But none of that changes the fact that I frequently find myself sitting in front of a very nice man or woman talking about how the army changed their life, what a positive experience it was in retrospect. They speak fondly of  how hard/boring/demanding it was (in a way I might remember freshman year). The occupation? Palestinians being arrested without charges? Settlers being protected as they steal land, destroy property and beat people up? Exceptions, exceptions, not as bad as you see it here on TV. So funny that both anti-occupation activists and Israeli soldiers see American TVs as the place where everyone gets confused.

But of course, they are not equal sides fighting over the same reality from the same position of power. Millions of Palestinians are not lying about their oppression, and Israelis in general (and Israeli soldiers in particular), are systematically separated from that reality until they go to police it. I also know about Breaking the Silence and the amazing testimonies that they get. They speak of an entire shadow reality that is not discussed or recognized by most Israelis. I understand the conventional arguments about propaganda, about outright intentional lies by powerful people to hide the injustices that are being perpetrated. I don’t mean to imply that this is not part of the problem, but I want to think in this post about how it is not the entire or only problem. Rather than exposing and denouncing lies, I want to ask in this post about how the system creates and maintains the disjunctures in information and experience between soldiers and anti-occupation activists.

For example, something that could fall under this line of inquiry is the fact that because Israeli soldiers only go to Palestinian towns and villages armed and in uniform, Palestinians always correctly see them as representatives of the Jewish state (from which they are automatically excluded) restricting their freedoms and assisting in the dispossession of their land. Consequently, all former Israeli soldiers report a glowering, hostile attitude from Palestinians and unproblematically assume that this attitude would continue if they were not in uniform, if they were not armed, etc, with disastrous, highly racialized consequences (knifings, stabbings, lynchings). Perhaps because of this experience, of seeing people afraid of you and angry at you (without seeing what they see and why), Israelis are mortally afraid  of Palestinians. The overwhelming number of routine contacts between Israeli and Palestinian activists in the anti-occupation movement is dismissed as merely a massive exception to what they perceive to be an unbridgeable, violent border between the two national identities.

But maybe that’s not the case at all. It’s just an idea, something to look into.

Another idea I was thinking about is the division of labor in the IDF and how that serves to cut up and divide soldiers’ experience of the entire situation so that it will be more directly explainable. For example, for anyone familiar with the army it is well known that Israeli-Jewish women have a profoundly different service than Israeli-Jewish men. It seems that their service comprises teaching classes about weapons use, in the process of which they create really strong support systems for each other within the army. The men go off and guard the Kav (the ever-moving border, literally ‘the line’). It might be that for them, army service has little to anything to do with coming into contact with the people under occupation. And how could the male soldiers explain it to them without raining down on their parade? Isn’t it safer just to ignore what you think is happening and play along? As an Israeli male soldiers coming to spend a weekend at home, would you really want to waste your sparse vacation days trying to convince the women soldiers that there is something very wrong about what they’re doing?

Ok, all this is just prep for this last example, from which the post takes its title. MaGav, Mishmar HaGvul, the Border Guard or Border Patrol. Every unit in the IDF has its internal reputation that is the intersection of several categories: dedicated or lazy, smart or dumb, rich or poor, country or city, elite or run of the mill or worse. In some ways, the units act like Israel’s colleges, or more correctly Israel’s fraternities, with flags, slogans, shirts (a few of which became infamous), and reputations. One of the major differences is that a central authority decides what the role of each of these fraternities/units is going to be in the maintenance of…security, of course. What else?

Well, what’s the role of MaGav? If you’ve ever seen a film about Bil’in or a film of any other nonviolent protest area, you’ve seen them. They are the unit of the army in charge of policing Israel’s innumerable borders. In East Jerusalem, in the illegally annexed land next to the wall, and who knows what other places. Soldiers from this unit have been caught with YouTube videos showing humiliations of Palestinians passing through their areas. It is generally agreed that they do a lot of the dirty, day to day work of the occupation while other units are mostly all about one-night only raids, and guarding bases and outposts in rotations. Speaking of which, apparently MaGavniks don’t switch from place to place: they stay put in one place for their entire three years, getting extremely “bored,” which is why they begin doing “stupid shit.” Without exception, all the commentary I’ve heard from soldiers about MaGav has been negative. They are the outcasts of the army, the dumb ones, the violent idiots who make the rest of them look bad. If American TV is the number #1 cause of the bad image they get (unjustifiably in their eyes) MaGav is the second. They can’t speak lowly enough of them.

All of this became infinitely more interesting to me when I discovered that these unit categorizations occurred parallel with the recognized (yet unexplained) ethnic configurations of each unit. It seems that some of the units are more Ashkenazi (white Israeli-Jewish, descended from European Jews) while others, like MaGav, are known to be brown units. In a video of a recent protest in Bidu and Beit Surik, the well-known anti-occupation activist Ezra Nawi, who is himself Mizrahi (a Jew from Arab countries, literally ‘Easterner’), comments in a mixture of sadness and humor about the ethnic background of the Israeli soldiers who came to protect the annexation of the nearby Palestinian village’s land for Jewish uses. In minute 4:05, he says :

“Our Druze brothers came to make order here! And the Ethiopians should also say a kind word! And also our brothers the Frenks, who are the basis for the MaGav.”

Frenks is a slang word I don’t know. But the Druze and the Ethiopians are two groups of people who serve in the army but are also of a disempowered and racialized socio-economic class.Then he turns to the soldiers themselves and says:

“I want Ashkenazis in MaGav! Why aren’t there Ashkenazis in MaGav? ”

Nawi was recently arrested for trying to prevent a home from being demolished with the usual canard about “assaulting a soldier.” (more info).Nawi writes about the intersections between his Mizrahi identity and his relationship to the racism of the occupation apparatus. He expressed similar concerns about MaGav’s makeup in his article in the nation. In it he writes:

:…as a Mizrahi Jew (descended from Jewish communities in the Arab and Muslim world), a gay man and a plumber, I do not belong to the elite of Israeli society and do not fit the stereotype of the Israeli peacenik–namely, an intellectual Jew of Ashkenazi decent. Actually, the police officers who constantly arrest me and I are part of the same social strata. I was programmed like them, have a similar accent, know their jargon and our historical background is comparable. And yet, in their eyes I am on and for the other side, the Palestinian side.

This simple fact seems to disturb them so much that they have to vilify me; that is the only way their worldview will continue making sense. I threaten them precisely because I undermine the categories and stereotypes through which they understand the world.”

Here we have a surreal situation. Why would the most disempowered, racialized, socio-economically depressed communities be most represented in the army unit that, at least for activists and protesters, comprises the very face of the apartheid regime in the territories? Why would Ashkenazi (white), socio-economically elevated soldiers be effectively rerouted to other work?

I believe that I can speak with more confidence on the possible consequences of this practice rather than its actual causes. In practice, the groups most disenfranchised by the current system have their standing in society predicated and conditioned on the oppression and dispossession of people they would otherwise be more identified with, the Palestinians. The people with most sociologicaly incentives to cross the border between soldiers and Palestinian are literally placed in charge of it: Israel’s borderline populations are placed in charge of the border themselves, they are given the opportunity to hold themselves above one of the only populations below them on the totem poll, earning their membership in Israeli society with every border defended, regardless of the rationale. Each of these communities, the Druze, the Mizrahim, the Ethiopians, has and continues to have serious problems with the state and complementary histories of activism. Ethiopians are excluded from Jewish schools and work, and protested/rioted when their blood was rejected for far it was contaminated with AIDS. Mizrahi activists posed a powerful challenge to the state a generation ago with the Israeli Black Panthers. Druze activists are starting to claim a Palestinian identity. Unregulated, who knows what they could do?

But we have forgotten Ashkenazis, who are also being managed (this time with privilege). Most of the soldiers I’ve talked to are Ashkenazis, which is how my thinking about this post started in the first place. What does it mean for more white Israeli soldiers to get a pass on confronting protesters? For one, secular white Israelis usually have more power in society, so there is some incentive to keep their actions targeted and framed, rather than ongoing and contradictory. More powerful people might go out and get really militant if they were forced to do what MaGav does. They might even refuse in greater numbers, putting even more tension on the consensus. Further, most of the anti-occupation protesters from the Israeli side are Ashkenazis themselves; no one wants someone’s family member, classmate, or future roommate to be protesting against them, do they? Has that ever happened? Why or why not? And most importantly, what might the soldiers decide to do in those situations?

I may be totally wrong. I anticipate that some people will tell me I am, and I welcome these challenges. I’m sure that many high class Ashkenazis do the routine grind of the occupation and then keep it to themselves, or somehow justify it, or get their experience of things regulated a different way, or go to Breaking the Silence. And of course, I haven’t talked at all about upbringing in Israel, how the occupation is framed there, how the army frames actions etc. etc. There are no small number of causes for soldiers to not see the injustice of the Palestinian’s situation, and no small number of causes for them to say nothing about it even if they do see it.

But the situation I’ve outlined is in any way true, then it presents an interesting conundrum for the anti-occupation movement. Here I am, white Israeli, yelling at brown people to stop oppressing other brown people while at the same time, white soldiers and perhaps even Israeli society in general participate in the shaming of MaGav, the idiots, the incompetents, the violent, the cruel, all words that all over the world comprise different words for denoting one thing: “brown.” But what can we do with the actual cruelty?! MaGav enforces cruel laws, arbitrary policies, racist settler agendas, etc. etc.

If it’s true, we should start thinking about it. How can this awareness be built into practice? How can we talk to soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds about the unjust position they have been placed in? How can we hold ourselves apart from and denounce discourses that assist in the racialization of MaGav, and the consequent white-washing of the occupation? How can we draw a connection between Israeli people of color (Israeli-identified Druze and Bedouin, Ethiopians, and Mizrahim) and the machinery of ethnic segregation in Israel/Palestine? Or is all that just condescension?

One more piece. The Movement for Dignified Living is a grassroots movement in Be’er Sheva that resists bank-initiated housing evictions resulting from predatory lending. They practice nonviolent direct action to radically challenge the power dynamics between their largely Mizrahi constituents and the banking system. One of the most amazing successes of this movement and its founder, Haim Bar-Yaakov, (who, by the way, reminds me a lot of Ezra Nawi– Mizrahi, middle-aged, amazing activist), is the ability to directly engage police officers who are of the same disadvantaged background and cause them to rethink the rationalizations they are given for evicting people (they are lazy, they are thieves, they need to be dealt with). The police actually inform the movement of evictions before they take place so that they have an excuse to stop!

The MDL (Movement for Dignified Living) is involved in a series of transitions. Their result will determine its future. But their experience suggests to me that confrontations with MaGav could be irrevocably changed if represented in the activism were people from the soldiers’ own neighborhoods, classes, or even families. In other words, the success of the movement in my mind depends to a greater degree than ever imagined on its racial diversity. If the movement is white, even radically deconstructing white privilege, it will be easier for soldiers from disempowered communities, like in MaGav, to dismiss them. The more diverse the movement, the more the contradictions of the system will be revealed, the more difficult it will be for MaGavniks to enforce the ethnic borders that are their charge.