january 2005

PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION

By Gideon Levy©



If people were shocked recently by photos of soldiers with the body of a wanted man, they should know that it was no isolated case, says a soldier whose unit did the same thing five years ago.
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=517346



For five years these photographs lay deep inside a drawer, in a place no one ever gets to, and Alon Kastiel didn't open the envelope. Not even once. Back then, after the army unit's operation, when he and all the rest of the squad received the photos, he showed them to a friend or two, but since then he left them undisturbed in the drawer of a closet in his room. He never showed them to his parents. Every once in a while, he would remember that the photographs still existed.

Last week he decided to give them to Haaretz, for publication in this column. Kastiel says he made the decision in the wake of the public furor that erupted after the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth published similar photos a few weeks ago, showing soldiers standing next to bodies of terrorists. He was especially incensed by the reaction of MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union), who said these were exceptional instances.

"I got uptight when he said that people who are photographed with bodies are the lowest of the low," Kastiel says. "He came out with some kind of terrible remark like that. He thought he was talking about 10 soldiers. He said that people who have their picture taken with bodies have mental problems, that they are sick. I wanted to show him that his children are in the same situation."

Alon Kastiel come from a family of leading furniture makers. He lives in upscale Ramat Hasharon and is a cousin of "Tuhor," the spiritual teacher of the basketball player Doron Shefer. Kastiel, 25, is now studying economics, accountancy and management at Tel Aviv University. It is three years since he completed his regular army service, part of which he spent in the undercover Duvdevan unit. He does reserve duty in a different unit.

"I decided to come to you," he continues, "because I was boiling mad at the idea that people think these are isolated cases. I tell myself that we were from the best homes in the world, the best and most moral people on an everyday level. In Duvdevan, one is the son of a professor, another is son of the owner of a large printing press, and I myself am quite a `northie' [a person from affluent north Tel Aviv or its suburbs], the finest of the country's youth, really. If it happened to us, in our small, high-quality squad, with top-class guys, I have no doubt that it happens everywhere in the territories."

Iyad Batat was a wanted man, a senior member of Hamas who had shot and killed a Border Policeman, Yehoshua Gavriel, 11 months before being liquidated. Nader Masalma was a 30-year-old junk dealer and the father of five, who lived on the street where the Duvdevan operation was carried out. He frequently visited Israel with a permit, in order to buy and sell alte zachen (second-hand goods). The day after the operation, his family told us that Masalma had not even known Batat. A. says that he was Batat's lookout man; the IDF Spokesman's Office said after the operation that he had "prepared murderous terrorist attacks, together with Batat." He was killed on the roof.

"The night the Duvdevan soldiers had dreamed of for years," was the gung-ho headline of the daily Maariv. When we arrived at the house in the village of Beit Awa, near Hebron, the next day, we saw the destruction that was caused by the massive fire the soldiers had rained down on the house where Batat had been. We heard the stories of the horrified tenants, among them five small children, who had undergone a traumatic night, first in the besieged and shelled house, then outside, half naked, in the cold of the middle of December 1999.



Duvdevan's dream night. The eroticism of the occupation. This is how it looked, the midwinter night's dream, from the perspective of Kastiel, who had positioned himself with his squad beneath the staircase of the neighboring house, lying in ambush for Batat:

"On the way you get into a state where you feel like Rambo. You come out of the vehicles on a tremendous high. You are completely armed from head to foot. You're going to take Baghdad. All the preparations for the operation are crackling on the radio, you hear the commanding officers - great action. The tension builds. Until you reach the stage of closing in on the house, which is the peak of the climax. Everyone in his corner is closing in on the house. Everyone in his position in the village, which was set in advance.

"We were four fighters in my squad, positioned under a small staircase in the yard of the house. Terribly scary. We were all scared. A staircase of seven steps in a garden, terribly pastoral and quiet. It's 11 P.M. The village is asleep. At first there is the adrenaline and you're not afraid, but after, when you get into position, the fear comes. And the cold - you always feel the cold. Then suddenly we heard one shot from the house. The radio starts boiling, everyone is reporting what he saw. We were dozens of soldiers around the house. All the communications systems are boiling. Everything goes to hell after the first shot. Everyone is on the air.

"We quickly got authorization for firing from the unit commander, after that first shot. We killed Batat's man on the roof - he was apparently there as a lookout. There was a bit of an exchange of fire, which led to a great deal of fire by us. We emptied out the ammo boxes. There was shooting there in insane amounts. For a lot of us it was the first time. You're all worked up. A year after that, in the depths of the intifada, you're already a lot less enthusiastic about the shooting. But that night was our first time.

"After the insane shooting we do a `freeze,' to collect a little intelligence. And then there's more noise from the house and Iyad Batat comes out with a pistol. The whole force identified him and opened fire. Everything around was lit up with mortars. After Batat is killed, we go into a state of freeze again and wait to see if there are any more terrorists in the house, wait to let them make the first mistake by making noise. You want absolute quiet, so it's enough even if a window blind falls.

"What about the tenants in the building? I don't remember. This freeze went on for hours. You're lying in the positions, thinking about the world and really scared, because you know already that this is no kids' game. People are shooting here. I remember a small story. As much as we played the armed he-men, we were dying of fear. The family whose garden we were in didn't know that they had four fighters in the garden. One of the boys suddenly came out and found himself behind us without our having noticed. That really spooked my commanding officer. Suddenly we heard a noise behind us and a kid a little younger than us was standing there and the commander cocks his weapon and we're all frightened. The kid turns white and so does our commander. We shouted to him to get back inside and that was the end of it. In this state of freeze everyone is uptight because we already fired. The whole night we try to tell stories and jokes in a whisper. It was my first shooting experience.

"The last stage comes at first light, in the morning. Usually a D-9 [bulldozer] comes to demolish the house. There is a procedure where a dog goes in and then the final stage, which ends with the D-9. That's how it goes by the book. This is an operation that was worked on for many months. Major General Yitzhak Eitan was the head of Central Command and I remember him briefing us in the territorial brigade, and he said explicitly, `Today we get Batat, alive or dead. Today we're finishing the story with him.'

"I remember it exactly. I remember that I understood that nothing would happen even if he came out of it dead. I don't remember if there was D-9 procedure there or `neighbor procedure' [use of a local resident to enter the building to flush out possible additional wanted individuals].You say the house wasn't demolished? Now I remember that the D-9 was actually in a reverse mode and the procedure wasn't implemented. We packed up in the morning. There is a procedure for packing up, called `Kola.' We were always waiting for Kola."

They went to the brigade base, dozens of wound-up fighters after a restless night. Then the military ambulance with the bodies arrived. "The bodies were unloaded next to the fighters. All the fighters were seized with enthusiasm. For most of us, I imagine, these were the first dead bodies we had ever seen. For me, at least, they were the first, but not the last.

"One of the soldiers started taking pictures with a small pocket camera. Very quickly there was a big demand for pictures. Then we took out our gear - there were a lot of cameras in the unit - and there was a hysterical demand to have our pictures taken. Everyone wanted pictures. We were all around the bodies. We spent hours next to the bodies, waiting for the operation to end officially and for all the fighters to return. We sat next to the bodies, we exchanged experiences, we looked, we played games with the bodies. I think they touched the bodies a little. The camera made that happen.

"We had a few rounds of pictures taken. It went on for maybe two hours. You have an hour and a half for being shocked and then it passes in the photograph. There was shock at the bodies, they were in an appalling state. There was a whole lot of ammunition in Batat.

"When we see a camera, everyone runs to stand behind the bodies, to be in the frame. A souvenir of one of the most dramatic nights of our lives. I, who was totally revolted by it, even then, didn't have my picture taken, but nevertheless a film made its way to me as the souvenir of a turbulent night. I am standing 20 centimeters from the frame. I am there. I didn't say a word, I didn't think about morality, it's bodies and not life, and your commander is having his picture taken with them and you never make a critical comment to a commander. All my commanding officers are there. It was in the center of the base and I am certain they all saw it. Dozens, maybe hundreds of soldiers around and they all saw the process of the picture-taking. I remember it bothered me a little, that thing, but there was tremendous commotion all around. I was part of it.

"Then we went to the unit and we occupied ourselves with the topic of how we would develop the photos. Really. It's not pleasant. I absolutely remember that. There is a procedure where the pictures are developed at headquarters, but we couldn't give them things like that. It wouldn't have gone through. It would have got stuck somewhere and created a snafu. They were private photos. Anyone who would see the pictures would be shocked. So we had a mechanism of not sending certain pictures to HQ to be developed.

"One of the guys volunteered to take the film home. Then we imagined some woman in a photo shop seeing the pictures while they were being developed. What would she think? What would she say? It was a store in Kfar Sava. About a dozen copies of each photo for all the guys. We took up a collection and paid.

"You look at the pictures and then you put them in the most remote corner of the house, making sure you don't chance on them in the years ahead. They disgusted me. I don't know what disgusted me more, the bodies or my behavior. Once a year I saw the bag from a distance and didn't open it. Burial at the back of the drawer."

Response by the IDF Spokesman: "The incident referred to took place during an IDF operation aimed at arresting the senior wanted individual Iyad Batat in Beit Awa village in December 1999. The pictures were taken at the end of the operation.

"When the commanders learned of it, the subject was investigated by the highest officials and disciplinary action was taken against those involved, including punishing the commanders and confiscating the films. The IDF gives great importance to its moral strength, no less than its military strength. IDF soldiers and their commanders are instructed to act according to the principles of its ethical code, which outlines their morality in action. In cases of deviation from the moral principles, the IDF acts with the full force of the law against those involved."

When he heard the reaction of the IDF Spokesman's Office, he was astonished. He said that no one was punished and that all the films were still in the possession of the soldiers.

The photographs: Iyad Batat on the stretcher, his face covered with a mixture of plaster and blood, his left hand stretched back, his right hand at his side, as though resting. His eyes are wide open. The soldiers around are all smiling, some of them broadly, as when the photographer commands: "Say cheese!" They arrange themselves in a photographic pose, like hunters with their prey. Three of them place a hand on the stretcher on which the dead man is lying. No one, but no one, looks at him: they are all looking at the camera.

A second photograph shows them kneeling around the two bodies. A soldier in a black woolen hat leans forward to make sure he is in the picture. Their commanding officer leans back, also to make sure he's in the frame. The dead men lie on stretchers next to each other, head to foot. There is a frozen smile on the face of Nader Masalma, who wears black underpants and an undershirt. His hands seem to be protecting his stomach. The two dead men are lashed to the stretchers so they won't fall off. They are almost the same age, those who did the killing and those they killed.

Tank insignia - corrupt it, mirror it :
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