Breaking the Silence

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

"It's like the thing you never talk about" says Shaul, "it's the dirt from the backyard that you do everything to keep in the backyard. The last thing you want is that this dirt will come to the front."

...

"...during 2002 through 2003 there were more than 500 days of curfew in Hebron. And we would lift it every few days so people could get food for maybe two or three hours, but if someone were to leave after these hours to get food for his family, then he would be detained for five, six, or seven hours. You must educate them.

"Or if you ask the Palestinians to stand in one nice line and one guy at the end starts to scream that could be seven hours, ten hours.

"If you call on a Palestinian to show his ID and he smiles too much, then that could be two hours or it could be eight hours. It just depends on which side of the bed you woke up on that morning."

....

Shaul's platoon sergeant informed him that every night they would hear gunfire and that he had to react and return the fire. It is important to note that a grenade machine gun is not an accurate weapon and that the targets that are firing from within a heavily urban area are all most impossible to spot.

When Shaul realized what he was going to have to do he became very nervous. He worried for hours about what would happen when 6pm rolled around. "At 6pm the shooting starts and you get your orders over the radio. You approach the machine gun. You still know that something is wrong, that something is not right. You don't believe that you're going to shoot the neighborhood...for what are we here?

"So you pull the trigger you spray the area you pray that the less amount has been fired and then there is four or five seconds of tense quiet. You pray you haven't hit innocent people. But the next day you're less tense, the third day, and then after a week it becomes the most exciting moment of the day.

"After a while you see that the Palestinians are not getting the message. They are continuing to shoot. So, maybe we shoot at 5:30pm to deter them. Then over a little bit more time we go out on patrols and we see a car and we decided to explode it to send out a message. Now when I talk about this I am talking about how the mission starts and where it goes. How it just becomes a part of you. The blending."

...

Yehuda Shaul stares on intensely and leans forward as he says: "No one wants to hear what's really going on in the occupied territories. No one wants the dirt from the backyard to get to the front. It's time to put the dirt so that everyone can see and that we can all begin to address it."

http://www.shovrimshtika.org/press_item_e.asp?id=17

[PalestineMyHeart 1,897]

Rank: Sergeant

Unit: Nahal brigade

Place of incident: Atarot-Kalandia

10/2000

... And all the time we were playing ‘Catch’ with the kids throwing stones. We would set traps for them there.

What do you mean by traps?

Traps, let me give you a somewhat funny example. We would put a can with a stun grenade inside, take out the safety pin, and place on it sweets, desserts that we would take from the kitchen. Then the kids would come, look at them and when they picked it up, the grenade would explode in their face. That’s one. I’ll give you another example. There was a couch that they would move all day, so we would booby trap the couch with stun grenades.

Where was this couch placed?

It was placed in the middle of where we were… there was a certain place where they would throw stones. And we were sick of them, like, taking the couch. So we (grinning)… and my platoon commander were wounded during this. He tried to set a trap and a stun grenade blew up in his hand, such things, it was a period then… And let me tell you, it was a crazy time.

http://www.shovrimshtika.org/testimonies_e.asp?cat=16

Kalandia (Qalandia) is the main checkpoint outside Ramallah.