I have never done time in a civilian prison. But military jails are another matter. During my long service in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—during 1967–1969 as a conscript and, thereafter, until 1990, as a reservist—I spent three stints, as far as I can remember, under lock and key. Each of them tells us something about the history of Israel and the IDF.

I

The first time was like a bad joke and brief, almost a non-event. It was sometime in mid-June 1967, a week or so after the IDF had defeated the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in the Six Day War. In the days after the shooting had ended, the IDF was engulfed by chaos. On the front lines, at the eastern edge of the newly-conquered Golan Heights and West Bank, along the Jordan River, the forward combat units dug in, waiting for what the politicians would decide—to hold in place, to withdraw, to shift the units about. (The troops remain there, more or less along the same lines, to this day, 53 years later.) They were also dug in on the western edge of the newly-conquered Sinai Peninsula, along the Suez Canal, from which they were to withdraw eastward, back to Israel proper, following the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979. It was the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace.

But the rest of the army, having never moved from its bases in Israel or having just returned to them between June 11th and 12th, 1967, simply fell apart. All was in flux. A mind-boggling victory had been won, the Arab armies had been mashed into dust and, in the short term, no longer represented a threat, and new territories and historic-religious sites, especially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, had been occupied and now beckoned. So the soldiers, including many in my unit—Battalion 908 of the Naha”l infantry corps—with their officers barely around and with no assignments to fulfill, simply took off, for a day or two or three; to visit relatives and girlfriends, or to browse in the alleyways of the Old City of Jerusalem, or to see and touch the Wailing Wall, or to look at Rachel’s tomb, just south of Jerusalem, or the prophet Samuel’s tomb just north of the city. Some ventured farther afield, to Hebron, King David’s capital before Jerusalem, where King Herod a thousand years later had built his monumental mausoleum, the Tomb of the Patriarchs (and their wives), seven centuries later converted by the Muslims into the al-Ibrahimiyya (Abraham’s) Mosque, the current focal point of prayer, tension, and violence between the city’s Muslim Arab majority and Jewish minority.

Battalion 908 was the Naha”l’s basic training unit, and its thousand-odd conscripts had donned uniforms in January, only five months earlier. They were about to clip on their graduation pins—the infantry soldier’s symbol, with red background (meaning combat status), attached to their olive berets—when Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser decided to roll the dice and challenge Israel. He pushed his armored divisions into the demilitarized Sinai Peninsula, ordered out the UN peace-keeping force along the Sinai-Israel border, and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping entering or leaving Israel’s southern port city of Eilat. After waiting a few days, Israel responded on June 5th by assaulting the Egyptian air force and armor in Sinai, triggering Jordanian and Syrian attacks on Israel, which ended with Israel’s conquest, in about 140 hours, of the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

During the tense days of late May and early June, the 908th, hardly a fully ready frontline unit, had been sent north and had dug in on the western rims of the kibbutzim Degania and Degania Bet, just south of the Sea of Galilee, establishing a defensive line to beat off a possible Syrian cross-border thrust. That thrust never materialized. The Syrians made do with occasional artillery salvos against the Jordan Valley kibbutzim. But on June 9th, while the Golani Infantry Brigade pushed into the northern Golan Heights, Battalion 908 was sent under a blazing June sun, in full view of the Syrian gunners on top of the ridge and in full combat gear, eastward, towards the southern Golan Heights—a thousand 18-year-old infantrymen trudging along the hot black asphalt road. Whether it was intended as a feint—to draw Syrian attention away from Golani’s push to the north—or as a serious preliminary to actually assaulting the Syrian Tawfik positions above, or a mixture of the two (a feint, to be sure, but if the Syrians didn’t respond or fled, to carry on up the Golan slope) is unclear.

The Syrian gunners must have rubbed their eyes in astonishment—we were abundantly visible and vulnerable—and then let loose. Some of the shells splashed into the sea behind us, sending up plumes of water. It was like watching a movie. But then they ranged in and shells found their mark. Our battalion OC (officer in command or commanding officer), Lt. Col. Shlomo Halamish, and his communications officer, standing by their Jeep on Tel Katzir, just above the road, observing the battalion’s progress, were cut to bits, and the battalion, after a brief sit down under the eucalyptus trees lining the road, was ordered back to the Degania line. Dispirited, we knew something bad had happened but not what—no one told us, and we traipsed back down the road, westward.

A day or two later, with the Golan firmly in Israeli hands and a ceasefire in place, the battalion was bussed back to its base near Hadera, south of Haifa, Camp 80, originally a British Mandate army base. Then things fell apart. The officers and sergeant-majors, given no orders, vanished, and the troops, singly or in groups, took off. The same thing happened in other bases. Israel’s roads were awash with hitchhiking soldiers going this way and that. The civilian public, after issuing a collective sigh of relief and thanksgiving (in the pre-June 5th days many had actually feared a second Holocaust), and proud of its soldiers, literally begged hitchhikers to get into their cars, even driving soldiers to distant out of-the-way towns, not on their routes.

That night I think I was on my way back to base from Jerusalem. I waited with several soldiers at a bus stop, thumbing a lift. It was dark. A large army pick-up truck, generally referred to (mistakenly) as a “Gladiator,” stopped and we hopped into the back, where there were two padded benches. In front, in the cabin, sat a driver and perhaps an officer or two. We couldn’t make them out. The vehicle sped northward. An hour or so later, as if miraculously, it turned off precisely toward the entrance to Camp 80 (I don’t think any of us had mentioned to the driver where we were headed), and we all piled out straight into the arms of Staff Sergeant “Albert,” who had just alighted and was standing by the cabin door. “Albert”—I don’t remember and probably never knew, his last name—was the legendary non-commissioned officer who ran the camp’s administration with an iron fist and a shrill voice. He barked an indistinct order—it was late and we were all half-asleep—and frog-marched us straight into the caboose which adjoined the main gate.

I can’t remember the night in the lock-up though I am sure, given its size and the numerous detainees, it was uncomfortable. Nor do I remember being stripped of my shoelaces and belt, as was the norm (to prevent suicides). The following morning, we were let out and shuffled off to our tents, with no charges or trial. Stay put, no more AWOLing, we were warned.

II

My second incarceration was lengthier and more serious, but I managed to turn it into a protracted joke. At least that’s how I remember it. It was 1968 and I was in a newly-formed Naha”l reconnaissance unit (sayeret) in the oasis outpost of Bir Thmade, in central Sinai. With our freshly-minted black berets, our task was to patrol the vast area in Jeeps and command cars, mainly against beduin hashish smugglers, but also to be on the lookout for Egyptian intelligence scouts. The officers had assembled us outside our tents. We stood in rows, three deep, for a roll call or whatever, and a lieutenant—he had never liked me—was going on and on about some nonsense (keep your huts clean, don’t fall asleep on guard duty, collect the candy wrappers littering the camp, etc.). “What an ass,” I muttered. I thought I had kept my voice down but apparently the desert air carries. The lieutenant called me out.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, hamefaked (sir).”

“I heard you.”

I admitted nothing. But early the following morning I was handed a brown manila envelope and told: “Inside are your particulars and a charge sheet.” It was probably a Thursday. I was told to make my way, by bus or hitchhiking, back to Israel, to stay the night at home and show up the following morning—Friday, the traditional day for courts martial—at my battalion HQ (the Bir Thmade sayeret belonged to Battalion 903) at Ibim.

So I took off, ultimately arriving at Ibim, near Sderot, on time. But on the way, I had opened the envelope and read the enclosed documents. Einai khashkhu (my eyes darkened), as they say. The complaint sheet, addressed to the battalion OC, stated: “We enjoin you: Give this soldier the maximal sentence.” They really didn’t like me back in Bir Thmade. A battalion OC had the authority to sentence soldiers to a maximum of 35 days in prison. A sergeant-major frog-marched me into the commander’s office. The OC, a red-bereted lt. colonel, looked stern. He read out the charge (“insulting an officer”) and then asked, pro forma: “Do you agree to be tried by me?” The question was mandated by IDF regulations. My reply was definitely not in the rule book: “No, sir.” I think I smiled (or, at least, I hope I did, broadly).

As a matter of course, soldiers answered in the affirmative, because saying “no” meant being sent up the chain of command to a higher echelon, which could dish out 70 days jail-time or more. The OC was clearly in shock and, for a long moment, at a loss for words. This was probably a first. But there was nothing he could do. His clerk filled out the paperwork and I was ordered to present myself at the Naha”l Corps HQ, in Jaffa, to be tried by the OC Naha”l (equivalent to a brigade commander). As it turned out, I was tried by the OC’s deputy, Lt. Col. Tzvika Levanon.

He had a nice guy reputation and a bushy Palma”h-style moustache to go with it. I agreed to be tried by him, but at our first trial session that Friday morning I decided to exercise my rights as a defendant (this was allowed at brigade-level hearings). “I want to call witnesses, who can testify that I didn’t call the lieutenant an ass,” I said. Thus I procured a brief leave from Bir Thmade’s heat and chores for two of my mates, who would need to travel up to Jaffa and back, meaning they would enjoy a day or two at home, a hot bath, momma’s meals, and so on. (Home leaves from Bir Thmade, because of the protracted travel involved, were infrequent—say for a week every six weeks.)

I spent the following week in loose detention in the Naha”l HQ complex—a sprawling, columned Arab house with a large, tree-lined garden surrounded by a wall—mostly sunning myself and reading. The food was better than at Bir Thmade. But for a few days they had me whitewashing tree trunks. (This was done in all IDF bases. I don’t know why or where the custom came from, probably from the British during the Mandate. Possibly the idea was to highlight trees so that sleepwalking soldiers wouldn’t bump into them.)

The following Friday my mates showed up. Levanon no doubt took their testimony with a large grain of salt. But, equally, he did not take the charge sheet too seriously. He sentenced me to seven days in jail. Immediately afterwards, accompanied by an HQ cook going on leave as my chaperone, I hitched down to Gaza’s central police station, a Mandate-era British police fort, which also served as a prison for both Arab terrorists and IDF miscreants like myself. Getting there took hours. My chaperone knocked on the thick, iron-ringed front door. A guard opened a hatch and asked what we wanted.

“He’s supposed to go to jail here,” said the cook.

“No can do, it’s after 14:00. We’re closed for the weekend.”

Arguing didn’t help. The cook, who wanted to get home for the weekend, was flustered. A brief discussion followed. In the end, I persuaded the cook to go on home and promised that I would proceed under my own steam, scout’s honor, to the Naha”l HQ on Sunday morning, and tell them that Gaza prison had simply refused to take me in. And so, after spending the weekend at home, I showed up on the Sunday morning at the Jaffa HQ. I told them my story and was given a new set of orders: Go to Naha”l Sinai, the tomato-growing Naha”l outpost on the Mediterranean shore of the Sinai Peninsula, near El Arish, which was at once an army strongpoint and settlement, and now also housed the Battalion 903 HQ, which had just moved there from Ibim.

Military-Industrial Complexities

President Eisenhower’s warning deserves to be better understood.

QuilletteGeorge Case

I arrived sometime in the afternoon. It was a hot day. I walked into the battalion offices, manned by two young, tired, barely conscious female soldiers. I can’t remember if I had any paperwork with me but if I did, I didn’t show it. I told the girls that Naha”l HQ had ordered me to spend a week at the outpost. (Naomi Shemer later wrote a beautiful song about the place—he’akhzut hanaha”l besinai. It eventually became a civilian settlement called Ne’ot Sinai, which was evacuated by Israel along with the rest of the peninsula following the signing of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.) I didn’t mention a trial or charges. I said I would need a room. The girls didn’t ask any questions, assigned me a room, informed me of the mealtimes, and told me that films were screened some evenings, after supper, in the dining hall.

I spent the week on my back reading books and newspapers and in the outpost’s communal club house, and showed up for meals and movies. Nobody asked me who I was—presumably the battalion HQ personnel thought I was a member of the outpost and the outpost members thought I was from battalion HQ. I exchanged banter with one or two soldiers. I remember one guy, with a blonde beard, with an English accent and broken Hebrew, who claimed he was a famous writer serving in the IDF incognito. I can’t remember who he claimed to be (James Joyce? Kingsley Amis?). At week’s end, I went back to the girls in the battalion offices, said the week was up and I needed to return to Jaffa, and they gave me chits for the buses the next day. In Jaffa, I told the secretaries I had served my sentence in Naha”l Sinai and was sent on my way. Eventually, I made it back to Bir Thmade.

III

The third and last incarcerative episode was the most serious, and no joking matter. I was given a three-week sentence in IDF Prison Number 4, in Sarafand, outside Ramleh, for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. Some of the following is based on the diary I kept during those weeks.

It was autumn 1988 and I was in the IDF reserves, and I was called up for a 35-day stint in the West Bank. I was told that the battalion would be stationed in Nablus (the site of Biblical Shechem), the main Arab town in the northern West Bank, on patrol and ambush duty in the casbah (the old town center). The town had a bad reputation. They really didn’t like us. (During the Second Intifada a decade or so later, the town and its three peripheral refugee camps were a hotbed of lethal Palestinian terrorism.)

When I showed up at our base, where we collected our equipment and officers, I said, “No, I’m not going.” I refused to take part in the suppression of the First Intifada, which had broken out the previous December. It was mostly an unarmed, non-lethal rebellion by the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Some East Jerusalemites and Israeli Arabs joined in. There was a lot of rage, demonstrations, stone-throwing, civil disobedience, non-payment of taxes, school and shop shutdowns, and general non-compliance with the orders of the military government, which had been governing the territories for two decades. Here and there, as the intifada progressed, there were armed attacks by Hamas gunmen, but these were rare. The rebels said they wanted to shake off Israeli rule (intifada in Arabic means a shaking off, like a dog shaking off fleas).

The platoon and company commanders tried to dissuade me. I stuck to my guns. They sent me to the battalion OC who passed me on to divisional HQ. The deputy division commander, a lt. colonel, tried gentle tough love. The trial lasted all of seven minutes. He kicked off by saying: Why not go home for the weekend, think things over, and come back, and we’ll forget about what has happened; perhaps we can even assign you to duties that will not involve interaction with the locals. I wasn’t having any of it.

“What we are doing is wrong; a crime,” I said.

“You leave me no choice,” he replied. “I’ll have to send you to prison. And believe me, it’s not for you, you’re a journalist, a doctor [of history].” (A few months before, I had published my first book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949.)

“I also have no choice. We have to get out of the territories.”

“Even if I agree with you, in the army we must carry out orders. It’s not a matter of political beliefs. I sentence you to 21 days in jail,” he concluded.

Again, it was a Friday afternoon; Prison Number 4 would not take in new inmates during the weekend. So I spent it in a tent with a quartermaster who had been denied leave for some offense or other. He was of North African origin and his hard line was typical of Israel’s Mizrahi Jews. “The only way to end the Intifada is to hit them hard, with an iron fist. It’s the only language they understand. If you speak to them and act softly, they think you are weak, they will exploit you. Be tough, and they’ll respect you,” he said.