When I got there, they immediately briefed me on the Qalandiya checkpoint—this was the old Qalandiya checkpoint, before it became a terminal. Because of things that happened to us there, the checkpoint was turned into a terminal. At the checkpoint there were twentyfour soldiers on a shift: twelve at the vehicular checkpoint and twelve at the pedestrian one, who were mostly on alert and acted as an intervention team. The pedestrian checkpoint was already sterile—not like in the past. When I got there, the pedestrian checkpoint was sterile, with only glass passageways and the military police crossing unit there. There was an alert force at the pedestrian checkpoint, and the other force took over the vehicular checkpoint. I was at that checkpoint, and the first time I was there I actively opposed what we were doing. Because of my opposition, my platoon commander took me in for a conversation and told me that he was forced to dismiss me from all my duties and remove me from the company within a week, and that they would find me a new company, headquarters apparently, because I expressed political opinions that were against military procedure. My “political opinions” were that while I was there, no one was going to lift their hands. This is a checkpoint where the women of Machsom Watch are there in twenty-four-hour shifts, or back then they were, and I said that no one turns to them, talks to them, or bothers them in any way, and that what they do is legitimate, and it’s their right. You can speak to them through the IDF spokesman, but we don’t have authority to talk to them otherwise. Those are the orders of the military, and I represented them faithfully. The soldiers didn’t listen to me, and they aimed their weapons even at the Machsom Watch women, they cursed at them, broke some bones. There was a lot of abuse at the checkpoint . . . It was around December or January, and it was a rough winter, not like this year. It’s cold in Ramallah, and Qalandiya’s exhausting—you stand there for twelve hours on your feet, a bullet in the chamber, it’s considered dangerous . . . you have a helmet on your head, and a flak jacket, and all your equipment is on, you’re always on your feet, twelve hours or 8/8, but it’s the same thing, and you’re always working. You’re freezing cold standing there, and you see the Palestinians driving up in their warm cars. We came up with a game: most of the Palestinian cars were old, and the trunks don’t open from inside the car, so we’d tell them to get out and open the trunk, so they’d have to go out into the cold and rain. It angered me, seeing them in their warm cars, to the point that I forgot they don’t want to see me there, either. One time, a guy by the name of Amjad Jamal Nazer—I remember him well—I asked him to get out and open the trunk, and he asked why, he said he could open it from the inside. It was hailing, and I was feeling a bit sick, and I told him to get out and open the trunk. He refused. I followed procedure: he said he wasn’t getting out, so I took his car, took his car keys, and told him to stand on the side. He mumbled a bit, I hit him in the face with the butt of my gun—and just like that I was part of the cycle of violence. My soldiers couldn’t believe it, they were so excited. I was a deputy commander at the vehicular checkpoint, and this was a step up for us, this incident. The checkpoint became very violent, because of the weather and the subpar conditions. Our food was always late, and for that, too, we blamed the Palestinians. The soldiers would send Arabs to bring them food from inside Ramallah when I wasn’t paying attention. Of course they wouldn’t pay them. They would collect prayer beads, take them for themselves. At that time, I didn’t know it was considered a war crime, to take prayer beads or even watermelons. I was extremely against it. I didn’t take part in it, but it happened all the time. A lot of squad commanders and sergeants took part in it. I have to say, the officers were opposed to it, and they tried anyone who was involved in these things. They were strongly against it. So those were the kind of things they took? Prayer beads, mostly food. They didn’t take money. There were other things—I don’t remember what exactly. Cigarettes? Cigarettes. It happened a lot that they’d stop a truck with cartons of cigarettes, and it was like a bribe, like you see at the Mexican border, they took two cartons and let them cross. And what if the driver doesn’t want to hand them over? Then he doesn’t cross, even if he’s right at the entrance to his house. But he gives it to them. I almost never came across situations like that. We were always there with a finger on the trigger, literally and figuratively. They told us that it’s a very dangerous place, and so anything goes. It’s like that today, too. It wasn’t like the brainwashing they gave us in Yakir, where it’s pastoral and beautiful. It was dangerous at Qalandiya, and we felt it. After a month at that front, a day before I was supposed to go home, a friend of mine at the sharpshooting security post was shot with four bullets and badly wounded. Another soldier at that post was also shot and killed. It totally changed the rules of the game. They closed the whole checkpoint, the checkpoint was hermetically sealed for twenty-four hours, and no one came in or out of Ramallah. We went into Ramallah with no reason, security-wise. We turned Ramallah upside down, real hatred, we arrested eighty people that night. We went crazy. What do you mean? We broke the lightbulbs of every house we went into with the butts of our weapons—as an operational pretext, we claimed that the light bothered us. We used the butts of our weapons, the barrel—physical violence on an indescribable level. The level of . . . it went up dramatically, the checkpoint became extraordinarily violent. From our point of view, they’d killed our friend. He was a good, personal friend of mine, and I took it personally. I removed any restraint from my soldiers at the checkpoint. The violence became a daily reality. We took people out of their cars by hitting them with the barrel of a gun. The sharpshooter standing above us had orders not to move his sight from the car being inspected, keep a bullet in the chamber, always keep an eye on the person. Any disruption—you could shoot. We started shooting at the legs of Palestinians who didn’t follow our instructions. There was an incident or two where we shot at their legs. They didn’t listen to our orders to stop fifty meters before the checkpoint and to lift up their shirts and turn around. That became the procedure. One time we didn’t hit this guy, he ran away and we caught him. One time we hit this guy’s leg, and we injured him. Needless to say, he was an innocent, unarmed civilian. With that, we finished up our time in Ramallah, which was, by the way, the calmer Ramallah. That was our company norm for many years, our violence was the pride of the company. We were dark, crazy, not like the 4th Infantry, who are nice Ashkenazis who behave with the Palestinians. The battalion commanders, brigade commander, did they know what was going on in Qalandiya, did they know about the violence? No. The battalion commander of 605 was very opposed to it. I think he knew about it some of the time, and when he found out about things he punished people and was against covering it up. But he didn’t know about the majority of the violent incidents. It stayed at the level of sergeants, platoon commanders. At most, deputy company commanders, company commanders.