[NYTr] Israel's Toy Soldiers

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TruthDig via Info Clearing House - Oct 1, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18488.htm

Israel’s Toy Soldiers

By Chris Hedges

If you are a young Muslim American and head off to the Middle East for
a spell in a fundamentalist “madrassa,” or religious school, Homeland
Security will probably greet you at the airport when you return. But if
you are an American Jew and you join hundreds of teenagers from Europe
and Mexico for an eight-week training course run by the Israel Defense
Forces, you can post your picture wearing an Israeli army uniform and
holding an automatic weapon on MySpace.

The Marva program, part summer camp part indoctrination, was launched
in Israel in 1981.  It allows participants, who must be Jewish and
between the ages of 18 and 28, to fire weapons, live in military
barracks in the Negev desert and saunter around in an Israeli military
uniform saluting and taking long hikes with military packs.  The Youth
and Education Corps of the Israel Defense Forces run four 120-strong
training sessions a year. 

“Upon arrival, the participants experience an abrupt change into army
life: wearing uniforms, accepting army discipline, and learning the
programs and lessons integral to the program,” the Let Israelis Show
You Israel Web site reads.  “The program includes military content such
as: navigation, field training, weapons training, shooting ranges,
marches and more, as well as educational content such as: Zionism,
Jewish Identity, history and knowledge of the land of Israel.  All of
this is taught in Hebrew in an intensive eight weeks.”

"The participants finish the program after completing a short,
intensive, exhilarating military experience that allows them to taste
Israel in a way that they never could before—as part of the Israel
Defense Forces,” the site reads.  “They leave the program with a
feeling of belonging and a strong connection to Israel, and many return
to Israel to continue the connection that was created in the framework
of the Marva course.”

There are, of course, gushing testimonials about the program.

"I spent the first few days of Marva doubting my decision, wondering
why I had come, wondering if there was any way out.  With all of the
running, yelling orders, discipline and Hebrew, I felt horribly out of
place,” writes Canadian David Roth of his summer.  “It was a completely
different world from the one I was used to.  All that changed, though,
by the end of the first week.  We had our first ‘Masa’ (Hike).  It was
very hard, but at the end, we all knew, our M16s were waiting for us at
the ‘tekes’ (Ceremony).  We got through the 8 kilometers and had our
‘tekes’ and got our guns.  It felt amazing, and from that point on
Marva was incredible.”

How have we reacted when we discovered that American Muslims were being
taught in a foreign country to fire machine guns at paper figures and
simulate military maneuvers?  And what about the summer schools in Gaza
organized by Islamic Jihad designed to train young Palestinians in the
basics of military life?  These Gaza camps, uncovered in 2001, were
widely denounced by Israel as proof that the Palestinians were teaching
their children to hate and kill.

The argument in favor of camps in Israel, as opposed to camps in
Pakistan, is that these young men and women are not going to come back
and use what they have learned to harm Americans.  They are not
terrorists.  Muslims, however, have not cornered the market on
terrorism and violence.  Radical Jews have also been involved in
terrorist attacks in Israel and the United States.

I discovered an American in Israel in 1989 named Robert Manning.  A
huge, burly man, Manning was living in the West Bank Jewish settlement
of Kiyrat Arba.  When I found him he was carrying a pistol, a large
knife strapped to his leg and an M-16 assault rifle.  He was part of a
Jewish terrorist group called Committee for Protection and Safety of
the Highways that set up ad hoc roadblocks and pulled Palestinians from
cars to beat and often shoot them.  He was a follower of Meir Kahane,
the leader of the Jewish Defense League, who was implicated in
terrorist attacks in the United States and Israel.  Manning served as a
reservist in the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank. 

Manning was wanted in California for murder.  He had been charged in a
1980 mail-bomb killing as part of his involvement in the Jewish Defense
League.  The bomb was intended for the owner of a local computer firm,
but the package holding the device was opened by the firm’s secretary,
Patricia Wilkerson, who was killed instantly by the blast. 

Manning, full of bluster and a bitter racism toward Arabs, used as his
pseudonym the name of the FBI agent in charge of his case, a bit of
humor that backfired on him by confirming my suspicion of his
identify.  I obtained the picture from his California driver’s license
and showed it to his neighbors at Kiyrat Arba.  They identified him
from the photo.  I wrote an article affirming that Manning, heavily
armed and an active member of the Israeli army, was living in a Jewish
settlement.  The Israeli government, until that moment, said it had no
information about his location.  He was extradited in 1993 and
sentenced the next year to life imprisonment without the possibility of
parole for 30 years.  He is in a maximum-security prison in Florence,
Colo.

Those who go through the Marva summer program are indoctrinated as
thoroughly as Muslims who go overseas and are told they are part of a
greater jihad for Islam.  The results, given Israel’s close alliance
with the United States, may not be negative for those in power in the
United States, but it may be very negative for those Americans defined
as the enemy, especially Muslims, should we suffer another 9/11.  The
program inculcates hatred and a belief in the efficacy of violence to
solve the problems in the Middle East.  It identifies Israel with
militarism.  It feeds the idea that a Jew born in Brooklyn has a
birthright to settle in Israel that is denied to an American of
Palestinian descent. 

Jerusalem, aside from being one of the most beautiful cities in the
world, is one of the most literate, creative and intellectual.  Do
these young men and women really know the best of Israel by spending
eight weeks playing soldier and glorifying the military?  Is the cause
of Israel advanced by mirroring the twisted militarism of Islamic
fundamentalists? 

Terrorists arise in all cultures, all nations and all religions.  We
have produced more than our share.  Ask the people of Vietnam or Iraq.
The danger of a military program such as these is that it solidifies a
mind-set of us and them.  It romanticizes violence.  It widens the
divide that leads to conflict.  It makes dialogue impossible.  There
are great Israeli institutions, from the newspaper Haaretz to the
courageous Israeli human rights organization

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