'These Duties Corrupt'
The case exposed far more than a single soldier's violent misdeeds. During the trial, soldiers who had served at the Hawara checkpoint over the past year gave testimony describing what they said were common, accepted practices among combat soldiers who detested checkpoint duty and often received little or no training for what they considered a policeman's job. In testimony and in interviews, they also argued that the army and Israeli society should accept some of the blame for abuses that they said were the result of an impossible mission.
"When we do all these things, we are not doing it only to the Palestinians, but to ourselves, too," said Aman, who was a friend of the convicted sergeant and recently finished his military service. "The most important discussion should be in our own society. If you blame the soldiers, you miss the point. . . . These duties corrupt."
A Palestinian woman tries to squeeze through the turnstile at the Hawara checkpoint with her son. Sometimes as many as 5,000 Palestinians a day request permission to cross at Hawara, just south of the West Bank city of Nablus.
(Molly Moore -- The Washington Post)
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For the convicted sergeant, the pressures were magnified because he was a Bedouin, an Israeli Arab in an overwhelmingly Jewish army engaged in combat against Arabs. Service in the Israeli armed forces -- which is mandatory for Israelis -- is voluntary for members of the Bedouin tribes. "People in the village did not like it that I contributed to the army," the soldier said in court.
Unlike his Hebrew-speaking comrades, he understood every word the Palestinians uttered in Arabic. "I heard them behind my back," he testified. "Traitor. Dog."
After two weeks in command of the checkpoint, he said, he asked his senior officer, Lt. Col. Guy Hazut, to take him off the assignment. Hazut, a 15-year military veteran, said in court that he refused: "It didn't seem right for a commander to leave his soldiers three weeks before the end of their term."
The soldier's trial and the publicity surrounding it contributed to efforts by the military to provide more instruction to soldiers assigned to checkpoints, to improve facilities and to begin training a new military police corps, according to military officials. The soldiers who have served at the roadblocks said those initiatives were a start, but that they did not address the main problem.
The constant struggle to balance the security of their men and their country with the pleas of elderly women who remind the soldiers of their own stubborn grandmothers is emotionally debilitating, Staff Sgt. Sergey Zamensky, an emigrant from Siberia, said in an interview in the central Israeli industrial town of Rishon Letzion where he resides.
Zamensky, 21, also spent months at the Hawara checkpoint before he finished his tour of duty this summer. He and his fellow commanders described turning away a tearful young bride in a white gown on her wedding day and forcing students to miss final exams because the checkpoint was closed.
"Every day, the regulations were different," Zamensky said. "One day, you can let everyone pass; on another, no one is able to come in. It's very difficult to explain. They don't care if someone in Nablus wants to explode himself in Israel. They just want to live their life. Regardless of how strong you are, dealing with these problems is too much."
Zamensky, who attended many of the court sessions in support of his Bedouin friend and comrade, added: "They say if you're a good person, there's no way you should be doing anything like this and be violent. They don't understand the situation. They're living in a movie."
Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
