For a couple of weeks now Israel has been assaulted with a propaganda attack. It was started by the anti-Israel NGO Breaking the Silence and distributed world wide by their willing accomplices in crime at the media.
There have been a number of good rebuttals, which of course receive nothing like the prominence of the original false and tendentious claims of the malicious Breaking the Silence report. Matti Friedman’s piece in Mosaic is worth a mention, and NGO Monitor’s very quick demolition of the aims and organisation of BtS is also excellent.
Many of the claims in their report reminded me strongly of a very difficult interview I conducted with my own brother in law back in 2006. This went out on 21st August, 2006 two weeks after the end of the Lebanon war and he was going, straight after the interview, to the shiva (mourning period) of his friend who had been killed next to him.
Some of the points covered in this interview:
- The troops were living in vacated homes: they wouldn’t dream of looting them or using the food in them;
- They carried 40kg into Lebanon with them on their backs (or on recalcitrant llamas in some cases);
- Fighting face to face with Hezbollah the IDF were better but Hezbollah had much better distance weapons this time from Iran;
- Despite being in an area of Souther Lebanon which had been cleared of civilians for more than a week, after seeing a man dressed as a civilian (and knowing he had seen them) they were not permitted to shoot him. Minutes later they came under deadly fire;
- The ensuing fire fight, including a call for tank support, resulted in deaths of IDF soldiers from both Hezbollah missiles and Israeli tank fire;
I reported all this in 2006. Since making aliyah, on a number of Memorial Days I’ve accompanied my brother to the cemetery where his friend was buried. Each year we meet the tank commander who fired the shells that fell on his unit. Some time after this, he was awarded a significant decoration for administering first aid to wounded comrades while wounded himself.
Here’s the entire episode. The interview starts at 3:40.
Our original Shire Network News website has long ago disappeared, but Way Back Machine has a link to the show notes and I have an archive of all the audio.
