Don’t let Israeli army brainwash you, warns powerful short film - watch

A new dark, psychological short film by Nadim Hamed produced by Eyad Barghouti in cooperation with the Palestinian civil society groups 7amleh and Baladna makes a bold statement against Israel’s latest attempts to enlist Palestinian citizens of Israel in the occupation army.

Project X features Samer Bisharat (star of Oscar-nominated Omar) as a youth who is brainwashed into serving in the army. But instead of gaining the privileges promised by a Palestinian collaborator, the young man realizes only devastating psychological and social costs as a result of his choice to serve.

The artistically potent short takes up one of the most pressing issues facing the nearly 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel who face daily systematic discrimination from education to employment and severe restrictions on land ownership.

Repression

Israel has long sought to repress national identity amongst the Palestinians who managed to remain on the land conquered by Zionist forces in 1948 when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from approximately 500 villages and cities.

The latest effort aims to drive a sectarian wedge between Palestinian Christians and Muslims in present-day Israel. In February, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved a law identifying Palestinian Christians as a non-Arab minority group.

According to journalist Jonathan Cook, “The measure is a minor one: It provides Christians with separate representation in the national employment advisory council. But it lays the foundations for a much greater scheme declared by [chairman of the ruling Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu faction Yariv] Levin to create a Christian nationality, leaving the traditional ‘Arab’ one to refer to Muslims only.”

Meanwhile, Israel has groomed a handful of clergy and members of the Christian community to promote military service among Christians, and recently sent out recruitment papers to Palestinian Christian youths.

Except for minority groups such as the Druze, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise approximately 20 percent of the state’s population, are not required to perform army service.

Many state benefits are tied to army service, including employment, and “Israel may be banking on desperation driving some youths into the army’s hands,” as Ali Abunimah has noted.

Resistance

However, the reruitment efforts are being met with resistance by Palestinian students at Israeli universities and anti-enlistment campaigning by Palestinian civil society organizations.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Druze youths are refusing to serve in the army and the state is facing an organized campaign within the community against the compulsory enlistment.

Eighteen-year-old Omar Saad has served approximately 150 days in prison since 4 December, when he reported to an Israeli military induction center to declare his refusal to serve in the army.

Saad, one of the longest-serving conscientious objectors in Israel, is currently recovering at home from a liver infection which his father has blamed on the poor conditions of the military prison where Saad was being held.

Another conscientious objector, 18-year-old Orthodox Jew Uriel Ferera, was given a second ten-day prison sentence on 25 May for his refusal to serve in the military, the anti-militarization group New Profile reported. [UPDATE: shortly after this post was published, New Profile reported that Ferera was handed down a third sentence yesterday — this time twenty days — of imprisonment.]

New Profile and a number of other human rights, community and political organizations, including Amnesty International, Baladna and the Druze Initiative Committee, have launched an online petition calling on Israel to end the detention of conscientious objectors. More

 

© 2014

Confessions of a Drone Warrior

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan.

The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.

It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.

He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”

That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.

The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.

Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf.

Despite President Obama’s avowal earlier this year that he will curtail their use, drone strikes have continued apace in Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan. With enormous potential growth and expenditures, drones will be a center of our policy for the foreseeable future. (By 2025, drones will be an $82 billion business, employing an additional 100,000 workers.) Most Americans—61 percent in the latest Pew survey—support the idea of military drones, a projection of American power that won’t risk American lives. More

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Chatham House Conference - Stop Killer Robots

 

© 2014