Video: “I killed for you, with these hands,” Israeli soldier tells lawmakers

Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 1 December 2015

“I killed for you, with these hands! You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you! I murdered!”

This stark admission was made by Ido Gal Razon, a former Israeli soldier, seen in the video above speaking to a committee of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on 11 November.

Razon wasn’t expressing remorse for the killings, but complaining that he has not been offered treatment for the severe psychiatric impact the butchery he committed in service of Israel has had on him.

“No one gives me therapy, and I complain! I shout,” he says. “I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says: ‘Why did you kill me? Why did you kill me?’”

It’s not clear who is haunting Razon at night, but he could be referring to any of the people he says he killed.

Razon says he was injured while a member of the 51st battalion of the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade when he took part in Operation Clear as Wine – an attack on Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip on 20 December 2007.

Indiscriminate shelling

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Israeli forces carried out a major assault on al-Musaddar village and the adjacent Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on that day.

The attack left eight Palestinian resistance fighters dead and injured 21 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including several children.

Amid indiscriminate shelling of the area, the Israelis destroyed at least 10 homes and razed dozens of acres of agricultural land.

Palestinian relatives mourn over the body of Jihad Jaber, 18, at the al-Aqsa hospital in the central Gaza Strip’s Maghazi refugee camp on 20 December 2007.

Ismael Mohamad UPI Photo

The incursion began, according to Al Mezan Center For Human Rights, around noon, when an Israeli “special unit sneaked into middle Gaza area from the eastern border fence and headed to the west.”

The unit, of which Razon was presumably a member, “entered for one-and-a-half kilometers and reached the village of al-Musaddar in central Gaza. Soldiers stormed six tall buildings and held their inhabitants [in] one room in each building.”

According to PCHR, 23 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza that week, 10 of them in extrajudicial executions. It was also the week that Palestinians were celebrating Eid al-Adha, the holiday marking the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Such Israeli assaults, with high tolls of death, injury and destruction, were routine events in Gaza well before the even more massive assaults in December 2008, November 2012 and during the summer of 2014, which together claimed 4,000 lives.

“Kill and kill and kill”

There is no doubt from watching the video that Razon was traumatized by the violence he took part in as a member of an invading, occupying force.

But there’s also no doubt that the victims of Israel’s war crimes have it much worse.

Watching Razon angrily talk about his psychological trauma recalls the words of Arnon Soffer, the Israeli academic and government advisor who helped plan for Gaza’s isolation in the early 2000s.

Soffer infamously said in 2004 that to keep Palestinians subdued and caged in Gaza, and thus preserve Israel as a Zionist “Jewish state,” it would have to “kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

“The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings,” Soffer added.

Ido Gal Razon is living proof that Zionism not only destroys Palestinians, but also those who are supposed to be its beneficiaries.

The video was subtitled in English by Ronnie Barkan, and Dena Shunra provided additional research.

Note: an earlier version of this post misidentified the Muslim holiday that occurred in December 2007.

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Comments

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Sria replied on

That's some video. Wow. Thanks for this post.

What layers and layers of trauma must their victims be buried under? So many generations destroyed.

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tom hall replied on

It seems that the closest such men can come to empathy for their victims is to don the identity of victim themselves. Through a tortuous process of guilt-laden dreaming they become the object of their own violence. Meanwhile those whom they've killed are consigned to a form of oblivion as nameless signifiers of the perpetrators' suffering. In this way, the process of imperialist absorption and annihilation is reproduced in the uneasy personality of the foot-soldier. The killer haunts himself with visitations and images of his victims, and thereby redefines the problem of state violence away from its historical and political reality and into the psycho-dynamic realm inhabited by those who carry out these criminal policies. His manifest anguish becomes a device for distracting society from the true measure of the barbarism upon which it's founded. Voices are raised on his behalf, and therapeutic solutions put forward, as though the central problem were simply how to ensure a healthy frame of mind after massacring a civilian population.

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Michael replied on

This is always the case for Israelis, they are always the victims. But we are not allowed to question anything they claim, for to do so, is antisemitic. Why do they behave like this? Because the idiots around the world, let them.

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Sandy Turner replied on

Everyone should see this video-Israelis particularly who support the present administration they are destroying their future anyone who opposes war should view this this happens to our soldiers in the US of course as well

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D. replied on

Obad 1:15
15 "For the day of the LORD draws near on all the nations. As you have done, it will be done to you. Your dealings will return on your own head.
(NAU)

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D. replied on

I dedicate this album [https://www.youtube.com/watch?... to ALL PALESTINIANS and their supporter's of this earth. May it give us all the strength to STOP THIS HORRIBLE EVIL REGIME CALLED ISRAEL.
Listen my friends and see all the faces of the suffering people and BEHOLD THEIR MISERY...RISE UP AND DEMAND FOR IT TO STOP!!!!
Our brothers and our sisters are being murdered in our name. IN OUR NAME.
LET LOOSE THE CHAINS THAT CONNECT US TO ISRAEL IN GOD'S NAME.

VIVA PALESTINE......
VIVA HER PEOPLE FOREVER.

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.