The Souls We Shatter: Testimonies from the Other Side of the Israeli Uniform. An infantry Man And A Pilot

 They wore the uniform. They followed the orders. Then they broke the silence.

Adding the Voice of Conscience: Testimonies from the Inside

When we talk about the cost of occupation, we often focus only on the physical destruction: homes reduced to rubble, towns locked under curfew, lives shattered by raids and bombings.
But there is another cost, less visible yet no less devastating: the slow corrosion of the soul, the silent breaking of the very people tasked with carrying out these missions.

On the website Breaking the Silence, founded by Israeli combat veterans, a soldier recounts the turmoil that still haunts him.
He served in the West Bank, proud to wear the uniform, proud to fight for his country — or so he thought.

"Did I behave properly?" he still asks himself.
"Was it right to fire that shot? To bark at that old man in the street? Was it really about security — or was it about power?"

Slowly, he came to realize that the occupation was less about defending Israel than it was about controlling another people.
"I thought I was a soldier," he says, "but I was more like a policeman — and only for one side."

At nineteen, he had absolute authority over entire neighborhoods.
"I could stop anyone, search anyone, detain anyone — just because I could. And I began to see how deeply wrong that power was."

He remembers a woman who crawled toward him on her knees, begging permission to retrieve her baby during a curfew.
"I told her to get up. But when another soldier cocked his rifle at her, she dropped back to her knees. The fear was automatic."

He remembers house raids, the tearing apart of homes, the look in children's eyes as soldiers rifled through their belongings.
"At the time, I told myself it was necessary. That it was about preventing terror. But deep down, I knew we were destroying people's lives — and for what?"

His realization was bitter:
"The system doesn’t just allow violence — it needs violence. It can't survive without it."

And he wasn’t alone.

From the skies above Gaza, an Israeli Air Force pilot wrote his own testimony — this one published on a personal blog later shared through Haaretz.
From his cockpit, he carried out missions he once believed were surgical, clean. Targets were selected with precision; collateral damage, minimized. That was what he believed — what he needed to believe.

But over time, cracks began to form.

"I started wondering," he wrote, "what actually happened after the bomb exploded. You see the house collapse through your targeting screen. You confirm the hit. And then you move on. You don’t see the mother digging for her children. You don’t hear the screams."

It gnawed at him.
"They told us we were knocking on roofs. Giving civilians a chance to flee. But if you put yourself for even one second in their place — would you know where to run? Would you even understand what’s happening?"

He realized that precision bombs and careful targeting couldn’t hide the larger truth:

"You can tell yourself it’s about defense. You can tell yourself it’s about minimizing harm. But in the end, you are the hammer falling on a society that can’t defend itself."

And like the infantryman, the pilot came to see that the damage wasn’t only to Gaza or the West Bank. It was to themselves.

"Occupation doesn’t just brutalize the occupied," the pilot wrote.
"It brutalizes the occupier. It trains you to feel nothing. It makes you forget that those flashing dots on the screen are human beings. That their lives matter as much as yours."

Both testimonies echo the same, haunting truth:
The system of occupation demands not just physical control, but moral blindness.
It requires young men and women — ordinary people — to surrender their empathy, to obey orders that slowly strip away their ability to see others as human.

"We send our sons and daughters to do this," the soldier says, "and then we act surprised when they come back broken, when they can't sleep, when they hate what they've become."

The pilot puts it even more starkly:
"You don't have to be a monster to commit monstrous acts. You just have to stop asking questions. And that’s exactly what the system teaches you to do."

Today, they speak out not because they hate Israel, but because they love it enough to refuse silence.
"If we ever want to heal, we must first look honestly at what we have done," the soldier says.

"And what we are still doing."

Source:

• Breaking the Silence – Testimonies Publications:
  https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/publications

• Haaretz Article on IDF Pilots and the Gaza War:
  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-04-17/ty-article-magazine/.premium/were-champions-at-repression-israel-air-force-pilots-open-up-about-the-gaza-war/00000196-44a0-dc5b-af96-6db5cddd0000