"We Must End the Violent Israeli Occupation": A Former Member of the IDF Speaks Out
"They're just going to continue to slowly erase the Palestinian people"
Last month, on May 27, the Cambridge, Massachusetts city council voted to review the city's contract with technology corporation Hewlett Packard over the company's involvement in the Israeli occupation.
The decision came after over a week of heated debate, including a two day marathon of public comment from hundreds of people speaking both for and against the resolution.
One of those in favor of the resolution was Maya Eshel, an American-Israeli who was a member of the IDF from 2014 to 2016.
"We must end the violent Israeli occupation and apartheid and support the movements for Palestinian liberation everywhere," Eshel said during her brief remarks.
Born in New York to an Israeli father and American mother, Eshel moved to Israel at the age of 15 and joined the military after she turned 18.
She’s spoken out before with groups like Breaking the Silence and IfNotNow.
Eshel told me about her experiences in the IDF and how being part of the occupying force radicalized her in favor of Palestinian liberation.
The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Hi Maya, thanks for talking with me. Let's start with your personal background—where are you from, and how did you end up joining the IDF?
I was born and raised in New York. My dad is Israeli and my mom's American. We lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood when I was growing up. When I was 15, my parents decided to move us to Israel. Me and my little sister were moved to a city outside of Tel Aviv called Givatayim. I finished my junior and senior school years there.
What was it like going to school there after growing up in the US?
Part of being in high school in Israel in general, and part of being an Israeli, is preparing yourself mentally and physically to serve in the military.
It's very much similar to the way that Americans go to college here and are preparing for what school they want to go to, what they want to study. It's within the culture, speaking about the military, speaking about whatever position you hope to get, it's very much part of the day to day existence of Israeli teens.
So I was in high school there for two years and it took about nine months after my graduation for me to be drafted.
What was your role?
I was drafted into the position of being a Human Resources non commissioned officer. Because everyone is drafted, there are people coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds. My position was to provide soldiers who may have been working 24-7 or may have parents who are ill with more personal attention, possibly more financial support.
I served for my first year and two months in Ovdah- Air Force base in the south of the country, an hour away from Eilat. And then the second portion of my service was served in Etsion Brigade in the West Bank.
Etsion Brigade is located next to settlements that have been strategically placed to divide Palestinian neighborhoods, cities and towns in the West Bank. Under international law, we are supposed to protect the occupied population, but the IDF is actually there to “protect the settlers.”
That was where I was exposed to the occupation, to the segregation, to checkpoints, to arresting Palestinian children. We had a detention center in my base, so I would see Palestinians undergoing the detention process.
You hadn't seen that part of the occupation so closely before?
That's a part of the reality over there. They make it very easy for you to forget that we are occupying millions of people. Even living in Tel Aviv or the time you don't have to think about it, you don't have to talk about it in your day to day life.
This was my first time coming face to face with a Palestinian from the West Bank. That was maybe four-and-a-half years into, or five years into, living in the country. And that was the first time I really was standing face to face with a Palestinian who coming from the West Bank.
While I was in the West Bank, I felt a bit weird about the whole situation. And there's a lot to be said about the way that they hide the occupation and they hide the dehumanization of Palestinians, the violent day to day occupation of Palestine, they hide it from the Israeli public.
So what was that like, the way that they hid that from you—how did they do that?
Even when I was taking a bus on my way to my base on Sundays—because our Sundays are our American Mondays—I would take a bus from Jerusalem, the central bus station, into the West Bank.
Truthfully, I didn't even feel like we were entering the West Bank. It all felt like Jerusalem. The wall, the separation wall between Palestine or the West Bank—I would feel something was off when we would pass the checkpoint from Jerusalem into the West Bank. But for Israelis it's so seamless to just move through the borders and throughout the country into the West Bank.
And if I didn't really feel any difference between Jerusalem and the West Bank, then most of the soldiers on that bus with me didn't didn't feel the difference. The situation on the ground has become so normalized for us that seeing the segregation, this really huge wall, it didn't really move me at the time. It was just kind of like, oh, there it is. That's a fact. There are the checkpoints.
Sometimes I speak to Americans here who have been on the ground in Israel and Palestine, and they tell me about how weird it is for them to see Israeli soldiers walking around with weapons. They see the way that Palestinians are being surveilled and they see the checkpoints and the soldiers sitting at the checkpoints and it's really strange for them.
A few of them will know very quickly, this is not right. I don't feel comfortable with this. What we're doing is wrong. And it's not a question for them.
But for me, it really took me a long time to understand what was happening because we're so brainwashed over there and the situation is so normalized. I had to live outside of the country to realize how militarized Israel is.
Let's talk more about your experiences in the IDF. You said the treatment of Palestinian prisoners was poor. Can you expand on that?
When I got to the West Bank, when I got to my base, I wasn't a fighter, I never went into a Palestinian village or town and conducted one of those like night raids. I wasn't standing at checkpoints.
But I did experience the culture of what it meant to be an Israeli soldier on a base in the West Bank and hear the language and the terminology that was used when people were speaking about Palestinians. They don't call them Palestinians, they call them Arabs, which is another form of erasing the Palestinian identity and history.
We had a detention center on my base. Some of the Palestinian detainees were sometimes really, really young. They could be up to like my chest.
Anyone who was being locked in was blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their back. And they were manhandled or they were walked in with a very physically intimidating Israeli officer and or two. Sometimes when they were being walked into the base, the soldiers would yell things at them.
At the time, I didn't have the strength to say anything. I was kind of like one of the few left wing soldiers on the base. So I was already feeling isolated and under attack. They would sometimes say horrible things to the Palestinians while they were being locked in.
One time I was going to the medical clinic, and I was sitting and waiting for my appointment. And a really small kid walks in, like I said, with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. He was the height of me sitting down. He was so close to me and he was walked in and he went into the doctor before me and he went in and out within like a minute. I don't know what they did with him inside there. He was alone.
Kids don't have much agency in a situation like that.
When kids are detained, they're far away from their parents. They don't speak Hebrew. There are documents that they're asked to sign and the people they are surrounded with are all Israeli and speak Hebrew and they don't speak Arabic. So they've no idea what's going on.
This kid was standing right next to me. He was blindfolded and couldn't see me. He didn't know that I was sitting right there. It was just so weird, the power dynamic and the control and the ability of the Israeli forces and government to just dictate the lives of so many Palestinians.
This kid's life is going to be changed because he was put in a detention center. Who knows how that could have affected him . After I saw this kid, I realized, oh, there's a detention center on our base. It was never a thing that even mattered or was talked about.
Did you ever get to see where the prisoners were held?
Because I was a Jewish Israeli soldier, and we did kitchen duty and guard duty on weekends. Not many people are around on the weekends. So you're kind of bored and you have nothing to do. I decided one day to go check out the detention center because why not? I was able to.
I went with my friends to the detention center. It was being kind of guarded by these two Israeli soldiers who had these big batons. They were watching TV and hanging out, and they brought us into the detention center.
It was very cold, even though it was really hot out. It was summertime, but it was a very cold space. Everything was made out of metal. The doors, when you walk in, it looks like a square building. In the middle of the building is this open space where the detainees can come out for a brief time to eat. On either side of this room, you have these big metal doors that have a very small rectangle where you can see the inside of the cells.
From those little rectangular windows, I could see the fingers and eyes of a few of the detainees. And they were saying things to me. I have no idea what they were saying.
The guards were telling us that if the detainees ever get riled up, they will use their batons. If they ever asked for medical attention, they really don't know what they're saying, because neither of the guards spoke Arabic. The only thing they understood was ibuprofen. Sometimes they wouldn't bring them ibuprofen just because they didn't want to.
I went into one of the cells that was open and I saw it was full of very unstable metal bunk beds. There was no room to breathe. It was a very small room. There were something like six or seven bunk beds in a very small space. When we went into this room, the guards showed us what it was like or what it would look like if they were doing a search, let's say one of the detainees brought in something they should have. They went over what it would look like if they were kind of taking the place apart. And it was just horrible.
They showed us where they would have the detainee stand if they were doing one of these routine checks.
Honestly at the time, I was like, yeah, okay, this all makes sense. Looking back, I think it was very surreal to be standing there. Just surreal for me to think that I was able to stand there and think that this is like just a thing that should exist.
But now things are different. You're a vocal advocate for using political and economic pressure to end the occupation. Can you talk a little about why you have those beliefs today?
I do not believe that Israelis, Jewish Israelis, are going to have a shift in their mindset. If the international community does not start pressuring the Israeli government or companies that are complicit in the apartheid state, then I don't think anything will happen. They're just going to continue to slowly erase the Palestinian people.
In Israel, Zionism is a strong system meaning for years Israeli right wing jews in power have been planning out the systematic erasure of Palestinians to turn Israel into a nation state with Jewish supremacy. A state where the Jewish Israelis think they are living in a democracy are too privileged to see the violence that it takes to maintain their supremacy. They will not want to compromise this dynamic in order to create true equality.
Many people do criticize the Israeli government but they do not criticize the lack of minority rights, Jewish supremacy, the existence of millions of oppressed people locked in an open air prison, in the West Bank and inside the borders of the country.
I feel very passionately about Palestinian liberation because I've seen it firsthand. I've seen my people, like the people that I'm supposed to identify with, Jewish Israelis, dehumanize Palestinians on a consistent basis in a way that makes me feel really frustrated and angry from the inside out.
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