by Ari Shavit
The setting is idyllic, a few hundred yards from the white sands of the Mediterranean shore. At six in the morning, when the fishing boats go out, I feel as if I am in the Crete of the 1950s. All that is west of me captures the heart: blue sky, blue-green waves, hopeful fishermen. But the fresh breeze that blows into my watchtower blows east, into the barbed wire fences, and onto the dark military tents. It lifts the spirit of the jailed Palestinians, and lifts the spirit of the jailing Jews.
The watchtower guards turn their eyes to the changing colors of the morning sea. So do the early-rising prisoners. In the tin shanty where the toilets are located, two of the prisoners stand on tiptoe, clinging to the only narrow window from which the Mediterranean can be seen. One day, when Free Palestine is established, its government will surely lease this piece of land to some international entrepreneur who will build the Gaza Beach Club Med. One day, when there is peace, Israelis will come out here for a short holiday break abroad. By these blue-green waters, they will drink white wine and dance the samba. On their way home they will buy embroidered black Palestinian dresses in the air-conditioned duty-free shop of the international terminal separating prosperous Israel from peaceful Palestine.
But for the time being there is no free Palestine, and no peace. That’s why we must get the morning delivery ready. A long line of blue-uniformed prisoners are being led under the curling wire fences. And those who prod them with barrels of M-16 rifles are my buddies. In the faint light of an early April morning, the Jewish soldiers grip their rifles tightly. They tell the prisoners to stop, to advance, to stop. And while the fresh breeze blows in from the sea, they tell the prisoners to hold out their hands in front of them. A young soldier goes from one to another, clamping on handcuffs.
This is Gaza Beach Detention Camp. It is one of several such camps built in a rush in recent years after the eruption of the Palestinian uprising in December 1987. More than a thousand Palestinians are imprisoned here. Most of them are not terrorists but demonstrators and rock throwers. Many are in their teens. Among them, here and there, some are physically small and seem to be boys.
The detention camp has two interrogation wards and four compounds. In each compound there are twelve old brown army tents. In each tent there are twenty to thirty prisoners. In the past, fifty or sixty men were crowded into each tent. Now conditions have improved and they are considered reasonable.
Each of the four compounds is surrounded by a conventional wire fence topped with barbed wire. Outside this fence is a narrow path for the jailers. Then comes an additional, outer fence—a sort of improvised wall made of metal barrels filled with cement. As the jailers pace back and forth between these fences, it occurs to me that it isn’t clear who are the confined and who are the confiners. The entire camp strikes me as a grand metaphor for everybody’s imprisonment. Both Israelis and Palestinians are fenced in here.
The internment facility has a dozen watchtowers. Some Jewish soldiers are struck by the similarity between these and certain other towers that they have learned about in school. But the shock is merely emotional. The watchtowers constructed in Europe in the 1940s were all made of heavy German and Polish wood, whereas the towers in the Gaza Beach facility are of flimsy Israeli metal produced up in the Galilee. The towers are equipped with searchlights, but they are rarely used. This is because the camp is suffused all night with an extra-strong yellowish light from hundreds of powerful lampposts. When the electric system is not turned off, as required, at early dawn, the bulbs and beacons go on glowing into the light of day.
The detention facility has a mess hall, a canteen, showers, toilets. Palestinian prisoners are assigned to scrub the Israeli soldiers’ toilets three or four times a day. Alas, some soldiers find that the hygiene standards achieved by the Palestinian scrubbers are not satisfactory. The prison facility also has a set of tents for reservists, a commander’s office, and an operations room. There are two kitchens: one for the jailers, one for the jailed. The two are separated only by a net. At times when the guards run out of coffee, their cook asks the prisoners’ cook to pass him two or three bags of the tasteless stuff through the net. The same sort of coexistence is found in the one medical clinic. A doctor may attend to a reservist’s eye infection immediately after he has patched up the leg of a prisoner injured by an overzealous interrogator. Thus everything is in order. The Gaza Beach Detention Camp runs by the rules.
Given the circumstances they are trapped in, the officers in charge try to do their best. They are decent men. On their orders, the prisoners receive plenty of food and cigarettes, and according to policy, they are given considerable autonomy. For the most part, the imprisoned are allowed to run their own kitchen and quartermastership and are given the supplies to do so. The prison commanders and the prisoners’ leadership negotiate daily. They allow life here to proceed calmly. It is two years now since an officer shot to death a prisoner who tried to attack him—and kept shooting while the young man rolled over on the ground in his blood. Nowadays, unlike in the past, families and lawyers are given the right to visit every Friday. The Red Cross drops in regularly.
Yet an evil stench is in the air that even the Mediterranean breeze cannot carry away. Although unjust and unfounded, the haunting analogy is pervasive. Here it is not suggested by anti-Israel propaganda but rather in the language the soldiers use as a matter of course. When A. gets up to do guard duty in one of the interrogation wards, he says, “I’m off to the Inquisition.” When R. sees a line of prisoners approaching under the barrels of his friends’ M-16s, he says with quiet intensity: “Look. The Aktion has begun.” And even N., who harbors strong right-wing views, grumbles to anyone who will listen that the place resembles a concentration camp. M. explains with a thin smile that he has accumulated so many days of reserve duty during the intifada that soon they will promote him to a senior Gestapo official.
And I, too, who have always abhorred the analogy, who have always argued bitterly with anyone who so much as hinted at it, can no longer stop myself. The associations are too strong. They well up when I see a man from Pen Number 1 call through the fence to a man from Pen Number 2 to show him a picture of his daughter. They well up when a youngster who has just been arrested awaits my orders with a mixture of submission and panic and quiet pride. They well up when I glance at myself in the mirror, shocked to see myself here, a jailer in this ghastly prison. And when I see the thousand or so humans around me, locked up in pens, in cages.
Like a believer whose faith is wavering I go over the long list of counterarguments, all the well-known differences. Most obvious, there are no crematoria here. And in the Europe of the 1930s there was no existential conflict between two peoples. Germany, with its racist doctrine, was organized evil. The Germans were in no real danger whatsoever. But then I realize that the problem is not in the similarity—no one can seriously think there is any real similarity. The problem is that there isn’t enough lack of similarity. The lack of similarity is not strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes.
Maybe the Shin Bet is to blame for this. Every night, after it has managed to break some youngsters in the interrogation ward, the Israeli Secret Service hands over to the Israeli paratroopers who control the city of Gaza a list of the close friends of the broken youngsters. And anyone standing at the gate, like myself, can see the paratroopers’ jeep leave the detention camp after midnight and drive into the occupied, darkened city, which is under curfew, to arrest those who are said to endanger the security of the state. I will still stand at the gate when the paratroopers return in their military vehicles with boys of fifteen or sixteen, who grit their teeth, their eyes bulging from their sockets. In some cases they have already been beaten. The soldiers gather around to watch them undress, to watch them shiver in their underwear. As they tremble with fear, even S., who owns a plastics factory in the occupied territories, cannot believe his eyes. “How have we come to this?” he asks. “How have we come to chasing such kids?”
Or maybe
the camp doctor is to blame for the analogy haunting me. He is no Mengele, of course, but when I wake him in the dead of night to treat one of the nocturnal detainees who has just been brought in—barefoot, bruised, looking as if he is having an epileptic fit—the doctor shouts at him. And although the detainee is barely seventeen and complains that he was just beaten on his back and on his stomach and over his heart, and although there are indeed ugly red marks all over his body, the doctor shouts loudly at him, “I wish you were dead.” And then, turning to me, he laughs and says, “I wish they were all dead.”
Or maybe the screams are to blame for my inability to rid my mind of the comparison. At the end of my watch, as I walk from the reservists’ tent to the showers, I suddenly hear horrific screams. Strolling in my shorts and clogs, a towel slung over my shoulder, toilet kit in hand, I am stunned by the literally hair-raising screams coming from the other side of the galvanized tin fence of the interrogation ward. From the various human rights reports I have read, I know what might be going on beyond the fence. Are they using the “banana-tie” method of torture or the other, more brutal methods? Or are they simply applying a crude, old-fashioned beating?
Whatever the method, I do know that from this moment on I will have no quiet. Because fifty yards from the showers where I try to rinse off the day’s dust and sweat, people scream. Eighty yards from the mess where I try to eat, people scream. A hundred yards from the bed where I try to sleep, people scream. And they scream because other people, wearing a uniform like my own, make them scream. They scream because my Jewish state makes them scream. In a methodical, orderly, and absolutely legal fashion, my beloved democratic Israel makes them scream.
Don’t be emotional, I tell myself. Don’t jump to conclusions. Doesn’t every nation have its dark cellars? Doesn’t every nation have its secret services and its special units and its hidden-away interrogation facilities? It just happened to be my bad luck that sent me to the place where I can hear how it all sounds. But as the screams get louder I know there is not a grain of truth in what I have just told myself. Because in this specific interrogation facility they don’t interrogate dangerous spies or traitors or terrorists. There are no ticking bombs here. And in the various prison compounds Israel erected in recent years, thousands upon thousands are being held. Many of them are being tortured. In our case the issue is not a dozen deadly enemy agents, and the issue is not a limited and precise operation of counterespionage. The thing here is cracking down on a popular uprising, a forceful occupation of another nation. And therefore what I see and hear here is an entire population of ours—bank clerks, insurance brokers, electronics engineers, retailers, students—imprisoning an entire population of theirs—tile layers, plasterers, lab workers, journalists, clergy, students. This is a phenomenon without parallel in the West. This is systematic brutality no democracy can endure. And I am a part of it all. I comply.
Now the screams grow weaker. They change to sobbing, wailing. Yet I know that from this moment on nothing will be as it was. A person who has heard the screams of another is a transformed person. Whether he does something about it or not, he is transformed. And I have heard the screams of another. I still do. Even as the screaming men stop screaming, I still hear them screaming. I cannot stop hearing.
So although there is no basis for comparison, I begin to understand how it was with other guards who stood in other places over other people locked behind other fences. How these guards heard others’ screams—and heard nothing. For in most cases, the evil do not know they are evil. Those who carry out atrocities don’t know they are doing so; they are simply obeying orders. Or waiting for a promotion. Or doing what they have to do to get on, when all they really want is to be home, safe and sound. And they worry about their taxes, and about their kids’ problems in school. But as they are thinking about home and wife and bills to be paid, their hands unthinkingly hold the weapon; their eyes are on the fence behind which other people are sobbing.
Most reservists are shocked when they first arrive here. They find the sight of other people caged in pens inconceivable. When they hear the screaming for the first time, they are shaken. Yet only two out of sixty reservists refuse to do guard duty in the interrogation ward. Only four or five are really tormented. The others adjust. After a day or two in the detention camp, most reservists find it almost natural to see people enclosed behind barbed wire. The interrogation ward becomes part of routine service, as if this is the way of the world. As if this is what the IDF was originally assigned to do. And those moral doubts that surface in the first days of service give way to the banality of a soldier’s life. When is the next furlough? When can we call home? When will the new uniforms arrive? For after all, this is just another army base, although this specific army base does not protect the border or train soldiers for combat but rather locks boys up. This army base puts boys out in the yard with hoods over their faces.
When we line up for guard duty at one-thirty in the morning, I look at my fellow reservists—at their faces, their slouching bodies, their oversized trousers and disheveled appearances. Are we the soldiers of evil? Are we agents of cruelty? Are we the heartless gatekeepers of oppression? When it comes right down to it, we don’t want to be here, either. We don’t like this work. It’s not for us, this whole fucking business. Like most Israelis, we’d prefer our Israel to be a sort of California, but the trouble is that this California of ours is surrounded by ayatollahs. The trouble is that although we are solid citizens of a consumer-oriented, technological democracy, we find ourselves in deep shit. And when we stand in this weary semicircle—tired, desperate, and miserable, with our tattered belts and with lousy coats that don’t keep us warm enough—we, too, feel like victims.
But it’s not that simple. When the formation breaks up and I climb the ladder to tower number 6, I realize that what makes this camp tick is the division of labor. The division makes it possible for evil to take place apparently without evil people. This is how it works: The people who vote for Israel’s right-wing parties are not evil; they do not round up youngsters in the middle of the night. And the ministers who represent the right-wing voters in government are not evil; they don’t hit boys in the stomach with their own fists. And the army’s chief of staff is not evil; he carries out what a legitimate, elected government obliges him to carry out. And the commander of the internment facility is not evil—he is doing the best he can under impossible circumstances. And the interrogators—well, after all, they are doing their job. And it is, they are told, impossible to govern the occupied territories unless they do all this. As for the jailers, most of them are not evil, either. They only want to leave all this behind and get back home.
Yet in some mysterious way, all these nonevil people manage together to produce a result that is evil indeed. And evil is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than all who contribute to it and carry it out. Despite our unkempt exteriors, our clumsiness, our pathetic petit-bourgeois ways, we are evil in Gaza. But this evil of ours is a cunning evil. For it is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s. Evil without evildoers.
From watchtower number 6 I can see the sea, the camp, the city of Gaza. Gaza is a city with no hope, no cure. It is the city of the people whose houses and villages we took in 1948 and whose place of refuge we conquered in 1967. It is the city of those whom we exploited during the long decades of occupation, denying them human rights and civil rights and national rights. So in Gaza there are no excuses. Gaza is not even needed for our defense like some strategic heights in the West Bank; it is not even a historically charged terrain like some parts of Judea and Samaria. Gaza is clear and simple. It is the epitome of the absurdity of occupation. It is futile occupation. It is brutal occupation. It corrodes our very existence and it erodes the legitimacy of our existence.
I look down at the tents and fences and barbed wire. For the last time I try to comprehend the inner logic of the place, the necessity th
at, so to speak, created it. And I summon up all our just claims, all our mitigating circumstances: Aren’t we refugees, too? Aren’t we, too, victims of violence? And if we are to survive in the Middle East, we must be strong. When attacked, we must respond. The IDF and the Shin Bet are all that protect us from total chaos. Only the willingness to use force is what keeps us alive here.
But it doesn’t work here. In the Gaza Beach Detention Camp it cannot work. Because there are places and there are situations that are clear-cut. And this is such a place. This is such a situation. There are no complexities here, no mitigating circumstances. This is what the Palestinians have brought upon us by means of uprising: they deprived us of the illusion of bearable occupation. They have told us that if we are to occupy Gaza, we must have a Gaza Beach prison. And if we are to have such a prison, we must betray ourselves. We must betray everything we were to be and everything we are to be. So the question now is not land for peace. The question is land for our decency. Land for our humanity. Land for our very soul.
Twenty-two years have passed since I observed my Palestinian enemies and my Israeli commanders from watchtower number 6. The watchtower no longer exists. Two and a half years after I returned home from Gaza Beach, the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords were signed. In a rare moment of bliss, Israel’s decency overcame Israel’s brutality, and Palestinian realism overcame Palestinian extremism. Within months, the occupation of the city of Gaza was no more. By the spring of 1994, the Israeli detention facility was dismantled. But the Palestinian government never leased the coastal terrain to a Club Med entrepreneur. It handed it over to its own security forces—far more brutal than Israel’s. Later on, that secular Palestinian government was overthrown by the radical Islamists, Hamas. After a short lull, the conflict resumed. Once again Israelis and Palestinians were caught in their well-known vicious circle: violence, counterviolence, countercounterviolence. So the grand metaphor of Gaza Beach still applies: the intimacy of the jailers and the jailed; the complexity of the besieged laying siege to the siegers; the jailers imprisoned by their jailed. The fact that the actual reality we live in is surreal.