Let's suppose the following: You are taking a group of decent people, 18-21 year olds, and putting them in charge of a civilian population. The group of people in control is bound to abuse their power and commit acts of cruelty, no matter how nice they might be prior to being put into that position of control.
This was proved by the Stanford Prison Experiment: "Normal" Students from Stanford were taken. One group was randomly assigned to be prisoners, while the other group was randomly assigned to be guards. Within days, the guard group was abusing the prisoner group, to the point where they were forcing them to identify themselves by number, (as opposed to name) to sleep without mattresses as punishment, and to undress and perform other acts of humiliation. Anyone familiar with Holocaust history should get a chill while reading that.
The territories are, in a sense, the Stanford Prison Experiment replicated. Take a group of decent 18-21 year olds and put them in control. Take the Palestinian population and make it the prisoner group. The Israeli soldiers are bound to commit atrocities.
I am not a believer in psychological determinism. We are born with psychological tendencies, some positive, some negative, which can be either strengthened or overcome. Nevertheless, I do believe that when talking of a large group of people, ie, Israeli soldiers, it would be unrealistic to expect every single one of them to overcome the basic facet of human nature that turns protector into occupier.
Do we really want Israeli society to be one where people are forced to spend three years of their youth being occupiers? Golda Meir often said that she could forgive the Arabs* for killing Israelis, but not for forcing Israelis to become killers. (This is a paraphrase.) I guess I kind of feel the same way.
Testimony 97, from "Breaking the Silence", former soldier in Hebron, on the Occupation:
"I'd say it corrupts us. I'd say it corrupts them. I'd say we lose in both directions. I'd ask people to put this on their agenda, to ask and learn and find out what goes on there....to tune in, to understand that for our society, even on the most selfish grounds, this is one of our worst ills, the severest of them all for Israeli society, for the people, the state, the economy, society, education. One of our worst ills."
* I don't mean to generalize, but I believe Golda Meir used the word "Arabs", as opposed to, say, "enemies of Israel", or, "a group of extremists from within the Palestinian population".
2 comments:
Shayna,
Great insight into the occupation.
I agree with you that power corrupts. Stanley Milgram's obedience studies did prove that authority figures are prone to abusing their power. However, that is in a situation where there is no ethics training, and where there is no higher authority figure.
For example, many police officers exemplify honorable behavior even as authority figures. This is due to months of training, and also a strong justice department which would handle any injustices committed by even a police officer. The police officer has to go to court, even for a routine traffic violation, to help prove the defendant guilty.
Therefore, i think the situation in Israel would be helped if the young Israeli soldiers underwent ethics courses, and were punished adequately when abuse of power is detected.
have you read edeet ravel? i have two books from the tel aviv trilogy. super leftist but good stuff. i get pissed off at her bc she's anti religion as well as borderline anti zionist but the writing is so goooooooooooood. this is very much an edeet ravel opinion except her solution is like, to leave israel to the pals and go live in canada. ugh.
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