"I Killed More Than 40 People For You!: Israeli Soldier

ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: “I killed for you, with these hands! You say, ‘Terrorists with blood on their hands?’ I killed more than 40 people for you! I murdered!”

This stark admission was made by Ido Gal Razon, a former Israeli soldier, seen in the video above speaking to a committee of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on 11 November.

Razon wasn’t expressing remorse for the killings, but complaining that he has not been offered treatment for the severe psychiatric impact the butchery he committed in service of Israel has had on him.

“No one gives me therapy, and I complain! I shout,” he says. “I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says: ‘Why did you kill me? Why did you kill me?’”

Full View

It’s not clear who is haunting Razon at night, but he could be referring to any of the people he says he killed.

Razon says he was injured while a member of the 51st battalion of the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade when he took part in Operation Clear as Wine – an attack on Palestinians in the central Gaza Strip on 20 December 2007.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), Israeli forces carried out a major assault on al-Musaddar village and the adjacent Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on that day.

The attack left 8 Palestinian resistance fighters dead and injured 21 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including several children.

Amid indiscriminate shelling of the area, the Israelis destroyed at least 10 homes and razed dozens of acres of agricultural land.

The incursion began, according to Al Mezan Center For Human Rights, around noon, when an Israeli “special unit sneaked into middle Gaza area from the eastern border fence and headed to the west.”

The unit, of which Razon was presumably a member, “entered for one-and-a-half kilometers and reached the village of al-Musaddar in central Gaza. Soldiers stormed six tall buildings and held their inhabitants [in] one room in each building.”

According to PCHR, 23 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza that week, 10 of them in extrajudicial executions. It was also the week that Palestinians were celebrating Eid al-Adha, the end of the Ramadan fast.

Such Israeli assaults, with high tolls of death, injury and destruction, were routine events in Gaza well before the even more massive assaults in December 2008, November 2012 and during the summer of 2014, which together claimed 4,000 lives.

There is no doubt from watching the video that Razon was traumatized by the violence he took part in as a member of an invading, occupying force.

But there’s also no doubt that the victims of Israel’s war crimes have it much worse.

Watching Razon angrily talk about his psychological trauma recalls the words of Arnon Soffer, the Israeli academic and government advisor who helped plan for Gaza’s isolation in the early 2000s.

Soffer infamously said in 2004 that to keep Palestinians subdued and caged in Gaza, and thus preserve Israel as a Zionist “Jewish state,” it would have to “kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

“The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings,” Soffer added.

Ido Gal Razon is living proof that Zionism not only destroys Palestinians, but also those who are supposed to be its beneficiaries.

(The video was subtitled in English by Ronnie Barkan, and Dena Shunra provided additional research.)