Mainstream reception of Breaking the Silence
Within Israeli mainstream discourse, anti-occupation dissent, including soldiers’ witnessing, is routinely delegitimized, and those expressing it are often designated as “Jewish self-haters” and “Arab lovers,” who have turned against their own people, and the like. Such denigrating responses have attended anti-occupation activism all along, but these attacks have become more mainstreamed and more virulent over the past few years, exacerbated (so it seems) by the advent of social media. Most of the grassroots activism generated by anti-occupation initiatives remains under the radar, but any bit of news that brings it into the public eye for a moment tends to become an occasion for vehement, at times orchestrated, attacks by politicians and other opinion-leaders. Within a few years, the intense, state-led assault on civil society groups concerned with the occupation, and on the agencies that partially fund them (including the New Israel Fund2 and (friendly) European governments), has created a toxic public climate for human rights organizations in Israel. This climate has paved the way for new legislation designed to curtail their activities. Thus, for example, a law was passed in July 2018, which is designed to keep organizations such as B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence out of schools and other educational institutions on the ground that their messages contribute to the delegitimization of Israel (Lis & Skop, 2017). A new law that would incriminate civil society organizations that are supported by funding from foreign governments, which is informally referred to as the Breaking the Silence law (even though the organization maintains that its specifications do not apply to it), is still pending. Interestingly, both discourse-centered anti-occupation activism and mainstream responses to it are grounded in a speech-as-action ideology. Indeed, the one thing these activists and their mainstream opponents share is a view of oppositional speech as a form of action. In fact, declaring Israel’s struggle over international legitimization as another war the country has to face, the threat of anti-occupation activists’ critical discourses to its image is amplified, attributing a great deal of (negative) power to their words.
Breaking the Silence has been a particular target for accusations concerning anti-Israel activities. Its testimonial project has been a major source of irritation for the military authorities and the political leadership. The moral panic triggered by soldiers’ testimonial activities evolved over time. It was relatively attenuated when the group of former soldiers first launched their photography exhibition, mentioned in the previous chapter, in the spring of 2004, and while it was patently clear that many in the Israeli political system and mainstream media found the organization’s advocacy objectionable from the very start, Breaking the Silence’s ongoing activities attracted no particular public attention between 2005 and 2009 (Zimmerman, 2012). Occasionally, some of its central members were asked to provide commentaries on media coverage relating to soldiers’ untoward conduct vis-à-vis Palestinian civilians, and they took those opportunities to reiterate their position that these infringements on human rights were endemic to the occupation regime rather than marking occasional irregularities that could be resolved through disciplinary action toward particular soldiers (as maintained by military spokespersons).
Things changed, however, in July 2009, with the publication of the Breaking the Silence booklet of testimonies pertaining to the 2008-2009 Gaza War, code-named Operation Cast Lead. This booklet (Breaking the Silence, 2009) pertained to a specific recent combat operation rather than to the general landscape of the occupation regime that emerged from individual soldiers’ testimonies in different military units, different locations, and different points in time. Breaking the Silence’s intervention in the conduct of the Gaza campaign, with its undisguised critique of military policies that led to the massive death and destruction caused by the Israeli army’s bombardment of highly populated neighborhoods, was vehemently rejected by the country’s political and military leadership, particularly when it transpired that these testimonies were brought to the attention of the UN fact-finding commission assigned to write a report on human rights violations by both the Israeli army and Hamas during this operation, a document which came to be known as the highly controversial Goldstone Report.3 Breaking the Silence found itself in the public eye, but not in the way its originators had envisaged when they sought to put the occupation on the nation’s agenda. The responses to the testimonies in the Gaza booklet in effect deflected attention away from the testimonies concerning the Israeli army’s disproportionate use of force, by staging a concerted and vocal effort to delegitimize the organization and its members.
Thus, after the Gaza booklet was launched, the (then) military spokesperson, Avi Benayahu, among others, questioned the credibility of the soldiers’ testimonies. He complained that maintaining soldiers’ anonymity, a self-protective measure adopted by Breaking the Silence to prevent the criminalization of individual soldiers, was preventing the army from properly investigating the incidents reported in the soldiers’ testimonies. He questioned the witnessing organization’s ethical motives, suggesting that it was driven by civil society groups’ competition over international funding rather than by a true desire to do good in the local arena, as they claimed, drawing public responses from Breaking the Silence activists (e.g., Golan, 2010). The issues of witnesses’ anonymity, the organization’s foreign funding, and its engagement with audiences outside Israel became central to the ongoing public controversy over the legitimacy of Breaking the Silence’s activities. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs pressured European governments - for example, Holland, Britain, and Spain - to stop providing funds for the organization’s work through state-sponsored agencies. With the increasing dominance of rightwing ethno-nationalist politics in Israel, the expressions of concern over the soldiers’ witnessing project grew into an outright demonization campaign. Thus, Avigdor Lieberman, when acting as Foreign Minister, led a blunt campaign against Breaking the Silence and other human-rights-oriented NGOs, saying: “These are not leftwing organizations but terrorist organizations and terrorist promoters ... who circulate fraudulent and distorted information as part of the de-legitimization [of Israel]” (Medzini, Ynet, 2011). As public opinion swayed against Breaking the Silence, it was routinely depicted as an anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, extreme-left, or pro-Palestinian organization, whose goal was to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli army and the Israeli State. The organization, however, persisted in its activities, with one group of core activists replacing the other, and with circles of supporters variously contributing to its work. Following the attack on Gaza in the summer of 2014, whose official name was Operation Protective Edge, it published another collection of testimonies (Breaking the Silence, 2015) that triggered another round of scandals. Each time the organization managed to break out of its under-the-radar mode of activity of small-scale meetings with the public, and to insert itself into mainstream media, reaching beyond its small, but steady, group of supporters and occasional audiences, its increased visibility ignited further expressions of animosity toward it, as I discuss in some detail elsewhere (Katriel, 2018).
Two events that marked a further escalation in the campaign against Breaking the Silence in recent years are worth mentioning. One involved an investigatory report broadcast in Israel’s most popular television news program on Channel 2 on 17 March 2016, at the instigation of a rightwing organization named Ad Kan [Up to Here], described as an Israeli Zionist activist organization that “is known for infiltrating Israeli extreme left-wing organizations, as well as practicing other forms of protest against organizations which it sees as anti-Israel.”4 Former soldiers sent by Ad Kan to offer testimonies to be included in Breaking the Silence archive recorded these interviews and edited segments of them into a defamatory TV report by journalist Ofer Hadad, accusing Breaking the Silence of collecting confidential military information in the interviews they conducted with witnessing soldiers, that is, of spying. In consequence, Breaking the Silence was vociferously condemned in the press and by political leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ya’alon. These allegations were rejected not only by Breaking the Silence itself but also by the State Prosecutor’s office, after it was confirmed that all the information Breaking the Silence circulates is routinely approved by the military censorship. Yet, the allegations against Breaking the Silence sparked a great deal of public condemnation, feeding into the larger campaign against human rights groups in Israel; the official statements exonerating the organization from the charge of spying were barely mentioned in the mainstream media.
The second event involved an attempt to strike against Breaking the Silence by targeting one of its most visible activists at the time. In June 2017, the news media announced an incident involving Dean Issacharof, a former combat officer, who was acting as the organization’s spokesperson at the time. Dean had publicly incriminated himself by testifying that he had violently hit a young Palestinian boy during one of his military rounds (Landsman, Haaretz, 2017). Rather than prosecuting him for his self-confessed transgression, the military authorities declared him a liar who was spreading false stories so as to slander the army. They brought in a Palestinian witness who testified to having been arrested by Dean, but denied having suffered any violence during his arrest. Dean insisted on his version of the story, and it eventually turned out that the incident he had recounted, which was corroborated by other soldiers, had involved a different Palestinian youngster, not the army’s witness. He was eventually cleared of the charge of lying, yet his request to be prosecuted for his misconduct, which would have given him a high-profile public platform to make his case against the occupation, was denied.
In addition to these disparate responses to Breaking the Silence’s testimonial project, other groups of reserve soldiers who had served in the Palestinian territories mounted an organized campaign designed to counter the occupation narratives circulated by dissident soldiers and undermine their credibility as authentic witnesses of the Israeli army’s practices in the occupied territories. Two such groups were founded in 2015, both in response to Breaking the Silence’s activities following the 2014 Gaza War. One was called Miluimnikim Bahazit [Reservists on Duty]5 and the other Haemet Sheli [My Truth].6 Both set out to counter Breaking the Silence’s testimonies, which they considered to be prevarications, by providing an alternative, positive narrative of Israel’s military policies and practices, promising to give the Israeli public an objective and unbiased view of the situation in the occupied territories and of the army’s conduct there. In what follows, I address the campaign mounted by My Truth, which will suffice for the purposes of my exposition. In an interview published on the occasion of a crowdsourcing campaign by My Truth, one of its leading members, Emanuel Miller, directly attributed the establishment of this grassroots reservists’ organization in May 2015 to its members’ outrage against Breaking the Silence’s report on Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza known as Operation Protective Edge. In his words, the report’s title “purported to describe: ‘this is how we fought in Gaza,’ but in reality it was a highly biased report; a collection of half-truths and unverifiable stories which were shrouded under the cloak of anonymity.” Addressing the report’s allegations of Israel’s human rights abuses against the civilian population of Gaza, the report ignored the fact that “dozens of terror tunnels were revealed, that three [Jewish] teenagers had been kidnapped and murdered [in the West Bank], or that Hamas had been stockpiling thousands upon thousands of rockets for the express purpose of shooting at Israeli civilians” (Yashar, 2016). My Truth’s message is designed as a direct rebuttal of Breaking the Silence’s campaign, countering its counter-hegemonic message by reiterating the hegemonic Israeli narrative that depicts the military domination over the Palestinian territories, and the control measures it entails, as justified on national security grounds and as both proportionate and considerate in their execution. In deploying this hegemonic message, My Truth duplicates the activist repertoire employed by Breaking the Silence - collecting and archiving soldiers’ testimonies, disseminating them to the Israeli and international public on their website (that has both a Hebrew and an English version), in talks and meetings with various groups around the country and abroad, in guided tours held in the occupied territories, and so on. Its activity structure and forms of public engagement mirror those of Breaking the Silence, appropriating the aura of authenticity and defiance usually attached to grassroots movements operating “from below.”
Given the fact that they echo mainstream Israeli positions concerning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as well as official positions concerning the high morality of Israeli military practices, it is not surprising that their messages are well received by the Israeli authorities and the mainstream public, as they claim. Their vision statement runs as follows:
My Truth shares the reality regarding the way IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] soldiers conduct their actions. Through our educational platforms and testimonies, we counter the misinformation and false claims being waged against Israeli soldiers. The organization sheds light on the unparalleled experiences and challenging situations which Israeli soldiers face on a daily basis. We fill the gap and vacuum that was created in Israel and abroad when discussing [the] moral values of Israeli soldiers and respond to those who slander and defame Israeli soldiers.7
This organizational vision statement, while pronouncing a commitment to counter the testimonies circulated by Breaking the Silence, cannot be understood as an example of parrhesia. The power differential associated with the parrhesiastic act of speaking truth to power does not hold in this case. Breaking the Silence, against whose oppositional testimonies My Truth activists wage their struggle, is neither a power-holder nor a decision-maker, and it is not in a position to act punitively toward its critics. It is, in fact, highly marginalized and frequently slandered. It holds no institutional authority, and its impact on political events has been negligible. By naming their organization My Truth, these reservists seek to relativize the contradictory truth claims put forth by Breaking the Silence activists. This name serves to implicitly deny the dissident soldiers’ claim to authoritative witnessing, the claim that experiences in the scene of occupation can be used as evidence of its morally problematic standing. Notably, while relativizing the dissidents’ point of view, they also claim that their own depiction of the scene of occupation is objective, which implies a non-relativistic position rather than a genuine recognition of multiple truths regarding the reality of the occupation regime.
Countering dissident soldiers’ point of view, My Truth activists do not pit one truth against another; rather, they present themselves as the sole truth-speakers and disparage Breaking the Silence testimonies as slander. They also rule out the possibility that both morally questionable practices, such as those reported by Breaking the Silence witnesses, and admittedly harsh yet necessary military responses to terrorist activities may be part of the complex situation Israeli troops are caught up in while serving in those territories. The one thing these two organizations agree on is that the situations in which Israeli soldiers find themselves when playing the occupier role are exceedingly difficult. My Truth (and the mainstream Israeli public more generally) regards this political situation as a given, as the result of an intractable conflict whose end is not in sight; it also casts the Palestinians as the sole aggressors, whose violent activities disrupt the occupation as a normalized routine. From the perspective of anti-occupation activists, on the other hand, this state of affairs is the result of a state policy that can -and needs to be - changed, and they hold the Israeli government, the more powerful partner to this conflict, responsible for initiating such a change. They concede that some Palestinians engage in terrorist acts that target Israeli civilians, but they do not see it as justifying collective punishment against the civilian Palestinian population as a whole. My Truth also differs from Breaking the Silence in that its goal of protecting Israeli soldiers from slander and defamation, which is how they interpret the dissenters’ critique, is grounded in a claim to exceptionalism - the view that Israeli soldiers’ circumstances and experiences are unparalleled. This position with regard to the Israeli occupation contrasts with Breaking the Silence's insistence on understanding the occupation regime with reference to structures of domination and patterns of control that can be traced in international conflicts in other times and places as well. Breaking the Silence activists have been influenced by the anti-Vietnam movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the USA, and have had contacts with members of the War Resisters International^ network as well
While it has been supported by a range of individuals and groups on the political left, including many in the country’s cultural and academic circles who share its anti-occupation agenda, Breaking the Silence has been operating in an agonistic public climate. Oral exchanges in the electronic media in which its members participate tend to quickly deteriorate into hostile accusatory attacks that preclude any possibility of reasoned debate (see Livnat & Cohen, 2018, for such an acrimonious encounter between the organization’s representative and a high-profile military reporter). Breaking the Silence activists have persisted in their efforts, reiterating their unsettling message again and again, undeterred by the hostile reception they faced and their inability to bridge the cultural logic of their universalist ideology with the prevailing ethno-nationalist one (Mizrahi, 2016). Acknowledging the limited reach of their message, they express their faith in the long-term consequentiality of activist engagements, disclosing a temporal orientation identified by Simons (2016) in his study of the anti-occupation group Ta’ayush as involving a messianic conception of time. Another way of viewing activist logic is to see it as involving a fractal rather than a linear and aggregative conception of time and action. In this conception, every action is seen as a metonym for the resistance project as a whole, so that desisting from any particular activist act at a particular point in time amounts to undermining the movement’s overall counter-hegemonic mission (Katriel, 2017). This distinctive attitude toward time and action is accompanied by a profoundly communal attitude whereby individual acts are always part of an ongoing collective effort. This view is neatly captured by the ancient Jewish saying that I have heard repeated over and over again in internal activist discussions. This Talmudic saying was often invoked as a clincher to exchanges in which doubts about the efficacy of activist efforts were expressed by citing its first part: lo aleicha hamlacha ligmor [It is not up to you to finish the work], often replacing the singular “you” [aleicha] with a plural “we” [aleinu]. The second part of this saying, which is usually left implicit, captures the sense of duty that permeates activist projects as a culturally shared taken-for-granted - v’ein ata ben chorin lehibatel mimena [but you are not free to abandon it].9
Breaking the Silence activists hoped their meta-discursive accounts would allow them to explain and justify their decision to participate in the organization’s collective counter-hegemonic witnessing project. Signaling their deep-felt affiliation with Israeli society, their accounts incorporated the double-gesture of dissent that was identified by Ivie (2015) as the hallmark of democratic dissent, whose limited nonconformity seeks to attain a modest but probably manageable goal - to “destabilize a prevailing mindset more or less to allow for some degree of revision sooner or later” (p. 50). In the case of accounts, as we shall see, this goal was attained through a move into explicitness.
