IDF Snipers - how they cope with intimate kills

A recent study about snipers in Israel has shown that snipers are much less likely than other soldiers to dehumanise their enemy,  the BBC's Stephanie Hegarty reports.

Part of the reason for this may be that snipers can see their targets with great clarity and sometimes must observe them for hours or even days.
"It's killing that is very distant but also very personal," says anthropologist Neta Bar. "I would even say intimate."

She studied attitudes to killing among 30 Israeli snipers who served in the Palestinian territories from 2000 to 2003, to examine whether killing is unnatural or traumatic for human beings.
She chose snipers in particular because, unlike pilots or tank drivers who shoot at big targets like buildings, the sniper picks off individual people.
What she found was that while many Israeli soldiers would refer to Palestinian militants as "terrorists", snipers generally referred to them as human beings.

There were about 20 gunmen escorting a convoy and one of them was unlucky enough to get in the sight of my scope. The distance was about 300m, almost nothing for a sniper.
A few seconds later I saw him lying motionless.
In the heat of the moment my only thought was to shoot more and more. I saw the figures rushing in panic and trying to hide.

We killed all of them, except three or four who were wounded and captured. Afterwards I blamed myself for not being cool-headed enough. I thought that if I had been calmer, I would have killed more enemies.

"The Hebrew word for human being is Son of Adam and this was the word they used by far more than any other when they talked about the people that they killed," she says.

Snipers almost never referred to the men they killed as targets, or used animal or machine metaphors. Some interviewees even said that their victims were legitimate warriors.

"Here is someone whose friends love him and I am sure he is a good person because he does this out of ideology," said one sniper who watched through his scope as a family mourned the man he had just shot. "But we from our side have prevented the killing of innocents, so we are not sorry about it."

          This justification - which was supported by friends, family and wider Israeli society -
          could be one reason why the snipers didn't report any trauma after killing, she suggests.

"Being prepared for all those things that might crack their conviction, actually enabled them to kill without suffering too much."

She also noted that the snipers she studied were rational and intelligent young men.
In most military forces, snipers are subject to rigorous testing and training and are chosen for aptitude. In the UK, they complete a three-month training course, with a pass rate of only one-in-four.

War-Weary Kids & Snipers in Diapers

It doesn’t take an air strike, or a telephoned warning that Israeli bombers are on the way, to terrify the war-weary children of Gaza, Jan McGirk reports in the London Independent. (click above to read entire piece.) Heightened surveillance is enough to cause nightmares.

Lasers glow red in the night like the eyes of wild beasts. An enemy spy drone, like a pale fish-shaped balloon, hovers high overhead to eavesdrop and snap photos. Heaps of fresh rubble cast weird shadows. And sonic booms – louder than a crack of thunder – trigger dread whenever F-16 fighter jets fly low.

In Gaza’s grim conditions, mothers find it hard to tell if their offspring are crying out of fright, pain or misery. But when normally bickering brats fall silent, it’s the first sign of mental scars from being constantly scared...

No sane child can remain unaffected by the mayhem of Gaza Strip. Playmates frequently are killed or maimed: at last count, Israeli guns had slain 89 Gazan children and wounded another 343 since mid- June, about one quarter of the total casualties of the back to back Israeli offensives...Factional feuds and inter-clan battles fell dozens more Palestinians in the crossfire. Three young sons of Baha Baalusha, a senior intelligence officer loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, were gunned down along with their driver during the morning school run on Monday, Dec 11th. The brothers were aged six, seven and nine. Four other classmates were sprayed by bullets and wounded....

“Children between age six and 12 are the most vulnerable to phobias,” explains Maha el Shawwa, who coordinates all Welfare Association programmes in Gaza. “Littler ones just cling to their mothers or grandmothers, but school-age children start wetting their beds or fearing the dark. They feel ashamed and get teased mercilessly by neighbours and siblings. We try to promote awareness of these simple problems, so the mother won’t place the wet mattress in the sun to dry where everyone can see it.”

In Beit Hanoun, a northern Gaza town, householders discovered that Israeli snipers who stay alert at the trigger all night must wear disposable diapers because they are forbidden to leave their posts. The snipers leave the used ones behind – sealed plastic packets of contempt. Schoolboys who soil themselves at night because they fear walking down a dark hallway often get mocked by their peers as IDF goons with smelly pants. It’s a slow battle for them to regain confidence.

Little Omar, a two year old who witnessed Israeli troops demolishing his father’s orange groves and converting his house to a barracks, mounts a barren hill every morning and simply screams at the horizon.

While most older children attempt to swallow such rage, others feel the need to strike out.

Little Omar, attempting to play in his father's ruined orange grove, heads away from his hill.

It is interesting to note that in Sderot, where hundreds of Qassam rockets have landed, Israeli children suffer many of the same traumatic stress symptoms. Very few have taken up psychosocial services, though, because there seems to be a stigma attached to admitting mental frailty.
Many of the young residents require play therapy in the Russian language, not Hebrew.

Hellacious Hebron

Mohammed Alatar, a Texas-based Palestinian filmmaker who is shooting a new documentary about three faiths colliding in Jerusalem, repeats a sort of mantra at every screening of "The Iron Wall", his cinematic opus on the security barrier. Alatar urges any Israeli he meets to do something about the venal atmopshere that blights Hebron. It feels like a ghost town run by vicious enforcers, and grows increasingly tense.

Daily life in this ancient trading center, which was officially chopped into two unequal chunks, is utterly paralysed. Hatred pulses there, and the mutual mistrust of settlers, soldiers, and Arab residents is palpable. The venerable City of the Patriarchs has been brutalised for decades and to live there must be a nightmare. So how can we take steps to fix this mess?
Hebron settler shoulders a rifle for protection at the Arab market back in 1987/photokees vintage photo

Contrast with photo snapped nearly two decades later by Ohel Nashim during her harrowing visit.

Military $$ go for Mezuzahs

It’s no secret that Israel routinely gets multi million-dollar military aid packages from the United States, but I was intrigued to find out that not all of this largesse gets spent on weaponry and armour. Made-in-USA mezuzahs, the little encased scrolls which the Torah requires to be mounted on every Jewish doorway, accounted for at least $30,000 of the IDF budget. How did protective amulets for the new Tel Aviv offices of the Prime Minister, the Defense minister, and their generals get labelled military hardware? Excuse the expression, but it appears to be some pork-barrel project, perhaps cooked up by powerful Jewish lobbyists.

According to Itamar Eichner, a reporter for Yedioth Ahronoth, that’s not necessarily the case. American military aid must be spent on American goods, in batches worth $30,000 or more. Since the state-of-the-art Defense Ministry building at the Kirya in Tel Aviv has hundreds of new entrances and exits which require divine protection, the mezuzah money had to come from somewhere. Why not use some Yankee dollars? Forget the devout scribes who toil away on parchments in Jerusalem’s alleyways or traditional Jewish artisans who have fashioned mezuzah covers for generations. Israeli top brass ordered a big batch of cut-rate Judaica from dealers in the United States in order to meet the foreign aid requirements. The Defense Ministry confirmed, rather sheepishly, that the cheaper American mezuzahs had been ordered. Delivery, courtesy of the American military, was included, I presume.