Speaking to the JC at the end of a UK tour last month hosted by Yachad, which saw her visiting university campuses and community centres, she says for a“non-Israeli citizen to say that about me is something quite bizarre. I live there, I was in the army.
“I have Canadian citizenship, I could go there if I wanted to, I don’t have to do this, I don’t have to care, but we all do this because we love Israel.”
Ms Bubis, who grew up in a Modern Orthodox family in Jerusalem, served in an operations room of the Civil Administration in the West Bank from January 2013 until March 2015.She says her experience there exposed her to the “impossible” task given to the IDF, particularly when it came to dealing with disputes between Israelis and Palestinians.
She went into service with “this notion [that] the occupation is bad, we know that it exists, but thinking I am going to be the good soldier at the checkpoint.
“The IDF is a great army, it is good at securing Israel and its borders but it has been given a political task in the Occupied Territories.”
She says it was seeing the way “settlers were treated with kid gloves” and the lack of power soldiers had to control them that frustrated her.
“Stone-throwing would be one of the things that happened regularly on both sides. But when it came to Jewish children, often the soldiers would report back and say ‘they apologised and we’ve sent them home’.
“The other side of that is there are hundreds of Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons at any given moment.
“We don’t want the IDF to police Palestinians in the streets and in their hometown. We think our military should be a means for defence and not a means for oppression.”
It all comes down to identity, she continues: “We go out there thinking we need to protect our people and I think part of it is that we identify with them.
“They are Jewish, they are Israeli, they are on our side. When you get into that mindset you don’t want to be against them because you are there for them — and that is the sad part, because when you challenge them, they flip on you and say you are not one of us.”
She says that during her service soldiers were often punished for using “excessive force” against settlers throwing stones at Palestinian schoolchildren, which was “very frustrating and confusing.”
Breaking the Silence’s detractors say the group has “given up” on Israeli society and that is why people like Ms Bubis are tasked with engaging the diaspora. She disagrees.
“We want to disengage with settlements and demand a two-state solution. The solutions have been on the table for decades, it is the political will that needs to change.”
She sees it as the job of politicians to come up with the solutions and in the meantime “the occupation cannot be justified morally. We need to talk about that whether there are peace negotiations or not.”
She says the pre-election move by the Israeli Prime Minister to form a pact with the extremist Jewish Power party, a successor to the banned Kahanist movement, is “unprecedented but it is easy to say Netanyahu is the problem and if he steps down the problem will go away.
“Netanyahu was allowed to do that because of the 25 years leading up to it.
“Settlements are getting more and more support and he is feeding off a process that started way before him.”
According to Ms Bubis, the average Israeli “just wants to get on with their normal lives, but if all they are being fed by Netanyahu is that we are going to live by the sword they don’t hear the word ‘peace’ any more.”
And yet she still has faith in the good nature of people: “I don’t think people are so racist in their heart, it is just that the political climate has normalised it.”
She is well aware that criticising the IDF is troublesome for many who hold Israel dear.
“It is the IDF, it is state of Israel, it is the Zionist dream that so many of us have, but we need to remind people this is not about the IDF, it is about changing policy.”
