'Our job was to hit them'

One soldier from the company agreed to be interviewed for this article under his full name. Ilan Vilanda, 38, is unmarried and lives in a moshav in the Jezreel Valley. He was born in Kibbutz Merhavia to immigrant parents (mother from France, father from Holland) who met as volunteers on the kibbutz in 1967. Vilanda was drafted in 1988 and served in the Givati infantry brigade. He was sent to prison four times for disciplinary infractions, and was transferred to Southern Command and assigned to Ash'har company, and later transferred to Ashbal Company.

When he arrived at the unit base, adjacent to Rafah, Yishai-Karin was already there. Vilanda was an operations sergeant and remained on the base until the end of the Gulf War of 1991. "It was like 'Halfon Hill Doesn't Answer,'" he says. "Tents in the desert, a guard at a gate with curls [barbed wire], and you could see the sea and Tel Sultan, the northernmost neighborhood of Rafah. We did police work, patrolling and tried to make order. If stones were thrown, we had means like teargas and rubber and plastic bullets, and we were given wooden truncheons and would beat people. I saw some rough things and I heard about others.

"Our job was to hit them. It was a kind of warfare without firearms. They set ambushes and it was like a cat-and-mouse game. I personally roughed up a kid here, a kid there, by hand or by truncheon. The adults were given serious beatings. There was one guy who had a TV at home and the foot patrol used to go to his place to watch the World Cup in soccer, until he got upset and told us to take the set. We were like police, but without law. Not that we were into bribery, but we were into doing what we wanted because we were the law and we controlled the street."

How do you explain this behavior?

"No one had a combat doctrine in the territories. We wanted to be combat soldiers and we fought like we understood we should. Later we understood that we had to carry out a detention order and that you couldn't just hit people for no good reason. It wasn't realistic. I would go home and an Arab would sit next to you on the bus and a quarter of an hour passed and I didn't ask him to show an ID or belt him one. I lived in two separate worlds, and the transition came when you put on your dress uniform and went home. There you found a different world, where no one wanted to kill you and you didn't want to beat up on anyone. On Sunday I would return to the base and it would all start over. It's really strange, but we didn't talk about feelings and things like that. We did the work."

Didn't it affect your behavior in civilian life?

"Obviously my behavior on the kibbutz is not my behavior in Gaza. They were two parallel worlds. It's the same personality that reacts differently to two extreme cases, and you are the same person. We developed a different personality because we had to do that work. At the start of my service I was identified with Mapam [a left-wing party, now part of Meretz] and there was no way I was going to beat anyone, but in Rafah you are hit by one stone and another stone, and you accumulate anger that bursts out in the form of violence. And that was supposed to be our response: we were there to give them back. Maybe it made me coarser. My political views changed in the army. I became right-wing and I vote for the National Religious Party. I got out in 1991, worked half a year on the kibbutz and went to Holland, where I worked in tourism for a few years and also made cheeses and wooden clogs. I also smoked drugs freely there. In 1995 I went to India."

At the beginning of 1996, Vilanda and five other Israelis were arrested in Goa for possessing hashish and LSD. After spending a year in detention they were tried and convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. They appealed, and a year later, with the help of the Foreign Ministry and President Ezer Weizman, were released and returned to Israel.

"I still feel at loose ends," he says, "but I was weird before my army service, too. As a kid I was hyperactive. I wanted to serve the state and that was the role. The whole army was one big flagrantly illegal order. Not that we in Rafah were out of the ordinary or anything. The missions in the army never caused me any doubts. You convince yourself that this is what you have to do and you are full of adrenaline and it has meaning. A lot of times I thought, Hey, what I'm doing is not good, but a soldier who kills another soldier at the front is worse."

Are you disappointed?

"We did three years of army. We did not get preferential work afterward or conditions for university study, and we did not wait for a miracle here. A lot of the guys from the company left the country. I am a farmer, and when I got back from India the place was full of Thais. The world wasn't exactly waiting for us to return to the kibbutz. I don't feel like we were used. I came to the army of my own free will and I would not serve any other army in the world."

His mother said last week: "He matured and changed in the army. I sent a nice kibbutznik and I got back an Arab-hater."