When did you get back from squad commanders’ course? I did the course several weeks before we finished our training period. I was squad commander for 4 months at the brigade training base, and during that time we were one weekend in Hebron, just a few days, like tourists coming to see… It’s funny. We’d already been in the army for a year and 8 months. We were in Hebron on the weekend, doing guard duty and helping out the training company in Hebron, and we went back. Then I was sent as a commander to the same area I had served in as a private. As a commander, you’re in charge, so not too much happened at my checkpoint. Once, a Border Policeman came to reinforce us and began beating someone up, and I told him to stop it. When you’re the commander, you can really control what goes on.

Why did he hit the Palestinian? The guy had a necklace with the word Palestine on it. [A map of] the Land of Israel, with Palestine written on it. The Border Policeman got angry. I wasn’t on the spot. He hit him in the face with that necklace. I came up to him and released him, ordered that Arab away, and told the BP that you don’t do things like that. But he definitely would have done more. I didn’t report it or anything. I wasn’t that brave. We detained people endlessly. It was real routine. Whoever came there without an ID or without something, or just didn’t look at us nicely, or was lying or something like that – he’d be detained for several hours. It was standard procedure, to such an extent that seemed like it was part of our orders.

Was it an order? No. A year later we found out that it’s something you’re not allowed to do. But it was, like, the squad commanders really teaching the soldiers what to do, when I was in training.

In case a Palestinian without a permit (illegal alien) would arrive… Of course it wasn’t explicitly stated. But if an illegal alien shows up, the squad commander says, “Okay, wait on the side here for three hours”. You take his ID, check it, verify that he’s not a suspect, and then say, “Okay, three hours, five hours”. It wasn’t something you’d count, simply until the end of your shift. If he’s rude, you pass him on to the next shift. Those kinds of punishment for people behaving badly, I did that. Throwing out someone’s ID, making it disappear. We detained him, he ran away, we were busy and he ran away from the checkpoint, so as punishment, we confiscated his ID and took it back to the company base. And that was that. Now he had to get a new ID issued, which hurt him for sure, he couldn’t do all kinds of things until he got a new ID, and that took a long time. Things that… that you just do.

Was there any talk about this? It was just procedure. There was talk about it on the level of getting on a Safari (army truck) or off it. After a while, I think it was when I was squad commander, towards the end, it became clear that if the battalion commander went by and saw you there with detainees, that was not supposed to happen. But that was after a long time. After a year and a half in the army, and several months on the job.

When was this? The summer after that. The summer of 2007.