What were the Palestinian families’ reactions when you entered their houses?Many [of the entries] were in the middle of the night, [so] if it’s kids or teens or all kinds, they’re just quiet and tired they just wanted to sleep or actually did fall asleep wherever we put them. The father of the family would always kind of be tight and right next to us to see that we really weren’t destroying his house too much, or he would try, “not here, yes here, don’t touch, what are you doing?”, to try to understand. Because after all, it is his house.

And you’d let him go through the rooms with you?In some cases yes and in some cases no. Like...

According to what?It would change according to the nature of the initiated [operation]. If it was a ‘mapping’ (a mission in which soldiers enter a Palestinian home in order to map its interior and make a record of its residents), then no, he can sit with everyone. If it was a search, then the minute we’d find something we’d ask him: What’s this? Like to try to get him to talk, to try and see if he knows anything or could tell us anything, instead of just arriving, finding [weapons] and leaving, but try to get the people in the house to talk and get information from them.

But it was from that angle. It wasn’t from the angle where he could really come with you to see that like everything was okay.No, no.

Or that he had some kind of say about...We, like, as soldiers and also when we talked about it among ourselves, in between, then when we said, “Okay, we have arrests, what do we do with this strange thing?” So we said that yes, there was like a kind of agreement between us that yes, we wouldn’t just tear apart a house if we don’t... if we’re not looking for something or if we don’t need to, we won’t just break things. We won’t start tidying up or putting back in place everything we’d moved, but we also won’t do things for no reason. So we like treated [him]... So like we didn’t really want to show him, “Here, look, we’re taking care of your stuff and everything is okay,” but we just said, “Yes, we’ll do it the best way we can.” If [it’s] to move the bed and like try not to break things and all sorts of things like that.

Yes, but these are things that you know and spoke about among yourselves. The Palestinian person doesn’t know this presumably.Yes, so when he comes it was like: sit, sit.

So it’s not that you let him come, go through the rooms with you and all that?No, no. We still wanted our peace and quiet, like, for him to let us work.

And how, say, you did mention it before, but like in cases of say arrests and that, I know just from my own experience, that often you take someone, especially if it’s someone relatively young, then there’s a reaction from the family. You know, the mother starts like...The mother shouts a lot, yes. The mother shouts a lot mostly.

Are these things that happened to you? Did you come across it ?Yes.

And how do the soldiers react to it? To cases like this?[They’re] indifferent. There’s no choice.

Indifferent or pretending to be indifferent in front of the Palestinians? Because really, from my personal experience, it’s a difficult moment.Yes. You focus on other things.

It’s interesting how the soldiers react to it on the emotional level specifically.I would try to focus on other things, to look... If I was outside the house and would hear it, then I’d look to the sides. If I was inside the house, I’d just ensure like that everything is okay and just kind of try to stay indifferent to it, because there’s really nothing I can do about it.

Would you talk about it later? You know, after the mission is over and you go back to the base and smoke a cigarette at the base.Not too much.