“First I was calm, then I became violent,” says a young woman. She “treated prisoners like animals.” The camera is fixed on her, you can see her struggling inside, struggling for words to describe what she did as a soldier in the Israeli army. How she arrested, slapped, kicked and insulted Palestinians at her deployment site in Hebron. “I’ve changed a lot in this position,” she says. “It’s hard to admit to myself what I’ve done.”
The testimony of this young woman is part of the documentary “Silence Breakers”, which describes the work of the Israeli NGO “Breaking the Silence”. It is difficult, painful work, because the activists of the organization, which was founded in 2004, turn their spotlight on dark corners of their country. They collect testimonies from former soldiers who break their silence and, as whistleblowers, provide information about army violence in the occupied Palestinian territories. They want to show how the occupation, which has lasted for 55 years, is poisoning the young conscripts, the army and society as a whole.
Filmmaker Silvina Landsmann, 56, who grew up in Buenos Aires and immigrated to Israel with her parents as a child, accompanied the activists’ work for several months. She went with them to Hebron, the largest city in the occupied West Bank. She was present in Palestinian villages whose inhabitants are subjected to violence by settlers. She also followed the internal debates at the NGO’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. With her camera she was always very close – it is pure experience, without explanations, without comment.
“I don’t want to give my opinion, I just want to understand,” Landsmann said at a meeting in Tel Aviv about working on the film. She spent five years working on it, with more than 450 hours of raw material to view and cut. “I followed my protagonists every day without knowing what kind of film it would be,” she explains. “Sometimes nothing happened at all, sometimes there was great drama.”
The film, she says, is intended to be a “window” through which one can look into Israel’s complex reality. You not only see the work of the activists, you also see how society reacts to this work. In short: You see a country torn apart.
“In this system, no soldier can do the right thing,” says one activist
A member of “Breaking the Silence” is shown leading a group of visitors through Hebron while being attacked by settlers. “You deserve a good beating,” they shout. “Get out, you cocksucker.” It’s no less turbulent in Tel Aviv, where activists distribute flyers and are called “assholes.” And things aren’t much more civilized or friendly in television studios or during a discussion in the Israeli parliament: the activists who broke the silence are called “traitors.”
In these debates, in this dispute, in these hostilities, the film raises the question of what it means to be a soldier in Israel today. At the age of 18 everyone has to join the army, the young men for almost three years, the women for two years. Almost everyone sees this as a patriotic duty. After all, Israel is surrounded by enemies and must be able to defend itself. So everyone who goes to “Breaking the Silence” afterward probably joined the army as a patriot.
And out of patriotism, out of concern for his own country, he later testified about what can become of the Israeli Defense Forces when the soldiers are deployed as occupying forces. “We don’t want to criticize the army itself,” says one of the activists in the film. “But in this system, no soldier can do the right thing anymore.”
