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April 15, 2005
The younger voices of Israel
Stories of a faraway lifestyle that's both normal – and anything
but.
PAT JOHNSON
Ariel Glazer doesn't fit the stereotypical image of a paratrooper.
The Israeli political science student looks younger than his 23
years and his slight frame and soft-spoken manner do not evoke the
tough-guy caricature of an Israeli military commander. But it is
a byproduct of Israel's long and troubled history that bookish kids
who in another environment wouldn't find themselves leading military
units are plunged into death-defying leadership roles.
On the day in 2002 when Israeli troops rolled into Jenin and Nablus
– sparking one of this conflict's most high-profile incidents
– Glazer was on a hilltop overlooking Nablus with a telescope.
The world would soon be transfixed by horrific – and as it
turned out, false – news reports of a purported slaughter of
innocent Palestinians by Israel Defence Forces in Jenin. But Glazer
saw what he believes to be a truer representation of the humanity
and inhumanity of the conflict.
From his surveillance perch, Glazer spotted a group of armed terrorists
moving through the streets of town, accompanied by human shields
in the form of a cluster of the town's children. Radioing to his
commander the whereabouts of the armed gang, Glazer watched as an
Apache helicopter moved into range. But the human shields worked,
thanks to what Glazer said is a superhuman effort on the part of
individual and collective Israeli soldiers to act morally in this
amoral conflict. With the terrorists in easy sight of the Apache's
gunners, the military held fire, for fear of harming the kids.
"There were three terrorists running from place to place with
children," Glazer said Monday, in a presentation to a group
of young Vancouver lawyers. The Apache commander had authorization
to kill the terrorists, but didn't. "Every time, he refused
to shoot," Glazer said. The terrorists escaped. But this wasn't
what made the news. Within days, the world's media would broadcast
what turned out to be completely falsified reports of an unprecedented,
cold-blooded slaughter of Palestinian villagers in Jenin. The two
incidents were symptomatic, Glazer claimed, of the willingness of
international media and their audiences to accept the most damning
imagery of Israeli soldiers, while overlooking the inhumanity of
terrorists. "It drives me crazy how they show soldiers like
us," he said. "They call us baby-killers. When I hear
that on TV, it just, pardon me, pisses me off."
Glazer is travelling the Pacific coast with three other young Israelis
as part of the Israel at Heart program, which has sent 12 groups
of four Israelis around the world to give a human face to a misunderstood
population. In Victoria and Vancouver for more than a week before
heading to Seattle and Portland then home, Glazer and his three
colleagues told their personal stories to high school students and
informal gatherings of Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.
Daniel Desta, a 22-year-old whose family left Ethiopia for Israel
when she was six years old as part of a large-scale repatriation
of the long-isolated Falashas, spoke of how most of her community
walked 40 days through the burning sands to Sudan, from where they
could be spirited away to what she called "our Promised Land."
"This is my Pesach story," Desta said, parallelling the
ancient tale of the Jewish trek from African bondage to redemption.
Roy Rimshon, the product of a kibbutz who recently finished serving
his three-year compulsory service, told a Vancouver audience how
Israeli young people grow up fast. "We're faced with hard questions
and hard decisions at a very young age," Rimshon said. "We're
not saying we're innocent. There is also the Palestinian side. Conflicts
have more than one side, more than one truth." But that doesn't
make the difficult life choices any easier, nor ease the pain of
the loss of friends and comrades, he said. "We try to keep
as human as possible," he added. "It's very hard. Serving
in the army's not natural.... It does stuff to you."
Aviva Zell spoke of her family and her community - settlers in a
West Bank enclave. Give up your homes and communities for peace,
most Israelis are telling her and her family. "When people
say, 'Aviva, it's for peace,' I'm not sure I understand," said
Zell. "For me to make that sacrifice, I think I have to be
sure I'm going to get a 100 per cent return [of peace]."
Israel at Heart is a nongovernmental organization that originated
after the Jenin incident, when some Israelis realized they were
doing a poor job of humanizing their side of this narrative. Its
four representatives were not the only young Israelis in Vancouver
recently. A week earlier, two teenagers – a Druse man and a
Jewish woman – spoke to schoolkids around the Lower Mainland.
Wael Badar and Hadar Jacobovich gave Canadian students a crash course
in Israeli civics. Badar tried to explain that, despite the images
of constant conflict, daily life in Israel is not so divisive. "Arab
teenagers, Jewish teenagers ... it is not only about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict," said Badar. "In Israel, you can see Arabs and
Jews one beside another in the street, talking, laughing. We all
live together, we all live under the same circumstances."
For the high school students at Prince of Wales secondary on Vancouver's
West Side, the comparison was one of daily life, an existence where
going for coffee or riding a bus can end one's life. "My mom
calls every five seconds to see if I got on the bus, got down from
the bus," said Jacobovich. But she stressed that it was not
all worry. "We go to school, we go to parties."
"I really learned a lot today," said one of the Grade
8 students. "I didn't know a lot on Israel." "I thought
Israel was all about wars and things," said one, "but
there's also some place in Israel that's peaceful. There's a lot
of mountains, forests, nature. A lot of religion." "I'm
from Jordan, so I know all this," said another student. "It
was really, really well done."
Both groups of students were chaperoned by representatives of the
Canada-Israel Committee, which last year set up an office in Vancouver
and hired a full-time director of local operations, Nava Mizrahi.
Pat Johnson is a B.C. journalist and commentator.
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