Former Israeli soldier now believes treatment of Palestinians is immoral

• Joel Carmel grew up in London’s Jewish community. He was passionately committed to defending Israel from his many critics, whom he believed to be biased and did not understand the constant threats to his security in the Arab world.
• He left for Israel as soon as he could, joined the army, and rose to the rank of second lieutenant. He served in the West Bank territories, which Israel occupied after the Six Day War in 1967.
• The West Bank is home to 2.8 million Palestinians, as well as more than 500,000 Jews, often described as settlers.
• When he witnessed the occupation as a soldier, he said he realized that Israel’s policies were as much a force for violence as terrorism that it was supposed to avoid.
• Carmel said he left the army determined to demonstrate that “you can be a patriotic Israeli and criticize the occupation.”
• He now works with Breaking the Silence, an organization of military veterans that he says he hopes to show the Israeli public what daily life is like for Palestinians living under occupation.
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As a teenager growing up in the comfortable north London suburbs, the heart of the British Jewish community, Joel Carmel had a singular passion: defending Israel from its critics.

“My synagogue, my youth movement, my school were all Zionist organizations. Zionism meant that not only did Israel have a right to exist but that she actively defended Israel,” he said.

In this bubble, all of Israel’s critics were biased, said Carmel, the son of a rabbi.

“They were all against us. Everything in the MSM was anti-Israel, and we had a responsibility to show the other side,” he said. “That meant saying that what Israel did was always a security problem and Israel had to do whatever it took to defend itself.”

Carmel became a young fan of Sion, a prodigy of pro-Israel campaigns. Passionate and articulate, he won a communal “Apprentice” contest, the Ambassador’s Award, which recognized his talent for defending Israel.

At 18, Carmel gave up his place at a British university, made “aliyah” for Israel (aliyah, which means “return”, is imbued with deep spiritual and nationalistic overtones), and joined the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soon after.

Joel Carmel

“It was not because he wanted to be a soldier. He wanted to be an Israeli and do what everyone else did. He wanted to be useful,” he said.

In fact, the soldier’s life was not natural for Carmel, he said.

“Most of the young Israelis were very excited about picking up a gun because it’s great. I hated it. I didn’t like the smell of gunpowder, and it was stressful holding this gun,” he said.

But he was always a great winner, he was selected for officer training. He learned that he would be sent to COGAT, the acronym for Israel’s military bureaucracy, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories. Carmel described it as the “shadow government” that Israel built to rule the West Bank, where 2.8 million Palestinians live and was captured from Jordan in the Six Day War in 1967.

Since then, more than 500,000 Jews have moved into the territory and built often controversial settlements.

“He wanted to be the moral soldier. He believed that he could be that soldier who provides Palestinians with good service, service with a smile,” said Carmel. “Later I realized that you could be as smiling as you wanted. You could give Palestinian children candy, but ultimately you control their lives with military power.”

During his training as an officer, he said that his doubts about the occupation began to crystallize.

One morning, at a crossing point in Bethlehem, the West Bank, where Palestinian workers gathered to enter Israel, Carmel said he witnessed a disturbing scene.

“You just have to be there to feel it,” he said. “Thousands of Palestinian youths were crushed in tunnel cages on the way to the security checkpoint. People were forced to climb on top of each other, it was when I started thinking, ‘There is something wrong here.'”

REUTERS / Raneen Sawafta

He said another critical moment for him was a visit by young officers to the mosque in the Caves of the Patriarchs in Hebron, a city south of Jerusalem. It is believed to house the tombs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and both Muslims and Jews treasure the shrine. There is also a synagogue on site.

When Carmel and his fellow trainees arrived, he said he was surprised when their shoes were not removed to pay minimal respect for Muslim beliefs.

“I was walking in my military boots in his mosque,” he said.

Once a newly coined lieutenant in the IDF, he was assigned to the Jenin district of COGAT. Their job was to issue travel permits to Palestinians who wanted to enter Israel to visit relatives or hospitals. There, entrepreneurs were given priority over “normal people,” he said. As a young officer, he controlled the freedom of movement of tens of thousands of people.

His work was stressful and had hints of Big Brother, he said. The permit application process requires Palestinians to provide comprehensive biographical information, he said.

“It was part of Israel’s control effort: we had to know everything.”

‘They are people’

When he was assigned the role, he was excited about the opportunity to learn Arabic. But he said his language skills never went beyond issuing military orders: “‘Stop. Put your hands up. Get out of the room. Get into the room.’ No social context, just instructions.”

The workload was heavy. He processed hundreds of travel permit applications a day. But he got to know his opposite numbers in the Palestinian National Authority: they were like him, he said: young overworked little bureaucrats trying to keep their bosses happy.

“That was a humanizing experience for me,” he said. “‘Everyone wants to kill us’; that is something that is heard in Israel. But as an officer in the Jenin district, I met a lot of Palestinians on a daily basis. I realized that this is not true. They are people.”

After two years, Carmel said his doubts were magnified. The occupation as a defense against Palestinian terrorists was one dimension of what he witnessed, he said, adding that humiliating and instilling fear in the Palestinians was another.

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The night of the “mapping operation” would be his epiphany.

He said he rode to a Palestinian village in an IDF jeep and saw the driver hitting trash cans outside each home, leaving a trail of stinky trash and rotting vegetables on the street.

They broke into the home of a Palestinian family, he said. While the tearful-eyed parents and children were guarded by heavily armed soldiers, others rummaged through their raffles and lockers. Carmel said he tried to smile at a small Palestinian boy, but he only returned his gaze. The search revealed nothing, they rarely do, according to Carmel, and had no military objectives, he said.

When the soldiers left the village, Palestinians on the rooftops threw paint bombs at their jeeps, he said, adding that an Israeli soldier pulled his gun out the window and violently fired rubber-tipped bullets.

“That was the moment when I realized that I wanted to get out of the military. I didn’t want to do something that I considered immoral,” he said.

“We are punishing people who have done nothing,” he added. “Yes, there is terror, and some people threaten us a lot. But the occupation is a system of constant violence, and it should not surprise us that some of that comes back to us.”

The army learned lessons from Carmel.

Carmel’s next move risked a prison sentence. Refusing to follow an order was a serious military crime, but it was a price he was willing to pay.

He wrote a letter to his commander.

“At that time I genuinely felt that, being so ideologically at odds with the establishment and the unit I was in, it severely affected and limited my ability to do my job to the best of my ability,” he said. “That being the case, I was concerned about the impact it would have on the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose freedom of movement they controlled and who would ultimately suffer the most.”

After a series of meetings with the top brass and much yelling, he was referred to a non-work job to finish his service, he said.

“When I left I realized that even if I had been the chief of staff, there was nothing I could do. The instructions come from the government. It is a political decision,” Carmel said.

But it did make an unexpected change. After his service ended, it became a case study for trainee officers.

He said a conference was “dedicated to that ‘crazy soldier.'”

“The letter I wrote to my commander appeared on the screen. The purpose was to eliminate people who might have a moral objection. It had been a great waste of resources for the army. The army learned lessons from me.” said.

Carmel eventually went to university in Jerusalem, got married, and now works for Breaking the Silence. According to its mission statement, it is “an organization of veterans who have served in the Israeli army who have been tasked with exposing the Israeli public to the reality of daily life in the Occupied Territories.”

“Israelis love their soldiers, and it’s hard to know about us: ‘We experienced those things because we were sent by you, the people, to oppress other people on your behalf,'” he said.

Many would prefer not to listen, according to Carmel. She and her colleagues are often called liars and traitors, she said.

REUTERS / Mussa Qawasma

Now 28 years old, Carmel is the father of a girl. The occupation is in its 54th year, and the thought that it might be invoked to defend it in ’75 fills her with dread.

“There is this old Israeli mantra: We do what we do so that our children do not have to serve in the military. It gives me hope that many good people are fighting for this cause and are listening to us,” he said. “I’d rather be that father than the father who tries to ignore him and find my daughter in the military one day.”

Carmel’s life has been a journey through ideology and conflict. When he reflected on his days as a young firefighter for an Israel that could do no wrong, he said he would have some advice for his younger self.

“I would say read a little more. That would have helped me understand that every criticism of Israel is not an attack on its right to exist,” he said. “You can be an Israeli patriot and criticize the occupation. It would have changed things in my life if I had known then.”