Home > Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock

by Open-Publishing - Thursday 2 December 2004
8 comments

Edito Wars and conflicts International


by Chris McGreal in Jerusalem

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".

"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.

"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is "the most moral in the world" because it says it adheres to a code of "the purity of arms". There is rarely much public questioning of the army’s routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been "caught in crossfire", or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.

But the public’s confidence has been shaken by the revelations of the past week. The audio recording of the shooting of the 13-year-old, Iman al-Hams, prompted much soul searching, although the revulsion appears to be as much at the Israeli officer firing a stream of bullets into her lifeless body as the killing itself. Some soldiers told Israeli papers that their mothers had sought assurances that they did not do that kind of thing.

One Israeli peace group, the Arik Institute, took out large newspaper adverts to plead for "Jewish patriots" to "open your eyes and look around" at the suffering of Palestinians.

The incidents prompted the army to call in all commanders from the rank of lieutenant-colonel to emphasise the importance of maintaining the "purity of arms" code.

The army’s critics say the real problem is not the behaviour of soldiers on the ground but the climate of impunity that emanates from the top.

While the officer responsible for killing Iman al-Hams has been charged with relatively minor offences, and the soldiers who forced the violinist to play were ticked off for being "insensitive", the only troops who were swiftly punished for violating regulations last week were some who posed naked in the snow for a photograph. They were dismissed from their unit.

Last week the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem criticised what it described as a "culture of impunity" within the army. The group says at least 1,656 Palestinian non-combatants have been killed during the intifada, including 529 children.

"To date, one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian," it said.

"The combination of rules of engagement that encourage a trigger-happy attitude among soldiers together with the climate of impunity results in a clear and very troubling message about the value the Israeli military places on Palestinian life."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1361755,00.html

Forum posts

  • It is interested how the statements in the Guardian article highlight the attitude of many, perhaps by far the majority of Israel people:

    "Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial ’not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust’. "

    The idea of abuse of non-Hebrew people is relegated to a non-issue, except of course for the minority activists, such as the woman who took the picture.

    You could say that years of bombings and having limbs torn apart causes this feeling, but there is always in the background the knowledge that not only has the land been stolen from Palestinian people, but the atrocities commited upon Palestinians by Israelis far exceeds any that has happened to Israeli people from Palestinians.

    The notion of course that the two people and the land is separate is a falshood, continued as a racist notion by those in Israel who believe they are indeed separate and not like those others who they have pushed out yet live within miles from them. The truth is, it is merely that one has Hebrew beliefs and the other has the Muslim faith. Those who do not now have a predominance of genes from other races, all descend from the same earlier group, semite race.

    "If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

    That of course has never been true. To take the land of another with this supposed justification is however how many people Israel see their situation. It is in the end the only justification for what those of the Hebrew faith who have come to the Palestine area, including the present Israel, have done since the Second World War.

    At some point it is likely that the World will accept its obligation to sort out this mess, and there will be a natural return of the Palestinian people to what is now known as Israel, and a realization by the Israeli people that indeed they do live a falsehood. That they are merely a grouping within a larger grouping (semite) - within a larger grouping that is the world - and that nowhere else is there now an exclusion of people to a country based upon perceived ’race’ or faith.

    To say that Israel has become the same as that which persecuted them in the period of Hitler is not an understatement.

    There are no gas chambers, and 6 million Palestinians have not been killed.

    But one life lost through racial reasons is no less important and the atrocities commited by Israel are no less evil.

    Two files that can be viewed illustrate this point extremely well.

    http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive2004/may/war_2004_may_images_4.html

    http://www.thewe.cc/contents/more/archive/atrocities.htm

  • This is it right here my fellow Americans. We are supporting the Bad Guys in the Middle East. We are financing, supporting, licking the shitty boots of, suffering spies from, being infiltrated at the highest levels of our government by a bunch of Fascist Scum Pigs, namely the Israeli government.

  • I don’t understand why the Israelis are shocked. They’ve been acting like nazis half the time.

    • correction, since 1948 their behavior have been questionable. Taking others land can not be justified by religion. I guess doing it with a gun would be called thievery. doing it with a gun and the Tora does does not change the equation. it is still thievery. By the way, you need not be anti-semite to come to this realisation.

    • Israel receives 13 billion dollars a year from the US, that is each year folks. They use this money to occupy stolen land and a lot of the money is used to build roads, infrastructure and homes for Israelis on Palestinian land. Our government is controled by Israel. Ariel Sharon was quoted as telling their parliment not to worry about America "we own them and they know it". The American people don’t know it, their propaganda media has made sure not to tell them this fact, it is kept secret from the average uninformed American who believes that Israel is the "only democracy" in the middle east and that they are somehow necessary for out exsistance. Ask the average American about Israel, and they will repeat this oft memorized phrase for they have been programmed and conditioned to not question what is happening there but to just mindlessly repeat "Israel is the only democracy in the middle east and they are our closest ally." They have taught us well.

      When will the American people become allies with America? The people in this country get nothing for their tax money. The government would never build homes for Americans. They tax us to death and squander the money on wars and on evil people like the Israelis. The only thing America’s people get is the rath and scorn of the rest of the people in the world and the bills for the evil things our government commits around the planet.

      Our schools are the instruments of the government that teach this propaganda and teach our citizens to be docile workers that ask for nothing for their hard work. It is time that the people of this country start to pay attention to what is happening in our name and refuse to silently go along with it.

      One way for us to take back the controls is to refuse to vote. On election day people should go out to their polling places with signs and proclaim that they no longer will be used to validate a phony election for phony government officials who squander our money and do evil around the world. If enough of us make enough noise for long enough, we may get the attention of the media, we need to start somewhere to put a crack in the system that dominates us and saps us into submission. Once this phony democracy becomes the laughing stock around the world that it truly is, it will be hard to press evil governments on other populations and the government will have to start to change.

      This latest blatant election is a chance for waking the people up here like never before in recent history. Two stolen elections have shown that the candidates are phony and that the system is being controlled at a different level. Let’s lift the curtain on our secret government and expose it for all to see.

    • Good posting and a Vote Nobody campaign or a demand for a ’None of the Above’ portion on the ballot could be very effective With regard to Israel they need to be careful with their racist genocidal policies. Ok it may get $13bn from the USA every year for its state of art killing machinery, but it’s outnumbered and surrounded by brave arabs, who, at the moment have traitorous governments (just like us)in the pockets of US zionists. Because of this it can be argued that the genuinely motivated marine has more in common with the arab he’s shooting at than either has with those bastards Bush/Saddam. For Israel as a state to survive,they need to moderate their gratuitous killings. The Israeli powers that be owe this to their children , otherwise there will be a definite ’final solution’ in years to come

    • You’re all a bunch of ignorant fools! The arabs are playing tricks with you. It so sad that you are too stupid to realize it. Israel is a state for jews. Arabs have nothing to do there!!!!

  • The book, Revisiting the Shadows....includes the author’s story of her father, a music director and violinist, being commanded to perform just before his execution at Majdanek. This book just came out in January of 2004. Sadly, the human pain still continues...and the callousness can still be manifest.