"We do not understand what we are doing here": From the IDF to the Commando Brigade, from Givati to the Paratroopers - more and more fighters, from all the INFANTRY units, testify that the erosion and opacity of the IDF has left them no choice but to refuse

[ed note: The following is a machine translation from the Hebrew by Yandex. Some slang terms are not clear.]

After a year of war, the term is little changed for the fighters of the Nahal brigade. They entered their 11th round in September. Each round lasts about five weeks. After that, they take a break at home. For 11 months a fighting spirit filled their souls, round after round. But in the latter something changed. Out of a platoon of 30 soldiers, only six reported. The rest have retired.

"I call it disobedience and rebellion," says Inbal, the mother of one of the soldiers in the team. "They go back to the same buildings they purged, every time they are re-ensnared. In the Zeitoun neighborhood, they've been three times. They understand that it is pointless and pointless." Even though they were a fifth of the departmental workforce, the commander insisted that they enter Gaza. "Because they were a small team, they couldn't go on missions. They just stayed there and waited for time to pass. It was even more unnecessary."

Last spring, there was a meeting of Nachal alumni and fighters. "My son had finished a role and had to decide what he was doing next," says Rona. She is interviewed under a pseudonym, like other parents in the article, for fear that the military will harass their children. "He came home happy, went to the meeting and came back off. He said there had been a very frank conversation between the fighters who simply told anyone who could stay away from the fighting to stay away. They said they were doing operations without an order of forces, i.e. with few fighters. Because there's no fix,then things are done half way through and the mission doesn't really get done well. They're not really protected. When you're told they're going to replace you, it's 50-50. The wards are empty, everyone who is not dead or injured is mentally damaged. There are very few left who have returned to fight and are not fully fit either. That was before all the assassinations in Lebanon. Since then he has told me: 'I don't know which army they are thinking of entering Lebanon with, but there is no army. I'm not going back to the battalion."

And not only in the Nahal - interviews with more than 20 parents and fighters indicate that this phenomenon is also occurring in paratroopers, Givati and the commando brigade. A quiet and muted phenomenon, but also one that is growing. Many soldiers refuse to fight in Gaza and vote with their feet. The sense of cohesion and mission that filled them for long months of the war has dissipated. "They fought to the last drop of their strength until they reached the point where they could no longer continue," explains Idit, mother of a fighter in one of the commando brigade units. "Every one of them is doing it quietly, it's not a movement. One goes to the commander, and one goes quietly to his commander and says he can't and is taken out of combat or temporarily transferred to another position. Things are closing in on the squad and it happens all the time. There's a constant latent dropout from fighting. This is not disobedience but dropout for reasons of burnout." Among mothers, the phenomenon is called "silent insubordination"or" gray insubordination."

The war is going nowhere.

Many parents say that the morale of the fighters began as early as April, with the IDF shuffling through Gaza, when the sense of satisfaction and meaning was undermined. "When the return began to the places we were, like Jabaliya, Zeitoun and Shajaya, it broke the soldiers," Idit explains. "These are the places where they lost their friends. The area was already clear. It had to be preserved. It frustrated them a lot. What kills them is the conditions and duration of the fighting with no horizon to end. You never know when you're going to come out and it's been like that for a year. Not to mention the loss and the harsh sights they see in Gaza."

"In one month they had three serious incidents of casualties and fatalities," Yael, the mother of a commando brigade fighter, told "The Hottest Place." "The vast majority of soldiers can't say no, they are very dedicated, altruistic and instill in them the mantra that they are here for the team. It's very hard for them to go against the flow. They are naive and motivated by social pressure. After the second incident I spoke to my son and he told me 'We're like sitting ducks, we don't understand what we're doing here. Second and third time back to the same places. The abductees don't come back, and you see it's never-ending and on the way soldiers get injured and die. It seems useless." That was in March - four fighters of the unit were killed and dozens more wounded in three separate skirmishes in the Khan Younis area.

"The next time he didn't come in. The one after that he went in and there he finally decided that he wasn't going on." Her son's team had already been due for release but were due to continue fighting for another four months, supposedly under the reserve system. "He told his commander that he wanted to remain a fighter in the reserves, but that at the moment he can't because of his parents, that he doesn't trust and doesn't think there's any point in continuing. He got out but didn't get a warrant 8. Two months before him two men from his team refused and that's what gave him the courage. At the moment most of them are not being put in jail and silencing the phenomenon."

After 12 straight months of a war that's going nowhere, the soldiers are declaring themselves"black." Military slang means they are depressed, worn out and unmotivated. "At first he was very goal-oriented," says Ofer, father of a sniper in one of the infantry units. "He said,' Our job is to bring back the hostages, our job is to get revenge, ' and he went there with joy. But over time the motivation eroded. Today the motivation is zero."

What happens to those who refuse

The physical conditions also took their toll. For almost a year they've been pooping in a plastic bag. You get one shower in 60 days. They feed on cabanas or tuna. The only music they hear is the booms of the air Force and the smell in the air is of death and decay. Soldiers in the paratrooper brigade say they haven't taken off their shoes for 82 days and call themselves "throats," after the meager share in the poultry industry. They feel that the military is not looking out for them, that they are just a tool on the way to "ultimate victory." Like Nahal, the paratroopers did not go home for 82 days, even when there was a ceasefire. No phone and no communication with the world. The brigade commander, Col. Ami Biton, who previously served as commander of the Northern Division of the Gaza Division, believed that contact with the world outside Gaza would break their spirit.

The text message sent to the parents of paratroopers ahead of their first outing in December

On December 21, they went home for the first time since October 7. Just before, the parents received a text message with instructions not to ask deep questions and not to open wounds. "Avoid inquiring questions about the fighting," it said. "An invitation for processing is desirable after the fighting and not during it."

"The second time they brought them back for two months with one phone home and again we received similar instructions," says Deborah, the mother of Uri, a paratrooper. "We already knew what was going on and I started digging into him. At first he didn't want to hear and politics didn't interest him and he took care of his staff, his brothers-in-arms, he explained that they were more brothers than his biological brothers but we kept digging."

Uri's turnaround began after three officers from his company were killed by an anti-tank attack at a house in Khan Younis. The trauma, Uri says in a conversation with "The warmest Place," accompanies him to this day. "All the officers went up to the second floor of a building and they were together, close together and looking out the window," he recalls."A missile penetrated the building from another window and hit them. The whole company had to evacuate them. And almost everyone should have seen it. We were finished, we all wanted to go home and decided anyway to leave us inside and give us a captain who would talk to everyone. Both the Commander and the Commander spoke in a very dismissive manner in the spirit of 'it's a shame but let's continue'."

"We kept fighting. We went back to Shajaya and Khan Younis a couple of times. We took part in an operation to rescue alive abductees and an operation to recover bodies, so I felt I was doing something significant. At some point we were all worn out and we saw no reason to go back to the places we had already been. We were never given a full picture. At some point I stopped feeling. I stopped believing in the system. I didn't believe in what we were doing anymore."

According to Uri, the pressure from home was increasing and finally overpowering. In July, just before another entry into Gaza, he decided to refuse. "My brother caught me for a conversation. He told us that our mother was crying and that everyone was scared. I told him I was a medic and what would the team do without me? They're my friends. He said the team will find another medic, the army will find another medic, but my family will not find another medic."

The family conversation was the last straw. "It sat on me for a long time," he explains. Every time, they talked about another entrance. It's not fear of dying. You're going to suffer and you know it. I was mentally exhausted and had panic attacks at the level I went with my friend after we were told we were done manoeuvring, and only my battalion were told we were going back in after a week and I was sure I had a moment of comfort. I started crying on some lawn and said I can't do it anymore. I was mentally exhausted.

"I told my commander that I couldn't do more in all respects, because of the house and mentally. No one got it. My commander offered me a captain and I will continue to fight. I was afraid to tell him that I just didn't want to go into Gaza anymore and I wanted to maintain my standard and my rights. I wanted to continue to be a medic, but not a combat medic. But they said I couldn't maintain the standard. "You're either a fighter or you're nothing." I've been told that if I go out I lose my standard and don't get out as a fighter. Because I did not serve 85 percent of my service as a fighter, I am not eligible for a college grant, even though I fought for eight months in Gaza and before that I was a fighter. I was a few percent short. They used it to bargain with me. There are a lot of soldiers who were scared to go in at the beginning and stayed to a warrior standard even though they're not really combatants. But they wouldn't leave me the standard on the francip.

"The commander I grabbed so much from him, in a second he stopped referring to me. They saw it as a choice rather than a necessity, didn't see that I couldn't fight anymore. In my last conversation with the commander he pretty much said I was abandoning my country and then he made a call to the company. My friends saw it as a betrayal too.

"The day I came down from combat, a soldier came up to me and asked how I did it. He wanted to, but he didn't have the courage. The next day he got off the bus on the way to the manoeuvre, decided that was it, he wasn't doing it anymore. They were talking to him really nasty. He was told, ' You can take your fighter's certificate and shove it up your ass.' This is a soldier whose father had a heart attack while he was fighting and he still came back to fight. In the end, he came out on top of my mind and got out of the IDF."

Emotional Blackmail

Some units choose to deal with the mental distress of the fighters with a heavy hand. Apart from the ostracism, humiliation and dispossession of economic rights, the threat to take away the title of warrior, which has become part of their identity and a source of pride that has held them to this day, deeply undermines them. The large shortage of soldiers also leaves those who are mentally injured and in need of treatment.

"My son turned to his commander last month and told him, 'I feel that my vigilance has decreased in such a way that not only am I endangering myself, I am also endangering the people with me, I am not as sharp as I used to be,'" Ofer describes his sniper son's turning point. "He told the MP,' I want to work on myself, I want treatment.' The commander replied: 'Why did you move here?'" . According to the father, the Commander told him that he could only listen, and only a commander could decide to release him for a certain period of time for treatment. "They're treated like a number," he says. "The only way to stop this drift or to rest is to say I refuse and then turn you into the most humiliated thing on earth. Just like that. And it doesn't matter what you gave, what you went through, what you did. Or they'll want to visit you and give you some kind of role or refreshment to be processed, but there's no such thing. Sometimes when they go out then take them to the pool, give them a good time. The processing that exists today is very inadequate.It has no effect. It's with the whole department. Therapy with 40 other people. In life, people will never leave their hearts with people who serve with them 24/7."

On the other hand, those who do receive mental benefits from G-d have to deal with emotional blackmail. The brother of a fighter in one of the infantry brigades says that when his brother returned home from Gaza, he refused to sleep in his room, barely ate and was in very heavy emotional distress. "After struggling with the sense of duty that only a 20-year-old can feel toward the state, he asked to see the Almighty,"the brother describes. That was in June, when the Knesset was busy promoting the exemption from conscription for ultra-Orthodox soldiers and extending the service to regular and reserve soldiers.

The judge ruled that he was entitled to mental health benefits. But after this ruling, the commander took him for a personal one-hour conversation and pressed him nonstop, trying in every possible way to get him into another round of fighting in order to 'finish with the commander in good order.' My brother agreed to give up his camels under the promise that he would only enter for a week and then receive his mental camels." The team that started the fighting consisted of 20 soldiers. "At the moment, the officer's total is five. If my brother hadn't gone in, the team wouldn't have gone in either. In the end, my brother was stubborn enough to come to his senses and demand to redeem his camels, but two more days passed before he left the base, during which he was summoned for three more long conversations with the commander, each of which he was under heavy pressure to give up the camels and enter."

Psychologists Seek Citizenship

Contrary to the notoriety that has gone out to the camels, the soldiers make it clear that they are not trying to shirk, they are simply not holding out any longer. According to Naama Gelber, a clinical psychologist, mother of a warrior and activist in"Mother Awake," regular soldiers are a greater risk group. "They are more poisoned, they are at an age where it is more difficult for them to admit their difficulties, it is harder for them to say 'Great about me, I can't' and the torturers that the army provides them are less good (than reservists)."

The IDF prides itself on mental health awareness and the need to provide mental assistance to combatants, but testimonies from soldiers prove otherwise. In the entrance speech of the new Magellan commander, Lt. Col. Z., he told his subordinates:"I come from a Polish house, we don't talk about feelings, this is how I was brought up and this is my way." In a conversation he had with a team that one of his fighters had recently been killed, he told the fighters that he "did not believe in psychologists and did not believe in Kabbalists,"and warned that they would not be approached with requests for adaptations. "That's what you look for in citizenship," he said. The comments caused a storm throughout the unit and recently parents of the fighters asked for clarification from Lt. Col. Z. In conversation with them, he retracted the remarks, but the message to the fighters had already passed.

The erosion of the fighters is so extreme that hundreds of paratroopers recently decided to band together, just before entering Lebanon, to fight for their rights. In their conversations, they express mostly authentic anger, insult and distress at not realizing how much they need respite and rest at home. Even their wounded friends and bereaved families are unable to visit and comfort. In addition, they describe being threatened with fines for combat equipment lost or destroyed on October 7 or during the fighting and being denied new equipment until they have not signed that they are responsible for the loss. When they go on remissions at the base, the sergeant major picks on them for allegedly inappropriate modelling or haircuts and delays their departure home. When they send tactical equipment to the laundry, they absorb comments like "Why don't they do the laundry at home, all of it will come out of Gaza." Instead of taking them home to stockpile troops, they shut down barracks and do nothing, as they say. If attitudes do not change soon, " the little wind left in our sails will also end."

A spokesman for the IDF has yet to comment

This article is part of a series that deals with the consequences of prolonged fighting and the emotional toll it takes on fighters and their families. לפניות: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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