Surrounded by the Negev desert, in southern Israel, there is a town without a soul or exact coordinates. Google’s map, almost infallible, here is defeated by the protection of a military land of about 25 square kilometers, on which 600 houses, schools, shops and public buildings are erected that do not know about ordinary people, but do know about weapons and wars.
The only ones allowed to set foot in its alleys, the Israeli soldiers, call this place Mini-Gaza. Its official title is Urban Warfare Training Center. However, little Gaza best meets the stupor that this city transmits: a cement and metal set, worthy of Hollywood, which tries to imitate any city in the Middle East – be it Gaza, Jenin, Beirut or Damascus – to carry out “training in urban conflicts.
“This is like a camera. When terrorists move weapons from one place to another, we show the images to the bosses,” a recruit is heard installing a contraption in a door frame. Although erased by the sand, the sign indicates that it is part of the fictitious El Alam school, whose neighboring construction is a suffocating underground tunnel that simulates those of the Islamist group Hamas.
For the Palestinian militias, for the Lebanese political-paramilitary formation Hizbulah; by Operation Defensive Shield (2002) or what Israel calls the Second Lebanon War (2006), the Jewish State justifies that it started this 45 million dollar model because, paraphrasing it, it realized that the war, once in the field open, passed from that time to urbanized areas.
“We built the city to make sure that the soldiers carry out their maneuvers as faithfully as possible to reality,” explains retired Israeli commander Bentzi Gruber, an active reservist and, one could say, also a professor at this Tze’elim base. When they go to a village in Lebanon or Gaza they will have the same center, the same religious infrastructure, refugee camps… all very overcrowded.”
When the sun goes down on Mini-Gaza, it mutates into a ghost town. But during the day there is no one who follows the Muslim prayer that the mosques really emit from their minarets. Nobody at least who, by belief, cares about that daily “Allahu Akbar”, in this noise of shots, explosive detonations, trenches and armored vehicles that a brigade of 2,000 soldiers can carry out at a time.
Far from this Training Center, which is half an hour from the Gaza Strip in a straight line and borders Egypt, is precisely what Ori Givati, a former tank commander between 2010 and 2013, laments about eleven years ago (and out of obligation, as dictated by Israeli military service) he exercised “on a few occasions” 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 of terrorism and nothing more. It is one of the aspects that contributes to training us to see the Palestinians only as enemies, as objectives”, criticizes Givati.
During this tour, “enemy” is the term that Gruber or the young recruits and instructors of Tze’elim repeat the most. Although they take pains to describe the site as a remote Arab city, the predominantly Palestinian symbology makes the association inevitable, as the campaign manager for Breaking The Silence, an organization of ex-soldiers who advocates ending the Israeli occupation, points out.
In the absence of a true “enemy”, in the Mini-Gaza rehearsals it is the soldiers with kufiya (the region’s traditional headscarf) who play the role of opponents. The banners with the faces of the “martyrs” -as 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 aside from fascination, and not in vain were they used for certain scenes from the Fauda series. Made by an official graffiti artist of the Israel 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, who died in an Israeli attack in the Strip; and in this line, endless legends that say “Palestine” or “Free Gaza”, just to mention a few.
“Try to imagine the challenges of fighting in places like this,” says Bentzi Gruber, who has led units in five wars. We try to make sure we do it ethically, not killing civilians if we don’t have to.”
For Gruber, the operation this July in Jenin, the largest Israeli ground and air operation in the occupied West Bank since the second intifada, proves this statement, since “fighting for 48 hours in an overcrowded place and coming out with almost no civilians hurt is a miracle.” ”. Especially, if the “terrorists”, he denounces, “use ambulances or children as shields”. However, for Ori Givati, the army “is denying or not taking into account many more effects.” “We are fighting against a population, the majority of whom are innocent, whose streets and houses we destroy, and they are affected beyond whether they are killed or not.”
Perhaps, in this urban recreation, the greatest introduction to the land, to life, is the reproduction of a house like yours, like mine, with its plates, its newspapers spread out on the table, flowers next to photos of relatives who they pose… Sure, with a touch of prayers written in Arabic that adorn the wall and many more carpets. “This apartment is designed to simulate the urban terrain of our enemies”, points out a young woman who, next to huge binoculars, tells how she observed the “enemy” taking over a private house. She defends that, being a war zone, the structure is empty. But when asked about how the Israeli army deals with families, when it occupies residences during incursions in the West Bank – like the ones recounted by former soldiers from Breaking The Silence – she clarifies and settles that “we are not supposed to go to apartments where a woman lives family, and the West Bank is another matter, I prefer not to talk about it.”
Like the Netflix series Fauda, ??the armed forces of the United States and Cyprus, among other undisclosed European nations, have made use of the hollow buildings of up to eight floors that draw the Mini-Gaza skyline. Israel continues to upgrade the city militarily because, she says, it is preparing against Hamas, Iran and even a war with Hezbollah.
Except that if an alien were to land, as is currently dictated, it would be necessary to talk 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 are going to need more bases, more extensive training, bigger wars,” Givati ??warns. Israel must stop the occupation. That is the real way to prevent innocent victims.”