The defendant was an `impressive officer'

A large group of paratroopers who recently completed their army service crowded into the courtroom of the District Military Court in Jaffa to support First Sgt. B. of Battalion 202. First Sgt. B. was accused of attacking 10 Palestinians during the past year at the Hawara checkpoint near Nablus, two of them in February. He will soon be sentenced.

B.'s friends had another reason to come to the courtroom in Jaffa: Their battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Guy Hazut appeared on the witness stand as well. Defense attorney Shlomo Tzipori had many reasons to be pleased at the close of the battalion commander's testimony. The battalion commander supported testimony that his soldiers were inadequately prepared to cope with a civilian population. He admitted that he, too, was personally responsible for the fact that the soldiers were not prepared to cope with the mental complexities of serving at the checkpoint. Hazut was supposed to wrap up his testimony this week, but both sides agreed to a plea bargain, which ended the proceedings.

Ironically, the most damning evidence against the defendant was a videotape filmed by the Israel Defense Forces' education branch. A film crew arrived at the checkpost in February this year to shoot a training film for IDF officers, only to find a real drama underway. The senior officer at the checkpoint, knowing that a film crew was located nearby, beat two Palestinians. One Palestinian was handcuffed in response to an order by the officer, who then hit him in the stomach. Another Palestinian, flanked by his wife and children, was punched in the face and even kicked in the lower part of his body.

Investigations revealed that in addition to the two beatings caught on camera, the defendant was violent with eight other Palestinians. The Palestinians were not randomly chosen, according to the investigation, but all had acted in a disorderly manner or had violated orders at the checkpoint. The investigation revealed that on 10 occasions the defendant used his gun to break the windshields of cabs driven by Palestinians. Their only violation was that they crossed the marked line where vehicles are supposed to stop at the checkpoint.

A training film

The defendant is a 23-year-old Bedouin from the Galilee. In his testimony, he said that only 15 percent of the residents of his village enlist to serve in the IDF, and that he is the only paratrooper. Senior officers appointed him to command the checkpoint because of his leadership skills and his native command of Arabic. The Hawara checkpoint is one of the two busiest checkpoints in the northern West Bank. Almost 6,000 individuals cross through the checkpoint each day, in addition to a bustling traffic of cars and cabs.

Hazut's testimony is not only important in defense of the checkpoint commander. It is also instructive as to the consequences of occupation and the continuous friction between the IDF and civilians.

In response to prosecuting attorney Captain Tzvi Gilboa, Hazut said, "The Hawara checkpoint is the most difficult assignment that Battalion 202 received in Nablus." The complexity of the assignment, according to Hazut, "comes from the desire of terror organizations to perpetrate terror attacks against Israel, which has exerted a great deal of pressure on those who serve at the checkpoint." This is also a very active checkpoint, because Nablus is the Palestinian commercial center of the northern West Bank, which only adds to the pressure.

According to Hazut, this was not the first outstanding example of what he called "unethical behavior." Three months previously, at the "Farm 7" checkpoint, another soldier hit a Palestinian whom the soldier claimed had cursed him and made a gesture which the soldier found threatening. It later became clear that the Palestinian was mentally ill. The soldier, who according to Hazut used more force than was required, was tried, relieved of his position and even jailed.

"No enemy, no matter how evil, justifies an immoral response," Hazut testified in the Hawara case. "We have to eradicate the concept of `Palestinian cheekiness.' There's no such thing. They are not our soldiers and we are not their educators."

Hazut said that he approved the request of the education branch to film the checkpoint for a week because he believed that the purpose of the film was important: To produce a training film for checkpoint squad leaders and platoon commanders in order to prepare them to cope with moral dilemmas.

In response to the final minutes of the tape, which capture the officer hitting Palestinians, Hazut said, "I was not surprised. After so many years in the military, I have ceased to be surprised."

He was also not surprised by the officer's explanation of his actions at the checkpoint, also caught on film by the crew. The officer said that he had acted in this way because the soldiers were threatened, and that this was his way of maintaining control at the checkpoint.

"You could say that I was very disturbed by what I saw," Hazut added. "The scene with the voices in the background, the Palestinian man's children, was not easy to hear or see - not that I haven't seen things like that before."

The grave difference between the case at the Hawara checkpoint and the events at Farm 7, according to Hazut, is the fact that it was the checkpoint's commanding officer who acted at Hawara.

"I have different expectations of a soldier and of an officer," Hazut said. Hazut ordered the officer to appear in his office for what he termed was a very difficult discussion. "I let the defendant see the tape," he testified in court. "He was disturbed and so was I. I was very disappointed in him. I considered him to be one of the better officers in the battalion. He claimed that this was his way of coping with the complex assignment. I said very harsh things to him. That I am disappointed, that I am angry. Despite the fact that I see myself as being responsible, [as] the one who sent him there. Even if I completely accept all of his explanations, that does not mean that he has the right to behave the way that he did. Not as a soldier and not as an officer who is supposed to be a role model for his soldiers."

Hazut's criticism of his own role in the event was as stringent as his criticism of the officer in his command. "In all aspects related to activity at the checkpoint, preparation was defective, especially in terms of the improvised infrastructure in built-up areas," he confessed in his testimony. "My error was focusing preparation on professional rather than mental context. It is clear to me that [in the future] I would invest 80 percent of the preparation on the mental part. I didn't think that way then. Now I am wiser."

Canceled raid

In response to cross-examination by the defendant's attorney, Hazut continued, "I don't think that they were given optimal conditions to implement the mission. I think that the infrastructure at the checkpoint could be better. As the commanding officer of the battalion I am very self-critical of everything related to how we prepared this mission." He added that the defendant was "an impressive officer in the battalion," and said, "He is cut from the same cloth from which we wish our officers to be made."

Hazut reiterated that the pressure does not justify behavior of this type and that soldiers were subject to even greater pressures in the past. In this context, he said that his father had witnessed the murder of two Egyptian prisoners in the Yom Kippur War. "Then too," said the batallion commander, "their attorney could have said that they were under emotional pressure."

Hazut said that he does not know of any military system that does not leave emotional scars. If it were up to him and money was no object, he says, he would set up a crossing at Hawara like the terminal at the Allenby Bridge.

The attorney noted that a short time before the film crew arrived at the checkpoint, the defendant asked to be released from his position. Battalion Commander Hazut granted the request, but said that the request was not based on the defendant's difficulty at the checkpoint. Hazut added that it was a shame that the defendant was relieved of his position only a month before completing his assignment, causing him to leave the soldiers in his command. "He was very pivotal," complimented the battalion commander. "I considered him to be quite a bit more dominant than the platoon commander. I can't say that I knew that he was in a difficult emotional state, but I knew that he had problems and that he wanted to leave the position immediately."

The attorney explained that the defendant avoided seeing a mental health officer because if he had, it would have prevented him from continuing to serve as an officer. "That's not true," Hazut said. "That's his sense of it. We referred a driver to the mental health officer yesterday and we refer soldiers in battle capacities, too. It wasn't done here because there did not appear to be a need. The situation was not presented to me as a serious emotional situation that demanded attention."

The attorney supported the defendant's testimony with a declaration signed by 72 paratroopers who recently completed their IDF service. They wrote that the use of force at checkpoints was not unusual. These actions were not carried out as a result of sadism, the attorney read, but soldiers were required to use force to carry out their assignments. The soldiers are in an impossible position. "If we are not taken seriously, we will not be able to fulfill the mission of preventing arms from entering Israel," the declaration stated.

The battalion commander did not respond directly. As an example of the moral dilemmas that face soldiers at the checkpoint, he cited a raid in which the battalion was supposed to enter the Balata refugee camp to round up suspects. The raid was canceled at the last minute when it became clear that the suspects took children out of school to serve as human shields. "I gave the order to all the forces to leave the camp, knowing that the battle would cause the death of innocent children," Hazut said. "We deal with moral dilemmas and sometimes we err. Not all our decisions are correct. The defendant made a grave error as well."

	The defendant in military court yesterday. The case ended in a plea bargain.
	Photo by: Guy Raivitz