Israel’s Female Soldiers Inflict Greatest Suffering

Women serving in the Israeli army in the West Bank are often more brutal and violent toward Palestinian civilians than their male comrades. That’s according to a report released this past weekend by Breaking the Silence, an organization of both male and female Israeli army reservists who are speaking out against their country’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

The new report, which features the testimonies of more than 50 female soldiers who have served in various military posts in the West Bank, offers some truly grim revelations about life as a woman in the Israeli military. "We discovered that the girls try to be even more violent and brutal than the boys, just to become one of the guys,” said the project’s director Dana Golan.

In recent years, females have become increasingly involved in combat and field operations in the Israeli army, and many have daily encounters with Palestinian civilians at checkpoints, roadblocks, and in Palestinian communities in the West Bank. In order to prove their worth as “fighters” to both their Israeli male counterparts and the Palestinians, who, they believe, have a more difficult time obeying women in uniform, these women often inflict even greater suffering on Palestinian civilians.

According to one soldier, “A female combat soldier needs to prove more … a female soldier who beats up others is a serious fighter … when I arrived there was another female there with me … everyone spoke of how impressive she is because she humiliates Arabs without any problem.”

Since when did humiliating civilians become a badge of honor?

The accounts of violence are downright horrifying. The soldiers admit various instances in which they spit on Palestinian civilians for entertainment, took Palestinian men into army tents and beat them in their private areas, stole Palestinians’ food and vandalized their property, and fired rubber bullets into demonstrators’ chests for sport. Often, to break-up the boredom of monitoring checkpoints all day, some women say they would round up innocent civilians, blame them for crimes they did not commit, and proceed to mercilessly beat them.

Perhaps the gravest of the stories comes from Hebron, where one female soldier said that her unit had a hobby of firing toy guns at Palestinian children. She noted, “Those plastic pellets really hurt … you're sitting on guard and 'tak' you fire at a kid, 'tak' -– you fire at another kid.”

Since this graphic and chilling report was released, the Israeli army has attempted to discredit the female soldiers by questioning their “reliability” and attempting to cast them as just a “few bad apples”. When measured against the soldiers’ repeated and detailed accounts of systematic humiliation, cruelty, violence, theft, and killing, however, this thinly veiled attempt at damage control simply does not stand up.

Asked how the situation that the female soldiers face in the West Bank might be improved, one interviewee responded, “The system is deeply flawed. The entire administration, the way things are run, it's not right.”

Rather than distancing themselves from these women’s reports, the Israeli military and government would be well-served to look inward and thoroughly examine the society that not only forces teenage men and women to serve in the military, but also sends its soldiers on brutalizing and violent missions in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli government's egregious failure to recognize and end a military occupation in which beating and humiliating civilians has become an entertaining pastime is the real silence that must be broken.

Photo credit: Shuk One