Check out this article: http://www.kawther.info/K20060907A.html
I have been inspired to look up my old unit online. A couple of nights ago I found this article and it dropped my jaw. It is full of complete bullshit: the history is wrong, her accounts of “torturing” and "suffering" are completely undocumented, and in line with her journalistic expertise she ends the article with a Paratrooper’s take on Golani. This is like asking a Nebraska driver about Iowa drivers and taking seriously their response.
I liked reading the article because I read so much Arab propaganda (and Zionist propaganda as well) that I begin to doubt the validity of any historical narrative. I start thinking, "Maybe there is just a series of viewpoints and maybe I believe the crazy one. I know many intelligent people who believe in the Palestinian cause. Maybe I'm wrong."
So I read this, and it is a big smear piece about the unit I served in. The pictures (the later pictures) feature guys that I know. The picture of the two “Golani Sweethearts?” The guy on the right was wounded by the first female suicide bomber in Jerusalem. He had a hard time walking and standing for awhile. He came back to Golani in a non-combat role. He is a great guy, and straight as an arrow.
I know the checkpoint she talks about. Yeah, some of the settlers in Hebron suck. So do some of the soldiers. But her description of Hebron's population?
In a propaganda piece she lets slip the existence of "tunnels" in Hebron. Tunnels? A defenseless unarmed population has tunnels? She also failed to mentioned how many time the IDF has left Hebron only to return after the Arabs shoot at the settlers. Oh yeah. They are now called settlers because in 1929 the Arabs killed the original Jewish population who had a continuous community there for a couple thousand years.
I don't want to argue about history or who is the bad guy. What was significant for me was that the article confirmed (for me) the veracity of my experience over the bullshit written accounts that I read.
The woman writes:
"I know much about Golani soldiers. They are all psychopaths, criminals, drug dealers who hide themselves behind a military uniform and derive their power from the weapons which they carry. Still then, armed to the teeth and before a defenseless civilian population, they are full of fear, cowards second to none."
She writes this as a fact. I know she is wrong. She writes about genocide like it is a fact. She writes about the Jenin massacre like it is a fact. She writes about the slaughter of captured Egyptian soldiers like it is a fact.
I have read many academic accounts that indicate that all these claims are false. What is significant for me (and probably not for any one reading this blog) is that her article restores my confidence that her viewpoint and her interpretation of the Israelis is wrong. I think it as false and contrived as her article.
