As my conversation with Ariel Ofer*, a soldier in the Israeli military, drew to a close, I lowered my voice and asked, “So, have you ever killed anyone?”
\t
“Even you,” he spat out in Hebrew, batting the air with his hand. “Don’t you understand it doesn’t matter?” Ofer glowered at me across the round metal table. Sitting in a Jerusalem hotel lobby, he struck me as the archetypal Israeli soldier: tall and lean, head shaved, with a T-shirt stretched tightly over his muscular chest.
\t
From the dining room, where Shabbat brunch had just come to an end, came the chatter of hundreds of American Jews. Time was short. I pushed Ofer to answer my question. “No,” he muttered, then shook his head and stood up to signal that our interview was over.
\t
It was the second day of my trip to Jerusalem courtesy of birthright israel, a program created “to bestow a visit to Israel upon every young Jew aged 18-26 as their personal \xe2\x80\x98birthright.'” A multi-million dollar collaboration between philanthropists, the Israeli government, and Jewish communal organizations, birthright israel has, over the past three years, paid the way for more than 40,000 young Jews to visit Israel. The organization had covered my airfare, assuming I would produce positive reports on the regimented 10-day educational trip. But it was the soldiers that had captured my attention.
\t
As an experimental “mifgash”–a meeting between Diaspora Jews and their Israeli peers–soldiers were assigned to accompany select birthright trips. At each birthright event, the young Israelis would lounge in their khaki uniforms–rifles perched against the backs of their chairs, wrap-around sunglasses pushed up on their foreheads, projecting cool confidence. The participants seemed to love the soldiers’ company. Irina Shleyger, a student at Baruch College in New York, who was in Ofer’s group, raved, “We were like the luckiest people. We had the most amount of soldiers and we had them for the most amount of time.” But what did these young Israelis feel when confronted with their Diaspora peers’ conceptions of an Israeli soldier?
Ofer was the first soldier I asked, and the first person to express his frustrations. He found some of the most basic questions he got from the birthrighters about a soldier’s life infuriating. “They ask us what we do, if we killed someone \xe2\x80\xa6 if we have the metal things you wear around your neck \xe2\x80\xa6 really idiotic questions,” said Ofer. It’s not just that he found their innocent curiosity bothersome; he found it betrayed a troubling misperception about Israeli soldiers.
\t
The students thought it was cool that Ofer was a soldier. “I always loved [Israeli soldiers]. Now I love them even more,” a student from Brooklyn College told me, his eyes glowing with admiration. “I like the way they fight for the country.” Ofer and other soldiers appreciated such support. They enjoyed great comradery with their Diaspora peers and thought birthright’s promotion of Jewish solidarity was crucial. But they rejected the notion that there was any pride in fighting: “Soldiers do what they need to do and if by chance they’re in a situation where they need to shoot someone then they do it,” said Ofer in a rapid-fire patter. “But it’s not like something they choose to do \xe2\x80\xa6 It’s only a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Or maybe the wrong place at the wrong time.”
\t
Later, other Israeli soldiers further clarified for me what was particularly “idiotic” about asking a soldier if he had killed the enemy. The bottom line, according to an intelligence officer, is that killing is considered a necessary defensive act. Various soldiers told me that anybody who has been through the army knows not to ask such a sensitive question. “Even if you did kill somebody, it’s not something you talk about,” said a recently demobilized artillery officer. “It’s not something to be proud of. It’s trauma. It’s something you’re going to want to forget.”
\t
Ofer seemed surprised that the students on his trip, all of whom had chosen to come to Israel during the intifada and were outspoken in their support for Israel, did not seem to pick up on this. He said many of them assumed soldiers are “constantly living in a state of fighting–killing all the time.” Ofer’s complaint about students’ perceptions was similar to one he had made before about international media coverage of the conflict. He said CNN presented a skewed image in which “all Israeli soldiers are very violent.” Obviously, Ofer expected the Jewish students to know better.
By law, every Israeli man and woman who does not receive a special exemption must enlist in the army at the age of 18. While their Diaspora peers study, travel, or start careers, Israeli men serve a minimum of three years in the armed forces, and women one year and nine months. Assignments range from musician to intelligence officer, basketball player to border guard. But, according to an ex-general who requested that his name not be used, Israel’s military has the highest proportion of combat units of any Western nation–at roughly one third of the total force.
\t
Within a few months, after undergoing an excruciating training regimen, an 18-year-old selected to serve in combat situations must be battle ready. Not surprisingly, the first taste of active duty is often transformative.
\t
“When I was drafted I was very right-wing,” Benny Hackmon whispered to me over a diplomat’s drone at a Foreign Ministry birthright reception. “I was thinking, kill them all and the conflict will be resolved,” said Hackmon, a 21-year-old security guard who had recently been demobilized from a paratrooper unit. Active soldiers only accompanied a few groups of birthrighters, but each busload of the 8,200 birthright participants this winter had at least one security guard. Most of the guards were just out of the army and saving money to travel or study. Hackmon was saving money for a motorcycle.
\t
Many of the visitors reminded Hackmon of himself as a hawkish 18-year-old conscript: “They think all the soldiers are warriors.” At that age he thought of the conflict in the simplistic terms of a war movie. Then, a year into his service, he was assigned patrol duty in the occupied territories. He hated it. Not because of the danger, but because of the tedium. Most of his 10-15 hour shifts “keeping the peace” were spent in silent, uneventful watches. But one night he was caught in an ambush: shots were fired at his unit. His friend was hit. Hackmon rushed to return fire, shooting into the darkness. Reflecting on the moment, Hackmon, who was regimented down to the precisely squared edges of his black goatee, flinched. “It was a shock, a real shock,” he said. Facing the enemy and the brutality of conflict changed him. Now he maintains that “you can’t drive the Arabs away and you can’t kill them.”
\t
“When you’ve been in the army you start to see differently,” he said. “It makes you older very fast. It’s good. It’s dangerous. You see a lot of bad shit. It makes you stronger.” To Hackmon, the birthrighters’ na\xc3\xafve view of the conflict was a direct result of never having been a soldier. “The difference between us and the [birthright participants]–you can see they haven’t had that difficulty,” he concluded. “It’s a very important part of the Israeli experience.”
I found Hackmon a couple of nights later, smoking cigarettes with scores of other guards in front of the gargantuan Jerusalem Convention Center. Inside, birthright organizers herded the participants past metal detectors into a giant Jewish programming fair. Outside, the guards were killing time. Guy Rosenthal, a curly-haired 21 year old, had completed his military service six months before. For the past few days he had been protecting a “very patriotic for Israel” group of students from Montreal. Observing their enthusiastic response to Israel’s holy and historic sites had been uplifting, but one aspect disturbed him: “They like to see soldiers but they have no clue about the army. When they think of the army they think guns, uniforms, shooting Arabs, fighting all the time.”
\t
Many of the visitors told him that they wanted to move to Israel to join the army. Rosenthal discouraged them. He did not enjoy service–why should anyone choose to go through it? Less than a year ago Rosenthal spent his week patrolling the occupied territories as part of an Israeli infantry unit. For him it was a grueling requirement of Israeli citizenship. There was nothing worse, he said, than returning home for the weekend, flipping on the television, and seeing coverage of the conflict. “I watched CNN, Sky News and all that,” he said, swinging his rifle around his body while he talked. “I felt like you worked hard all week and they called you a murderer.” The images struck him as gross misrepresentations of what really happened: “When you see a child against the tank you always feel sympathy but what they don’t show is the child just killed someone with a stone.”
\t
Rosenthal certainly did not see himself as a murderer but he also did not see himself as an armed avenger. When students approached him and said, “Israeli soldiers are the best. We stand behind you,” he cringed. Rosenthal did not serve in the army because he wanted to–he did it because his government mandated that he serve. He was glad to be done and was eagerly anticipating a trip to South America. When the students pressed him about the intricacies of his service, Rosenthal would simply say, “I did what I had to do.”
Later that night, 4,000 birthright participants, dozens of philanthropists and Israeli luminaries, and hundreds of guards crowded into the Convention Center for the climactic birthright “Mega Event.” As the crowd settled into their seats, Brazilian and Argentine participants tried to outcheer each other with their national soccer chants. The lights dimmed and the show got underway. Participants from 19 countries joined forces to shout “Israel, Israel, Israel.”
\t
The M.C.s, both dressed in black-tie attire, announced a double bombing in Tel Aviv. But the show went on. An Israeli pop band banged on giant drums and set off pyrotechnics. A giant egg cracked open and a winged women emerged with the words, “Is real your birth right” (sic) projected on a screen behind her.
\t
As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made his entrance the chants shifted to “Sharon! Sharon! Sharon!” The prime minister gave an impassioned, if brief, speech to the birthright participants, declaring, “Now you know who is wrong and who is right.”
\t
Naturally, the young Israeli soldiers in the audience that night tended to agree the actions of their army were justified. But they expressed hope that the visitors would take away more than blind support for Israel. “To take a stance without really knowing what happens is the worst thing,” Ofer insisted. He wanted his fellow Jews to better understand what motivated Israeli soldiers: “Everything we’re doing is because we’re human beings.”
*This soldier’s name was changed at his request.
