Moral price of the Israeli occupation?

Breaking the Silence, one of the groups supported by the New Israel Fund, is an organisation of former Israeli combat soldiers who want a public debate about the "moral price" paid by Israeli society for the occupation. They gather testimony from Israeli soldiers about their experiences, and it is hard to think of a group of people less anti-Israel than Israeli soldiers. But read their most recent report, containing the stories of dozens of female soldiers.

A lieutenant, posted in the Gaza Strip with the education corps, says: "The truth is that I only confronted it in retrospect, after leaving: suddenly I realised to what extent I had not been a human being out there ... It's like a movie with a lot of death around you, an unreasonable reality, with soldiers doing inhuman things to others and to themselves."

A sergeant from the Nahal unit: "I knew I was not real, I knew that something here was not right. If I pass a seated person and spit at him, and call him a terrorist because I've decided he's a terrorist, then something here is just not right. And that's what I tell everyone: come take a look at the blood of someone who's dead, it's not right."

Hat tip to Rory McCarthy of the Guardian, excerpted from his nuanced farewell file from Jerusalem in the UK Observer.