testimony catalog number: 830854
rank: Lieutenant
unit: Paratroopers
period: 2010
Duringrank: Lieutenant
unit: Paratroopers
period: 2010
Operation Cast Lead, or at any other time, were the laws of war
discussed with you at all? What is allowed and what is not, in what
situation, what constitutes an illegal order?
In any basic training, a class about legal and illegal orders is
compulsory. Those are the things discussed. I think you mean values
during combat where civilians are involved. I know that in my brigade,
at least, that is emphasized. I have nothing bad to say. I experienced
most of my theoretical dilemmas when I was in officers’ training,
although I think it’s one big disgrace, what goes on there in that
respect. I had a real crisis of values there. You sit in class with the
army’s cream of the crop, at the end of the officers’ training course,
and along comes the company commander and presents a dilemma – that’s
not what he meant, but that’s how he presented it: you’ve battled for a
hilltop, you came to conquer the ridge, and your buddy has been shot.
You see the guy who shot him, and your buddy is dead. You’ve taken the
hilltop, that guy is still alive, he puts down his gun, he has no more
weapons, he raises a white flag. So the commander asked the guys doing
officers’ training in the Israel Defense Forces: What would you do? 50%
of the people there said they’d shoot him in the head.
What did the company commander have to say to that?
He realized he’d made a mistake by even posing it as a dilemma, when
it’s actually a violation of the law. He realized he was cornered and
tried to get out of it. Then my friend got up and said that he didn’t
understand the dilemma because it’s simply illegal. He said that anyone
who would shoot the guy in the head simply shouldn’t be in officer
training. There was another time when we had a class on values in
combat. It was in the infantry part of the officers’ training course.
You have a class on checkpoints, and you’re shown a film where some
squad commander beats up an Arab, so the guys say: you can’t blame him,
he’s been on guard duty for ten hours and he’s burned out, totally
wiped, he has to let off steam, I completely understand him.
Israeli soldiers talk about the occupied territories 
