Tomgram: Oded Na'aman, Is Gaza Outside Israel?

On returning from his first trip to the Gaza Strip, Noam Chomsky told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, “It’s kind of amazing and inspiring to see people somehow managing to survive as caged animals subject to constant, random, sadistic punishment only to humiliate them, no pretext. Israel and the United States keep them alive basically.

They don’t want them to starve to death. But life is set up so you can’t have dignified lives. In fact, one of the words you hear most often is dignity... And the standard Israeli position is they shouldn’t raise their heads. It’s a pressure cooker. It could blow up. People can’t live like that forever. It’s an open-air prison.”

And that was before the Israelis began raining down their most recent round of death and destruction on that tiny, densely populated area.  Other than the Palestinians themselves, no one has experienced this grim reality in a more up close and personal way than Israel’s soldiers, sent repeatedly into the Gaza Strip and into Palestinian towns and villages in the Occupied Territories, where a creeping program of land theft is still underway.  Testimonies from a large number of veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on their daily experiences -- on what the (IDF) once described as a policy of “searing of consciousness,” involving brutal methods of all sorts -- have been gathered by the dissident group Breaking the Silence.  These can now be found in a powerful new book, Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies From the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010, published here this September (and almost totally ignored ever since).  Today, they couldn’t be more grimly relevant.

These are testimonies that must be read if the situation and anger in the region are to be fully grasped.  Think of them as the equivalent of the Winter Soldier Investigation of the Vietnam era, in which American Vietnam veterans testified to the horrific on-the-ground brutality of a failing pacification war.  Oded Na'aman, an IDF veteran and co-editor of Harsh Logic, introduces a small selection of the testimonies from that book, adapted and abridged for this site. Tom