JERUSALEM — During the past two months, Col. Gal Hirsch has lived his life from shooting to shooting, riot to riot, day into night into day, without more than two hours of sleep in any 24-hour period.
As commander of the Binyamin Brigade, Hirsch has controlled Israeli military activity at some of the worst flashpoints of violence in the West Bank.
With an endless cycle of violence to oversee, Hirsch has forgone weekly leaves. Twice, he returned home to see his wife and two children. Both times, he was quickly called back to his unit.
Yet with the army keenly aware that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is taking place in the media as well as on the ground, the 37-year-old Hirsch was recently given an hour off from his hectic duties to tell how the crisis looks from his perspective as a senior military commander.
During an interview at the Israel Defense Force’s Central Command headquarters in eastern Jerusalem, Hirsch fielded several calls and beeper messages reporting fresh incidents in the field, then quickly bounced back to the subject at hand.
“We are in a complicated situation…we must behave with extreme caution. We cannot just walk into that china shop and behave like an elephant.”
On a typical day, Hirsch is involved in everything from ordering Israeli responses to riots or shootings, dealing with the daily needs of Israeli settlers, planning special operations, appearing before the media, and maintaining a surreal dialogue with Palestinian commanders through remaining communications channels.
But whether Israel has been behaving like the elephant Hirsch describes — the Hebrew equivalent of the proverbial bull in a china shop — is perhaps at the core of the international controversy Israel is mired in today.
In the first weeks of the conflict, scores of Palestinian civilian deaths sparked accusations by international human rights groups that Israel used excessive force when dealing with Palestinian rioters. And even as the conflict has shifted toward a guerrilla-like war spotted with terror attacks, the excessive-force question remains on the agenda — particularly when Israel retaliates with helicopter raids on the hearts of Palestinian cities.
For Hirsch, who was seriously injured three years ago when Palestinians hurled a cement block through his windshield, the answer is clear.
“Israel is behaving in a very, very restrained fashion. Our restraint is unprecedented in any campaign against terror or guerrilla activity.”
Despite Palestinian evidence of scores of deaths and thousands of injuries inflicted by the Israeli army on the upper bodies of stone-throwers, Hirsch says his units have followed orders that compel soldiers to shoot only at lower body parts and to use live fire only when fired upon.
Mass riots backed by what Hirsch describes as heavy gunfire have created a very difficult situation for troops on the ground. Yet Hirsch insists his troops have been careful to use only rubber-coated steel bullets against rioters, while using live fire without hesitation to shoot at any Palestinian firing a gun.
He denies that soldiers are shooting indiscriminately.
“Our activity in the field is under complete control,” he says. “I know about every bullet that leaves a gun barrel.”
He knows the world sympathizes more with the Palestinians because they are seen as underdogs. And he knows that in a globally wired world, images of what his units do are flashed around the world instantly.
“An Israeli soldier in a full-metal jacket and M-16 facing a child with a grenade never makes a good picture,” he says.
“But I believe that even in the media arena the world is starting to get tired of the Palestinian point of view, and they are starting to understand that this is initiated violence and not spontaneous.”
As the conflict has evolved, Hirsch says, the Palestinians had shifted to night attacks, but then realized they couldn’t really pose a threat to the IDF after dark, so they shifted instead to more use of gunfire during the daytime, including some snipers.
In recent weeks, he adds, they have made yet another shift — shooting attacks on main West Bank arteries at Israeli soldiers and civilians.
The multiple tactics explain why the situation is so complicated.
The status quo is not a state of classic war between two sovereign states, nor is it a clear-cut guerrilla war or a popular uprising.
Hirsch describes it vaguely as a “fighting situation,” with multiple components: guerrilla warfare, terror, counter-terror, riots and demonstrations.
Israel has also begun to shift its strategy, from simply trying to contain the violence “into a ‘shaping’ attitude, taking more action with offensive implications,” he says.
The jury is still out on whether such a strategy can help Israel extricate itself from the crisis.
Even though Hirsch believes the Palestinians have made no military gains to date and have realized they will pay an increasingly heavy price for confronting the powerful IDF, the question of whether Israel can defeat the Palestinians militarily and forge a political solution to the conflict remains open.
“That depends on whether Israel wants to win by points or by knockout,” he says.
A knockout would only be possible if Israel decides to unleash all of its military force to completely destroy the Palestinian Authority. But the diplomatic backlash against Israel in such a case would be devastating — and it could also spark an all-out regional war.
Yet the other option — a long, drawn-out conflict that Hirsch calls victory “by points” — poses big questions not only to the military but also to Israeli society.
So far, Hirsch believes Israelis have demonstrated they have the staying power to sticking out the conflict.
For example, he says, reserve soldiers have been reporting for duty with high morale.
Furthermore, despite raw emotions driving the Palestinians to fight for their independence and their assumed ability to sustain much heavier losses than Israel, they are reeling under the force of the army, Hirsch says.
“Whether or not Israel can ‘win by points’ is an internal question we must ask ourselves. It will depend on what victory means for Israel, and what do we want as a country. Winning by points will be complicated — just as complicated as this entire war.”