Former Israeli Soldier Itamar Shapira (Flora Fair)
It was a dark autumn evening in a small West Bank village north of Nablus. A group of Israeli soldiers had just fired on a Palestinian police jeep that drove through their blockade without stopping. The vehicle careened out of control, coming to a stop on the side of the road. Their guns ready, the soldiers waited to see if anyone inside the jeep moved.
As they stood there, several Palestinian villagers walked from a nearby hill, heading toward the jeep.
Among the soldiers watching the scene was Itamar Shapira, a young Israeli who began serving in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in 1999. All non-Arab Israeli youth, male and female, must serve in the IDF. Shapira was with the infantry and worked on explosive demolitions, eventually commanding new soldiers. He was also in Lebanon for the Israeli withdrawal of 2000.
But Sept. 11, 2001 changed everything. Though the terror attacks took place thousands of miles away in the US, they affected his work. He and fellow soldiers began entering Palestinian villages in the middle of the night, arresting men there. They bombed a road to punish residents for allegedly giving haven to terrorists. While soldiers arrested Palestinians, Shapira and others guarded the road leading into the village. That’s when the jeep came.
“We saw one gun pointing out of the jeep. We shouted at it to stop,” he said. Just seconds after shouting this warning, the soldiers shot and killed everyone in the jeep, according to Shapira.
When Palestinian villagers began coming toward the jeep, Shapira wasn’t sure of their motivations. “Our snipers were told to shoot anyone with a gun, but they couldn’t see,” he said. “Two helicopters went up and said they saw guns.” Everyone on the ground was ordered to fire.
In all, nine Palestinians died in the shooting. It was the first time Shapira participated in actual combat. “We were part of what today I consider as a massacre,” he said.
Shapira is sure that even if the Palestinians had been armed that night, they couldn’t have hit him and the other soldiers because they were several hundred meters away. “Luckily some of the soldiers did not obey orders, and a few lives were spared I think,” he said. Shapira, however, did obey the orders.
There were several more arrests and house demolitions throughout the night. Shapira said that in every village they went to, someone was killed.
“I never killed anyone again,” he said. “But it started something moving in me. Understanding I was a small part in a big political game.” He began to think seriously about the implications of what he’d done. “I was looking for all the reasons why I was really right, all the reasons why they were really right. And if I find that I’m not more right than them, I’m a murderer,” he said.
He tried to stop thinking about it, but he couldn’t let it go for long. “I realized I killed people and maybe I don’t have a reason to live,” he said. He began thinking about when he was a child, how he viewed Nazis as the ultimate evil. He realized Palestinian children must see him in the same way. He saw the cycle of revenge between Palestinians and Israelis as endless, meaningless.
“What’s the meaning of justice if you are creating more injustice,” he said, adding that the actions of the IDF were only creating a more desperate situation in which terrorism could thrive — giving Palestinians nothing left to lose.
While Shapira struggled with these ideas, a man on the other side of the wall was arriving at the same conclusion. Sulaiman Khatib, a Palestinian who had been recently released from Israeli prison, knew that violence accomplished nothing.
Khatib grew up in a small village near Jerusalem. When he was 12 years old, he joined the Fatah youth movement and would throw stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers. At 14, he and another boy attacked an Israeli soldier with a knife. The soldier survived and Khatib was sent to Israeli prison for more than a decade.
In prison, Khatib decided to change his methods. He participated in hunger strikes and other non-violent acts of protest to improve conditions there. “I read in the prison about both sides’ histories and other world experiences, so that made me want to struggle nonviolently,” he said.
Once he was released, he became active as a Palestinian youth leader. On a mission trip to Antartica in 2003, Khatib met Israelis who were not soldiers or police for the first time. He talked to them about their own experiences and decided to work with Israeli activists for peace.
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