Breaking Ranks

From the YouTube link to the film:

This special feature documentary goes inside one of the most closed institutions in the world: the Israel Defense Forces during the war in Gaza. Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War presents first-hand accounts from IDF soldiers who served in Gaza after October 7th 2023. Speaking openly – many for the first time – they describe what they recall seeing on the ground: the bombardment, the civilian impact, the pressure, the confusion, and moments that raise difficult questions about conduct, culture and accountability inside the military ranks. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Ben Zand, the film pieces together rare testimony that was never meant to be heard publicly. It also hears from Palestinians in Gaza about the consequences of the campaign, offering as full a picture as possible of a war largely shielded from view.

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About the documentary “Breaking Ranks: Inside Israel’s War”

When I saw the link to this documentary, I thought to myself: Maybe this is what will truly break the ranks? Maybe testimonies from soldiers about the things they did with their own hands, or saw with their own eyes, will succeed in dismantling Israel's collective defensive ranks that refuse to look straight ahead and see the destruction that the State of Israel carried out in Gaza. Maybe we'll start to see some question marks within the lines that form this fortified wall of denial, maybe empty spots here and there from those who, despite everything, agreed to grasp the scale of the disaster and stepped aside, maybe a bit of chaos amid those perfectly aligned lines, so sweeping in their uniformity, will allow some movement within the rigid framework of "only we matter, and we're always the righteous ones," which creates those lines in the first place.

I hope so.

At first, I was afraid to watch. I have to admit it – it has become hard for me to watch the daily horrors that unfolded in my name in the past two years in Gaza, and that still continue even after the ceasefire, because a ceasefire is for the weak, and we're strong and heroic, so we keep bombing and killing children. Beyond that, I no longer believe that images of atrocity really touch people here. After all, even the most horrific videos of children being murdered or injured, of people crushed under collapsing homes, of babies with severed limbs – even those don't break the lines. And often – how awful – spark talk of "they deserved it" or its cousin, "you forgot October 7th," decked out with laughing emoji responses. I didn't want to put myself through more of that.

But on the other side of the little debate playing out in my head, I think it's our duty to know. The least we can do is to know, to not look away. We need to look at what our hands have done there, to hear the nightmare stories from the people we're tormenting, turning their lives into hell on earth, inflicting pain that will never fade, an endless human suffering with no end in sight.

So I took a deep breath, clicked the link, and watched.

"Whoever wants to shoot without restrictions can shoot without restrictions… There was a case where one of the commanders wanted to fire at some humanitarian building, and we told him it was forbidden... and then he fired a shell there and said, 'I saw someone there with an anti-tank launcher on his shoulder'... Now go prove otherwise..."

The film shows testimonies from soldiers, without showing graphic images of destruction, desecration, and blood. What it brings is a different kind of horror, one that takes longer to grasp its meaning. A sentence like that, uttered by one of the soldiers, stating one simple fact – I am allowed to abuse, kill, destroy whoever or whatever I want at any given moment – doesn't depict a single shocking human story. In fact, it describes an entire shocking reality, in which there are broadly two groups of people, one imposing itself on the other, and within that reality, the first group is permitted to do anything that comes to mind to the other. Anything. And if you pause for a moment and take that thought further – just that one – then you start to understand the horror. With no limits on power, in an atmosphere of hatred and fear, driven by a deeply ingrained sense of superiority, and motivated by revenge (as one soldier testifies)... anything goes. And indeed, it all happened, even if those huddled in the ranks look the other way and whistle.

"I saw an officer ordering a tank to demolish a building in an area permitted for Palestinians, because a man was standing on the roof hanging laundry, and he decided that man was a spotter... He didn’t have binoculars, nor any weapon, and the nearest military force was 600-700 meters away... The shelling took down half the building, and there were injuries and deaths... And I encountered events like this once a week... And we're just one unit… There are dozens of units like our at any given time..."

"When I was standing in my basic training we all had to repeat the army commands, we all repeatedly said 'means, intent, and capability.' There's no such thing in Gaza. No one will talk to you about means, intent, and capability. They'll talk to you about 'some suspicion,' 'wandering in a forbidden area,' 'a man aged 20-40.'"

"We finished a deployment period in the Strip, so at the end you pull out the reports… there's the commanders' summary. And it was written: 'Terrorists we took down: 112.' I can say that only for one of them – one! – was there suspicion that he was armed. That means that the other 111 people we killed, no one claimed they were armed."

And so, slowly, without images of buildings vanishing into clouds of smoke, without dogs devouring human bodies (there's testimony about that too), without children covered in blood calling out for their mother in bitter sobs, without adults with lost looks in their eyes, their gaze reflecting a world that shattered into fragments in an instant and will never return to what it was – the horror takes shape gradually. Understanding builds layer by layer, filling up and taking space like a giant balloon inflating with air, growing and growing and growing.

In this film, you can see not only the horrors in Gaza, horrors that no person in the Western world, except those who spend their time huddled in Israel's defensive lines, hasn't seen and been appalled by – anyone who watches this film will also see the doom Israel is marching toward, the loss of conscience and moral compass, the distorted image Israel insists on staring at and only at, right there, between the lines.

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Ayala Shalev is the editor of That's About Us.