Former IDF Sniper Says Dehumanization of Palestinians and a Rhetoric of Hate is Driving Israel’s Forever War in Gaza

Weiman is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since September 2000 and who seek peace, an end to the Israeli occupation and the release of Israeli hostages.

Before leading Breaking the Silence, Weiman was a history teacher and before that, he was a sniper in the IDF. The green line refers to the internationally recognized “pre-1967” borders between Israel, the West Bank and Gaza that have been erased from official Israeli maps.

“You have to understand, Israelis we don’t see Gaza, we don’t see the streets of Gaza, we don’t see Gazans, we don’t hear about what is happening inside Gaza,” Weiman said, speaking at a Washington, DC press conference held with US veterans peace group, Common Defense, the day before Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the US Congress. “There is an iron curtain between the people of Israel and the Gaza Strip.”

Weiman remembers that “The first time I met Palestinians in my life was as a combat soldier in Jenin in 2006 after finishing my training in the special forces. And it was from two sides of the barrel of a gun.”

On the other end was “a kid I dragged from his bed in the middle of the night,” a kid whose peers in Israel know nothing about him. At a talk Weiman gave to 18-year-old high schoolers in Tel Aviv just before traveling to Washington, “they asked me to explain to them what is the Gaza Strip? Who lives over there? What is going on over there because we don’t have any idea.”

Weiman got an idea during a 2008 operation in Gaza, when, as the spotter for his sniper unit, he called in a bulldozer to destroy greenhouses that were blocking the view from the house they’d commandeered for an ambush, “because our line of sight was more important than anything else in that operation.”

Although an Israeli soldier had been taken hostage at the time, the operation was not there to free him, Weiman said. It had only one purpose; to provoke. “The goal in that operation was to create an atmosphere where the Palestinians would attack us and then us as IDF snipers and soldiers can shoot them back,” Weiman said. “It was the day to day routine of the Israeli occupation.”

He recalled how “in Gaza every couple of years we have a very big operation where the IDF kills a lot of Palestinians, and a lot of soldiers die as well.” Civilian collateral damage used to number around 14 civilians per target, Weiman said, but today “we are seeing collateral damage of sometimes three digits” and military leaders are “considering collateral damage as something that is almost okay. And me personally as a soldier who fought over there, I don’t think it’s okay. I don’t think civilians should die, period. Not Israelis and not Palestinians.”

That dehumanization, says Common Defense executive director and former US Army veteran, Jose Vasquez, is what is driving the forever war in Gaza, and Israel’s occupation, both of which his organization, like Weiman’s, strives to end. What we are seeing, he said are “the dehumanizing impacts of occupation. Nowhere is evil more clear than in Gaza today. This brutal campaign has left Gaza in ruins and its people in despair.”

Janice Jamison, a US Air Force veteran with Common Defense, agrees. “It seems that civilian casualties are the point,” she said. The Israeli attack on Gaza is “the most destructive bombing campaign of the past century,” Jamison added. Such attacks, “are designed to annihilate an entire people.”

Vasquez has been to East Jerusalem and the West Bank — before the current Israeli attack began — and has seen the conditions for himself, “how Palestinians on a daily basis get dehumanized,” whether it’s being told which streets they can walk on to controlling how they reach their places of business. “Many people have thrown around the word ‘apartheid,’ Vasquez said. “I don’t  know what other word best fits the situation.”

Indeed, Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of South Africa’s revered former president, Nelson Mandela, has declared that “The Palestinians are experiencing a worse form of the apartheid regime, worse than that we have ever experienced as South Africans.”

The solution, said Vasquez, is “leaders who have a vision of what a future looks like that doesn’t require Israelis to on a daily basis dehumanize and occupy the Palestinian people. So it starts with a ceasefire but it’s a much bigger project.”

In the meantime, IDF soldiers continue to slaughter Palestinians with an apparent absence of remorse or empathy. That, says Weiman, is driven in large part by the rhetoric constantly fed to them, and in particular, the use of the term ‘Amalek’. It refers to an Old Testament commandment to wipe out all Amalekians for attacking Jews as they left Egypt, and not to spare their children or livestock while destroying everything they owned.

“What we saw now after this war started on Gaza are government officials, MKs,(Members of the Knesset), ministers in our government, religious leaders, are using the dog whistle, Amalek,” Weiman said. “We had Xerxes and we had Hitler and now the Palestinians are called Amalek.

“You can hear it, you can see it in videos that soldiers are uploading from the Gaza Strip to social media and again you can hear ministers from our government using that word,” Weiman continued. “And that helps IDF soldiers to feel comfortable shooting inside Gaza.” It’s based on hatred and racism, he says, but also “not seeing Palestinians as people just like me, who have ambitions and dreams and kids and they are afraid and they are happy and only seeing them as the enemy.” That, he said “helps us with the 57 years of occupation.”

In the occupied West Bank, says Weiman, it’s also based on the Israeli rule of law. “We have two separate law systems,” he said. “We have the Israeli criminal law system for settlers and we have the Israeli military law system for Palestinians. And the Israeli criminal law system basically lets settlers do whatever they want.”

On the morning we spoke, Weiman had received a video “showing settlers with metal clubs with spikes on the edge of it, beating Palestinians, sending three of them to the hospital, one of them a 38-year old woman with a broken skull. Next to them, in the same video, you can see two soldiers protecting them,” he said, referring to the settlers.

“Essentially you’ve got people who are bullying children,” said Vasquez who, when visiting the West Bank, observed Palestinian children as young as seven “going from their elementary school to home” and having to face “being not only taunted but rocks thrown and sometimes physical altercations.” The result, he said, was that “unfortunately the orders the IDF soldiers receive is that they’re hands off when it comes to the settlers. So essentially you’ve got people who are bullying children and the one authority in the space who could do something about it are ordered to not do anything about it.”Those soldiers are told their actions — or inactions — are protecting Israel but, says Weiman, “it’s not true, it’s not protecting Israel, it’s controlling Palestinians. Weiman says he supports Israel’s right to defend itself and protect its civilians but not the way the Netanyahu government is going about it. “It’s protecting the settler enterprise. It’s not protecting Israel. Protecting Israel is being with the 1967 borders.”

The ones that aren’t shown on Israeli maps.