There were army rabbis coming around and praying, and they gave a lot of moral support… Inside the area, rabbis come to talk to you. A rabbi was brought into a house and he was all fired up about being out in the field with the combatants, and wore a ceramic protective vest for the first time in 30 years and he sat with the men for talks. We also had these army-rabbinate-issued booklets with essays.

What was in them?
Essays about the operation, the importance of serving the People of Israel who has been persecuted all these years and is now back in its own homeland and needs to fight for it. All the well-known clichés, connecting it to the Holocaust and defending God and also because it's Gaza, and the link to the evacuated Katif settlements, and here we are going back to the Katif area, to Netzarim. After I got out I saw a newspaper article about someone who was evacuated from there and had flown the Israeli flag again from a rooftop at Netzarim. These are opinion articles and contents that shift the main focus away from the actual idea of battling a terrorist organization that's present amongst civilians. The battalion commander said in the beginning that we're going in there to stop the Qassams. But the pamphlets spoke of going back to the source, of historic justice, things like that.

People actually read this?
Yes. That's the reading material we got. This, the Book of Psalms, and a newspaper…
The commander of the Gaza Division forbade having newspapers in the field. There was one newspaper smuggled in with the supplies in a heavy APC. It was a Monday newspaper and that's what we read all week. Whoever could read Arabic could also read the books we found there.

Except for the pamphlets, did the rabbi have talks with the individual soldiers?
Not with me, but I heard from my friends. The houses were defense posts and we couldn't go outside, so we would usually be eating, cleaning our weapons or gear, or doing lookout shifts. So all of a sudden the rabbi would appear and all of us would be assembled and seated in the living room of this house and the rabbi would speak.

We were in Tze'elim and began maneuvers to prepare for our entry into the Gaza Strip. We were actually going through various exercises for our specific assignments. In this framework, regarding what we're talking about – the army rabbinate – two things happened in our contact with them at the time. The first was the distribution of pamphlets, an indirect sort of contact. It's the kind of pamphlet that is distributed in military synagogues, or pages of the weekly reading that is also distributed at military synagogues, containing rather explicit political contents. Like writing, for example, that the Palestinians are like the Philistines of old, newcomers who do not belong in the land, aliens planted on our soil which should clearly return to us. There were also these acronyms of the name of the Jewish settlement Netzarim that should be rebuilt.

What were these pages, exactly?
There are flyers containing the weekly religious reading that are very similar to all kinds of military pamphlets you see in the synagogues, but they have the IDF stamp on them and that of the military rabbinate. In the military rabbinate there is a department called 'Jewish Awareness for a Winning IDF' which is in fact the department in charge of motivation issues and solving problems of morality and fighting and the like, for soldiers.

What problem did you have with that?
Personally, I think that as a citizen of a democratic state what bothers me is actually the distribution of political pamphlets with the stamp of the IDF on them – a body that is supposed to be apolitical. I think there is no room for political views in the army, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. I think they are out of place in an army framework. There's no way a battalion commander can come to his soldiers and say: we now have to go back and resettle Netzarim. That is our mission. This is what we should do, rebuild Netzarim. Clearly, a battalion commander who would say this would at least be reprimanded, and he is likely to be penalized even more severely. And here an official institution tightly connected to the army, acting in the name of the army, comes and disseminates the same messages, and no one says anything. This is what bothers me here.
…The second thing, the more immediate measure we witnessed about this was when we were training at one of the Tze'elim zones. We had just concluded a maneuver and we were preparing for the next one, and then this Army Rabbinate officer came along with his ranks, uniform and all, and asked us if we were willing to listen to a rabbi who was with him, in civilian dress. We agreed. Up came a man who introduced himself as Rabbi Chen, that was his name, who came as a civilian to speak to us. The whole talk was presented in points: the first point throughout his speech – later you see it in the pamphlets as well – is the sanctity of the People of Israel. He put it this way: he said that while going in there, we should know there is no accounting for sins in this case. The meaning of this, I'm getting into some interpretation here which is inevitable, otherwise one does not realize how problematic such a statement is. When a rabbi says 'there's no accounting,' the meaning is that when a person enters a zone that is naturally very dangerous and everyone is afraid to enter and no one knows what will happen, what the future has in store for us, of course there are fears. Such fears are intensified by each person's own past and deeds he must confront, and naturally there is always that primal fear that this is the place where all my sins will be paid for. So in view of this, that rabbi up and says: don't worry – there's no accountability. On the most basic level this is how I understand his meaning. I don't see any other way to interpret it. Furthermore, this statement contains a statement about the future: if there really is no accountability for what I have done in the past, then naturally there is none for what I am about to do in the immediate or distant future. In other words, we should know that whatever we do is fine.

Was there any mention of the Palestinians? What did he say about them?
Another point that came up was when that rabbi said we are actually conducting the war of 'the sons of light' against 'the sons of darkness.' This is in fact a statement with highly messianic language. This is war that prepares the way for final redemption. This is outrageous in itself. Again, we witness a language that is not acceptable to all present, definitely a legitimate view and as such I have no problem with it. But it must not receive any kind of official stamp, it must not be used within any military framework. It is just like a political view. But the more disturbing point even, than this theological point, is its demonization of the other side. It turns the other side as a generality into 'sons of darkness' while we become 'sons of light.' There is no differentiation which we would expect to find between civilians and others. Namely, here is one people fighting another people, with all the messianic implications. But that's the point: this is also religious propaganda. In other words, the army is not a revival meeting. This is not the reason people enlist. They do not put on a uniform in order to be Judaized and be reborn in the faith.