“Occupation” was just a word to Yeshuda Shaul, founder of the Israeli veteran peace organization Breaking the Silence, before he joined the Israeli Defense Forces in 2001. For the next two and a half years, however, Shaul’s relationship with his job was “schizophrenic,” protesting the occupation one day, and enforcing it the next. After his service, Shaul and some of his fellow soldiers decided to “break the silence,” opening an exhibit in Tel Aviv in 2004 documenting Israel’s activities in the occupied territories, and educating a largely uninformed citizenry about its government’s human rights abuses.
Breaking The Silence has collected over 700 testimonies from Israeli soldiers serving in the occupied territories. Many are published in Our Harsh Logic: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Occupied Territories, 2000-2010.
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—Steven Hsieh
