There was this whole thing with the trucks carrying marble. There are quarries in the Bani Na’im area and all the factories are in Hebron, South Hebron. All of the drivers, none of them have a permit to use the road, so they drive on the Mamila road and bypass the barriers. It drove the battalion commander and the brigade commander crazy. The battalion commander stands in front of you, “What are the Palestinian vehicles doing on the road?” He’d go crazy. And you can’t stop them. It got to the point where we’d take keys, IDs—which is illegal, by the way. Taking someone’s keys is also illegal. And you can’t just stop the traffic. Most of the people are just ordinary people who want to make a living, right? There was some meeting, the brigade commander came to speak with the staff, and I said to the brigade commander, “You’re giving me an order that I can’t carry out. If you don’t want traffic here, give me one magazine, live ammunition, permission to destroy two trucks and shoot someone in the leg, that’s the price.” He said, “What? How could you do something like that, it’s unethical.” I said, “Yeah, that’s right, it’s unethical, but that’s what we need to do if you don’t want traffic. Give me the means, you’re giving me an order without the means to carry it out, and that’s the price.” That’s after I’d been there, I don’t know, eight months, I understood what was going on, right? He said, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Okay, then don’t give me the order, or don’t get annoyed when you see trucks on the road.” At least he seemed shocked, like, I wasn’t seriously suggesting it, right? I don’t want to shoot anyone, I wanted to shake him up a bit, that’s what you’d need to do if you really, really wanted to, you’d have to use force, a relatively large amount of force. And he said, “Okay, we won’t use force.” There still was the order, but okay.

It ended there? Listen, the whole thing with Palestinian traffic on the road around Hebron is a game of cat and mouse, really. It’s like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Someone leaves from here, then you go, and he goes like this. It got to the point where we were trying to keep the trucks out of commission. As far as I know it didn’t go as far as destroying property. Why? Because you can stop a truck, you can take the person’s keys, you can take his ID, you can remove all the air from the tires, you don’t have to puncture them, you can just take out the air, right? You can even take the person.

Where? Sometimes to the base . . . handcuffs, blindfold, you leave him at the gate to dry out.

A truck driver transporting marble on route 60? Yes, sometimes it’s marble, different things. You know, anyone who bypasses the barriers and drives on the road without a permit, and so on—in short, a Palestinian. Sometimes you bring the guy just to the gate, put him in the booth and he stays there, for an hour, sometimes half an hour, sometimes a day, from morning to night, it doesn’t matter—even if you take the guy, you go back to where you stopped the truck at the side of the road, an hour later, sometimes just five minutes later, and there’s no truck. It’s gone. Every time. It doesn’t matter—you take the keys, lock the truck, let out the air from the front tires, they have some kind of compressor, right? You let out all the air from the compressor, you don’t cut the wires . . . the cabin is locked and the motor is off . . . —you come back, ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, and the truck’s gone. Amazing, just amazing. Listen, a man in hardship who needs to make a living, he’ll go to great lengths. Until it . . . if he’s afraid they’ll just burn the truck or shoot at it, then he’ll stop driving. The risk is too great. But take his ID? Okay, take the ID, who cares. Take his keys? Okay, he has another set of keys at home. Or sometimes you can start it with a screwdriver, those old Mercedes, a screwdriver, or a nail, same thing. He’s very motivated.