The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine (13 page)

11
  Matti Peled, “A Requiem to Oslo”
The Other Israel 65
(February-March 1995).

12
  Walid Khalidi, “Converging tracks,”
The Other Israel
, April 1995, Cambridge, MA.
http://israelipalestinianpeace.0rg/issues/66toi.htm#Converging

13
  Uri Avnery, “I shall not see his like again,”
Ma’ariv
, March 3, 1995. Archived at
http://www.israelipalestinianpeace.0rg/issues/66t0i.htm#I

It was 1974, and as I moved from elementary school to high school, it became clear that I was not only still behind academically, but that I had another issue as well, one that had not surfaced until then and may well have been genetic: a big mouth. There were subjects about which I could not and would not keep silent, regardless of who I was facing. Later on, I realized that there was one exception, one person in front of whom I did keep silent—my father.

During the first talk my class had with the vice principal on the issue of discipline on school grounds, I argued with him that his idea of discipline was archaic and unfair. My homeroom teacher, who taught math and physics, topics with which I had trouble anyway, was a recent immigrant from Eastern Europe. He was stern, uncompromising, and insecure. He never smiled, and he did not believe in second chances. I was terrified the entire time I was in his class and couldn’t function.

By the end of my first year in high school, I had even alienated the physical education teacher, although I was a good athlete and actually liked both the teacher and the class. He was an old-fashioned instructor, and he would make the lives of kids who were not athletic miserable. One day, the teacher insulted a student who was overweight and invited the entire class to make fun of him as he stumbled through gym. I waited for the end of class, when all the students had left, to approach the teacher: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Was it really necessary to insult him like that and have the class join in?”

Needless to say, he was not accustomed to being reprimanded by a freshman, and I found myself in the principal’s office and in serious trouble. “You dare to think that you know better than I?”

When the year finally ended it was clear that this particular high school was not going to work for me. In tenth grade, I transferred to a school closer to our home in Motza and actually had a great year. I had a charismatic homeroom teacher who taught history and civics and who welcomed my big mouth and was in awe of the fact that my father was Matti Peled. We got along great, I did well in all my subjects, and I was quite happy.

That year, at the suggestion of a few friends, I began practicing karate, and I fell in love with it. Karate eventually became a lifelong pursuit. Still, after eleventh grade
I realized that the traditional school environment was too restrictive for me and not one in which I could succeed. So for my senior year, I decided to go to what is called an “external” school, a high school that merely prepares students for the matriculation exams. You go to school for three or four hours each morning, and then you are free. There was a bit of a stigma attached to these external schools—they were not exactly the kind of school that “good kids” attended, but I really didn’t care. I knew I would not do well if I stayed at a traditional school, and that I would never make it through the matriculation exams. My father was on sabbatical at Harvard at the time and had no particular opinion on this, and so it was up to my mother to agree. It was tough for her, and she was not crazy about the idea, but after she met the principal, who was a terrific man and a great educator, she agreed.

My mother’s fears proved unfounded. I met great kids at the school, and it turned out to be a fine year for me. Highly motivated, I did quite well on my matriculations, which in Israel is extremely important.

As my school years were coming to a close and I was approaching draft age, I began to have mixed feelings about joining the military. My father had convinced me that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was wrong. But as a staunch Zionist, I was also convinced that Israel had to have an army—and not just any army but the best military force possible. I believed that if more people like me joined the IDF, it would be a good, moral army. So I was conflicted; I wanted to serve and to set an example, but I also wanted to protest the injustice.

I had been practicing karate for two years by then, and that too influenced my thinking and my motivation. Karate teaches discipline and non-violence. And yet I found karate training more demanding, both mentally and physically, than anything I had previously experienced. What’s more, I enjoyed the rigor, and I was eager to continue to challenge myself in those ways—the army could offer that.

As a young Israeli who was healthy enough to be a combat soldier, I had two choices: I could volunteer to serve in a particular unit and hope to be accepted or I could let the army decide where to send me. My father thought very little of the Special Forces units—in his opinion they were over-glorified—and he was concerned by the fact that new ones were being established all the time. “The armored tank brigades are the most important force in the battlefield,” he said, in an effort to persuade my decision. “A tank is a sophisticated machine and understanding how to operate a tank, with all of its computerized components will be useful to you once you return to civilian life.” But there is no glory in tanks, only grinding, dirty, oily work.

In the end, I did what so many good Israeli boys do. When I was drafted in February 1980, I volunteered to join one of the many Special Forces commando units. I was attracted by the physical and mental challenges of the training, which I knew would be tough, though going in I had no idea just how tough it would be, and I was completely sold on the image of the Israeli hero. I wanted the status symbols that included the red beret, the special semiautomatic weapons, the brown
shoes, and the pins that are the mark of Israel’s finest. How much of this was vanity and how much patriotism is hard to say; both played a role in my decision.

I was sent to basic training at the famous paratroopers training camp in Sanur, in the West Bank near the Palestinian city of Jenin. At the entrance to the base a sign read, “If we don’t rely on one another, we will find ourselves hanging next to each other.” It makes sense in Hebrew because the word for “rely” and the word for “hang” is the same:
taluy
. The point was that we are a team, and we have to be able to count on one another; if we can’t, we will all end up dead. Another poster read: “Paratroopers—the long arm of the IDF.”

Sanur was located in a green and pastoral area of the northern West Bank. The base sat by a tall, menacing hill on top of which sat a tomb of a Muslim sheikh. We marched up and down that hill more times than I care to remember.

I did not think much of the fact that this was Palestinian land until our first nightlong march. We had to carry heavy equipment and move quickly and in complete silence. Despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t help but notice that we were marching on cultivated land and trampling somebody’s crops. I walked as fast as I could to catch up to our sergeant and tried to tell him the crops were being destroyed. I had no idea how naive my comment was. He ordered me to remain silent and keep marching.

The training was so tough both physically and mentally that pretty soon we were drained and all that mattered was making it through the week. The hardest thing for me was not being allowed to sleep through the night. Our sergeant would wake us up at all hours for surprise inspections, marches, and drills. He also kept a small notebook in which he recorded everything we did wrong throughout the day. At night he would get us out of bed and give us all sorts of exhausting punishment-drills.

But there were privileges to being part of an elite unit. Even as a new recruit you had better food than the rest of the army, and you got to go home almost every weekend. Going home meant uninterrupted sleep, good home-cooked food, and seeing your girlfriend—the only things a new recruit cared about.

When it was time to go home, an army bus took us out of the West Bank to a major bus depot in Israel, and from there we each took a public bus. I will never forget those long rides to Jerusalem on Fridays. The buses were crowded with exhausted soldiers like me, as well as a few civilians. The soldiers would often sleep, even while standing. If you were lucky enough to get a seat, you fell asleep with your head resting on the stranger in the seat next to you, your semiautomatic poking him in the ribs.

As our training advanced, we began participating in simple security missions that included patrolling the streets of Palestinian towns like Ramallah, the Old City
of Jerusalem and remote villages in the West Bank. Not once did I have a clue why we were there or what we were securing. All I ever saw were civilians going about their business. When we were in more remote areas, we saw nothing but the typical pastoral landscape of the West Bank, terraces with grape vines and olive groves.

I remember once getting prepped before a patrol in Ramallah. We were given batons and handcuffs. In those days there was no uprising, no protest to speak of, no Intifada. We were a small, highly skilled infantry unit, specializing mostly in anti-tank warfare, and I remember thinking,
Why are we in a city full of civilians, and what are we supposed to do with these batons and handcuffs?

Our lieutenant briefed us before we were sent to Ramallah. He said we were to walk up and down the streets and that if anyone so much as looked at us we were to beat them, or as he put it, “Break every bone in their body.” This seemed pretty extreme:
to break people’s bones just because they looked at us?
How could anyone avoid looking at us? We were a platoon of fully armed infantry soldiers in the middle of a city full of civilians. I seriously did not get it. But soldiers do not ask questions; they follow orders. When you are in basic training, your lieutenant is your God, even if your father is a general. I was too intimidated to ask questions and far too tired to think it through.

Many years later, when I learned that people under military occupation have the legal right to engage in armed resistance, I also realized it was a stroke of luck that I was never attacked because there were times when our commanding officers carelessly put us in serious danger. When I realized this, the first thing that came to my mind was a particular instance when we were sent to secure a remote spot in the West Bank. It was Friday morning, and we hadn’t slept since the early hours of Thursday morning. The routine was that we trained all day Thursday and after dinner we went on a grueling nightlong march. After the march, we had to prepare for Friday morning inspection, which meant there was no time to sleep. This particular Friday we expected to go on leave, but instead of going to the bus depot we were all piled into a large army truck and taken to some remote spot in the West Bank. We were sent to secure different places in the area, and I and one other soldier were sent to secure a secluded hill. We had our guns, water, and a communication device, and our only instructions were, “
Dir Balak, mi sheyashen!
” You better not fall asleep! “
Ken Hamefaked!
” we replied. Yes sir!

There was no power on earth that could have prevented us from sleeping. We were exhausted from a week of physically and mentally draining days, capped by a long, hard, sleepless night and a grueling expedition to this remote spot. To top it off, it was a hot day, and the sun was in our eyes. Our commanders did not permit us to wear sunglasses or chew gum, two things that may have helped us stay awake. “Anyone caught with gum will spend the weekend on base!” That was enough to keep us from ever looking at, never mind chewing gum. In short, the moment our superiors left us, my partner and I slept like bears in winter.

We were grateful not to get caught sleeping because the penalty for that would have been severe. Our ignorance was such that this was our only concern. It did not occur to us that anyone might harm us and that our lives were in danger. We should have been thankful that the Palestinian resistance did not find us. The carelessness our commanders displayed by placing young, inexperienced, and exhausted soldiers in such a predicament only occurred to me many years later, when I met Palestinians we imprisoned for attacking and even killing soldiers in similar situations. They wait in ambush for days for such an opportunity. We were lucky, but there were many who were not.

The symbol of the elite special forces in Israel is the red beret. Every kid wants one. To earn the red beret, each unit has its own “Beret March.” It is longer and harder than any one march a soldier has to go through. Ours was a fifty-mile trek with open stretchers. That meant that every six or eight guys were responsible for carrying a stretcher with a soldier lying on it. Four guys at a time carry the stretcher on their shoulders and switch off at set intervals. Typically no one wanted to be on the stretcher, so this role would fall to someone who was not fit to march due to an injury.

It really was a backbreaking march. The night was hot and extremely humid. We wore a full uniform of long-sleeved shirts and long pants. We had army boots on our feet, and besides the stretchers every soldier had to carry his semiautomatic rifle and all sorts of other heavy equipment. We sweated so profusely that our uniform was wet the entire march, and that meant terrible rashes and constant, almost unbearable and unquenchable, thirst. Water was rationed, and we only drank when we were told. When we did drink, there was a discipline to it. We carried our water in canteens, and because not even the slightest noise was permitted the canteens had to be either completely empty or filled to the brim and covered with a small sheet of Saran Wrap before it was sealed shut with the cap. If it was done right, the water did not make a sound when we walked. Once opened, a canteen had to be emptied completely.