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Saturday, December 06, 2003
'I punched an Arab in the face'
Liran Ron Furer, a sensitive and creative young man, says he became a
sadist in the course of his military service at checkpoints. Four years
later, he has written a confessional book about his experience, which he
says transforms every soldier into a beast.
By Gideon Levy
Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with
his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of military
service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting
everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On the verge of
completing his studies in the design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art
and Design, he decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the
book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought it to declined to
publish it. The publisher that finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the
Steimatzky bookstore chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is
determined to bring his book to the public's attention.
"You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent
would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person,"
says Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this way. The boy
himself doesn't portray himself this way to his family when he returns from
the territories. On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone who
is doing the important work of being a soldier. No one can be indifferent
to the fact that there are many families in which, in a certain sense,
there are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it
and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the
dinner table."
Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here
he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of
the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat
up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who shot
out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too loud, who
abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep,
just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome"
(also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier into an
animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with him from
home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly everything is
permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier
tests his own limits of violence impulsiveness on his victims - the
Palestinians.
His book is not easy reading. Written in terse, fierce prose, in the
blunt and coarse language of soldiers, he reconstructs scenes from the
years in which he served in Gaza (1996-1999), years that, one must
remember, were relatively quiet. He describes how he and his comrades
forced some Palestinians to sing "Elinor" - "It was really something to see
these Arabs singing a Zohar Argov song, like in a movie"; the emotions the
Palestinians aroused in him - "Sometimes these Arabs really disgust me,
especially those that try to toady up to us - the older ones, who come to
the checkpoint with this smile on their faces"; the reactions they
spurred - "If they really annoy us, we find away to keep them stuck at the
checkpoint for a few hours. They lose a whole day of work because of it
sometimes, but that's the only way they learn."
He described how they would order children to clean the checkpoint
before inspection time; how a soldier named Shahar invented a game: "He
checks someone's identity card, and instead of handing it back to him, just
tosses it in the air. He got a kick out of seeing the Arab have to get out
of his car to pick up his identity card ... It's a game for him and he can
pass a whole shift this way"; how they humiliated a dwarf who came to the
checkpoint every day on his wagon: "They forced him to have his picture
taken on the horse, hit him and degraded him for a good half hour and let
him go only when cars arrived at the checkpoint. The poor guy, he really
didn't deserve it"; how they had a souvenir picture taken with bloodied,
bound Arabs whom they'd beaten up; how Shahar pissed on the head of an Arab
because the man had the nerve to smile at a soldier; how Dado forced an
Arab to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how they stole prayer
beads and cigarettes - "Miro wanted them to give him their cigarettes, the
Arabs didn't want to give so Miro broke someone's hand, and Boaz slashed
their tires."
Chilling confession
The most chilling of all the personal confessions: "I ran toward them
and punched an Arab right in the face. I'd never punched anyone that way.
He collapsed on the road. The officers said that we had to search him for
his papers. We pulled his hands behind his back and I bound them with
plastic handcuffs. Then we blindfolded him so he wouldn't see what was in
the Jeep. I picked him up from the road. Blood was trickling from his lip
onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees
banged against the trunk and he landed inside. We sat in the back, stepping
on the Arab ... Our Arab lay there pretty quietly, just crying softly to
himself. His face was right on my flak jacket and he was bleeding and
making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva, and it disgusted and angered
me, so I grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side. He cried
out loud and to get him to stop, we stepped harder and harder on his back.
That quieted him down for a while and then he started up again. We
concluded that he was either retarded or crazy.
"The company commander informed us over the radio that we had to bring
him to the base. `Good work, tigers,' he said, teasing us. All the other
soldiers were waiting there to see what we'd caught. When we came in with
the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly. We put the Arab next to the
guard. He didn't stop crying and someone who understood Arabic said that
his hands were hurting from the handcuffs. One of the soldiers went up to
him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and
we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he
flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted that I was a totally crazy,
and they laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old
mentally retarded boy."
In his sister's rooftop Tel Aviv apartment, where he is living now,
Furer, 26, comes across as a thoughtful, intelligent young man. He grew up
in Givatayim, after his parents immigrated from the Soviet Union in the
1970s. Before Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, his mother was a right-wing
activist, but he says that their home was not political. He wanted to be in
a combat unit in the army, and served in two elite infantry units. He did
his entire army service in the Gaza Strip.
After the army, he traveled to India, like so many others. "Now I was
free. The crazy energies of Goa and the chakras opened my mind ... You
stuck me in this stinking Gaza and before that you brainwashed me with your
rifles and your marches, you turned me into a dishrag that didn't think
anymore," he wrote from Goa. But it was only afterward, when he was
studying at Bezalel, that the experiences from his army service really
began to affect him.
"I came to realize that there was an unchanging pattern here," he says.
"It was the same in the first intifada, in the period that I was serving,
which was quiet, and in the second intifada. It's become a permanent
reality. I started to feel very uncomfortable with the fact that such a
loaded subject was hardly mentioned at all in public. People listened to
the victim and they listened to the politicians, but this voice that says:
I did this, we did things that were wrong - crimes, actually - that's a
voice I didn't hear. The reason it wasn't being heard was a combination of
repression - just as I repressed it and ignored it - and of deep feelings
of guilt.
"As soon as you get away from army service, the political and media
reality around you is not ready to hear this voice. I remember that I was
surprised that no soldier had gone public with this yet. It all somehow
dissolved in the debate about the legitimacy of settlement in the
territories, about the occupation - for or against - and nothing connected
to the routine of maintaining the occupation appeared in the media or in
art."
Not an individual case
Furer is out to prove that this is a syndrome and not a collection of
isolated, individual cases. That's why he deleted a lot of personal details
from the original manuscript, in order to underscore the general nature of
what he describes. "During my army service, I believed that I was atypical,
because I came from a background of art and creativity. I was considered a
moderate soldier - but I fell into the same trap that most soldiers fall
into. I was carried away by the possibility of acting in the most primal
and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment and without oversight.
You're tense about it at first, but as you get more comfortable at the
checkpoint over time, the behavior becomes more natural. People gradually
test the limits of their behavior toward the Palestinians. It gradually
becomes coarser and coarser.
"The more confident I became with the situation, as soon as we reached
the conclusion - each one at his own stage - that we are the rulers, we are
the strong ones, and when we felt our power, each one started to stretch
the limits more and more, in accordance with his personality. As soon as
serving at the checkpoint became routine, all kinds of deviant behavior
became normal. It started with `souvenir collecting': We'd confiscate
prayer beads and then it was cigarettes and it didn't stop. It became
normative behavior.
"After that came the power games. We got the message from above that we
were to project seriousness and deterrence to the Arabs. Physical violence
also became normative. We felt free to punish any Palestinian who didn't
follow the `proper code of behavior' at the checkpoint. Anyone we thought
wasn't polite enough to us or tried to act smart - was severely punished.
It was deliberate harassment on the most trivial pretexts.
"During my army service, there wasn't a single incident that made us
understand, or made our commanders interfere. No one talked about what was
permitted and what was not. It was all a matter of routine. In retrospect,
the biggest source of guilt feelings for me didn't happen at the
checkpoint, but by the Gush Katif fence, when we caught the retarded boy. I
demonstrated the most extreme behavior. It was a chance for me to catch
one - the closest thing to catching a terrorist, a chance to vent all the
pressure and impulses that had built up in all of us. To lash out the way
we wanted to. We were used to giving slaps, to handcuffing, to a little
kicking, a little beating, and here was a situation in which it was
justified to let go entirely. Also, the officer who was with us was himself
very violent. We gave the kid a real beating and as soon as we got to the
post, I remember having a great feeling of pride, that I'd been treated
like someone strong. They said, `What a nut you are, how crazy you are,'
which was basically like saying, `How strong you are.'
"At the checkpoint, young people have the chance to be masters and
using force and violence becomes legitimate - and this is a much more basic
impulse than the political views or values that you bring from home. As
soon as using force is given legitimacy, and even rewarded, the tendency is
to take it as far as it can go, to exploit it much as possible. To satisfy
these impulses beyond what the situation requires. Today, I'd call it
sadistic impulses ...
"We weren't criminals or especially violent people. We were a group of
good boys, a relatively `high-quality' group, and for all of us - and we
still talk about this sometimes - the checkpoint became a place to test our
personal limits. How tough, how callous, how crazy we could be - and we
thought of that in the positive sense. Something about the situation -
being in a godforsaken place, far from home, far from oversight - made it
justified ... The line of what is forbidden was never precisely drawn. No
one was ever punished and they just let us continue.
"Today, I feel confident saying that even the most senior ranks - the
brigade commander, the battalion commander - are aware of the power that
soldiers have in this situation and what they do with it. How could a
commander not be aware of it when the more crazy and tough his soldiers
are, the quieter his sector is? The more complex picture of the long-term
effects of this violent behavior is something you only become conscious of
when you get away from the checkpoint.
"Today it's clear to me that that boy whose father we humiliated for
the flimsiest of reasons will grow up to hate anyone who represents what
was done to his father. I definitely have an understanding of their motives
now. We are cruelty, we are power. I'm sure that their response is affected
by elements related to their society - a disregard for human life and a
readiness to sacrifice lives - but the basic desire to resist, the hatred
itself, the fear - I feel are completely justified and legitimate, even if
it's risky to say so.
"It's impossible to be in such an emotional state and to go back home
on leave and detach yourself from it. I was very insensitive to the
feelings of my girlfriend at the time. I was an animal, even when I was on
leave. It also sticks with you after your service. I saw the remnants of
the syndrome in India - something about being in the Third World, among
dark-skinned people, brings out the worst of the `ugly Israeli,' which is
as Israeli as it gets. Or the way you react to a smile: When Palestinians
would smile at me at the checkpoint, I got tense and construed it as
defiance, as chutzpah. When someone smiled at me in India, I immediately
went on the defensive.
"I was an average soldier," he says. "I was the joker of the group. Now
I see that I was often the one to take the lead in violent situations. I
often was the one who gave the slap. I'm the one who came up with all kinds
of ideas like letting the air out of tires. It sounds twisted now, but we
really admired anyone who could beat up some guy who supposedly had it
coming. The officer we admired most was the officer who fired his weapon at
every opportunity. Out of everyone I've spoken to, I've been left with the
most guilt feelings ... A friend from the army read the book and said that
I'm right, that we did bad things, but we were kids. And he said that it's
a shame that I took it too hard."
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