Gideon Levy : Hooray for the Snitches of Breaking the Silence
:
The
Israeli soldiers who expose the crimes of the occupation are much
braver than the cowards who shoot to death Palestinian girls wielding
scissors.
haaretz.com
Hooray for the whistleblowers; they’re snitches.
Hooray for the women who complain about sexual assaults; they’re
snitches. Hooray for those who install hidden cameras in slaughterhouses
to document animal abuse. Hooray for those who put to shame people who
abuse patients in psychiatric institutions and for those who expose
domestic violence – they’re snitches too. And a big hooray, of course,
to those who document the crimes of the occupation and bring them to the
knowledge of the public in Israel and the rest of the world. Hooray for
those who won’t keep silent in the face of those crimes, hooray to
Breaking the Silence.
The
wave of savage incitement against the NGO, Breaking the Silence,
consists of two contentions — that they’re liars and that they’re
snitches. The first is false, the second is absurd. Nobody has caught
Breaking the Silence in a lie, not even the imposter MK Oren Hazan. So
much for the first contention. The second is even more fallacious –
there’s no other way to reveal the truth but the one adopted by the
organization.
When
Tzipi Livni complained at the recent Haaretz conference in New York
that the organization doesn’t go to the Israel Defense Forces with its
findings, she was whitewashing. She too knows what we’re dealing with
when we talk about the military legal system. Would she say the same
about other whistleblowers? Settle things inside the family? In the
community? Concealment is the root of evil.
The
defense minister’s statement that the organization’s goals are
“malicious” is proof that complaints of injustice cannot and must not be
brought to the IDF, which he is in charge of. When the state’s
president says at the Haaretz conference that the IDF is the most moral
army in the world, he too proves that in Israel there’s nobody to talk
to.
The
Israeli leadership, army, society and media are all convinced that an
occupation army can be moral, that an army that killed thousands of
innocent people in Gaza is the best of the best and that an army that
shoots stone-throwers and stabbers to death indiscriminately is above
all suspicion. All this proves why it is imperative to expose the truth,
in Israel and around the world.
Yes,
when the country is brainwashed and refuses to see, there’s no choice
but to turn to the world. Those who want to hide the truth abroad don’t
want it to see the light in Israel either.
Breaking
the Silence’s thousand witnesses are the army’s elite commando unit,
the most excellent of soldiers, the most daring, most patriotic of them.
Their day of glory will come. They are much braver than the cowards who
shoot to death girls wielding scissors. They are the only ones who can
still save the IDF’s lost honor in the world . If Israeli public
diplomacy is still effective anywhere in the world, it’s thanks to
Breaking the Silence. If there’s still a chance to talk to people of
conscience in the world, it’s thanks to the “snitches.”
I
saw the impressive appearance of Breaking the Silence activist Avner
Gvaryahu at the Haaretz conference. Even Roger Waters was moved to see
there are still Israelis like him left.
The
“snitches,” those who reported to their states and the world of the
iniquities of their countries’ evil regimes are history’s heroes. Who
are the dissidents if not “snitches’ and who are the heroes, if not the
dissidents? In the new Israel, the documenters of the Bus 300 affair —
the 1984 cover-up of the killing of two Palestinian terrorists captured
alive, by Shin Bet agents — would be branded as traitors and those who
exposed the 1950s massacres in Kibiya and Kafr Qasem would be charged
with doing so for malicious motives. The new Israel doesn’t want to know
about all that. Maybe it would applaud the slaughterers in Kafr Qasem
and issue citations to the skull-crushers of the Bus 300 Affair.
This
is how a society living in denial reaches its most critical, dangerous
stage – losing touch with reality. Israel no longer wants to know what
is done in its name and wages war on those trying to deny it the luxury
of saying, “I didn’t know.”
This
insane war is joined by the deafening, frightening national chorus,
which includes most of the opposition and almost all the media.
Everybody knows the occupation is felonious and evil and everybody, but
everybody, wants to deny it.
All together now: Death to traitors, death to truth.
Gideon Levy
Haaretz Correspondent
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