How Former Israeli Soldier Turned Anti-War After Witnessing 2014 Gaza Invasion

Serving in the IDF brought Benzion Sanders face-to-face with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, turning him into a committed anti-war activist.

As aerial bombardments in Gaza give way to a ground invasion, activists around the world have criticized Israel’s violent response to this month’s surprise attack by Hamas. Many of those activists are Jewish. Some are even Israeli citizens.

Such is the case for Benzion Sanders, a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Raised in a highly religious Orthodox Jewish family, Sanders was steeped in Zionist ideology, the name for the philosophical and political movement that drove Israel’s creation. He even participated in “settling” of the West Bank, the process by which Jewish families displace Palestinians in territory illegally occupied by Israel.

Sanders’ time in the IDF prompted an unresolvable moral dilemma.

“When my Israeli infantry unit arrived at the first village in Gaza, in July 2014, we cleared houses by sending grenades through windows, blowing doors open and firing bullets into rooms to avoid ambush and booby traps,” wrote Sanders in an essay published Saturday in US media. “We were told Palestinian civilians had fled.”

“I realized this wasn’t true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been lying on the sand floor of a shack, in a pool of blood.”

The experience shook Sanders’ conviction in the righteousness of Israel’s conduct, especially under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He joined the organization Breaking the Silence, a group of anti-occupation Israeli veterans who protest Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinians and their culture. He’s now a director of Extend, a group connecting Israeli and Palestinian human rights activists to Jewish audiences in America.

Sanders joins activists like Miko Peled, a former member of Israel’s Special Forces who has called Israel a “radical regime” where “half of the population lives in what it thinks is a Western democracy while keeping the other half imprisoned by a ruthless defense apparatus that is becoming more violent by the day.”

Several Jewish media figures have also engaged in prominent criticism of the Middle Eastern country in recent weeks, including commentator Katie Halper, “Chapo Trap House” co-host Felix Biederman and academic Norman Finkelstein.

Sanders believes Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza will ultimately fail in its stated aim of eliminating Hamas.

“For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence,” Sanders writes.

“It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.”

Israel has bombed Gaza since an October 7 surprise attack by Palestinian group Hamas that killed 1,400 Israelis. The death toll among Palestinians quickly eclipsed that tally, in accordance with Israel’s official policy of “disproportionate force,” now standing at over 7,000 and still rising as the IDF pursues a ground invasion of Gaza.

Israel has been engaged in violence against the country’s indigenous Palestinian Arab population since large numbers of Zionist settlers arrived in the territory in the early to mid 20th century. The country has repeatedly worked to undermine efforts towards statehood in occupied Palestinian territory, pointing to armed Palestinian resistance as an excuse to avoid compromise in the name of Israeli national security.

The Netanyahu government has deliberately worked to promote and strengthen Hamas, recognizing the value of the controversial armed group in delegitimizing the Palestinian cause.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support the bolstering of Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told a group of fellow members of his Likud party in 2019. “This is part of our strategy.”