Music
WILLACY: This is a side of Israel the rest of the world rarely sees. In the heart of Tel Aviv, the TLV dance club thumps into the early hours. The country is in a state of perpetual war but these young Israelis are living like there’s no tomorrow.
Music
WILLACY: At first glance, this looks like a typical nightclub anywhere in the world – a frenetic mix of techno music, alcohol and any number of recreational drugs. But this is a dance floor with a difference. Nearly everyone here is a soldier or a former soldier in one of the most formidable armies in the world.
After the brutality of the battlefield, this is where they come to let off steam.
DR TINA BERKOVITS, Therapist: They have a bad time after they see what they see.
You have post traumatic syndrome, automatically, as far as I know.
Music
WILLACY: At an age when most youngsters in the western world have barely left high school, these teenagers are conscripts at the frontline of one of the world’s bitterest conflicts. Every young Israeli, except the ultra-orthodox religious students and Arabs must serve in the military. Their daily work brings them into contact with people who want them dead.
MATAN KRAUS: I’m Matan Kraus, 19 years old. I was recruited to the Israeli Defence Forces seven months ago -- currently in a pre-course for squad commanders.
When I finish my training I’ll be serving in an infantry unit.
WILLACY: Matan Kraus couldn’t wait to turn 18, just so he could enlist. There’s a saying in Israel “The nation is the army and the army is the nation”. For a country that draws its population from the four corners of the world, Israel’s citizens army is the glue that holds society together.
Like their fathers, mothers and grandparents before them, young Israelis like Matan have answered the call for what they see as the defence of their very existence.
But this latest war is not against a hostile neighbouring state, but rather a people Israel has occupied for 38 years.
The Israeli military is one of the few in the world with compulsory conscription for women. Some take their place in combat units alongside the men, but most are deployed in other roles in the people’s army.
HELENA MOSHE: My name is Helena, I am almost 19 years old. I serve at the foreign relations department of the Israeli Defence Force.
It’s very stressful. You have to find the inner strength within yourself to deal with it. But I think what really helps is that, especially combat soldiers, have such a feeling of confidence in one another, I mean they’re real friends. Many times, you know, a squad is like a family.
WILLACY: Like most Israelis, Helena has postponed her career to fulfil her legal obligation to serve in the army.HELENA
MOSHE: If you’re not religious, you’re obligated to serve for two years, 24 months. If you are religious, you have a choice to contribute to the state in another way, volunteer in a hospital or with disabled children, anything to help the country.
Music
WILLACY: Seemingly a million miles from the battlegrounds of the West Bank and Gaza, Tel Avivians stroll a Mediterranean promenade. Only about six percent of Israelis live in the occupied territories. Contrary to perceptions in the west of the world, most of these people have never even visited Gaza or the West Bank. Peace for them means living their lives free of Palestinian suicide bombings.
Music MATAN KRAUS: It’s good to be at home -
to feel for two days that less responsibility lies on your shoulders. We have free time, and go to the movies and restaurants and to theatre – just to spend as much time as you can together.
Music
HELENA MOSHE: The weekends are my time to be an individual, to be just you know, a teenager,
and you know just go to the movies and have a normal life.
WILLACY: On this night, Helena is preparing to head to Tel Aviv to meet Matan. The two were childhood sweethearts, and are holding their relationship together during their army service.
But as Matan, Helena, and thousands of other young Israelis were heading out for the biggest night of the week, a Palestinian suicide bomber was also arriving in Tel Aviv.
21 year old Abdallah Badran drove up and down the city’s promenade before picking his target.
NEWSREADER VOICE OVER: At 11.20 pm, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Tel Aviv, outside a nightclub called The Stage. Four people died. Forty-nine were injured and evacuated to hospital. After a long period of tranquillity and diplomatic optimism, last night’s incident has proven that terror never rests.
HELENA MOSHE: Now that you’re here and you know that this is a place you go to every week and you see it like this, it’s really painful. I mean if you had any kind of routine of life before, this kind of breaks it.
MATAN KRAUS: It never ends. I don’t know one person who one of his family members or friends wasn’t hurt by a suicide bombing or a terrorist act.
Music
HELENA MOSHE: Living in Israel, you really want to go out and relax and live your normal life, but I think seeing what I’ve just seen, it’s nothing I forget, I remember it.
Music
WILLACY: But here at Mike’s Place, the usual bar patrons are unperturbed by the events just down the road. It seems to make little difference that this is a bar that’s survived its own night of terror.
YOASH LIMON, Bar Manager: We had a bomb in here about a year and a half ago. We had a guy, suicide bomber blew up in the other entrance. Killed three people and injured the security guard and the security guard is back to work, so life goes.
JAY GOSALVES, Musician: I was the last person to come out and I walked out through all the dead bodies.
The guitar player I was just playing with, Yani, he died and Ron the piano player, he died, and the waitress that I was going to have the argument with, she died. She lost an arm and man it was crazy.
MATAN KRAUS: It’s a situation that will last for a couple of days, and then people will return to their normal lives.
YOASH LIMON, Bar Manager: Took exactly a week to reopen, the owners both decided it was very important that we reopen as quickly as we could, and that was it. Everybody came in to help, all the regular customers were here, and we got the place reopened.
Music
WILLACY: This is the place soldiers go when they really want to party hard. The TLV dance club is hosting a break up party for paratrooper units. These elite troops have just finished weeks of gruelling training and will soon be posted to the frontline of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
Music
WILLACY: Israeli youngsters are notorious for their use of party drugs like ecstasy and other uppers called liquid energy and hagigat. The drugs are made locally. Officially, the Israeli army maintains the line that no serving soldiers use drugs. It’s a very sensitive topic that is not openly discussed.
Music
WILLACY: The young women are their guests. Some are in the army themselves, others are trying desperately to avoid military service – a practice that’s becoming increasingly common.
Music
ELIOR GALON: I am working as a waitress and I’m in a conflict about what to study.
WILLACY: At 19, Elior Galon would normally be serving in the army. But she’s among the estimated 50 percent of young women who now evade the draft. Like many, Elior left the country to avoid the military, and followed the well-worn Israeli hippy trail to India. Officially, the Israeli army cracks down hard on draft dodgers and claims a very high success rate but unofficially, it’s not difficult to slip through the cracks, especially if you’re a woman.
ELIOR GALON: Many people go to India, many Israeli people after the army going in big groups, going especially to Goa, to, I call it a drug trip, you know to go and get totally free and experience stuff and after all this hard experience in the army, they really need it.
WILLACY: So you’re obviously having a relaxing time there.
ELIOR GALON: Yeah.
WILLACY: What do the Indians call that?
ELIOR GALON: That is a chillum, and it’s like a smoking device.
ELIOR GALON: Most of my friends going here in Israel every week, every Friday to a trance party, doing acid, doing lots of drugs, but they need afterwards, in Saturday or in Sunday, to go to work.
WILLACY: Elior is one of a new generation of Israelis who’s turning her back on the army.ELIOR GALON: Even though some of the activities that the army do is to protect the people who live here, it’s still, they’re still killing. I believe that only God can give and take life. I cannot participate in anything related to it. If I’m in the army, I’m part of it and it’s not too good for me. Even though many times they kill terrorists, but many times they also kill -- I don’t know --their family, their wife, their children, people that didn’t do anything.
WILLACY: For some young people, this is where the hippy trail ends – back to Israel and drug rehabilitation. This is the “Balancing Village”, the uniquely Israeli approach to getting people back on track. The patients are treated with a combination of natural therapies and alternative medicine.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: Usually we have people here from India, where drugs are very cheap. Loads of Israelis are there, it’s far away from home.
WILLACY: Most of the patients here are suffering from drug induced psychosis, others develop even more serious mental illness. Almost all patients are former soldiers, who finished their compulsory service and left their highly disciplined lives for new freedoms abroad. According to the medical staff, many of their problems can be traced back to their experiences in the army.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: Israel is a country which is politically very stressed and one of the things that happened in Israel, it’s like a very, very intensive kind of living, very, very fast. Young people have to grow up very fast.
WILLACY: If these people are some of the casualties of life in the Israeli army, then they are casualties the government seems determined to ignore. There is no official recognition that the citizen’s army, that pillar of Israeli society, can cause such trauma in its ranks. Drug dependency and mental illness are seldom the subject of public debate here, and treatment options are few and far between. There are only 30 places in the “Balancing Village”, another 900 young Israelis are waiting to get in.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: In my opinion, there’s not enough space.
There are many, many youths that are put into hospitals. You know if we had more facilities here, of course we could put many more people in here.
WILLACY: In this highly structured society, generations of teenagers have three constants – school, the army, their family.
MATAN KRAUS: At advanced training you do nothing. We expected to stand at roll call, we stood but the commanders all went to a meeting.
WILLACY: For Matan Kraus, this is the weekly farewell dinner with girlfriend Helena and his parents.
NITZA KRAUS, Matan’s mother: It’s much more sophisticated than when I was in the army, when we were in the army. They’re expected to think more, they expect of themselves more.
I think they want to pick up or to pick up as much as possible in the music and films.
WILLACY: But the army in Israel is not just for teenagers. Matan, like his father, will be called on to serve as a reservist for one month every year until he’s 45.
MATAN KRAUS: I miss them already. It’s tough, but I’m not sad that I have to go. It’s something I want to do, it’s something I know we need to do, we have to do.
WILLACY: At the central bus station, thousands of young Israelis are heading back to base. These soldiers won’t see family, friends and sweethearts for at least another week.
HELENA MOSHE: I know that he serves in a really dangerous place. I know that being a combat soldier,
he’s a target, you know. I always listen to the news, obsessively almost. I just try not to think about it and just support him, you know, to make him feel confident, as confident as possible, although, you know, sometimes I’m very worried.
Music
WILLACY: A nation founded in the wake of the tragedy and trauma of the Holocaust, Israel is determined to mould new generations capable of defending themselves and their homeland and while many young Israelis are still happy to take their place in the people’s army, more and more are deciding their future is better off without it, and their country’s future is better without them.
Reporter: Mark Willacy
Camera: Michael Cox
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Jerusalem Co-ordinator:Ayelet Cohen
Producer: Trevor Bormann
WILLACY: This is a side of Israel the rest of the world rarely sees. In the heart of Tel Aviv, the TLV dance club thumps into the early hours. The country is in a state of perpetual war but these young Israelis are living like there’s no tomorrow.
Music
WILLACY: At first glance, this looks like a typical nightclub anywhere in the world – a frenetic mix of techno music, alcohol and any number of recreational drugs. But this is a dance floor with a difference. Nearly everyone here is a soldier or a former soldier in one of the most formidable armies in the world.
After the brutality of the battlefield, this is where they come to let off steam.
DR TINA BERKOVITS, Therapist: They have a bad time after they see what they see.
You have post traumatic syndrome, automatically, as far as I know.
Music
WILLACY: At an age when most youngsters in the western world have barely left high school, these teenagers are conscripts at the frontline of one of the world’s bitterest conflicts. Every young Israeli, except the ultra-orthodox religious students and Arabs must serve in the military. Their daily work brings them into contact with people who want them dead.
MATAN KRAUS: I’m Matan Kraus, 19 years old. I was recruited to the Israeli Defence Forces seven months ago -- currently in a pre-course for squad commanders.
When I finish my training I’ll be serving in an infantry unit.
WILLACY: Matan Kraus couldn’t wait to turn 18, just so he could enlist. There’s a saying in Israel “The nation is the army and the army is the nation”. For a country that draws its population from the four corners of the world, Israel’s citizens army is the glue that holds society together.
Like their fathers, mothers and grandparents before them, young Israelis like Matan have answered the call for what they see as the defence of their very existence.
But this latest war is not against a hostile neighbouring state, but rather a people Israel has occupied for 38 years.
The Israeli military is one of the few in the world with compulsory conscription for women. Some take their place in combat units alongside the men, but most are deployed in other roles in the people’s army.
HELENA MOSHE: My name is Helena, I am almost 19 years old. I serve at the foreign relations department of the Israeli Defence Force.
It’s very stressful. You have to find the inner strength within yourself to deal with it. But I think what really helps is that, especially combat soldiers, have such a feeling of confidence in one another, I mean they’re real friends. Many times, you know, a squad is like a family.
WILLACY: Like most Israelis, Helena has postponed her career to fulfil her legal obligation to serve in the army.HELENA
MOSHE: If you’re not religious, you’re obligated to serve for two years, 24 months. If you are religious, you have a choice to contribute to the state in another way, volunteer in a hospital or with disabled children, anything to help the country.
Music
WILLACY: Seemingly a million miles from the battlegrounds of the West Bank and Gaza, Tel Avivians stroll a Mediterranean promenade. Only about six percent of Israelis live in the occupied territories. Contrary to perceptions in the west of the world, most of these people have never even visited Gaza or the West Bank. Peace for them means living their lives free of Palestinian suicide bombings.
Music MATAN KRAUS: It’s good to be at home -
to feel for two days that less responsibility lies on your shoulders. We have free time, and go to the movies and restaurants and to theatre – just to spend as much time as you can together.
Music
HELENA MOSHE: The weekends are my time to be an individual, to be just you know, a teenager,
and you know just go to the movies and have a normal life.
WILLACY: On this night, Helena is preparing to head to Tel Aviv to meet Matan. The two were childhood sweethearts, and are holding their relationship together during their army service.
But as Matan, Helena, and thousands of other young Israelis were heading out for the biggest night of the week, a Palestinian suicide bomber was also arriving in Tel Aviv.
21 year old Abdallah Badran drove up and down the city’s promenade before picking his target.
NEWSREADER VOICE OVER: At 11.20 pm, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Tel Aviv, outside a nightclub called The Stage. Four people died. Forty-nine were injured and evacuated to hospital. After a long period of tranquillity and diplomatic optimism, last night’s incident has proven that terror never rests.
HELENA MOSHE: Now that you’re here and you know that this is a place you go to every week and you see it like this, it’s really painful. I mean if you had any kind of routine of life before, this kind of breaks it.
MATAN KRAUS: It never ends. I don’t know one person who one of his family members or friends wasn’t hurt by a suicide bombing or a terrorist act.
Music
HELENA MOSHE: Living in Israel, you really want to go out and relax and live your normal life, but I think seeing what I’ve just seen, it’s nothing I forget, I remember it.
Music
WILLACY: But here at Mike’s Place, the usual bar patrons are unperturbed by the events just down the road. It seems to make little difference that this is a bar that’s survived its own night of terror.
YOASH LIMON, Bar Manager: We had a bomb in here about a year and a half ago. We had a guy, suicide bomber blew up in the other entrance. Killed three people and injured the security guard and the security guard is back to work, so life goes.
JAY GOSALVES, Musician: I was the last person to come out and I walked out through all the dead bodies.
The guitar player I was just playing with, Yani, he died and Ron the piano player, he died, and the waitress that I was going to have the argument with, she died. She lost an arm and man it was crazy.
MATAN KRAUS: It’s a situation that will last for a couple of days, and then people will return to their normal lives.
YOASH LIMON, Bar Manager: Took exactly a week to reopen, the owners both decided it was very important that we reopen as quickly as we could, and that was it. Everybody came in to help, all the regular customers were here, and we got the place reopened.
Music
WILLACY: This is the place soldiers go when they really want to party hard. The TLV dance club is hosting a break up party for paratrooper units. These elite troops have just finished weeks of gruelling training and will soon be posted to the frontline of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.
Music
WILLACY: Israeli youngsters are notorious for their use of party drugs like ecstasy and other uppers called liquid energy and hagigat. The drugs are made locally. Officially, the Israeli army maintains the line that no serving soldiers use drugs. It’s a very sensitive topic that is not openly discussed.
Music
WILLACY: The young women are their guests. Some are in the army themselves, others are trying desperately to avoid military service – a practice that’s becoming increasingly common.
Music
ELIOR GALON: I am working as a waitress and I’m in a conflict about what to study.
WILLACY: At 19, Elior Galon would normally be serving in the army. But she’s among the estimated 50 percent of young women who now evade the draft. Like many, Elior left the country to avoid the military, and followed the well-worn Israeli hippy trail to India. Officially, the Israeli army cracks down hard on draft dodgers and claims a very high success rate but unofficially, it’s not difficult to slip through the cracks, especially if you’re a woman.
ELIOR GALON: Many people go to India, many Israeli people after the army going in big groups, going especially to Goa, to, I call it a drug trip, you know to go and get totally free and experience stuff and after all this hard experience in the army, they really need it.
WILLACY: So you’re obviously having a relaxing time there.
ELIOR GALON: Yeah.
WILLACY: What do the Indians call that?
ELIOR GALON: That is a chillum, and it’s like a smoking device.
ELIOR GALON: Most of my friends going here in Israel every week, every Friday to a trance party, doing acid, doing lots of drugs, but they need afterwards, in Saturday or in Sunday, to go to work.
WILLACY: Elior is one of a new generation of Israelis who’s turning her back on the army.ELIOR GALON: Even though some of the activities that the army do is to protect the people who live here, it’s still, they’re still killing. I believe that only God can give and take life. I cannot participate in anything related to it. If I’m in the army, I’m part of it and it’s not too good for me. Even though many times they kill terrorists, but many times they also kill -- I don’t know --their family, their wife, their children, people that didn’t do anything.
WILLACY: For some young people, this is where the hippy trail ends – back to Israel and drug rehabilitation. This is the “Balancing Village”, the uniquely Israeli approach to getting people back on track. The patients are treated with a combination of natural therapies and alternative medicine.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: Usually we have people here from India, where drugs are very cheap. Loads of Israelis are there, it’s far away from home.
WILLACY: Most of the patients here are suffering from drug induced psychosis, others develop even more serious mental illness. Almost all patients are former soldiers, who finished their compulsory service and left their highly disciplined lives for new freedoms abroad. According to the medical staff, many of their problems can be traced back to their experiences in the army.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: Israel is a country which is politically very stressed and one of the things that happened in Israel, it’s like a very, very intensive kind of living, very, very fast. Young people have to grow up very fast.
WILLACY: If these people are some of the casualties of life in the Israeli army, then they are casualties the government seems determined to ignore. There is no official recognition that the citizen’s army, that pillar of Israeli society, can cause such trauma in its ranks. Drug dependency and mental illness are seldom the subject of public debate here, and treatment options are few and far between. There are only 30 places in the “Balancing Village”, another 900 young Israelis are waiting to get in.
DR TINA BERKOVITS: In my opinion, there’s not enough space.
There are many, many youths that are put into hospitals. You know if we had more facilities here, of course we could put many more people in here.
WILLACY: In this highly structured society, generations of teenagers have three constants – school, the army, their family.
MATAN KRAUS: At advanced training you do nothing. We expected to stand at roll call, we stood but the commanders all went to a meeting.
WILLACY: For Matan Kraus, this is the weekly farewell dinner with girlfriend Helena and his parents.
NITZA KRAUS, Matan’s mother: It’s much more sophisticated than when I was in the army, when we were in the army. They’re expected to think more, they expect of themselves more.
I think they want to pick up or to pick up as much as possible in the music and films.
WILLACY: But the army in Israel is not just for teenagers. Matan, like his father, will be called on to serve as a reservist for one month every year until he’s 45.
MATAN KRAUS: I miss them already. It’s tough, but I’m not sad that I have to go. It’s something I want to do, it’s something I know we need to do, we have to do.
WILLACY: At the central bus station, thousands of young Israelis are heading back to base. These soldiers won’t see family, friends and sweethearts for at least another week.
HELENA MOSHE: I know that he serves in a really dangerous place. I know that being a combat soldier,
he’s a target, you know. I always listen to the news, obsessively almost. I just try not to think about it and just support him, you know, to make him feel confident, as confident as possible, although, you know, sometimes I’m very worried.
Music
WILLACY: A nation founded in the wake of the tragedy and trauma of the Holocaust, Israel is determined to mould new generations capable of defending themselves and their homeland and while many young Israelis are still happy to take their place in the people’s army, more and more are deciding their future is better off without it, and their country’s future is better without them.
Reporter: Mark Willacy
Camera: Michael Cox
Editor: Simon Brynjolffssen
Jerusalem Co-ordinator:Ayelet Cohen
Producer: Trevor Bormann