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'Hatred and fear and rage': A former Israeli officer on why some soldiers oppose the occupation
BEFORE HE MOVED to Israel in 2011, Joel Carmel grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community in London, where defending Israel was seen as both an obligation and a calling.
These days he's part of a group of former Israeli soldiers speaking out about the realities of the military occupation of Palestine, and the ongoing war against the people of Gaza.
The advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, a group of Israeli military veterans opposed to the occupation, visited Dublin this week on a trip organised with Christian Aid and Trócaire.
He sat down with
The Journal
to discuss the events that led to his own change of heart, why some soldiers feel compelled to speak out, and what the consequences are for those who do.
Exploited trauma
Many of the soldiers who have given testimony about their recent experiences in Gaza had previously spoken to Breaking the Silence and had decided never to return to military service in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
That was until Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups launched their unprecedented attack against Israel from Gaza on 7 October 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,195 people – mostly civilians – and the capture of 251 hostages.
'People really felt at that moment that there was a need to fight for our survival as a country,' Carmel said.
For some, that impetus did not take long to fade.
'It became very clear, quite soon into the war, that this wasn't about the objectives that the government said it's about,' Carmel said.
'It wasn't about bringing home the hostages and it wasn't about eliminating Hamas either, because they have not done a good job on either front.'
It's about controlling larger and larger parts of the territory.
'And from the point of view of some very influential people in our government, it's about paving the way for building new settlements.'
More than 600 days into the retaliatory war on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 55,000 people and been
accused of genocide
in a case at the International Court of Justice.
Carmel said those soldiers who answered the call in 2023 and have since come back from Gaza with new testimony for Breaking the Silence, returned with 'a deep disappointment in the mission and in the exploitation of people, of Israelis, in order to carry out this mission, which is so obviously a political war'.
'It's a war for the survival of this government.'
The trauma inflicted on all Israelis by the 2023 attack, Carmel explained, was a gift to the extremist members of the current coalition government in Israel, exemplified by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
'It's horrible to say, but for the more extreme right-wing elements of this government… they saw 7 October, probably with sadness and shock and so on, but they saw it as an opportunity.'
In May, Smotrich said Gaza would be 'entirely destroyed' and that the people who live there
would 'leave in great numbers to third countries'.
'Hatred and fear and rage'
According to Carmel, who left the army in 2015 and joined Breaking the Silence in 2019, the experiences that spur members of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to come out against the occupation are varied.
In his case, what first led him to question the logic of Israeli occupation was the sight of terrified children he encountered on a 'mapping mission' in the West Bank.
At the time, he was an officer in COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), the branch of the military that oversees the administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but on this occasion he was accompanying combat soldiers.
Mapping missions in the West Bank, which has been occupied since 1967, are ostensibly carried out to produce sketches of Palestinian homes in case the IDF ever invades the area.
The soldiers arrived at a house in the middle of the night and the unit commander banged on the door to wake up the family inside.
'I think the image that really caught me was just seeing the family. It was just a normal family,' he said.
'There were kids there, and I remember looking at them and thinking, no one's told them it's going to be okay.
'I wanted to somehow communicate to them that it was going to be okay,' he said. But he doesn't speak Arabic and wasn't a member of the unit.
'It was a bit difficult to know what to do and I just decided that I was going to smile, you know, that was the only thing I had.
They looked at me with a stare of hatred and fear and rage.
'I think that was the moment that made me think, there's something very deeply wrong about what we're doing.
'The way that I was brought up, in the community I was brought up in, but also in the training that I got in the IDF, you're told that everything that we do as soldiers is for the purpose of keeping our friends and our families safe. It's all about security.
'And then something about this image was it became so clear that there's nothing security-related about this.'
Carmel later learned that not only was this a 'very soft' mapping mission, but that once the sketches of the homes are complete, soldiers often simply throw them away.
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The real purpose of these missions, he explained using IDF language, is 'to make our presence felt' and show Palestinians 'who's in charge here'.
Human shields
One account from a former soldier who returned from Gaza stands out to Carmel as particularly powerful.
It has been widely reported, including in testimony provided to Breaking the Silence, that Israeli combat units in Gaza use Palestinian civilians as human shields, sending them into buildings ahead of them in order to trigger any potential booby traps.
'You're in this really high-adrenaline kind of environment, and you're always scared,' Carmel said.
'You're going into all sorts of places where you're risking your life and then you have the downtime between missions that you go out on.
'During that time, they, the human shields, the Palestinians, were with them, and they were basically handcuffed and blindfolded and stayed with them in the houses that they were occupying in Gaza, which they turned into makeshift posts.
'And then, in order to go to the toilet, because they're handcuffed and blindfolded, the soldiers needed to take down the zipper and take down their trousers.
'And he said there was something about the aesthetics of that that was so shocking.'
Carmel said that when news of the IDF using human shields came out in Israel, a common retort was 'This is nothing, Hamas uses human shields all the time'.
Israel consistently accuses Hamas of using human shields in Gaza by embedding in built-up areas and digging tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure, something Carmel has 'no doubt' they do.
He also makes a point of noting that the Israeli military headquarters is in a residential area in the centre of Tel Aviv.
Unwelcome points of view
Speaking out publicly about the harsh reality of the occupation and blowing the whistle on crimes committed during wars does not go down well with much of Israeli society, and the government especially.
'So there are various people who have distanced themselves from me, that's for sure,' Carmel said of the personal consequences that have come with taking up the anti-occupation cause.
I'm lucky to have a supportive family. I'd say at least my nuclear family are very supportive.
'A lot of my cousins on my mother's side are settlers, or they come from settlements and they live in other places now, but they are settlers and yeah, it's very uncomfortable.'
All the same, 'we found a way to live'.
For Breaking the Silence, Israeli society is a hostile environment.
'I think, in terms of our organisation, it's very difficult for the government and for the State of Israel to have us, because we are speaking truth to power and we're doing the work of the opposition,' Carmel explained, 'because our opposition is very, very weak in Israel.'
'So we're kind of the extra-parliamentary opposition and so part of the attempts by the government are to make it harder for us to do our work.
'This has been going on for years, and there's been all sorts of rounds of different kinds of measures they've tried to take against us.
In 2018, the government introduced the Breaking the Silence law, which was designed 'to distance us from schools so we wouldn't be able to talk to young people', Carmel said.
He described this as 'amazing' because 'when they turn 18, they go to the army, but no one wants to tell them what they're going to be facing'.
Israeli citizens – with few exceptions – have to do mandatory military service.
The latest round of hostility towards the organisation is a bill that would impose heavy taxes on donations to NGOs from abroad.
The proposed law would impose an 80% tax on NGOs that receive the majority of their funding from foreign entities, but the finance minister would be able to exempt some organisations.
Carmel described this as an attack on left-wing organisations because they receive money from abroad that has to be publicly declared.
'But the right also get their funding from abroad, but from private and often very shady sources which don't have to face any kind of transparency regulations,' he said.
'Whereas we get a lot of our funding from state backed donors, like Trócaire, which gets its funding from Irish Aid.'
This kind of funding needs to be declared publicly because governments want to know where their money is going, Carmel explained.
The hostility from the state towards NGOs mirrors that of some European countries, like Hungary and Georgia, and Carmel says Israel is often compared to Russia in this regard.
'Basically our lawyers are telling us if this (bill) goes through, the best way to deal with it is basically to move everything abroad.
'But we don't want to be like the Russians, we don't want to be dissidents working from outside of Israel. The whole point is that we believe in working with Israeli society.
'We believe in working with the international community too, but we want to change from within and without, and we want to be connected to what's going on on the ground, because we're former soldiers, we're part of the system.
'So we believe that we need to be in conversation with Israelis all the time, and that's exactly what the government is trying to prevent.'
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