I was one of the panelists at the Breaking the Silence event at Temple Sinai in Washington last month ("Israel and U.S. Jews must break their shared silence," Voices, Dec. 12).
I never thought that after sharing experiences from my IDF service with fellow Jews I would be accused of helping to "kill Israelis and destroy Israel" ("Here's how to destroy Israel," Letters, Dec. 19).
I served in Sayeret Nahal, the special forces reconnaissance unit of the Nahal infantry brigade. I spent the first 14 months of my service in intensive training, after which my unit was deployed to the West Bank, where I served for eight months. We were then sent into the Gaza Strip during operation Protective Edge and today I am still periodically called for reserve duty in the West Bank.
We made it clear to everyone at Temple Sinai that we hadn't come to talk about the "rotten apples" of the IDF. The testimonials we shared, like the
testimonies of over 1,200 IDF veterans collected over 15 years by Breaking the Silence, do not describe isolated incidents; they describe the daily experiences we faced as soldiers, having been tasked with controlling a civilian population of millions of Palestinians against their will while protecting Israeli settlers living in their midst.
This is not hearsay. These are our experiences, which we took an active part in, and feel we cannot remain silent about. As Americans and Jews, we believe this is no less than an affront to the values we were raised on — that everyone is created equal and endowed with inalienable rights; and that our faith commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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