arens (12/05/82)
Following this message I'm sending a partial translation of a long monologue published in the column of Amnon Dankner in Ha'aretz, one of the leading Israeli dailies, on November 5. It was surrounded with quotation marks in 36 point size. I understand this to indicate that Dankner is quoting a soldier who witnessed the events described. The camp described seems to be the Al Ansar detention camp the Israelis erected in southern Lebanon. In it they have been holding at least 7000 Palestinians most of them detained after the fighting ended, during sweeps of the refugee camps. Some "disturbances" were reported there a while ago, one of which could be that described here. In a talk here at Berkeley, the chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights reported that the Israelis have not agreed to make public the names of the detainees, nor to allow them to meet with Red Cross representatives of lawyers. Any Israeli officer above the rank of Major has the right to arrest any person in Lebanon and have him sent to such a camp. No family members or other local authorities are notified, there is no review and the arrest order may be renewed indefinitely. Even the Labor party voted against the law that gave the military this authority in Lebanon. They were particularly upset with the provision that the order may be renewed indefinitely by the arresting officer without any review whatsoever. In another piece of news from the Holy Land, Ha'aretz reported on the 24th of October that Israeli soldiers are no longer being prosecuted for looting and robbery in the areas of Lebanon controlled by the IDF. Prosecutions stopped after the end of the fighting in west Beirut. The reason for this is that looting is an offense only under the military code, and the approriate section deals only with looting DURING A TIME OF FIGHTING, and the fighting is over. Of course, armed robbery is an offence under the regular legal code in Israel, but Lebanon is outside Israel... The news item is quick to note that looting and armed robbery by Israeli soldiers in Lebanon have NOT stopped. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- After two or three days I already knew: something bad will happen here. I didn't imagine it would be this kind of a thing, but I was sure that something, something, will happen. When a whole unit becomes totally depressed in 48 hours, the pressure starts and you know that somehow, somewhere, the whole thing will blow up. (...) You may say that this depression started because of the conditions (...) -- living in tents, field toilets stuck out in nowhere, shitty showers, and food which was nothing but combat rations. (...). All this takes away your desire and your good mood immediately. But always the question is also what you do under these conditions. What you are there for. And this time we in for it. What is the single thing I will carry with me from this tour of reserve duty, for a long, long time? This feeling of the sharp smell emanating from their camp, from the pens, the shine of the searchlights, and the noise of the engines of the armored troop carriers circling among the pens at night. Four damn hours in the guard tower: You sit, lean the rifle aside, and look down. Seven thousand people in tents, milling around and whispering, motioning. (...). Someone throws a rock wrapped with a note from one pen to another, and someone else catches it there. The armored troop carrier noisily travels the road between the pens, the searchlights brightly color the tents, the images of the people going among the tents. And the smell, this horrible smell, of seven thousand sweating bodies, of their stinking feces in the shitholes, of the chemicals thrown into those holes to prevent sickness. This smell that surrounds you throughout the day and the night, sears your nostrils, accompanies you while you're eating, while you're asleep and awake, until you get used to it and accept it and it becomes part of you, and only when you return from leave and approach the camp, and it hits you so hard, only then are you surprised and a sense of nausea overcomes you, until you get used to it again. They're called ``portees''. Not prisoners, because they aren't legally prisoners, not ``POWs'' because they aren't prisoners of war either. ``Portees''. Why? How should I know? Because they were ported here, so that's what they're called. (...) Seven thousand ``portees'' in an area the size of a football field. (...) We're distant, guard them from afar, without any contact with them. We only know that if something happens, if they run towards the fences, if they riot, we're supposed to open fire: From the towers, from the lookouts, from the armored carriers between the pens. And so, eight hours a day, every day, every night, and a sort of depression comes up from the pens and infects us, like the smell, and our faces turn gray, and our mood becomes more somber, (...) and the mornings become grayer and grayer. On the second week some of us were taken off the watch towers and told to man the roadblocks on the road to Nabatieh (...) to prevent the locals from peeking at the camp. At the beginning the happiness is great -- to get out of the camp, away from the stinking and annoying mass of ``portees'', not to hear the screams of pain of those being interrogated. But even there, at the roadblock, it turns out, it's no picnic. (...) Something always happens to ruin things -- after a few days, some women come close to the camp. Someone let them through. What could we do? What can you do with women who come to you and start begging and kissing your hands and crying and take out a picture of a young man with a moustache, in a suit and tie, and ask you in tears if you've seen him, perhaps, in the camp? They haven't seen him for three months. Just disappeared. At military HQ in Saidon no one can tell her anything. At the Red Cross they don't know. Maybe he's in the camp after all? She would like to walk by and have a look. Maybe she'll see him. And maybe, maybe you can identify him? And again the photograph is shoved under your nose by a shaking hand. Do you know him? He's my husband. Do you know him? Did you see him, there in the camp? Go tell her that you see them from afar and smell them from afar and guard them from afar, and that for you they aren't human beings with a moustache and a tie and a suit and with a wife at home and maybe kids, but just a mass of seven thousand small ants milling around in blue uniforms at day and in underwear at night. So someone let them get close to the fence and there were shouts, and the ``portees'' got closer to the fences and the soldiers in the watchtowers and on the ramps cocked their guns, and from the ``portees'' came the sound of suppressed anger, and someone bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at the soldiers, and soon there was a shower of rocks, and the soldiers trained their guns on the crowd, which started excitedly moving towards the fence, and someone fired into the air, and there was a scream, and the women at the fence began to cry, and the ``portees'' shouted and by now were running to the fence, and shaking it. The soldiers were very confused. And then came one of the MP officers -- the poor souls who, unlike ourselves who sit outside the camp, are actually inside it, shaking from fright all the while, because they know that if something serious takes place and we have to open fire on a massive scale, we will hit them too. Anyway, one of their officers stood up straight, aimed his gun, and started shooting among the prisoners. And we were around, outside the fences, we watched dumbfounded how the bullets tore people's flesh, and how the wounded pulled back suddenly and held onto the place where they were hit and blood ran out from between their fingers and stained their blue uniforms, and the wounded started falling to the ground and screaming, one seemed dead, another started having convulsions, and another obviously in great pain. (...) And you hear now, every day, about a hand grenade thrown at a road block, about a car driving up with a submachine gun firing from its window at the soldiers manning the road block, and already you're afraid of every voice, of the sound of every approaching car, and you grab your weapon and tense, and slowly you learn to ignore the women who come to you with photographs in their hands, and you drive them away and in your heart you fear that one of them will take a grenade out from her dress. Then you return to camp, enter the tent (...) and the depression surrounds you again. (...) If someone were to tell me that in one of the last days of the tour of reserve duty someone would commit suicide, I wouldn't have been surprised. But despite that, on the morning we were to be released, (...) while we waited for the busses to come and take us away, when everything was behind us, (...) -- it seemed unnecessary, out of place, tasteless. But the shot was fired. And the man lay there, a large wound in his temple, blood flowing freely out and bathing his surroundings, and his eyes staring emptily up at the tent. (...) You know, in such cases, usually, after all the running around, and the doctors and the medics, people start talking. He did it because of this. No, he did it because of that. But this time -- nothing. A sort of general shrugging of the shoulders. A few quiet whispers (...). The first soldier released from the camp, the first soldier to finish this tour of reserve duty. And we sit silently, waiting for the busses, and under us the crowd of ``portees'' is milling around, moving lazily near the fences. And I watch them and shiver for a moment, fear engulfs me, and I sense that there may be some curse in them, which comes up to us together with their acrid smell, and sows in each of us some dark seed, that sprouts in the darkness inside of us. A seed that sprouted too quickly in our suicide. (...)