Surrounded by the Negev desert, in southern Israel, there is a town without a soul or exact coordinates. The almost infallible Google map here is defeated by the protection of a military land of about 25 square kilometers, where 600 houses, schools, shops and public buildings are erected that do not understand ordinary people, but do of weapons and wars.
The only ones allowed to set foot in its alleys, the Israeli soldiers, call this place Mini-Gaza. Its official name is Urban Warfare Training Center. However, small Gaza best captures the wonder that this city conveys: a set of cement and metal, worthy of Hollywood, which aims to imitate any city in the Middle East – be it Gaza, Jenin, Beirut or Damascus – for hard to complete “training in urban conflicts”.
“This is like a camera. When the terrorists move weapons from one side to the other, we show the images to the bosses”, a recruit is heard to say as he installs a device in the frame of a door. Although erased by the sand, the sign indicates that this is part of the fictitious El Alam school, which has as its neighbor a suffocating underground tunnel that simulates those of the Islamist group Hamas.
For the Palestinian militias, for the Lebanese political paramilitary formation Hizbullah; for Operation Defensive Shield (2002) or what Israel calls the Second Lebanon War (2006), the Hebrew State justifies that it started this 45 million dollar model because, in its words, it realized that the war, at other times in the open field, has since moved into urbanized areas.
“We built the city to be sure that the soldiers exercise their maneuvers as faithfully as possible to reality – explains the retired Israeli commander Bentzi Gruber, an active reservist and, one might say, also a teacher at this base of Tze’elim–. When they go to a town in Lebanon or Gaza, it will have the same center, the same religious infrastructure, refugee camps… it’s all very overpopulated.”
When the sun goes down in Mini-Gaza, it turns into a ghost town. But during the day there is also no one who follows the Muslim prayer that, in truth, the mosques broadcast from their minarets. No one, at least, who by belief cares about the daily “Allahu Àkbar”, among the noise of gunfire, detonations of explosives, trenches and armored vehicles that can lead to a brigade of 2,000 soldiers at the same time.
Far from this Training Center, which is half an hour from Gaza in a straight line and is on the border with Egypt, this is precisely what Ori Givati, a former tank commander between 2010 and 2013, regrets, which some 11 years ago (and for obligation, as the Israeli military service dictates) was exercised “a few times” in these narrow streets.
“There is no mention of who lives there, what their culture is, their humanitarian situation or that there are not only armed groups. The only way to talk about Gaza is through these trainings. This base makes Gaza look like a home for terrorism and nothing more. It is one of the aspects that makes us train to see the Palestinians only as enemies, as targets”, criticizes Givati.
During this tour, “enemy” is the term most repeated by Gruber or the young recruits and instructors of Tze’elim. Despite efforts to portray the site as a remote Arab town, the predominantly Palestinian symbolism makes the association inevitable, as the campaign director of Breaking The Silence, an organization of ex-soldiers advocating for an end to the Israeli occupation, points out. .
In the absence of a true “enemy”, in the Mini-Gaza rehearsals it is the soldiers wearing kufiya (the traditional headscarf of the region) who play the role of opponents. The banners with the faces of the “martyrs” – this is how the Palestinians refer to their dead – are the ones that would adorn the entrance to Hebron or Nablus, while the murals deserve a point and part of fascination, and not without reason they served for certain scenes from the Fauda series. Made by an official graffiti artist of the Israeli armed forces, they reproduce the logos and flags of Hamas, considered a terrorist group in Israeli, American and European eyes; also the face of its former leader and co-founder, Ahmed Yasin, killed in an Israeli attack on the strip; and in this line, endless legends that pray “Palestine” or “Gaza free”, just to mention a few.
“Try to imagine the challenges of fighting in places like this,” asks Bentzi Gruber, who has led units in five wars. We try to make sure we do it ethically, without killing civilians if we don’t have to.”
For Gruber, the July operation in Jenin, the most important Israeli ground and air operation in the occupied West Bank since the second intifada, proves this statement, since “fighting for 48 hours in an overpopulated place and leaving ne with hardly any civilians injured, it’s a miracle”. Especially, if the “terrorists”, he complains, “use ambulances or children as shields”. However, for Ori Givati, the army “is denying or not taking into account many other impacts”. “We fight against a population, mostly innocent, whose streets and houses we destroy, and it is affected beyond whether they are killed or not.”
In this urban recreation, the most important introduction to the land, to life, may be the reproduction of a home like yours, like mine, with dishes, newspapers spread out on the table, flowers next to photos of relatives… With a touch of prayers written in Arabic that adorn the wall, of course, and many more carpets. “This apartment is designed to simulate the urban terrain of our enemies”, points out a young woman who, next to enormous binoculars, explains how to observe the “enemy” taking over a private house. He argues that, since it is a war zone, the structure is empty. But when we ask him how the Israeli army treats families when they occupy residences during incursions in the West Bank – such as those recounted by former soldiers in Breaking The Silence -, he clarifies and concludes that “we are not supposed to go to apartments where a family lives, and The West Bank is another matter, I prefer not to talk about it”.
As in the Netflix series Fauda, ??the armed forces of the United States and Cyprus, among other undisclosed European nations, have made use of the empty buildings of up to eight stories that dot the skyline of Mini-Gaza. Israel continues to militarily upgrade the city because, it says, it is preparing against Hamas, Iran and even a war with Hezbollah.
Except that if an extraterrestrial landed, as the current situation dictates, he would have to be told about the Mini-West Bank, today the only territory in which Israel operates on a daily basis. “As long as we continue to have millions under our control, we will need more bases, more extensive training, bigger wars – warns Givati-. Israel must stop the occupation. This is the real way to avoid innocent victims.”
