public opinion in the USA,” they decided to launch an American tour. “We are here,” Chayut said, “because you are the immunity we have as a society.”


Hebron resident Zleikha Muhtaseb (Staff photo J. Adas).

The same reasoning is behind Americans for Middle East Understanding’s decision to sponsor a three-week speaking tour for Zleikha Muhtaseb to speak about what life is like for Palestinians under occupation. Muhtaseb lives in Hebron, the West Bank’s second largest city and the only one where militant Israeli settlers live within the municipal boundaries. The 1997 Hebron Accord divided the city into H1, the newer areas ostensibly under full Palestinian control, and H2, the oldest part that is under Israeli military control, where some 250 settlers and an equal number of yeshiva students live among 20,000 Palestinians. In this area Israeli soldiers regularly patrol the marketplace and can enter Palestinian homes at any time, day or night, and often take over the roofs for temporary military posts. This has happened to Muhtaseb’s family, whose home is just opposite the Tomb of the Patriarchs, known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi mosque and to Jews as the Cave of Machpela. It was here that, in 1994, Brooklyn-born Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Hebronites, and injured nearly 100 others, as they were praying.

The settlers do not leave the Palestinians alone, Muhtaseb said. They stone Palestinians walking in the street, pry off external door handles to homes, cut telephone lines and electrical wires, drain water tanks, break into Palestinian shops and homes, and throw trash and rotting vegetables from their upper-story apartments. The settlers make life miserable for the local residents, and are the reason soldiers from Breaking the Silence say that “it is disgusting to serve in Hebron.”

To safeguard the settlers, last summer the Israeli military installed metal gates at each arched entrance to the old city. These serve as checkpoints when soldiers are present, and are kept locked when they are not, preventing Palestinian movement into, out of, and even within the area. Some families opened their homes and provided ladders so that other residents could move from roof to roof, which became the normal way for Muhtaseb to move between her home and place of work, but the Israeli military threatened to weld the doors shut if the practice continued.

The main road connecting the southern and northern parts of H2 was rebuilt in 1997 with USAID money, and intended to serve the whole community. But because it passes by one of the settlements, it has never been open to Palestinian vehicular traffic, and lately has been completely closed to Palestinian pedestrians, including schoolchildren. Muhtaseb said children as young as six must now take long detours passing several checkpoints, at each one of which they are searched. They then run the gauntlet of harassment by settler children and arrive at school nervous, exhausted and unable to concentrate.

For much of the time since 2000, H2 has been under nearly continuous curfew—meaning that Palestinians are confined to their homes and unable to have access even to their roofs. This creates enormous tensions within families, many of whose businesses have collapsed as a consequence. To address the crisis, in 2003 Muhtaseb founded the Ibrahimi Center for Social Development, which concentrates on the problems of women and children, and above all on education. She offers literacy classes and economic self-help programs for women, and brings in a psychologist to lead weekly sessions for mothers where they discuss how to deal with such problems as domestic violence, maternal depression and children’s nightmares. Muhtaseb provides the children with pre-school programs and tutoring services to compensate for the many lost days of schooling, as well as drama projects and games designed to allow them to express their frustrations. She teaches children not to fight at checkpoints, which only gives soldiers the opportunity to get rough with them, but to know their rights and insist upon them. When possible, she works with Israeli organizations so that the children will see that not all Israelis are settlers or soldiers. Mainly, Muhtaseb said, she does not want the children to have a black view of the future.

When asked what would be her solution, Muhtaseb responded that she would like for the settlers to be disarmed and not be given such massive support by the government of Israel and outside groups. She does not mind living with Jews, she assured the audience, as long as everybody is treated equally and subject to the same laws.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.