“[We’ve Become] A Brutal Occupation Force Similar To Germans in World War II”
Criticism of Israeli policy by Israeli soldiers is taken much more seriously than criticism by outsiders.
Criticism of Israeli policy by its top security chiefs will be taken even more seriously.
Democracy Now reports today that all 6 former chiefs of Shin Bet – the agency responsible for Israel’s internal security, with the combined powers of an FBI and CIA – have criticized Israeli treatment of the Palestinians:
The stunning Oscar-nominated documentary, “The Gatekeepers” … brings together six former heads of Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, collectively speaking out for the first time ever. They detail their methods against Palestinian militants and civilians in the Occupied Territories, including targeted killings, torture, recruiting informants, and the suppression of mass protests during two intifadas. But in doing so, they also criticize the occupation they were assigned with defending and warn that successive Israeli governments have endangered their country’s future by refusing to make peace. “We are making the lives of millions unbearable, into prolonged human suffering, [and] it kills me,” Carmi Gillon says in the film. “[We’ve become] a brutal occupation force similar to the Germans in World War II,” adds Avraham Shalom ….
Avraham Shalom – the Shin Bet leader who compared Israel to the Nazis – knows what he’s talking about:
And, by the way, Avraham Shalom was a young kid in Vienna in the 1930s. He didn’t know that he’s a Jew. He was forced to go to school after the Kristallnacht. He was almost beaten to death by his classmates. He felt firsthand what it means to be a Jew under a racist regime. And when he compares that, he compares the Israeli occupation to the Germans, that—like how the Germans treated the Poles, the Czechs, the Dutch, he knows what he speaks about. And I think that his worry is something that had resonance in me, as well, about what—where will it lead, the occupation—I mean, if it will continue like that.
Washington’s Blog