In July, Israel detained ten soldiers who were suspected of raping a Palestinian man at a detention center in southern Israel. This followed reports in the international press—including from the New York Times and CNN—of widespread physical abuse at the same detention center, Sde Teiman. The soldiers detained at Sde Teiman were brought for interrogation at another military base; Israeli protesters stormed both that base and Sde Teiman to demand that the soldiers be released. (The Israel Defense Forces has denied the claim of widespread abuse and the soldiers have denied the rape allegation.) The protesters have been supported by right-wing cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who referred to the accused soldiers as “our best heroes.” Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, has called for an investigation into whether Ben-Gvir, who is the national-security minister, purposely delayed the police from responding to the riots; eventually, military battalions were mobilized to help protect the base where the soldiers were being interrogated.
To talk about what occurred and what it means for Israel’s future, I recently spoke by phone with Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem. He is also one of the co-founders of Breaking the Silence, an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli military has changed over time, whether Israel proper is at risk of becoming more like the West Bank, and what Benjamin Netanyahu really thinks of challenges to the state’s authority.
How does the storming of these bases fit into the history of right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law in Israel?
First and foremost, we need to keep in mind that we have had settler violence in the West Bank for many years, and it has been rising for years without enforcement, or close to no enforcement. So the settler community has been living for decades in a reality where they can break laws. I’ll even take one step back and say the entire settlement project is a project that is drowning in criminality. This can mean building settlements against the rules, the construction of housing on private land, et cetera. It can also mean settlers beating up farmers or shepherds, going into communities and attacking them either to displace Palestinians or to create such a headache for the state that the message is “It’s not worth it for you to actually enforce the law.”
We have had decades of this kind of behavior in the West Bank, and unchecked violence where soldiers were given orders to stand idly by. When I was a soldier in the West Bank during the second intifada, our orders were not to enforce law on the settlers. Our job was not to protect the Palestinians. Our job was to protect the settlers.
Over the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers, who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live, or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and join the attack. Sometimes it’s because specific military units were made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S. was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers. [A spokesperson for the I.D.F. told The New Yorker that “soldiers who encounter violent crimes committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians are required to stop the incident and, when necessary, stall or detain the suspects until the police arrive at the scene.” In cases where soldiers do not obey these instructions, the spokesperson added, “the incidents are thoroughly examined and actions are taken accordingly.”]
So you’re saying that the biggest change is in the makeup of who the soldiers are?
It’s structural to the way the I.D.F. is designed. In a full-scale war, the better equipped, better trained units go to the front line. In our case, now, that’s Lebanon and Gaza. So who stays in the West Bank? Reservists. But it’s not only normal reserve units. It’s also what are called regional-defense units. The West Bank is divided into several regional brigades. Each of them has regional-defense battalions, which are reservist units made of local settlers. So settlers who live in the area of Hebron, for example—many of them are mobilized in the area of Hebron.
And remember, as a soldier, the settlers are on our side, and Palestinians are the enemy, so we’re not going to protect the enemy. Because the settlers host us for a Friday-night schnitzel, because they speak our language, because they have political power. But it’s also because they are completely integrated into the system. On Friday night, they host us for schnitzel. On Sunday morning, or on Monday morning, their security officers sit in the briefings at the headquarters and get updates on what’s happening. On Tuesday, they go and use our shooting range to stay in good shape, whatever. And on Thursday, we’re going to arrest them?
Lawlessness and violence was allowed because the relationship between the military and the settlers on the ground became so symbiotic. It is now so symbiotic that it’s not clear any more where the military starts and ends, and where the civilians start and end.
Can I stop you for a second?
Well, two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army—a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like Smotrich.
In 1990, only two and a half per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That’s about three times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions that can advance their status in the economy post-military service, while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?
In 2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed—the other one was neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the Palestinian—basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter’s parents to show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya’alon, who was the minister of defense at the time—a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the I.D.F.—had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an execution that was filmed.
That was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation, accountability. Now it became, “In our Army, we have different ethics than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And it’s unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this.” For me, that’s the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of the rank and file, the ideas had changed.
