Israel's State Attorney Concludes Investigation, Determines Breaking the Silence Spokesman Lied When Reporting Violence Against Palestinian
Earlier this summer, Dean Issacharoff, the spokesman of Breaking the Silence—an Israeli left-wing NGO dedicated to collecting testimonies from IDF soldiers who had allegedly abused Palestinians—led a group of tourist on a tour of Hebron. It was the same kind of well-rehearsed sortie that had inspired Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon to partner with the organization and release a controversial collection of essays about Israeli misdeeds great and small. But on that particular day, Issacharoff thickened the soup with a personal anecdote of his own.
Recalling his own military service, Issacharoff shared with his listeners a blood-curdling account. “I wanted to be a professional solider,” he said, remembering a particularly contentious interaction with a Palestinian suspect. “I had to escalate it into violence, so I kneed him until he almost passed out.” The account, unfurling in halting English, leaves little room for the imagination, and ends with Issacharoff saying that such brute force is inevitable when young soldiers, not experienced police officers, are called in to forcefully occupy a civilian population.