Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal

Author:Max Blumenthal [Blumenthal, Max]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781568589725
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: 2013-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

49

The Base

Known popularly as the Magav, the Israeli Border Police evolved in part from an army division created in the wake of the state’s foundation for the explicit purpose of capturing and deporting Palestinian refugees who have slipped into their former villages to reunite with family and spouses. Named the Minorities Unit, the division was comprised mostly of deeply impoverished young men recruited from Druze villages in the north and Bedouin Arab enclaves in the south. Their recruitment of non-Palestinian Arab subgroups served David Ben Gurion’s divide-and-conquer strategy, which he dubbed, “fragmentation.” As one Israeli official said, the Minorities Unit formed “the sharp blade of a knife to stab in the back of Arab unity.”

Today, a disproportionate percentage of Border Police commanders are Druze seeking to consolidate their citizenship rights through service to the Jewish state. Their units are supplemented with Jews from the lower rungs of Israeli society, from Ethiopians to Russians to Jews from the Arab world, all seeking status in a society that treats them as second class. Denigrated by the Ashkenazi elite as arsim, or Israeli rednecks, and regarded as the least prestigious arm of the country’s armed forces, many Magav members project their resentment against the only groups more poorly regarded than they: Palestinians, leftists, and African migrants. As Israel’s frontline occupation maintenance force, the Border Police exceeded the rest of the army in documented abuses committed in the West Bank between 2000 and 2011. Of the 244 reported abuse cases—most abuses are not documented—only 12 were prosecuted.

My friend Rona (name changed to protect identity) was an academically credentialed expert on human rights who supplemented her modest teaching income by leading sessions for Border Police units as a facilitator. By the time we met, she had grown disillusioned with the human rights work, concluding it was a fruitless exercise that allowed the army to wash its hands of the abuses its soldiers committed by letting them vent it all to a token leftist. In August 2010, Rona led a session at an army base in Jericho in which members of a Border Police unit bragged to her about executing an African migrant they had captured in the southern Israeli city of Eilat. They told her how he had fiercely resisted his arrest and cursed them—chutzpon, they called him, claiming he did not “respect them adequately.” As punishment for his impudence, the policemen beat the migrant half to death, and then finished him off with a bullet to the head. The crime went undocumented and unprosecuted. For her, it was the final straw.

Before she quit, Rona insisted on taking me to a session at the West Bank army base Beit Horon so I could document the disturbing proceedings. All I needed to do to secure entry, she said, was declare that I was one of the human rights facilitators and keep my mouth shut. A week later, Rona and I were standing at the train station in Modiin, a mega-settlement located in a no man’s land between Israel and the Occupied Territories, baking under a cloudless sky as we waited for our ride.

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