by Jessica Kerry

There were three shocking things about the Israel Defense Forces I kept running into with my parents and sister during our stay in Jerusalem.

The first was the simple fact of seeing them in the first place. There were young troops everywhere, from the Israel Museum, to the Old City, to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, milling about in languorous packs, their dark green uniforms with rolled-up sleeves absorbing the sun’s heat. Their loud chatter interrupted our guide’s description of the Second Temple as we sat on the wide stone stairs that once led to a grand entrance through the Southern Wall; we got stuck behind a group filing slowly down the narrow steps to the old Roman street that cut through the Jewish Quarter ten feet below the modern ground-level. The boys’ olive skin and dark lashes captivated my sixteen-year-old sister.

Our paths kept crossing with them, we learned, because of a government-run educational program that takes new recruits to all of the same meaningful cultural and historic spots that tourists like us visit. Specially-trained education officers serve as tour guides to acquaint recruits with the significant points of Jewish history and heritage, so they can fully appreciate what they’ll have the responsibility of defending. I guess you need a program like this in a country where military service is mandatory, beginning at the age of eighteen and lasting two years for girls, three for boys. If they are going to have to fight, they better know what they’re fighting for. There’s nothing abstract or nebulous about serving a country whose neighbors want it gone, whose very existence in the years to come cannot be taken for granted.

The second shocking thing was that those young troops made me feel old by comparison: at eighteen, they were two years younger than me, and looked it. In most cases, two years don’t mean much; but somehow the difference there between eighteen and twenty felt significant. (Maybe it’s just that war seems like an occupation for grownups: one that I certainly couldn’t imagine myself undertaking, much less anyone younger than me.) Moving in small packs, whispering under the education officer’s lecture, flirting with each other en route to the next landmark—the groups of teenagers brought to mind my own field trips in high school with all their attendant boredom and hormonal energy. Olive drab aside, the giggling ponytailed girls would not have been out of place in the halls of any American high school.

Except that instead of backpacks hanging off one shoulder, they had automatic rifles. This was the third shocking thing. I had barely ever seen guns before (much less operated one) and now here was this pile of pointed black weapons outside the Yad Vashem visitors’ center that one group left before entering the museum: swinging the gun straps over their shoulders like a flimsy sack of potatoes and tossing the weapons down to land with a metallic clack one on top of the other. The guns didn’t even seem real.

Some of the male soldiers were still waiting for their adolescent growth spurts, making them look more like boys playing cops-and-robbers—or rather, soldiers-and-terrorists—than privates in one of the world’s fiercest armies. These kids would be returning not to a classroom, but to a training camp; to study not math and history but ambush and retreat. Despite their fresh faces, they were already mastering the grownup business of war.

We crossed paths with several IDF field trips at Mount Herzl, the Jerusalem hilltop named for Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, whose tomb is located along with those of several other important Israeli leaders. The northern slope of the hill is the national cemetery for Israeli soldiers killed in the state’s violent half-century of existence. The square flat stones lie in rows, each marked in Hebrew with the fallen soldiers’ vital information: name, the years of birth and death, the battle in which he or she fell, and the country of origin, since Israel is at its heart a land of immigrants who arrived in the past century from Eastern and Western Europe, North Africa, North America in a time-undoing reverse Diaspora.

Dotted around the terraced hillside, sitting in the shade beside the raised grass-covered tombs where unit members are buried side by side, were the greenhorn soldiers worshipping at the altars of their military forebears. I couldn’t hear what the education officers were telling them, but I imagine it was similar to the explanations from our guide of cemetery design and relevant military history. With the crucial difference that Israeli military history has to mean something more to those destined to write its next chapters. I can’t imagine what it must be like for those young recruits to visit the graves of those who died doing what was now their duty to do, who wore the same uniform and fought even before there was any uniform, when the troops were just skinny Holocaust survivors fresh out of the displaced persons camps.

What must it be like to visit a place that unavoidably declares: these people were all just like you, the young soldiers of Israel, and you could end up just like them—over there, in the section of recent additions dappled with the slowly wilting flowers their families left? It seemed insensitive to show the young troops the martyrs of past battles just as they were training to fight the battles of present and future; martyrdom is a lot to ask of an eighteen-year-old.

But in Israel there is no point in concealing the risks of military service or pretending the dead don’t exist. There is no tiptoeing around the subject of casualties or mortal danger, because there’s no illusion of safety to take for granted. In such a small country with such frequent violence, mandatory military service means that everybody has a loved one’s grave to visit on Mount Herzl—not to mention the countless civilian graves supplied by terrorism. Death is something you get used to in Israel, without ever really getting used to it. And sacrifice is easier to ask for when complacency isn’t an option, because the stakes are too high.

But the complex political situation in Israel means that military service isn’t always so straightforward and simple. Controversy has arisen over specific groups exempted from service, especially the Orthodox students of yeshivot, or Talmudic schools, highlighting the long-standing tension in Israeli society between its religious and secular factions. Not to mention that Israel’s tangled relationship with the Palestinians and Lebanese raises all kinds of questions about the moral and human price of Israelis’ safety and the concessions the country is willing to make in exchange for peace.

Internal conflict takes different forms: disagreement within the Jewish community about what it can afford to pay for security and peaceful resolution (last year’s pullout from Gaza is a prime example); and individuals’ own conflict between commitment to country and personal beliefs, which under easier circumstances wouldn’t have to be at odds. One Israeli we met had served jail time for refusing to serve his reserve duty in the West Bank, the remaining territory under de jure Palestinian Authority and de facto Israeli military control. Oren was a native of Tel-Aviv who had left his post as an officer in the IDF to study in the States and then work for B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based NGO dedicated according to their literature to protecting “human rights in the occupied territories”. He and a colleague, a Palestinian named Karim with a truly impressive smoking habit, took us in a decrepit van for a tour of the growing security barrier and the checkpoints in East Jerusalem, where the barrier is actually a reinforced concrete wall. In the Palestinian neighborhoods, the narrow roads that tack sharply back and forth in their lurching ascent of the Jerusalem hills have no sidewalks and no trash collection. It can take farmers and small businessmen hours each day to pass through security checkpoints to access their land or shops that lie on the other side of the concrete.

“I was in jail one month,” Oren told us as the van wheezed up the slope, “Because I refused to do my reserve duty in an occupied area where we are making hardship in these people’s lives. I tried to be—how is it called, when they allow you to not serve because of you are against war?”

“A conscientious objector,” one of us offered.

“Yes, exactly, but I could not do it because it isn’t that I am against fighting completely: I will serve anywhere except the West Bank because there it’s not helping anyone, it is only making the Palestinians’ lives more hard. And I told them that I will serve somewhere else, but they wouldn’t relocate me. So I had to go to jail one month, and I will do it again if I have to.”

Though Oren and B’Tselem’s position is controversial, with critics accusing the organization of advancing a pro-Palestinian agenda, it reflects the fundamental tension between Israel’s security demands (i.e. keeping out terrorists) and the state’s moral and democratic ideals. At what point does defending your own people cross the blurry line into oppressing others? While there are few who elect to go to jail instead of serving, this question certainly complicates military duty for those Israelis who can’t stand to see their country cross that line.

We made several stops on our East Jerusalem tour for particularly good views of the flat gray wall as it cut across the parched yellow-brown landscape. One of these stops was at a small Palestinian town perched on the crest of a hill, Abu-Dis, which the security wall had cleaved in two. The major part of the town sat on a high outcropping above the main road, leaving the separated portion stranded on the ledge below. Legal action brought by activist groups like B’Tselem had halted construction pending a decision from the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the dirt road into lower Abu-Dis had been blocked off by a pile of large rocks crowned with concertina wire, and a Jeep-full of Israeli military police standing by with their guns to supervise the trickle of people allowed in and out.

We got out of the van on a patch of dirt off the main road directly in front of the improvised stone barrier; facing us was the unfinished wall, an exposed cross-section of concrete with metal rods sticking out of it.

“The situation here is very extreme,” Oren said, after explaining our presence in Hebrew to a dubious MP. “The wall is cutting off this section here from the rest of the town, which is where everything is that they need: food, services, et cetera. Their groceries are delivered as far as these rocks here and they have to meet the trucks and carry the bags to their houses. The children must sneak past the guards every morning to cross to the other side because the school is there. When they don’t make it, they don’t go.”

On the other side of the stone barrier was a group of Palestinian men and boys: the boys kicked a soccer ball around the rocky clearing (there is no grass in East Jerusalem), while the men stood around like passengers at a station waiting for a train that wouldn’t come.

Our last stop on the tour was in an Israeli neighborhood overlooking a wide ravine, on the other side of which lay a Palestinian village. The entrance to the village, rigidly controlled by a security checkpoint, was on the other side; on the side facing us the tightly-packed houses clung to the lip of the ravine as if afraid of tumbling into the no-man’s-land below, a barren, dusty expanse of trash-strewn rocks and sand known in Israeli politics as a “buffer zone.”

The staunch guardians of the ravine were two uniformed girls of about my age, who looked supremely bored with staring off at the dust and distant shacks all day. Unlike the field-trip troops, these girls were actually there on duty, although they clearly weren’t seeing much action: they leaned against their Jeep, each with a rifle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. One girl had streaky blondish highlights that clashed with the toughness of her dusty fatigues and combat boots: there was something of the absurd in that juxtaposition of military uniform with the familiar bad dye-job of so many teenage girls.

Our similarity in age made me wonder what it would be like to meet those girls in a different, social context: Would I like them? Would they be just like me and my friends and your basic average American twenty-year-olds? Or does it take an altogether different kind of person, maybe stronger of character or just tougher, to defend a country? To wield an automatic rifle?

Seeing guns everywhere is just something you have to get used to in Israel. IDF troops aren’t the only ones who have them: ever since a group of elementary school kids was killed on a field trip a number of years ago, Israeli law has required that all school groups have one armed guard for every ten individuals. Similarly, companies that run tours in Israel hire private security guards who tag along behind the groups in civilian garb, their only demarcation the black rifle bouncing at the hip.

So even in the IDF’s absence, guns are present at every tourist site, which in Jerusalem means just about everywhere—especially during high season for Birthright tours when the youth of the Diaspora arrive by the thousands for ten free days of reconnecting with their Jewish heritage. My family’s trip to Israel happened to coincide with the June Birthright season, and the mostly American groups outnumbered even the IDF field trips at some sites. It’s hard to say which was stranger: the groups of pubescent soldiers, or the ordinary civilians with guns who flanked the noisy Americans.

The crowds of Israeli soldiers and young American tourists were an exercise in subtle contrasts: the two groups roughly the same age, so similar in demeanor and appearance except for the Israelis’ uniforms and deep golden tans. And their weapons, of course, a glaring distinction that spoke volumes about the enormous responsibility that young Israelis must live up to: defend the country and finally, somehow, bring peace.

Even as a visitor on a short trip, you get used to the teenagers in uniform and the guns, as you get used to the other peculiarities of life in a country constantly defending itself, for better or for worse, against people who want it to go away. You carry your passport with you at all times and finally start remembering to take the change out of your pocket before passing through metal detectors. You have your bag opened and ready by the time you reach your hotel’s front door so the guards can check it quickly. You learn to slow down for security checkpoints on the highway, where you probably won’t have to come to a complete stop if you don’t look Arab. And you discover that the lone soldiers by the side of the road aren’t standing guard or performing some exercise in isolation—they’re just trying to hitchhike home to their families in time for Shabbat.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 11th, 2007 at 8:56 pm and is filed under First Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories, Young Traveler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.