Anarchists Against the Wall Protest Pilots at Airbase

Published January 02, 2009 @ 09:27AM PT

These Anarchists are known more for what they do each Friday in the West Bank Villages along the separation barrier. This Friday is not like the others, according to Haaretz:

Twenty-one members of the "Anarchists Against the Wall" group were arrested Friday morning after they blocked the entrance to the Sde Dov Israel Air Force base in North Tel Aviv.

The protestors, wearing white masks and covered in fake blood, laid on the street and played dead.

Ayala, one of the protesters, said that the protest was meant to "show IAF pilots the results of their actions in Gaza. From thousands of feet in the air, a pilot who aims and presses a button can ignore, forget, or be unable to fathom that at that moment he killed innocent people. We came here to remind them of this."

Good job. That being said, I haven't heard of a single soldier refusing to take action in Gaza this past week. Are all the soldiers inclined to refuse orders already out of the system?

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Comments (3)

Well; I'd imagine the soldiers are fairly young. They're required to join the army after they graduate I think. Just as Palestinians are taught to hate the Israeli occupation, the Israelis are taught to hate the Palestinians. To them they are fighting the murderers of their friends and family.

Thus, how Hamas came to exists for the same purposes.

But good for the Anarchist. Peaceful protesting always makes the biggest statement. That, the group of people that went around in a cardboard tank with the Israeli flag, and threw rocks at it, and played dead. I forget where it took place.

I wish a group of people started that here in the U.S.

Posted by Dina Yazdani on 01/02/2009 @ 10:11AM PT
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Point of fact: To be a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, you have to go through quite a process. It takes years to become a pilot. Also, many of them are full time military, post conscript age, and others are reservists.

Which is to say, the comment about soldiers being mostly young is true when it comes to most operations, but probably doesn't apply to the pilots. And I know that many reservists have been called up for the operation in Gaza. Which is a good thing; reservists are more experienced, more focused, less likely to commit atrocities by choice.

Posted by Charles Lenchner on 01/02/2009 @ 10:20AM PT
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Another feature of air-to-ground combat is that the aviators can't see the victims. It's hard enough just to find an assigned target and hit it, and it would be even harder to determine what and who is really there. Consequently, people who agonize over the possibility of killing innocents by mistake tend not to choose to remain in combat aviation.

Posted by Doug Samuelson on 01/04/2009 @ 01:50PM PT
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Charles is a nonprofit professional with 20 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations in Israel, Palestine and the U.S. For the past few years, he's been specializing in online organizing.