A year after the last Gaza conflict, a hard look back

It’s been a year since Operation Protective Edge saw the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas engage in a brutal fight that killed at least 2,104 Palestinians, 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians in Israel, according to the official United Nations tally. Included in that tally were 495 dead children in Gaza.

I attended a lecture on June 25 at a bookstore in Brooklyn that was organized by a group called Partners for Progressive Israel. The speaker was Avner Gvaryahu, a former IDF soldier who now works with Breaking the Silence, a group of IDF veterans who speak about their experiences in the Israeli military, and who are critical of the methods used against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Breaking the Silence is a controversial group, and the IDF is critical of their methods, as many of the testimonies the group gathers are given under the condition of anonymity.

As fighting engulfed Gaza last year, a global war of narratives raged on social media, and I followed myriad conversations as they played out. Most arguments didn’t get far before the legitimacy of Israel or thousands of years of religious history and conflict in the region were brought up.

I attended the lecture because I wanted to hear specifics about the situation there that came from people who lived it.

Gvaryahu began with some background on the IDF’s rules for urban combat. One of the most complex things a soldier in an urban area has to deal with is doubt, he said, as they are surrounded by possible hostility, but also by civilians. “If there is a doubt, there is no doubt — don’t shoot,” he said of the military’s policy during his service.

That changed in 2004, he said, when a government committee decreed that soldiers are ultimately citizens, so their lives are more important than citizens of the enemy. “This is a massive change,” he said, and stated that while a number of top-ranking generals opposed the change, and it never officially passed, there was never any real debate about it, and “all evidence says the doctrine was adopted.”