As Israeli journalist and author Matti Friedman noted in a critical response to the latest BtS publication:
“Breaking the Silence’s money is foreign, not Israeli, and the primary customers for its product are foreign, not Israeli. At its extensive English website, Jewish soldiers are presented for international consumption as a spectacle of moral failure, a spectacle paid for by Norwegians, French Catholics, and Germans. This being so, it is completely reasonable for Israelis to wonder what exactly this group is and which side it is on.”
An answer to Friedman’s last point can be found in an analysis of the latest BtS publication by the Times of Israel’s military correspondent Mitch Ginsburg who suggests that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that BtS wants to see “Israel’s ability to bring its military might to bear against Hamas […] drastically reduced.”
In addition to all this well-founded criticism of BtS’s methods, goals and modus operandi, IDF veterans – including soldiers who fought last year in Gaza – have challenged the latest anonymous BtS testimonies on social media.Even though all this indicates that BtS is a fringe group whose methods and aims are viewed with suspicion by mainstream Israelis, the group has obviously well-connected supporters abroad. A recent Ha’aretz report highlights meetings between BtS representatives and “members of the White House National Security Council” as well as “senior officials” of the State Department’s human rights bureau. According to the report, these meetings were organized by Matt Duss of the Washington-based three-men Foundation for Middle East Peace, and Duss reportedly felt the meetings showed that BtS “has an open door to the administration.”
This is very interesting in view of the fact that there is actually an American organization that seems comparable to BtS – though it has apparently an incomparably harder time when it comes to attracting media attention or finding an “open door” to senior government officials. Like BtS, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) wants to give a voice to soldiers critical of what they experienced during their service. But unlike BtS, IVAW seems to get no major funding from European governments or NGOs, and when I was trying to research the media coverage of the group, I quickly came across complaints that even efforts to put on major events were met with “silence” by US mainstream media. Not much success with “breaking the silence” for IVAW, it seems.One of the complaints that focuses on the failure of the New York Times (NYT) to cover a 2008 event put on by IVAW cites the paper's public editor’s explanation that there simply was no interest in covering “charges and counter-charges at home by organizations with strongly held political viewpoints about the war.” But apparently, the NYT has a different standard when it comes to covering charges against the IDF made by an organization like BtS, which obviously has “strongly held political viewpoints” about the wars Israel has to fight: BtS’s latest allegations were covered in an Associated Press report; in 2007, the NYT published a report on a BtS event in Jerusalem that described BtS as “a group of former Israeli combat soldiers and some current reservists [who are] shocked at their own misconduct and that of others” and helpfully included a link to the group’s website; and a 2010 article entitled “Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege” counts BtS among Israel’s “most prominent human rights organizations.”When it comes to ‘open doors’ in Washington, America’s own IVAW again seems to have a harder time than Israel’s BtS. According to one relevant report I could find from 2008, there was “a packed public hearing on Capitol Hill” organized by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, but the report also notes that even “politicians who have consistently criticized the [Iraq] war” regarded IVAW as “a politically risky ally,” and one IVAW representative confirmed that the group is “generally viewed as too radical for most politicians.” Maybe Matt Duss, who so helpfully opened important doors for BtS, could also be of assistance to IVAW?Unsurprisingly, IVAW shares BtS’s criticism of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and the group has also condemned last year’s Gaza war.
But for some reason, denouncing Israel’s military clearly attracts more funding and publicity than denouncing the US military. This also seems to be reflected on social media: currently, IVAW’s Facebook page has 26,472 “Likes”, while the BtS Hebrew Facebook page has 39,538 “Likes” and its English Facebook page has 173,918 “Likes” – despite the fact that both groups were founded just a few months apart in 2004 and that American military campaigns in the intervening decade have obviously affected many millions more than Israeli military campaigns.
Last but perhaps not least, some questions: is it conceivable that any American organization of military veterans would collect anonymous testimony from active soldiers, would accept foreign funding for their work, and would travel the world to present their publications, including to foreign government officials, while retaining any credibility at home? And another question: when BtS representatives recently met with Obama administration officials, did they wonder if these officials would be equally interested in anonymous testimony collected from US soldiers?