(Alaa Badarneh)

Even if they are heavily armed, the Israeli soldiers are obsessed and extremely suspicious of each and every Palestinian being a kamikaze.
Is it to ease their stress that they are so numerous to smoke hashish and abuse of other drugs?

They are so young and already thrown down into murderous operations of repression : These children are already loosing their sense of humanity.

Those of the soldiers who are the worst are the "temperamental".
The one recruited from among the settlers easily become typical of the case : they are capable of the worse cruelty. they are not sensible people any more. They are fanatics, only willing to "scoff" Palestinian. Anyway, would anyone sensible built his house on stolen land in the middle of nowhere?

What comforts the Palestinians who are put down and murdered everyday by these soldiers raised up to hate the Arabs; is that they know that for these soldiers going back to normal life won’t be an easy task. They also know that the price these Israeli will pay for all the harm and pain they did, will be very high. And that the more they ill treat, the worse will their future be.

The Palestinians also know that the atrocities committed in Palestine will ruin these soldiers, just like the worm rots the fruit; the day will come when they will get children and then, the Palestinian kids they killed will haunt them.

The human being has its limit when it comes to resist the horror : No one shoots at innocents without being sooner or later deeply affected.
Even if violence is inherent to man, it is not a natural thing for him to have to put to with violent situations constantly for months and years on end.

Situations where people’s life and his own are at stake, puts him in such a state of nervousness, hyper acuity, stress, particularly intense excitement which are of course not normal, not natural, not human. A condition, in which one can not keeps control of himself, is unable to escape : it is a state of hypnoses where one is trapped like the mouse by the snake.

When the soldiers get home, the difference between the military life in Palestine and the civilian life in Israel is such that it is hard for them to manage and take their bearings. Life becomes dull and the kind of excitement they have had when wearing the uniform can only be met under the effect of cocaine.

A large number of the soldiers become anguished, have nightmares, get unexplained fears and start loosing their foothold ; they suffer from deep psychological crises and get the kind of satisfaction they need in drugs.

Unstable, they have only one wish: leave, travel. If they were able to save the money they earned while in the military; they can travel for quite a while. Hence, they fly to Peru, Australia, Thailand, Laos or for the most : India.

The years spent with the uniform depraved them and their behaviour abroad is offensive and scandalises. The owner of a business in Cuzco told us that he would not take bookings from Israel. " They are unsociable and behave like wild : breaking everything, damaging the furniture, being rude to the staff…" Those words were told to us once again by Indians, Australians, Thai and Laotians :
" They come in groups and usually stay in the guest-houses of Van Vieng near Ventiane where hashish circulates openly. They are loud, contemptuous with the Laotian workers (…) If we put up with them in Laos it’s only because we badly need tourism; in Thailand, some small business ’Chinese owners who don’t know what an Israeli, a Jew or a Martian is and cannot be accused of discrimination, have put signs outside their business saying that Israeli tourists are not welcomed."
Some of these tourists come back from their trips on heavy drugs.

A psychiatrist I interviewed, said he was dismayed at the situation of these young Israeli mentally affected by the brutalities they had known and used of. He told of the acknowledgement of violence being the most repressed thing in Israel and that men and women needed to recognise it as such in order to get hold of it. He added that the price to pay for all this violence was huge in terms of mental health and that Israel had become an ill society.

These youngsters, sent to fight unarmed civilians with very modern weapons are, just like the Palestinians, victims of a politic system and a war that are beyond them . They saw their friends being killed, they killed, they witnessed children crying in fear because having to face this army.

The day the young Israeli will understand that they have been abused by leaders that preferred war to peace, that they are born on a land stolen by 90 %; that they are the children of a discriminative State, their awakening will be brutal too.

I remember, one evening at Calandia Check-point; I saw under the rain a soldier sitting on a tool as if lost , overpowered. It was obvious that this young shy boy was not in his place there. It was the third time that he had seen me coming out of Ramallah. He was not hostile nor abrupt to me , he was simply curious to know what motivated Americans or Europeans to get to the Palestinian camps : he had grown up in a country where Arabs are considered animals, terrorists and he could not understand that ’sensible’ people could respect and sympathised with the Palestinians.

This young man dressed up as a soldier had not chosen to be there. Something inside him was doubting and talking to me allowed him to confirm these doubts tormenting him.

The sad look on his face, the loneliness in his eyes did not leave me. May be the day will come when this young boy will realise that he is the victim of leaders who only lied to him. Because Israel only holds the key to a fast solution.

The solution lays with the Israeli State and its acceptance to :

 Let the Palestinians that it has thrown out in 1948 (at that time they had 93% of Israel between the frontiers of after 1967) come back to their land.

 Take the occupation troops out of Palestinian lands that it kept up ruining since 1967.

 Clear the 400 000 settlers that illegally foist themselves on since then, on the 22% of the land left to the Palestinian. Get out of Syria and Lebanon that it annexed to itself illegally.