Ordinary (Israeli) Men: Jewish Guards in a Gaza
Prison, 1991
Lately, (August 2025) I have been reading the Israeli
journalist Ari Shavit’s 2013 book, My Promised
Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Spiegel and Grau). This is an
episodic history of the establishment of the state of Israel, and how it
affected the original Palestinian residents. The entire history is too complicated
for me to summarize here: I just want to focus on one small part of it.
In 1991 Shavit was a member of the Israeli military
reserve. During his compulsory one-month annual tour of duty, he was assigned
to act for 12 days as a guard in a Gaza beach Detention Camp. This prison was
built in response to the 1987 intifada,
an uprising by Palestinians against Israel. At first, Shavit thought he should decline
the posting and risk being jailed. Then he thought that since he was a
journalist, it would be better to become a guard and write about what it was
like. He did so, writing a 3000-word account that he published in 1991 and
re-published in his later book (pp. 227-36).
The behavior of these Israeli guards resembles that of
the men in Battalion 101, the subject of Christopher R. Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101
and the Final Solution in Poland (1998),
These were ordinary middle-aged German men, too old to be drafted into the
army, who were conscripted to the killing fields of Eastern Europe instead. Browning
recounts how easily these men adapted to their new jobs, especially to the
group dynamic required for them to engage in mass killings and round-ups of
Jews.
The Israeli guards in 1991 were not engaged in mass
killings, of course. Rather, they guarded, interrogated, and humiliated their
prisoners. For example, three or four times a day, the Palestinians had to
scrub the Israeli guards’ toilets. Once a young prisoner was “broken” through
interrogation and revealed names of his friends, Israeli soldiers fanned out to
arrest the friends, often bringing them back already beaten to the camp. The
camp doctor, as Shavit observed, was no Mengele, yet he screamed at a beaten
17-year-old prisoner in severe pain, “I wish you were dead.” (p. 231)
Everywhere Shavit went, he heard the screams of men and boys being tortured.
And he knew that these men and boys were not traitors, spies or terrorists.
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Shavit’s account varies in one significant way from Ordinary Men. The Jewish guards were
aware of what they were doing and discussed it. One guard, observing the
teen-aged prisoners, said “How have we come to this? How have we come to
chasing such kids?” (p. 231) Another guard commented sarcastically that he “ha[d]
accumulated so many days of reserve duty during the intifada that they [would]
soon promote him to a senior Gestapo official.” (p. 231) Another, observing a line
of prisoners moving under guard, says “Look, the Aktion has begun.” (p. 230) (Aktion
was the German term for round-ups of Jews). Others commented on the
similarity of the Gaza prison watchtowers to the watchtowers in the
concentration camps their parents or grandparents had survived.
Only one or two of sixty reserve guards recruited
along with Shavit refused duty in the interrogation wing. The others adjusted.
Just as Nazis adjusted to mass murder via its bureaucratic routinization, so
the prison camp in Gaza ran smoothly through a division of labor.
Shavit was a guard back in 1991. Imagine how guards
are behaving now. I have read horrific accounts of Israeli tortures of
Palestinian prisoners over the last several years. Often these accounts are
written by Jewish authors critical of Israeli policies. One article I recently read
described how many recently-imprisoned Palestinians have had to have their
hands amputated, because the handcuffs they were forced to wear for days at a
time cut off all circulation to their hands.
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