The Occupation Corrupts From Above

The Occupation Corrupts From Above
 
By Akiva Eldar 
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/364268.html
 
The lie we were told about the Air Force's bombing of the Nusseirat
refugee camp has very long tentacles. These tentacles start from the
very highest echelons and do not skip over any sector of Israeli
society. Their roots are planted deep in the territories, fed by the
poison of the occupation.
  
Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the
Palestinians
for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian
land.
Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner
for the
road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into
outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it
would be impossible to promise "painful concessions" in exchange for
peace, while at the same time
terming people who concluded such an agreement "traitors." 

Politicians who lie for the sake of ideology or political interests
are nothing out of the ordinary. Yitzhak Shamir declared openly that
"it is permissible to lie for the sake of the Land of Israel." When
George W. Bush began his war on Iraq, he and the politicians who
surround him flooded the American public with
falsehoods. The problem is that in Israel, lying has become the norm
among the working levels of the army, the legal establishment and the
diplomatic corps. Lying has become a way of life for commanders and
soldiers, lawyers and clerks, most of whom are far from having
right-wing views and many of whom loathe the
occupation. 

While the politicians lie in order to perpetuate the occupation, the
workers learn to lie in order to justify it. Israel Defense Forces
soldiers have become used to seeing settlers prepare a road to yet
another outpost in the morning, and then hearing on the radio in the
evening that the defense minister and the prime minister "vehemently
deny" the existence of any new outposts. So what do they do? They say
(perhaps even to themselves) that this is a "security road."

Members of the Shin Bet security service know that not every
Palestinian who was executed without trial was truly a "ticking bomb."
They have become used to "cutting corners" and to living with the lie.
Analysts understand that
it is impossible to defeat a people fighting for its land and that
there is no basis for the claim that there is no Palestinian partner
for a fair division of the land. But they have learned that it does
not pay to tell the leaders the truth.

There was great danger in the occupation even in the days when the
four former Shin Bet chiefs were an inseparable part of it. But the
view looks different from the other side. When Ami Ayalon and his
colleagues were inside, they
served the occupation. And in the nature of things, in order to
justify the evils that are an inseparable part of ruling another
nation by force, they also did not always adhere strictly to the
truth.

Psychologist Arye Reshef, a former commander of the IDF's pilot
training course who today researches the psychology of moral behavior,
cites endless studies that show that very few people are immune to
moral backsliding in situations that compel them to act in defiance of
their basic values.

Gideon Kunda of Tel Aviv University, who researched the organizational
culture of high-tech companies, writes that "through the desire to
bind the worker and his soul to the organization's interest,
organizations engage in constant brainwashing of their workers." Kunda
quotes a manager who spoke of a culture
of generally accepted lies: "If you want the project, you have to
lie."

A pressurized situation or environment can drag individuals into acts
even more severe than distorting the truth. A "normative" young man
who testified at the Kafr Kassem trial in the 1960s (in which a group
of Border Police were
convicted of having shot and killed civilians who went out to work in
their fields not knowing that a curfew had been imposed), said: "If I
had been told that it would help the country to shoot at a kibbutz, I
would also have done it." Psychologists who ran simulations of prison
situations stopped them
soon after they began when students who were asked to play the jailers
demonstrated intolerable cruelty toward their "prisoner" colleagues.

The soldiers who harden their hearts at roadblocks, the pilots who
loose bombs in the middle of cities, the attorneys who whitewash and
the spokesmen who lie are not people who lack moral values. Most are
merely victims of the situation created by the occupation.

But moral roadblocks know no borders. A moral roadblock removed from
occupied Gaza will ultimately also come down in Tel Aviv.