Despite the heated debates behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two members of the Israeli Army chose to steer clear of politics in order to discuss the human aspect of their personal involvement in the war on Tuesday night.
Speakers Lior and Inon addressed an audience of about 50 students at Boston University’s Hillel House as part of a national university tour called Israeli Soldiers Speak Out, sponsored by StandWithUs, an Israeli advocacy group, and the BU and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Students for Israel.
Lior, an officer in the Israeli Army stationed in the Gaza strip in 2009, focused on recounting his service rather than state his political opinions.
“We don’t want to give you statistics or facts, anything that you could find in a newspaper,” he said. “We want to give you our personal experiences.”
Lior, who grew up and attended high school abroad, said that while his youth was spent away from Israel, his homeland was never far from his heart.
“Growing up there was always a real feeling of Israel in my home. I felt going back to Israel was really about protecting home,” he said about his return in 2002 to join the army.
Lior said that the most profound experience he had in the army was having a unit of 25 soldiers serve under him.
“You’re dealing with human beings, not robots,” he said. “You have to help them deal with their everyday problems as well as their soldier problems. I was overwhelmed by a feeling that came from within the unit which asked, “Why are we fighting like this day in and day out?'”
He said that he thought the answer to that question is that Israel wants professionals capable of making ethical, moral and military decisions conducting warfare.
“We need people that would be taking fire from a building, see that there are innocent children in that building, and decide that the right decision is to hold fire,” he said.
Following Lior’s address, Inon reiterated his colleague’s sentiment concerning political impartiality.
“Our only contribution to the debate over what is happening in the Middle East right now is our personal stories,” Inon said.
He began his portion of the lecture by bringing forth four volunteers from the audience and verbally placing them in a scenario a squadron in the Israeli army could find itself in.
“You hear an old woman screaming from over a hill at night and as your approach her you can see that she is wounded, but that she also has wires coming from under her clothes. What do you do?”
His volunteers concluded that they would retreat and leave the woman where she was.
“The same thing happened to me in Lebanon,” Inon said. “And I did the same thing that you just did.”
Inon echoed his colleague’s statement that the most profound experience serving in the Israeli Army was having a unit under his command.
“You become their father, their mother and their girlfriend,” he said.
While the pair kept all political views out of the lecture, the soldiers were inevitably asked about their personal views on the state of affairs between Israel and Palestine once the floor was opened up to questions.
When asked, Lior said he could envision eventual peace in his country of origin.
“Inon and I both live in Israel and we plan to raise our families there and if we didn’t think there was going to be peace one day we wouldn’t have chosen to do these things,” he said.
Sallie Pernick, a School of Hospitality Administration junior, said that she attended the lecture in order to gain insight into the lives of young people from other parts of the globe.
“I’m just expecting to hear the soldiers experiences, and hopefully I’ll be able to compare that to the lives of young people from this part of the world,” she said.
Ariel Shecter, a sophomore at MIT, said that she attended the lecture in order to hear first-hand accounts of the fighting that Israel has been a participant in over the past few years.
“It’s not very often you have the opportunity to hear accounts of war like this,” Scheter said.
This article has been updated to reflect that StandWithUsis a sponsor of the Israeli Soldiers Speak Out national speaking tour.
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