Soldiers of Honor

 

"His sentiments are reflected by the Israeli novelist and playwright AB Yehoshua, who gets on the stage to read a comment piece he had written the day before to mark the event. "The great danger to Israeli society," Yehoshua explains, "is the danger of weariness and repression. We no longer have the energy and patience to hear about another act of injustice."

A man appears holding a handwritten sign that condemns Breaking the Silence as "traitors". Some of those attending try to usher him away while others try to engage him in conversation. A journalist asks Shaul if the man is "pro-army". "I'm pro-army," Shaul answers immediately. "I'm not a pacifist, although some of our members have become pacifists. I'm not anti-army, I am anti-occupation."" 

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At one point in this article the author opines that all military occupations of a defeated country result in brutalization of the occupiers and abuse of the occupied,

That is not really true.  The conduct of British and US occupation authorites and troops in Austria, Germany and Japan was not like that.  There were instances of violence and theft against the occupied (and the reverse) but these were few and were dealt with severely by the occupying powers.  The US command in Germany did not hesitate to court-martial offenders in its ranks.  As a result these occupations were bloodless and the Austrians, Germans and Japanese accepted what had to be an unpleasant experience coming after a horribly lost war.

In Germany where I lived during the occupation, the US Army went to a lot of trouble ensuring that people did not starve, that the schools were open and that economic activity was resurrected.  There was an inital period just after the war in which a policy of deprivation was in place in Washongton, but Lucius Clay got that changed and the situation improved rapidly.  As a result little children like me could walk the streets of cities like Bremen and Frankfurt am Main in 1947 and 1948 without there being any fear for us.  I got lost once at eight years old in Frankfurt.  I went to a German cop who was directing traffic.  The polizei put me in a car and took me home.  Many Americans married German women.  Some never left. 

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is nothing like that.  It is a brutal, savagely racial thing run by adolescents commanded by  officers scarcely older than their "men."

The Israeli soldiers who have found the courage to speak of this are "bound for glory" when the day comes that their country accepts the awfulness of its actions.  pl       

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/08/israel-soldiers-speak-out-brutality-palestine-occupation

http://www.studymode.com/essays/The-Sexual-Behavior-Of-American-Gis-154838.html

http://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~roehner/ocj.pdf

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Comments

[Yours Truly]

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God...

Matthew 5:9

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:

I think the aims of the Allied Powers was to reconstitute the occupied states.

I think Israelis have been deliberately brutalizing the Palestinians in order to cause them to leave the Occupied Territories.

They have been successful in that Christians have been leaving - Ramallah, I heard, used to a Christian city.

[VietnamVet]

Colonel

Yes, when we grew up in the late 40’s and 50’s it was a remarkable period in time. The overlords recognized how close to the edge society had come and ruled with law and order and concern for the ordinary people. Unlike today, when it is everybody for themselves and damn tomorrow.

The Palestine Occupation is a cancer. The ideology behind it, stoking religious and ethnic hatred for power and land, is metastasizing across the world from Israel to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Chad and Ukraine.

[Highlander]

VV

All the tribal groupings you named were just a little bit "bat guano" crazy well before 1945, when the Jews started crawling out of the ovens and heading south to the the "Promised Land".

I do agree with you, tribalism is reemerging world wide as the great nation states start to lose their power and will to control the tribes.

[kao_hsien_chih]

Not just Ramallah, but as I understand it, but the cities that ought to be far more familiar to world's Christians, Nazareth and Bethlehem, used to be Christian cities well into 20th century. (granted, Nazareth is in Israel proper, rather than the Occupied Territories, but it remains a mostly Arab city, or so I'm told.) Not that most Christians of the West know much about the Arab Christians, though, even in the biblical cities like those in Palestine or Syria....

[Eliot]

"I do agree with you, tribalism is reemerging world wide as the great nation states start to lose their power and will to control the tribes."

I think the EU is an interesting example of that. Intentional or not, it has undermined the status of its member states and given aid to regional separatists across the continent.

[Abu Sinan]

I was born in Germany to US officers. I spent the first five years of my life there where we lived in local housing on the local economy. My father learned and spoke German and we got along great. I have since gone back many times.

You are correct, the occupation of Germany, Austria and Japan are nothing like the occupation of the Palestinians. We treated these peoples in such a way that within a decade or two both countries were off and running and ended up being technological and production power houses.

[turcopolier]

Abu Sinan

Both of your parents were US military officers? pl

[Laura Wilson]

Amen.

[Laura Wilson]

Again, thank you for a powerful and insightful comment on one of the most pernicious issues of our time.

[Abu Sinan]

Yes, my father was prior enlisted Army who got out after serving in South East Asia in the late 60's, got his degree, and became an officer with the Air Force. My mother was a nurse in the Army. This was back in the day when they booted women who got pregnant, so her career ended when she got pregnant with my brother, although they came back like 25 years later and wanted her to join up again as a major due to a nursing shortage.

Both my sister and I were born in Wiesbaden in the early 1970s.

[Haralambos]

A little-remembered anniversary remains largely ignored by the MSM: http://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/08/leaving-the-uss-liberty-crew-behind/

[Larry Kart]

"..when the Jews started crawling out of the ovens and heading south to the the "Promised Land."

You do have a way with words, Highlander.

[Matthew]

Most of Israel's founders did not escape the Holocaust. They had immigrated to Palestine decades before. The so-called Promised Land was inhabited by thousands of people already and the Zionist Project was built on land stolen from them.

The "tribal" people only became crazy because they refused to accept the outright thievery of their patrimony.

[Larry Kart]

Matthew -- My point was that "crawling out of the ovens" struck me as a peculiarly ugly choice of words.

[Charles Dekle]

Col Lang,

From January 1998 until November 1999 we lived in Bedesbach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedesbach at the bottom of Freisen Hill. My wife was the civilian Chief of the Social Work Clinic and I was an Associate Professor for UMUC in Baumholder.

Our little village had several festivals while we lived there and Judi and I would always attend. The Germans were always gracious and treated us very well. During each celebration several of the village elders would always insist that we sit at their table and have a beer with them. It turns out that all 4 or 5 of them were former Wermacht soldiers and had spent time in the states as POWs during the war. They were very interesting and very nice to us. I am sure that they are mostly passed on by now.

I have been an adjunct and full-time associate professor for UMUC since we lived in Sicily and worked for the Navy beginning in 1995. However, my fondest memories of students were the tankers and artillerymen who took my algebra and computer programming courses at Baumholder. Sometimes they would come in directly from the field wearing their coveralls and face paint. They were a great bunch and I am very proud that I had the opportunity to know them.

Germany is a pretty civilized place to live. A great deal of the credit for that goes to the US Army.

Regards,

[Matthew]

Larry: Agreed. All Holocaust comparisons are either intellectually sloppy or inaccurate. I never confuse Likud with Holocaust victims. I never compare the occupation, which I hate, to the Holocaust, either.

Sorry for my tone; my irony detector is out of service.

[Highlander]

Larry,

What wording would you prefer?"The quaint Nazi tea party came to an end, and the Jews lost their free housing in Germany. So they had to look elsewhere."

[Highlander]

over a few drinks, I once heard a couple of USArmy spooks describe Germany as a very polite authoritarian state in a tuxedo. They also included Switzerland in the same description .

[Charles Dekle]

Thanks for the chuckle. I would agree but add that the streets are even cleaner in Switzerland. ;-)

Regards,