by Iain Overton
I thought this museum was as good a place as any to start. The Israeli Defence Force, or IDF, had refused me an interview – mainly, it seemed, because I was an investigative journalist. I had been interrogated at Tel Aviv airport for five hours for the same reason. But I could not be prevented from seeing the guns of Israel’s history just because I was a pain.
The youth looked long at my stamped visa, a slip of paper stapled into my passport, and nodded for me to go to the ticket office, where another conscript on her two-year service was looking even more bored. It was 15 shekels, about $4, and she ushered me through with a flick of her wrist.
I walked past a turnstile, past a short line of grey, industrial concrete walls and out into a courtyard of focused, broiling air. It was over 35 degrees out, and you sympathised with the guards in their thick uniforms under the unwavering disc of a midday sun. A map pointed me to the huts I wanted – numbers 10 and 14. The first was for ‘The Six-day War’ exhibit, the other ‘The Yom Kippur War’. But I was not drawn there by the histories of Israel’s wars, I wanted to go there because these huts were filled with guns.
Perhaps it was no surprise that the IDF museum would dedicate its gun rooms to such influential conflicts in its brief history. After all, the Israeli army is awash with firearms – about 1.75 million of them.22 This works out at roughly 22 guns held by Israeli soldiers for 100 of its citizens. In Egypt that number is 2 per 100, in Jordan it’s 4.23 Perhaps just as these two historic wars define Israel, so too do its weapons.
Passing heavy artillery exhibits – field guns painted in uniform desert-brown besides small clusters of black shrub-like sculptures of welded-together rifles – I walked to the first of the two exhibits housed in a large Nissan-style building. The Six-day War hut was dedicated to the 1967 conflict between Israel on the one side and Egypt, Jordan and Syria on the other. It was not six days long – it lasted 132 hours and 30 minutes and left Israel with the largest territorial gains of all of its modern conflicts. Sinai and the Gaza Strip were captured from Egypt; East Jerusalem and the West Bank were taken from Jordan; and the Golan Heights won from Syria. Seven hundred and seventy-seven Israelis lost their lives – their enemies lost over twenty-two times that. The sorrows of modern Israel were firmly laid down within that shortened week, and this hut, filled with cooling air and 608 revolvers and pistols from around world, embalmed its memory.
The handguns that filled this room were what I had come to see. They lined its walls in white-edged cabinets, each fixed to a perforated screen with small plastic ties. There were Israeli Uzi 9mms, American Desert Eagles, Italian 0.22mm Berettas and Belgian 7.65 Brownings. Names that conjured up forgotten violent times: Makarovs and Webleys, Mausers and MABs. At the far end, in front of a cabinet of British sea-flares, was a display for bullets, 126 rounds placed in neat rows, each section divided into different types of firing mechanisms: centre fire, pin fire and rim fire rounds.
Then I realised that there were no explanations here, no details given. I had hoped for an insight into the role that guns played in the Holy Land – a sense of why Israel needed so many of them. But it was just a room full of pistols and bullets. Devoid of context, such as I found with the police armoury in São Paulo, or a guide, as given me in Leeds, it was as boring as the sun outside was hot. So it is with many military museums. As if guns themselves deserved veneration: a room where you have to speak in a hushed voice and look solemn. I took a selfie with my phone and wondered just how long it would take someone to run in and shoot me if I broke one of the glass panes to get a pistol. Then I did myself a favour and left.
The next hut, dedicated to the Yom Kippur War, had two green-clad mannequins facing you as you opened the door. For a second I was spooked. But this room was filled with rifles, not people. There were forty cabinets of them, white-framed, glass-fronted as before. Inside were long guns; muzzle-loaders; assault and sub-machine-guns; light, medium and heavy machine-guns; training and target rifles. Guns from all over the world – Chinese, Polish, Egyptian, Lebanese, Greek, Bulgarian.
Beside the door, perhaps in a spirit of revolutionary independence, was a gift from ‘Ye Connecticut Gun Guild’: a Kentucky Rifle – the one that once struck fear in the hearts of English foot soldiers in the American War of Independence.
Then there was a cabinet dedicated to rifles made by Israel Weapon Industries, including the infamous 9mm Uzi sub-machine-gun. Other cabinets showed the first attempts to create rifles here in the Holy Land. Beside them was a section on European homemade guns from the 1940s, and you thought of the small groups of Jews who armed themselves in those terrible anti-Semitic days.
Then I saw a small photo. Five men in black and white – they were in a field, and each held a long rifle. It was the national team for the fifteenth Olympic Games, in Helsinki in 1952. ‘The first appearance of Israeli’s sharpshooters in an international competition,’ said the caption.
This celebration of their skill in shooting was a stark one. The subtext was not their ability to put a hole in a target a hundred yards away, rather, it was the state’s ability to end the life of an enemy at ten times that distance, because this room was lined with sniper rifles. And the cabinet that had the most sniper rifles had the Israeli sign over it.
A Lee-Enfield, a Mauser, an M14, and a Galil Sniper Rifle: all laid out. ‘In Israeli Defence Force specialist units,’ the card next to the Galil read, ‘since 1983 and still in use.’
In a way this was what I had come to Israel to see. How the Israeli military, engaged as they were in such a drawn-out conflict, used guns both in self-defence and in attack. And, of these, the sniper’s rifle was the most intriguing, because it spoke of a very specific intent – not just of fire and spray, but of targeted death.
Ultimately, though, the guns here were unable to tell me of the stories and deeds that lay behind them, so I headed back into the heavy heat. I needed an interview with someone who deeply understood the role of the guns here. I needed to meet a sniper.
I had not expected it to be a woman. I had asked a local journalist to help me set up the meeting and, in a flippant way, had assumed it would be a measured and quietly violent man. But she was twenty-seven years old and had a light-touched beauty that so many women in Israel have, and she was not what I thought a sniper would look like at all.
We had agreed to meet in the courtyard of the American Colony Hotel, the light Jerusalem-stone-built hotel in the east of the Holy City. The American Colony was set up by Baron Ustinov – grandfather of the late actor Sir Peter Ustinov – when he found the Turkish inns of the time unacceptable and wanted suitable accommodation in Jerusalem to house his visitors from Europe and America. Today, it’s a meeting place for journalists, spies and politicians – all drawn to its luxuriant gardens and to each other.
‘I’ve just seen Tony Blair,’ the sniper said as she walked past the quiet diners sipping coffee in the shadows of the central courtyard. She was Anglo-Israeli, articulate, well-educated and seemingly liberal. She defied every preconception I had about snipers.
Her main role had been as a trainer in the Israeli Defence Force. She once ran courses that sought to ensure each infantry unit in Israel had at least one sharpshooter, sometimes more. ‘We would teach them how to calculate wind, range, how to deal with their gun malfunctioning; the course was theoretical but it meant going to the range and practising camouflage in urban areas and in the field,’ she said, her face flickering in the discreet light of the candles laid on every table.
I imagined she also taught these soldiers to aim for ‘the apricot’, that small area that lies between the top of the spine and the brain; where a bullet will bring a man down without reflex. They call it a ‘flaccid relaxation’, and a good trainer would teach you to hit this spot every time.
The sniper training was intense and demanding, she said. Soldiers worked in pairs, the shooter and his observer. The observers were there to analyse the distance, the weather conditions and the wind speed and then give this
information to the snipers. The teams endured months of intensive training – carrying weights of up to 60 per cent of their body mass for over 30 kilometres at a time. They developed the ability to make themselves invisible through camouflage; to locate enemy snipers; to pick up on the smallest of details that let them track their target. As one sniper, quoted in the IDF’s official blog, said: ‘Sometimes you can be focused for two hours and nothing happens. Then, the target comes, and you have two seconds . . . I stand by what I do, though, because these people were aiming at me, my friends and the people of Israel.’24
The Israeli army clearly realises the value in training up snipers. Not only were they good value for money (a sign at the US Marine Corps sniper school reads: ‘The average rounds expended per kill with the M16 in Vietnam was 50,000. Snipers averaged 1.3 rounds. The cost difference was $2300 v. 27 cents’).25 They were also a psychological weapon.
Certainly, Israel had, over the years, developed a skill at precise killings through the use of helicopters, drones and elite units. Snipers played a major role in this precision warfare, or ‘focused foiling’ as it is sometimes called. On 14 December 2006, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled that targeted killing was an acceptable form of self-defence against terrorists. How targeted it is, though, is up for debate. According to the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem, these so-called ‘targeted’ killings took 459 Palestinian lives between September 2000 and June 2014. Of these, 180, about 39 per cent, were civilians or people who did ‘not participate in hostilities’.26
But this focus on training snipers by the Israeli Defence Force was certainly not a new development in warfare. The verb to snipe first was conceived in the 1770s among British soldiers serving in India. There hunters who proved themselves adept enough to bag the elusive snipe bird earned themselves the title ‘sniper’. The British further honed this skill in combat when they formed the Lovat Scouts, a Highland regiment that served during the Second Boer War in 1900.27 This unit was the first to put on a ghillie suit: a camouflaged outfit designed to resemble heavy foliage.
It was in the Second World War when snipers really seized the attention of the world and became the powerful propaganda tool they are today. These sharpshooters became pin-ups of the battlefront and sent so powerful a message of terror that German snipers were celebrated back home. They were treated to elegant wristwatches after fifty confirmed kills, a hunting rifle following 100 kills, and for 150 kills they were sent on a personal hunting trip with the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), Heinrich Himmler himself.
Some snipers became renowned for their deeds. The most famous was Simo Häyhä who, during the 1939 Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, in temperatures that dropped to -40°C, was credited with 505 confirmed kills of Soviet soldiers. All of these kills took place within three months, meaning Simo averaged about five a day. So good was he that he was known as ‘White Death’, a legend bolstered by such facts as the one that he used iron sights on his Mosin-Nagant rifle rather than telescopic sights, because to use a glass sight you had to lift your head higher and so risked being seen by the enemy.28
Of course, Hollywood contributed to the myth and mystery of the sniper. Films like American Sniper and Saving Private Ryan show hard-bitten American southerners who dispatch the enemy with clinical exactitude. And the 2001 epic Enemy at the Gates celebrated the duel between the Russian sniper Vassili Zaitsev and his partly fictional Nazi foe Major Erwin König, as the battle of Stalingrad raged around them.
Such hero worship endures today. Websites like snipercentral.com are packed with details about the tactics employed by snipers, specifications of their rifles and scopes, and league tables of the numbers of kills that famous snipers have chalked up.
Reading these kill lists, you are struck by how prominently modern wars feature in them. This is because as rifle power, sight technology and ballistics have improved, so the distances at which a sniper can hit his mark have lengthened. In 2009 thirty-four-year-old Craig Harrison, a corporal of horse in the Blues and Royals Regiment in the British army, killed two Taliban machine-gunners in Helmand province in Afghanistan at a range of a staggering 2,475 metres. The weapon he used – an L115A3 Long Range Rifle – would likely not have been powerful enough to reach the Taliban fighters had he shot it at sea level, but because he was at an altitude of over 1,500 metres the thinner air meant the rifle’s range was lengthened. At that distance each click on his telescopic sight resulted in a shift of about 25 centimetres as to where the bullet landed. The bullets, when fired, flew for six seconds and dropped about 120 metres on their way. However you look at it, the two kills were incredible feats of skill.29
So accurate and deadly have snipers become over the years that they are seen as somehow ‘unfair’ in war; they are feared and loathed in equal measure. The biographer of Sepp Allerberger, a sniper on the Second World War Eastern Front, described in detail what happened when Russian partisans captured a young German marksman. The youth was dragged into a sawmill and, still alive, had every limb cut off with a buzz saw. His torturers ‘tied ligatures around his limbs before cutting them off’ so that he didn’t bleed out. When Sepp found him, dead, the saw blade was ‘still turning, and had reached up to his navel’.30 In another incident, the Russians found a Nazi marksmen with one of their own sniper rifles – its wooden stock full of notches, one nick for each Russian killed: ‘They’d cut off his nuts and stuffed them into his mouth. But the worst thing was that they’d rammed his gun up his arse, barrel-first right up to the back sights.’31
Knowing the hatred that snipers inspired, I asked this trainer before me, as she sipped her drink, if she had any qualms about teaching such dark arts.
‘Yes, sometimes we would sit back and think: “Wow, what are we teaching here?” But we were largely just teaching on a base, all our targets were paper ones. Perhaps not to think of what we were training to do, we even had a stupid sense of fun. We would get T-shirts printed for each course. I remember one of them had very small letters on it that read: “By the time you finish reading this you’ll be dead”.’
I laughed then, but other T-shirts from Israeli sniper training academies were less amusing. One showed an armed and pregnant Palestinian woman in the crosshairs of a rifle. The caption read: ‘1 shot 2 kills’. Another had a child carrying a gun in the centre of a target. ‘The smaller, the harder,’ it read.32
But she was adamant, like all of those I met who had served with the IDF, that there were very specific rules governing engagement with the enemy here; any soldier who fired without a direct order would face a court martial and go to prison. And she really believed in what she was teaching – she had even married a sniper.
‘I got you in my sights,’ he used to joke with her.
The next day I headed to the West Bank, home to about 2.5 million Palestinians and 350,000 Jewish settlers.33 The settlements are considered illegal under most interpretations of international law, but the Israeli government disputes this and gives the settlements its backing.
The Jews who have made their homes here are renowned for being well armed. After all, these communities live under threat from Palestinians who would use deadly force – rightly or wrongly – to shift them off these disputed lands. So I was heading to a military training camp run by Jews that schooled other Jews from around the world in counter-terrorism techniques, hoping to get an insight into some of the armed mentalities that framed this age-old conflict.
The owners of the training camp had called it Calibre 3, and, on arrival, an angry shouting filled the air – the instructors were running a training course. I went around the portable building site huts and peeked through the door. Behind it, a group of pre-teen American Jewish kids were finishing their lesson. The instructor, a towering man, his ripped muscles visible in his neck, was telling them how to stop a terrorist from stabbing you. Beside him a ten-year-old, his mouth full of metal braces, smiled and stabbed his mother with a foam dagger. She laughed and then gave
me a fearful look, as this was not my course, and she did not know me. The enemy was everywhere.
I went outside and picked up a brochure for Calibre 3.
‘Our classic two hour instructor program,’ it read, ‘is designed for tourists of any age who would like to get a taste of Israeli methods of shooting and combat.’ The images on it were of men with shaved heads. They offered training to security personnel and to wide-eyed Jewish tourists out here on a visit to the old country.
Seeing me, Eitan, a short and trim man in military fatigues, came over. He was the head instructor and told me how Jews from ‘all over’ came here. Some stayed for as long as thirty days, he said with a thick Hebrew twang, during which they were taught sniper skills, handgun training, rifle handling. The basic aim was to teach them not to shoot ‘the good guys’, ‘only the bad guys’.
‘Come,’ he said, and we walked around the corner, past a line of high-topped earth mounds covered with camouflage scrub and oil barrels, and out onto a narrow range. On one side were fourteen tourists, all from the US, most in white T-shirts. At the end were paper targets: one of an Israeli soldier, the other of a man with a red keffiyeh, the headdress of the Arabs. Both images showed the men holding semi-automatic rifles, but it was clear which one was the good guy and which was the bad guy.
‘From my angle, weapons are designed for killing,’ shouted the instructor, a brick wall of a man with Thai boxing tattoos across his arms and up his neck.
‘Weapons are not for defending, weapons are for killing. If I want to defend myself, I wear a bulletproof vest, a helmet. But I use this,’ he said, lifting his Uzi sub-machine-gun. ‘This weapon is for killing.’