On the personal level, before we started the interview you said quite unequivocally that you went through a process where you understood that the occupation switched from necessary to unnecessary for you, in your words.Yes.
You told us throughout the interview about all the things and the reasons that have security justifications, why have you nonetheless reached the conclusion that occupation is unnecessary?Because all the security justifications are not connected to protecting Israelis and all the Israelis I protected are beyond the Green Line (in the West Bank). I never saw a wanted person who was threatening Tel Aviv, I never saw someone who can hurt Jerusalem and I didn’t see the Separation Barrier behind me that also blocked the white car I was chasing. All of my routine activities, all of my unusual activities of actually protecting Israelis [were] in Telem, Adora, and a group of children from Kiryat Arba (names of Israeli settlements). At no point in these activities, which were really justified in terms of security, if there hadn’t been settlements connected to the issue, they would have been completely unnecessary. That’s an understanding I think I might have had a little then, but I really reached it only after my discharge. That everything I did there, 95% of the security activity I did there was to protect the settlements, it wasn’t to protect Israel. Maybe a wanted person I arrested and maybe orders I gave are somehow connected to someone who really wanted to hurt Israelis inside the Green Line. But all the patrols I did, all the Israelis I actually protected in practice, all of it was solely settlers.
Why did you decide to do this interview and break the silence?Because it’s really important, it seems important to me. You told us at the beginning of the conversation: 90% of Israelis haven’t set foot in Judea and Samaria at least since 1989. Ninety percent of Israelis don’t know what goes on there. Most of the guys who study with me at university, and I take them sometimes to look at a village near us, Isawiya, surrounded by a wall on four sides and you can see it from the university. And no one has a clue what goes on there. Two hundred meters from them, a village which by the way is technically within the Green Line. It isn’t really, but on the map it is.
It’s not within the Green Line, it’s within the lines of annexation (the annexation of East Jerusalem to Israel following the occupation of the city in 1967).Yes, but they don’t know what goes on inside this village. Just as they can see the piles of garbage that isn’t taken to any landfill and they can see that it’s completely dark at night. They have no idea what goes on beyond the Separation Barrier, which they can see from their window. The people behind them definitely don’t know. I remember the conversations with my girlfriend’s mother, who’s certain everything is completely justified, certain that we only do good things there, and I’m trying to tell her that, “No, at no point did I protect your life.” And she’s incapable of understanding this because she has no connection to the experience of what it is to be in Judea and Samaria. She’s never been beyond the Green Line in her life. No one in the family there has been beyond the Green Line. None of the kids in her family served beyond the Green Line. She never knew anyone who’d been beyond the Green Line until she met me. People don’t know what goes on there, what an IDF soldier does. He doesn’t chase after terrorists, it’s not the Land of Pursuits (a period following the 1967 Six Day War in which Palestinian fighters frequently entered the occupied West Bank from Jordan and were chased and caught or killed by the Israeli military). People think that Judea and Samaria is the Land of Pursuits. It’s not. It’s important to me that they know this.