Another soldier dies for kadimas

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insane agenda    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/773371.html

[mord]

insane agenda    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/773371.html

     
 
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Itai Schwartz. After a year in the army, he succeeded in raising his profile and entering a combat unit. (Reproduction photo by Limor Edrey)
 
 

 
The sorrows of young Itai
 
By Aviva Lori
 
It was a matter of friendship, says Eva Schwartz. Too many friendships and personal relations between the army and the settlers led to disaster. Colonel Yuval Bazak, who recently completed his term as commander of the Samaria Brigade, takes the same view. "Many times, the army, in the name of such friendship, did not fully carry out its responsibilities, such as in the case of the illegal settler outposts," he said in an interview with the Ynet Internet site.

"Too many times, we turned a blind eye. It was convenient not to deal with issues having to do with law and order. The evacuation of Amona was the peak, the radicalization of the fringes, which expanded. This is the most dangerous phenomenon. We saw many cases of breaches of order and of violence that we did not see previously, certainly not with this intensity and this frequency."

The name Amona and the events surrounding the army's evacuation of the illegal Samaria outpost last February will always draw a reaction of outrage from Eva Schwartz. Just thinking about it is enough to set her on edge. She responded furiously to the interview with Bazak: "My son was a soldier in Nahal," she wrote in talkback number 172. "His company took part in the evacuation of the access road to Amona the night before. There was an extremely violent clash between the soldiers and the settlers. My son underwent atrocities, a terrible trauma, because of the settlers. They spat on his beard and called him a Nazi. A kid who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. They cursed him, beat him, knocked him down. The word atrocity can hardly convey what he went through there. The settlers and that battle, which was really a civil war, generated a mental collapse from which he never recovered.


 
 
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"A month and a half later he killed himself on his base in Samaria. In the note he left he said that he saw the hatred in their eyes. He did not want to be in this kind of world, in which brothers trade blows. Because of those settlers I do not have a son today. I will never forgive them. Accursed may they be. You think that you can do whatever you want. For how long?"

The rage of Eva Schwartz, a lean, introverted woman, has not abated. In the living room of her home in Modi'in, she talks and weeps by turns, refusing to be comforted, pointing an accusing finger at the settlers above all, but also blaming the army for the death of her son. Everyone remembers Amona, she says, from the violent images broadcast on television on the day of the evacuation, from the blood dripping from the head of MK Effi Eitam and from the interim report that gave rise to a parliamentary committee that investigated the confrontation. ("The report was comprehensive and most of its conclusions were accepted by the police, so there was no need for a final report," says the committee chairman, Yuval Steinitz of the Likud.) What is much less known, Schwartz says, is what happened on the night before the evacuation, the night between January 31 and February 1. The night when her son, she says, took one blow too many.

Without pity

"Before Amona, he took part in the evacuation of [the outposts of] Sa-Nur and Homesh and told us horror stories about the way the settlers treated them," Schwartz says. "But the peak came in Amona. Their task was to guard the road leading up to the hill, to leave it open for the evacuating forces. But the settlers blocked the road, so that the evacuating forces would not be able to pass, and that happened at night, before the evacuation, and all the media outlets missed what happened there."

S., the commander of one of the companies in Itai Schwartz's battalion, explains: "Our mission that night was to move the settlers off the road and remove the stones, so that the tractor and the bulldozer would be able to get through the next morning and demolish the buildings in Amona." However, the settlers learned of the plan and entrenched themselves on the road in the form of a human chain.

"It was a very, very, very brutal event," says G., a soldier from Itai Schwartz's company, who was there that night. "Now, after the war [in the north], and compared to what we went through, it is slightly dwarfed, but at the time it was a harsh event - physically, and especially mentally. Everyone went through a crisis. They [the settlers] lashed into us without any pity.

"We arrived at night, the first force. We were supposed to drive them back and separate them. It was terrible. Two of us were hit in the head by stones and there were also sticks. People were wounded and had to be evacuated. We had truncheons but didn't use them even once. It affected us all very powerfully. It influenced Itai more than the others. He wasn't capable of doing it. He stood by the side and waited until it would be over. I was next to him. I did what I did and he stood at the side and cried, you could say. He didn't refuse the order, but he didn't do what he was supposed to do."

A month and a half later, on March 16, Itai Schwartz committed suicide. The next day he was to go home for the weekend. He shot himself with his personal weapon on a Thursday at 5:15 P.M. on his base in Samaria. An hour and a quarter after he spoke to his mother on the phone and told her, "Mom, don't worry." An hour after writing a farewell note for the world. A trenchant note, etched in agony:

"Maybe you will think that what I did is extreme, but from where I see it, life is not self-evident. Our world is cold and disgusting. Man is a wolf to man. It is a world without love. Love is dead! In Amona I was witness to hatred. I saw people who are supposed to be brothers exchanging blows. The hatred was in their eyes. I do not want to remain in such a world."

Not long before this, his girlfriend of four years had broken up with him, and his pain was great.

"Even the last person I trusted left me, because in the end everyone leaves. Now even this is gone and I am so weary. Weary of being abandoned anew every time. Weary of fighting for everything that should be self-evident, weary of looking for justice. The time has come to rest. Tell my family that it's not their fault and I'm sorry. Itai."

Itai's parents, Eva and Yaakov, are trying to collect the pieces of the puzzle and fit them together into a coherent whole. Itai was home on the weekend after Amona and told them what he and his buddies had gone through. "He said 'I saw the hatred in their eyes' and I asked him how it was possible to hate someone you don't know," Yaakov relates. "There was a very brutal clash with the settlers there. They hit the soldiers. There were wounded soldiers, there were blows. They spat on his beard and called him a Nazi."

But Itai didn't tell his parents the whole story. It was only after his death that they learned about his true signs of distress, from reading the "Green Leaf" forum on the Internet and from what they heard from his commanders and buddies during the shiva week of mourning.

"There are images from that evening that are still stuck in my head and will probably remain there during the coming period," Itai wrote in the forum. " ... I remember the rocks and the illumination flares they threw at us. More than anything I remember the blows between the settlers and the soldiers. How one of us was trampled there on a rock for a few minutes. The wounded on both sides and the spitting, the looks, the anger ..." He wrote that he preferred talking and dialogue.

"The person who was trampled on the rock was Itai," his father says. "One of his commanders told me in the shiva how they trampled him and how he was in total shock and how they got him out of there and sat him down by the side. From the officers I understood that some soldiers were evacuated to hospital and also that Itai did not hit back. He was short, just one meter 57, but he was a judoka at a level that no regular person could knock him down if he didn't want to be."

"He told us about hair-raising experiences," his mother says. "He said it was a civil war. And he didn't understand how that could be. He went to guard them in the territories, to nab terrorists so they wouldn't be attacked, and they called him a Nazi. He told about children who would made a hole in the fence that surrounds the settlement and then would run away to make the soldiers risk themselves by chasing them. They allow themselves unbelievable things. That caused him a very deep crisis of belief."

Itai Schwartz was almost 22 when he died. He was born in Holon and spent the last 10 years of his life in Modi'in. He has a sister, Hila, 30, and a brother, Omer, 16. His father immigrated to Israel from Hungary in 1957, studied electronic engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva and works for Tadiran, a communications company. His mother, also from Hungary, settled in Israel in 1969 and studied science education - she teaches in a Modi'in junior high school. Itai was born after many difficulties. "It was a very precious pregnancy," Eva says, "after many miscarriages."

From an early age, he suffered from speech and writing difficulties, but overcame them with physiotherapy and intense physical activity. In 10th grade he was found to have an underactive thyroid gland, a condition that had led to a decline in his school grades. The problem was dealt with by a drug that restored his equilibrium. At the age of 15 he began to develop a political and social awareness. He became a vegetarian and a romantic idealist with a love of humanity, animals and nature. He asked his parents not to buy Colgate toothpaste because of the experiments the company is said to conduct with animals, and not to drink Ein Gedi mineral water because, in his opinion, the company was harming the environment. He went often to a hill near his home that was designated a nature reserve, to pick up waste left behind by hikers.

As the time for his army service approached, he talked about volunteering for the Paratroopers. "I couldn't understand why he wanted to do combat service," his mother says. "He was a very intelligent boy. But when it turned out that his army profile was only 64, because of the thyroid problem, he said he wouldn't serve at all, because he didn't want to be a clerk."

He completed high school in a theater track and wanted to be an actor. "His skills in the natural sciences were greater than his acting skill," his mother says, "but he disavowed that. All he was interested in was the theater and the youth movement."

Before being drafted, he volunteered for a year's community service with the Haoved Vehalomed (working and learning) youth movement, based in a Haifa commune. But that didn't work out, and he went into a pre-army course as a driver.

"It was all from his fear of becoming a clerk in the army," his father notes. "How do they take a kid with his high psychotechnic results and make him a driver?" Eva Schwartz says. "The army could have made better use of him."

Person of principles

Itai began his army service as a driver, but quickly realized it wasn't for him. His parents helped him get a transfer. "We approached the adjutancy unit through someone we know," his father recalls. "He checked Itai's data and almost flipped. 'What is a kid like this doing as a driver?' he asked, and got him into a paramedics' course."

Itai served as a paramedic in a religious pre-army boarding school and set out to get his army profile raised. "We knew what he was up to and we were against it," Yaakov Schwartz says, "but there was nothing we could do. It was stronger than anything with him. He went to an army doctor, who started to gradually reduce his medication until he reached the conclusion that Itai no longer needed it, and in the end raised his profile to 82 - combat quality in every respect - and he immediately submitted a request to enter a combat track."

In November 2003, after a year in the army, Itai Schwartz started from scratch again. He did combat basic training with the Nahal Brigade and then advanced training, at the end of which he was posted as a combat paramedic in a battalion that guarded settlements in the territories. "In order to guard those accursed settlers," snaps his mother.

Itai enjoyed the training and felt a sense of satisfaction. M., a soldier who served with him then, recalls the romanticism that was an integral part of Itai's motivation. "For him to be a fighter was a virtue of the highest level. Straight out of the books. Like the old-time generation. Today people take it for granted, whereas he was in awe of it. Like our grandfathers."

The continuation has less lustre. Itai's tendency to see and judge things in black and white terms did nothing to help him get through the daily routine smoothly. "Most people cut corners," his mother says. "He was a very meticulous boy. He wouldn't give in or compromise and he had to fight for small, silly things, because order was very important to him. There were many times when he had nothing to eat, because of his vegetarianism. I told him to take food from the house with him, but he said, 'No, the army has to feed me.' When he stayed on base for Shabbat he didn't eat anything, because they always had cholent [which contains meat]."

S., one of Itai's officers, frequently was on the receiving end of the complaints. "He was introverted, but fought for everything he wanted to achieve," S. recalls. "A person of principle. And there were things he would not compromise on. A small example - when the kitchen forgot to prepare a vegetarian dish, another person would take rice and be satisfied with that, but he didn't let it pass. He had to bring it to the attention of the commanders, so they would know it wasn't right."

His period of service in the pre-army boarding school brought him closer to religion, his parents say. He started to pray, put on tefillin (phylacteries) in the morning, and grew a beard. "That was partly for convenience and partly him becoming more religious," his father explains. "But when he came home for the weekend he drove on Shabbat. It started before he was drafted. He believed in God and in the next world. Maybe that influenced his decision to commit suicide. He conducted philosophical conversations and read books of philosophy. When the army returned his effects I found Orwell's '1984' there. In recent years he went to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with Eva's father. I used to go, too, but I stopped in the past two years. I am very angry at the religious community for the way they use Holocaust symbols and resort to violence."

Fury in the eyes

In the army he was considered a "rosh gadol" - a "big head," one who cares and takes responsibility - and a reformer. "If you killed a fly he couldn't understand why. He was a kind of flower child, a nature kid," says a soldier from his platoon. After Amona the soldiers had talks with their officers to sum up the operation. "Itai didn't say a word," Eva says. "That's what he told us afterward. The commander said it was another of their difficult missions and they had to go forward. No reference was made to the mental trauma they underwent. The soldiers didn't talk about it among themselves, either, as though nothing had happened. I asked Itai whether the army had prepared them for the mission. He said there had been preparation the previous August, before the evacuation of Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlements], but no one had talked to them since. I understand that there was no time before the operation, but they could have devoted a little more time afterward. The Military Police were well prepared beforehand and they talked to them after the operation."

S., the officer, has a somewhat different recollection of the events. "There were talks at the platoon level in order to get feedback and so we would know if anyone needed treatment, and we didn't form the impression that anyone had reacted unusually, so we saw no reason to give anyone mental aid, and we went ahead with our missions. Itai may have been in distress, but he didn't project that externally."

People don't always project things - you knew they had a hard night.

"It was a hard night, but all told we had missions like that all along. His company served in Sa-Nur earlier and experienced daily friction with the settlers. At Amona we didn't know what lay in store for us, but in retrospect I would say that it was equally hard in both places."

Itai's parents believe that that night was especially hard.

"Not everything went smoothly. Some soldiers cracked. The friction was physical at a level where we saw the settlers' faces. I would imagine that the rage he saw in their eyes hurt him very much. He noted that in his [suicide] note. He took it hard that we were protecting the settlers and they vented their anger in the form of violence against us."

The IDF Spokesperson's Unit says in response: "Prior to embarking on the mission, the commanders of the force in which Itai Schwartz served held a preparatory talk with the soldiers. In addition, summarizing talks were held after the mission, in which the soldiers were able to tell about their feelings and also get help if needed. This was done at the directives of the mental health personnel."

Two weeks after Amona, Itai Schwartz came home for Shabbat and said nothing about any mental distress, apart from the pain of breaking up with his girlfriend. On Sunday he returned to his base. There were serious terrorist alerts in the area and all furloughs were canceled. And now, Itai's situation was complicated by a new source of distress: he was sentenced to three weeks without furlough for refusing an order.

The argument was over the legality of kitchen duty. By accident, he was given two consecutive days of work in the kitchen. He was awakened at 6 A.M. to prepare breakfast for the entire company, but he didn't want to get up. The company commander explained to him that first he had to carry out the mission, whether it was right or not, and argue about it later. His platoon commander, who happened to be on a mission outside the base, spoke to him on the wireless and said he would be back in an hour and solve the problem. Itai would not retract his refusal. and was punished by being made to remain on the base three days after his buddies went on their first furlough after the alerts.

Note on the bed

On the day before he was scheduled to go on leave, he chose to end his life. He planned it all meticulously. He wrote a note, placed it on the bed below his (he slept on the upper part of a bunk bed), removed the clip from his rifle and left one bullet in the barrel. At approximately 5 P.M. he got a phone call from his former girlfriend. He climbed over the stone wall of the base and sat down on the other side. With one hand, he held the mobile phone close to his ear, and with the other he held the rifle, which he placed on the ground with the barrel pointed at his throat.

That is how he was found by a friend who was summoned by a soldier who saw him from the watchtower. "He drew our attention to the fact that Timmy [Itai's nickname in the army] had been sitting there a long time in the same position," says M., the soldier whom the guard called. "I went to see what was happening. He saw me and hid the rifle, but when I saw the rifle and the way it was positioned I understood that this was not good. Even as a joke, you don't hold a rifle like that. Instinctively I started to jump, but when I noticed there was no clip I slowed down, because I thought it was less terrible. And then, as I was moving toward him, the shot came."

Could it have been accidental?

"I don't think so. For that to happen you have to [censored] the rifle, open the safety and put your finger on the trigger - that's a lot of actions - and he was already beyond all that. All that remained was for him to squeeze the trigger."

A., the friend on whose bed the suicide note was left, didn't notice it at first. "I got back to the room little earlier," he says. "There were several of us there, but I didn't see the note on the bed."

Itai's friends are undecided about whether he fit the "suicidal soldier" profile. "If you asked me who in the platoon could do that, I would have pointed to him first," says G. "But if you asked me in general, it would never have crossed my mind. Yes, he was very extreme in his reactions, for good or for ill, a bit depressive, very sensitive, gentle and vegetarian, but that still doesn't mean anything."

His parents find it difficult to accept the manner of his death. "His battalion was in Lebanon and they had a great many casualties," his father says. "If Itai had been killed in battle, that would be something else completely. It would be easier to cope with the bereavement of war than it is with the bereavement of suicide. Because the bereavement of suicide could have been prevented."

Eva: "He would have been so happy if he had been in Lebanon."

Yaakov: "We also would have felt differently if he had fallen there and not a few months earlier."

He missed his death by a few months?

Yaakov: "Yes."

How do you cope with it?

Eva: "You don't. I have nothing else in my head, only this. Itai had not been home since Amona, except for one weekend. We didn't see him, we didn't know there was anything wrong, but they saw it in the army and did nothing. Someone told me afterward that he said, 'If I kill myself, will I get an after [special furlough]? Will they let all of you come to the funeral?' The platoon commander told me that he wasn't okay, that he spoke to him and asked if he wanted to see a mental health officer, but Itai didn't want that. If they were aware of it, why didn't they deal with it? It's their responsibility. It was their duty to watch over him. It's inconceivable that no one should take responsibility for a death that could have been prevented."

More than six months have passed since the suicide, but the Military Police have not yet completed their investigation. "Within the framework of the investigation, every attempt is being made to clarify what led to the death of the deceased," the IDF Spokesperson's Unit states. "The issue of his commanders' responsibility and the treatment he received from them are also being examined. After perusing the initial findings of the investigation, the Military Advocate General's Office ordered the completion of the inquiry. When it is concluded, the Military Advocate General's Office will formulate its conclusions."

If Itai were alive, he would have completed his army service two weeks ago.W