From the roof of the house on the edge of the village, the great bowl of the valley shows a biblical landscape, a rocky hilltop and, in the distance, the white towers of Nablus. Along the dusty road, Palestinian men, women and children are toiling under a hot sun, barred from driving by an army roadblock: an old woman in a blue velvet dress, her face white and sweating; a woman holding a sick child in her arms, its eyes rolling; a water engineer trying to get to a meeting in Nablus to sign a contract. A Red Crescent ambulance with a doctor and a driver. On the roof are sandbags, camouflage netting, an Israeli flag; beyond the walls, in the garden, garbage, pizza boxes, a cardboard target of a soldier with chest sections marked. At the beginning of this year, the army occupied the top floor and roof of the Turabi family's house. It was their bad luck that its position on the edge of the village of Tsara, overlooking all the roads from Nablus, made it an ideal watchtower for soldiers charged with stopping suicide bombers entering the cities of Israel. They arrived a week or so before one of the Turabi sons was due to get married and move into the new apartment his parents had built on the top floor for him and his bride. Nine months later, there is still no wedding. Concrete slabs have been raised in front of the gate, anyone who passes before their door is subject to a checkpoint and the ones the army doesn't like the look of have to put their identity documents into a slit in the side of a plastic soft drinks bottle which is hauled up on to the roof by a piece of string. The army told the family that they would pick up the tab for water and electricity, but though the bills have been handed over, no money has appeared yet. To add to their troubles, some people in the village called them collaborators. In the night, the family and their children are terrified; according to one of the sons, 23-year-old Naeem Turabi, they hear shooting above their head. The mother, forbidden to pass through the locked doors of the side entrance to climb the stairs in her own house, wants me to tell her what damage the soldiers are doing up there to her son's marriage home. Since the start of the intifada, Israeli soldiers have been accused of war crimes, massacres and, above all, child murders - 2,534 Palestinians have died since the intifada started, 434 of them under 18 and 110 of those under 12, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service. To the poet Tom Paulin, the IDF (Israel Defence Force) is the "Zionist SS". Many journalists have interviewed the Turabis, but among the vast noise of opinion and testimony that rises up from this part of the world, the voices that are missing are those of the soldiers, the people sitting on the roof. Buried under their helmets and flak jackets, with all the scary hardware of modern military technology, packed inside tanks and Hummers and armoured cars, they seem like metal men, without identity, not really human. The IDF incursion into Jenin 18 months ago was a watershed in the army's media relations. The exclusion of journalists led to wildly inflated reports of a massacre of civilians, whole families dead, poisoned food, rape. A few months ago, I met a reservist who served in Jenin and he told me what passed through his mind as he watched the tanks blunder into the old city, shaving off the front of the narrow alleys. Thoughts unspoken and unheard. I asked the IDF spokesperson's department for five days' unrestricted access, 24/7, to a combat unit in daily contact with Palestinians. I said it was for others to document atrocities, I was interested in penetrating the silence that muffles Israel's army. They agreed, laying down just two rules: that the soldiers be referred to by their first names only, and that all interviews take place in the presence of an officer from the spokesperson's department. No questions or answers were censored. What follows are the thoughts and feelings not of generals or politicians or intellectuals, but of the 20-year-old conscripts of Israel's army of occupation who have finally been given permission to speak. The soldiers sitting on the roof of the Turabi house had arrived that morning to take over from another company. They found the place trashed, the stairs covered with rotting garbage, floors filthy. "They're living like pigs!" cried a sergeant with tatttoos down his arm. "But you were two hours late. Do you know what it's like to be stuck on this roof for two weeks?" the soldiers who were being relieved shouted back. "Next time you don't wait to be woken," their platoon commander told the arriving soldiers, "you set the alarm on your cellphone. As for the rest of you, you're not leaving until you clean this place." The arriving soldiers were from the 890th Paratroop Brigade - Palhod 890. They came in an armoured vehicle from a base 10 minutes away, a collection of trailers rented from the religious settlement of Kdumim which bought them a few years back with the over-optimistic plan of attracting visitors to a holiday camp in the fresh air and barbed wire of the occupied territories. The Hebrew name for Nablus is Shekhem, pronounced as if you're spitting out phlegm from the back of the throat, which is what most Israelis would like to do to Nablus. They call it the "capital of terror" - from here came the bombs or bombers of the Dolphinarium nightclub in Tel Aviv in which 21 Russian teenagers were killed, the Park Hotel in Netanya where 30 were killed, and the Sbarro Pizza Cafe in Jerusalem where 15 died, including seven children. Aviram, the 24-year-old company commander and captain of 100 men, sits at his desk in his office (a metal freight container) behind an Israeli flag and a photograph of one of his friends who was killed in action. He is short with a sweet smile, looks about 14, reads the novels of the Israeli writer David Grossman and has fought some of the most violent and controversial battles of the second intifada. "I started out in the duvduvan, a special unit that deals with counterterror, where we are disguised as Arabs," he said. "I was dealing with the specific head of terrorist organisations or ticking bombs; I arrested the people who did the lynch of our soldiers in Ramallah - we took the guy three weeks after it happened, a 19-year-old. He didn't look so frightening in the middle of the night. I was involved in the arrest of Marwan Barghouti [the leader of the Tanzim, the military wing of the Fatah movement]. During Defensive Shield I was in Arafat's compound in Ramallah. I think I have been through every refugee camp, walking through walls. "Jenin was the most difficult of all. There is no reason I can tell you why they were more stubborn but they fought bravely and they gave us a good fight. As a human being, I was making the difference between the terrorists and the civilians, I don't see myself as a killer of women and children and they took advantage of that and tried to use civilians as human shields. They put bombs all over the camp, in the trees, doorways. You could see a Palestinian family surrounded by bombs. There was some strong fighting there and I guess some civilians were hit, I can't tell you by who. I know that in the eyes of Palestinians, we are the occupiers and if the army was sitting in my home in Yavneh, I would feel I was occupied. But suicide bombers I can't understand, it's unbelievable, after three years I still can't understand it, though I know the reasons, and they are what my company is here to stop. At the end of the day, there are people who want to kill my family and to protect them I have to check the bags of those people and sometimes kill them." When the Palestinian doctor and Red Crescent ambulance driver put their identity cards into the plastic bottle at the front of the house, it was hauled up by Avi, a 20-year-old Ethiopian, one of the Black Jews of Africa, who handed them over to the radio operator who radioed through the identity numbers up to the next level of bureaucracy until they finally reached the Tel Aviv office of the Shabak, the internal security services, who were short-staffed because it was lunchtime, leaving the doctor and driver sitting in the garden for two hours in the hot sun, an action defended by the army because it says that ambulances have been used to transport suicide belts - Aviram said he had found one himself. Avi's grandfather was a kes (rabbi) in Addis Ababa, who in the 1970s had brought the first Ethiopian Jews to Israel in a terrible march across the Sudan, where many were murdered, raped or fell victim to diseases in Sudanese refugee camps, a story more extraordinary and dramatic than the illegal immigrant ship Exodus. In Ethiopia they were known as the Falasha - strangers - a term as pejorative as "nigger" in America. "A Jew is a Jew, all over the world they oppress us and that's what it's like in Ethiopia," Avi said. In 1991, the Israeli government launched Operation Moses which airlifted the remaining Jews out of the country to Israel where they caused astonishment among the earlier arrivals from Poland, Berlin, Morocco and Baghdad and, in a national scandal, were surreptitiously converted by rabbis who didn't believe they were really Jewish. "I can't say there's no discrimination here," Avi said, "because there is. Nobody says anything to your face but I see it, I know." Avi is proud and delighted to be in the IDF; for an Ethiopian to serve in an elite combat unit is to prove something to himself and to the rest of the country, that he can be as tough and as Zionist as the native-born Sabras. "I joined the paratroopers because I wanted my parents to be proud of me. I really love this country and I want to progress and move on. I have big plans for myself, I hope to become a fashion designer. I wouldn't like it if someone came to my house and sat on the roof, but I'm sure the army has its reasons because we're not here for the hell of it. I understand why the people downstairs are angry, they're right to be, but the bottom line is I have no choice: if I'm not going to defend my family in Ashkelon, who is? The political issues are too big for me. I keep my mind on the job." With one hand, the government of Ariel Sharon had recently given the settlers more money for expansion, with the other it took from the army. A current national scandal is that half the serving soldiers don't have ceramic plates in their flak jackets. The paratroopers have to bring their own bedding from home, and the trailers are a pre-teen mess of Snoopy sheets and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle duvet covers. Outside, the base looks like Eminem goes camping: in the evening they gather under the moonlight to dance to hip-hop dressed like LA rap stars. The extreme informality is hard to digest, growing up in Britain on parade ground discipline and deference to rank. There are no salutes in the Israeli army, and officers are called by their first names. Aviram beckoned a sergeant over to speak to me: "In a minute," he said, waving his commander away. The air is loud with the music of mobile phones whose ringtones, downloaded from the internet, connect the army of occupation with the army of the hysterically preoccupied - their mothers. "He's a good boy," Aviram's mother told me a few days later. "He's still my baby, though he'd kill me if he heard me say it. All his soldiers on the base, they look like soldiers but they're still babies, they need someone to hug them." And so they hug each other. The intense affection the soldiers feel for their achi - brother - is palpable. They come from everywhere, from kibbutzim, from closed religious communities and industrial Haifa where they have Arab-Israeli friends, but most are from the densely populated coastal plain, missing the cities' malls, cinemas, clubs and cafes. The base has Orthodox Ashkenazi soldiers who put on a tallis and tefilin every morning to pray, Mizrachi soldiers with families from Yemen, Syria, Kabul and Baghdad, several Ethiopians, Russians born in Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. It was the idea of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, that the IDF would serve as a tool of socialism, the melting pot in which every part of the country would meet each other, rich and poor, Europeans from Berlin, North Africans from Fez, the grand diaspora reunion. All Israelis are required to do three years' military service from the age of 18, and once this is completed, they are recalled, if required, for periods lasting between a week and three months, for miluim, reserve duty, until they are 42 if they served in combat units and 50 for non-combat soldiers. Equal numbers of girls are conscripted, mainly serving in support functions such as office work, social welfare and vehicle maintenance, both in the occupied territories and at the ministry of defence. The full spectrum of Israeli society - the future university professor and the future car thief - all have to be found a place. And not just the Jews but also the Russian Christians who arrived in the 1990s, the Druze, who have a tradition of military service, and the Bedouin. Two groups are exempt from compulsory service, the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) and the Arab Israelis, those Palestinians who remained in Israel after the 1948 war led to the expulsion and flight of today's refugees and who now comprise 20% of the Israeli population. The Haredi successfully lobbied the government that studying the Torah was a service to the country, and the Arab Israelis were excluded on the grounds that they could not be expected to fight against their Palestinian brothers, though cynics think that the state doesn't want to arm them. Both these groups can volunteer for military service, though few do. For most Israelis, the army remains the place where the national identity is forged, and of the soldiers I spoke to, none supported conscientious objectors, although a couple said that they would consider joining the reservists' protests once their three years were up. The soldiers' relationship with the settlers is mainly restricted to meetings with officers, though some of the religious soldiers join them for services. The settlers who walk their dogs or jog in the early morning don't acknowledge the soldiers going out on patrol and the soldiers don't say hello to them. Part of the company's job is to guard the settlement and to prevent the settlers from attacking Palestinians in surrounding villages: "One settlement near here is very radical," Aviram said, "and the company there has two problems, one with the Arabs, one with the Jews. Usually after a terror attack in the area, the settlers go to the Palestinian villages and make a pogrom." A reservist spoke even more bluntly: "They think they're an army and this country doesn't need another army. They have a habit of creating facts on the ground and the army has to deal with their shit. Relations between us can be very difficult. In certain places the settlers have lobbied to get rid of commanders. There are documented cases where settler organisations have infiltrated the army bases by using supportive personnel, particularly quartermasters who'll turn a blind eye when stuff goes missing. There are instances of settlers raiding military armouries and stealing weapons. It's like the wild west, they're turning themselves into the law."


One night, word came that a female settler, driving on the road 400 metres from the base, had been shot at. The soldiers scrambled into their flak jackets, loaded the magazine of their M16s, ran to their jeeps and drove off to lock down the surrounding villages and round up the population for questioning. A terrifying announcement came over the settlement Tannoy: "A terrorist has infiltrated the settlement. Everyone stay indoors." In the hamal, the war room, two soldiers operating the radio were baffled. "What is this bullshit?" they asked each other. "We've heard nothing about a terrorist infiltration. They're scaring their own people." As the night wore on, the details revealed a banal farce - the shot was a stone and the terrorist infiltration was a settler hitting the wrong button on a row of prerecorded announcements. The following morning, 20-year-old Amit went out on patrol to the villages to track down the stone-thrower. A natural diplomat, he had just come back from the army's intensive Arabic course and was now one of the company's only two Arabic speakers; the other, Oren, heard the language from his Iraqi parents but speaks it "like a child". In the village of Jit, the patrol stopped some Palestinians. "We started asking about the incident last night and someone said, there is the house of the head man. So I went to the house and we sat and had coffee," said Amit, "and I told him to go to the school and tell the children to stop throwing stones, because it starts with stones and ends with something much worse, and he agreed. I told him that on the other side we had made good relations with the settlement so that they stayed away from the villagers, and that's why it's quiet round here at the moment. "The problem starts in our Israeli schools where they teach literary, not spoken, Arabic. If we Israelis spoke the language properly, that would have solved a lot of problems from the start. I spent a lot of time understanding the customs, the way of life, particularly how they receive guests. I really like their mentality and their culture. I have no Arab friends and no history of being connected to them; my grandparents on both sides came from Germany before the war, but I have a great interest in the fate of the people who live in this area. It's really important that if we're neighbours and we live in the same lands, there should be communication, and it's important that it happens within the army because that's the point of conflict between the two sides." At lunchtime on Sunday, two policewomen appeared, tiny girls who strutted around the base in sawn-off tops and white jeans. They had been called in from the military police because the Palestinian men in the villages objected to male soldiers inspecting their women's bags. When teenagers are inducted into the army, they can be assigned to a number of different roles according to IQ and physical fitness: the parachute brigades are the elite combat units every Israeli kid dreams of joining and which take only the best and the brightest. Then, in descending order, there are the cavalry, the engineers, the jobniks who sit behind a desk in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, and the military police and border guards who accept those who fail the IQ tests - the illiterate, the damaged, the angry. The MP's job is to investigate soldiers for possession of drugs and other infractions. The border guards are supposed to control the border with Egypt, preventing smuggling of cars, drugs, prostitutes. Yet they're everywhere, in Jerusalem and Hebron, one of the worst flashpoints between settlers on the rampage and the local Palestinian population. Among many soldiers they are regarded with contempt. Inside the armoured vehicle that transports platoons to an outpost, someone had scrawled among the graffiti: "The army forgets, the border guard never forgives." The position and treatment in Israeli society of working-class immigrants from Muslim countries is complex but among their numbers are found some of the most rightwing and racist of all Israelis. Orit, one of the policewomen, has grandparents from Yemen on one side and Afghanistan on the other. "Primitive people," she said dismissively, in good English, having spent a year in Brooklyn living with relatives, "like everyone from Arab countries. Checkpoints are my job. Look, it's not fun but I have to do it, if it's not me it's someone else and if it's not someone else, it's nobody. It's a little scary but I check very good, I look at their ID, their packages and bags. I'm only 19 but I don't think my age is important; when you hate you hate. I hate Arabs. With everything that's going on here, how can you love them? They haven't got a heart, someone who blows up has no heart. But however much I hate them, they'll always hate me more."


The soldiers talk about music, films, their girlfriends, football, and the religious talk religion, but they keep their mouths shut about politics. "Politics don't belong here," Aviram said. "There's no room for these discussions. I have soldiers who are settlers, and I have soldiers who think the settlements should be dismantled." None the less, it's not hard to figure out who thinks what. "The army isn't going to stop me from going on peace demonstrations when I'm on leave," one soldier said. Every other Friday they get on buses at the settlement stop and fan out across the country. Many head for Tel Aviv to meet their friends, buy jeans and drugs, get a tattoo and party at the city's trance clubs; others return to parents and girlfriends.
Shai, a 22-year-old second lieutenant and a platoon commander, went from a week-long commando course back home to Hadera, a middle-class town between Tel Aviv and Haifa. His family came to Israel from the Ukraine in 1979. "I'm the machlachat, the forward patrol, like the SAS, doing reconnaissance, arrests, searches," he explained. "I was in Tulkarem for eight or nine months, it's a small city with a lot of terrorism. We did a good job. It can be done, to make it completely clean of terror, but it would be a hard way, women and children would have to become the enemy. You can control the city but if you have one boy with a Kalashnikov, you have an enemy. I do my job to keep quiet in the country, the politics is over me. If they tell me a terrorist is going to blow himself up in Tel Aviv, I go to catch him. I see his wife and kids, you think things in your mind but you have no option. Sometimes I talk to my friends, I say, my head is going to explode, I have slept an hour a day. The cellphone doesn't stop when I get home on Friday. I still have responsibility for 20 soldiers, maybe he needs help or I want to know if they got home OK. It never finishes, it's always work."

Shai is in a posse with four friends, they go back for ever and have a theme song they first sang in kindergarten, Stand By Me. The rest of them have finished their military service and are out in the world, free to express themselves. We drove to the edge of the city, the five boys and some of their girlfriends, to a mall where they go for coffee. They don't drink much, few Israelis do. The night begins around 11pm, they see a movie, drive to Tel Aviv, or go to a nightclub on a kibbutz. They can't believe that Shai has signed on for another two years. "In the beginning he was brave," one friend said, "but now he's crazy, you need to have a mental scratch to do this work." Shai went with the army to Auschwitz, from which his grandmother was liberated. "You never imagine what people can do. She saw her mother and her father shot. She was all alone. When I stood there - I don't know how to say it - I put my beret on straight and I stood up strong. I said, I am here." His friend Liran also went to Auschwitz: "I understood things from another angle. Anyone can do those things the Nazis did, even us. If we don't have this strong relationship to human beings, you can hate them. I was in Ramallah, I saw the child see his father as powerless, but not everybody understands this. You're tired, you take all the bad things you feel and you take them out on someone else. Terrorism affects our values. There can be a soldier whose friend was killed and he's standing in front of a Palestinian and he asks himself, how important is this Palestinian to me? The left says the occupation is making us corrupt, and it's true. The occupation has weakened the connection with morality for some individuals."

Almost every soldier I spoke to wanted to talk about the discrepancy between what they see on the streets of Nablus and Ramallah and what appears on the foreign news. "Does the world really think we're making a holocaust against the Arabs?" one soldier asked me. They are baffled and upset by what they regard as deliberate distortions of the facts by journalists, particularly the omission of the presence of armed Palestinian militias among the crowds of stone-throwing children. "The world sees this war and we are the Goliath and they are the David," Shai said. "The media make us ugly and it's not true. I was in Hebron and we needed to take over the roof of a house for a time to watch the city. I stand up and watch where at the front we have put barbed wire round the house. I saw a female photographer take some children and arrange them so it looked like they were inside the barbed wire. I see pictures of soldiers grabbing some kid and I saw that kid a moment before throwing a Molotov cocktail, but Europe isn't interested in that."

Two years ago, in the New York Times, the journalist Chris Hedges observed Israeli soldiers in Gaza "entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport". What did Shai make of this allegation? "If that thing happened, the whole army would stop," he said. "It couldn't happen."
"It could happen," one of his friends said. "The army is a big system. There is not a country that can control every soldier."
"If the soldier does this, he pays the price."
"But the price is very little, he sits in jail for 16 days."
We began to talk politics. "What's wrong here is the situation of the people in the refugee camps," one friend said. "We are willing to give up the territories, even from the capital, the holy city of the Jews, for peace."
"You can't get anything from a political discussion," Shai interrupted. "In the end there is our side and their side. We'll sit at a table and write things and finish it. This is the solution. Our way, the military way, is a wheel, it never stops. Until we have an agreement, we have to protect the cities, but it's not the way to end it."

My favourite graffiti on the walls of the armoured vehicle was the following little poem: 1 life 2 short 3 years 4 what. Maybe Udi wrote it - I found him on Sunday afternoon, on the top floor of the Turabis' house, having just watched a video of Friends. He wants to be a chef and has a Jamie Oliver charm about him: "I have been sitting on this roof since last week, but in four days I finish with the army. I want to go home and when I get there I will stay far away from Nablus and Ramallah. I never wanted not to be in the army but after three years it makes you want to puke. It gives a lot to the soldiers but enough is enough. I'm going home and I'm going to have a hot shower and sleep in my own bed. Then I'll get up and play soccer, see my girlfriend and start to live.

"It's obvious that a person who is not bothered about what we're doing here is lying to himself but, on the other hand, there's no other way. If I can summarise my two and a half years on the West Bank it's going from dilemma to dilemma, one conflict to another. I'm not afraid, we're not in Vietnam, but it's not like we have someone to fight against. Our enemy is using guerrilla tactics, they're terrorists, it's not a real war. For me what is meaningful is dealing with the civilians, the Arab population, which is much more challenging. Every normal man who sees the civilians feels uncomfortable with what we're doing - and that's an understatement. That's the most amazing thing, that we're 20 and so powerful! You have to learn to control yourself and it's hard to do. The people you see in this room know how to control themselves but there are others, children like us, and they don't."

A new book by Liran Ron Fuer, a former Israeli staff sergeant who served in Gaza in the mid-1990s, asserts that the army turns everyone into a violent sadist. Ora Ardun, who is part of Machsom Watch, a group of Israeli women who monitor abuses at checkpoints, told me this was something of an exaggeration. "They are human and it's more difficult to go against the tide than conform. There are many examples of cruelty but it depends very much on whether their commanders drive them to be that way."

"The army does kill children, it does, that's a fact," Udi went on. "We can't deny it because the figures are there. Children are being killed. But every case you have to see as an individual. You can't say just because someone has been in the Israeli army he can't join some university. You don't know where he's been or what he's done, it doesn't make sense. There are a lot of people in the world who think that obeying orders is not an excuse, that sometimes we need to refuse orders, and I agree that I would refuse orders, but so far I haven't had that kind of order.

"I don't know why most of the world is against Israel right now. I see BBC, CNN and it looks like Serbia here, like we're making a lot of war crimes. Part of the argument is probably true but you can't ignore all the bastards killing civilians who have no connection to this war. I don't think there is one of us who doesn't know someone at home who was killed or injured. We're in a very bad cycle. There are many who think that this chain of events is leading us nowhere and we have got to stop it and then someone else will say, no, we should hit them harder, in their neighbourhoods and houses. The real point is that I'm hurting thousands of people every day, even though I don't want to. But I am not a politician, I am only the one who is saying you can pass, you can't pass."

One night Aviram sat down in front of a laptop and looked at photographs by Judah Passow of the mass destruction of the centre of Jenin, walls that Aviram himself had broken, houses he had destroyed or entered at gunpoint. A child stands in the centre of the apocalypse, biting her nails, with a demented expression in her eyes, women wander through a landscape of death and loss. I watched Aviram's face, lit up by the screen, as the images clicked away in front of him. "Sad pictures," he said quietly, then, with almost no pause, "Did you know three of our soldiers were killed in an ambush today? Young boys."

The same conflict preys on the mind of Aviram's mother, Sophie: "Everything he does I'm proud of, but I'm sure that it has a big effect," she said. "Jenin was something very meaningful for his life. He wasn't the same Aviram as I knew before, and it was the same with my husband when he came back from Lebanon. But we talk about it a lot, we are a very open family and it's important that he hears what we have to say. That out of all this death the meaning of life will be more important to him. We want him to be a mensch, a human being who can still see the eyes of the other, not a war machine." Ten days later, Judah bumped into Aviram among the crowd of 100,000 in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv at the largest Peace Now rally since Rabin's assassination eight years before. He had been to every peace rally since Rabin was killed, he said.

Even before I entered the base and met the soldiers, I had wondered about their future. Were they to become a Vietnam generation, damaged and broken? I saw how thick their skins were - the soldier who said to me, " I'm just doing my job, the Palestinians can hate me all they want, I don't care." I had pondered the fate of Yonatan, a skinny 21-year-old who was one of the top snipers in Israel. The snipers are the army's killers, working alone, usually without a commander. A sniper shot the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist Tom Hurdnall in the head. "You have to understand that this is a war," said Yonatan. "There is a moral imperative to every operation. I have got no feeling or conscience about anyone I have killed, there is a reason and it's done to standard procedures. And when I finish in the army I will go to New Zealand and Australia, to try to find another reality."

I asked Michal Eschel-Grossman, a psychotherapist and the mother of two sons, one who has just completed his army service and the other who is to begin shortly, about the future of these boys. "Israeli society is becoming more and more violent, you can feel it on the road and the queue, in the public dialogue that calls the peace camp traitors," she said. "Serving in the army may be very damaging to young souls. Regarding the soldiers who protest, holding two contradictory positions simultaneously is very difficult for such a young person."

The next time I saw Udi, he was standing on a windy street corner in Tel Aviv, a frail-looking boy in a large sweater. "I look different without the helmet?" he said. Like two separate people, I replied. "Well, this is the real me." We walked to a cafe and I asked him about the Udi who joined the army and the Udi who had just left. "When you are 17 and they start to classify you for what kind of army service you will do, most of us are still children, you don't totally understand what the army is until you get there," he said. "Soldiers in basic training want to fight and kill, they don't understand it will be a trauma for life. No extreme change has occurred in me but that is because there are two kinds of soldier, the kind who had a very close friend who was killed in front of them, or they killed at close range themselves, and the kind who did not. I'm glad to say I'm in the second group, which makes me the minority. In the last year of the army, I had a very confusing time, I started to question why am I guarding this settlement, why am I not letting this 60-year-old Palestinian through, and I think it made me more mature and aware of who I am and who is my neighbour. It would be very comfortable for Israel if the Palestinians were not here and the same for them if we were not here, but everyone knows now there are going to be two nations."

On the base, various soldiers had rolled their eyes when I mentioned the ISM, international volunteers who stand between the civilian community and the army, but I thought Udi might feel that, in another life, he could have been one of them. In fact, he said, in his three years' military service, the only time he lost his temper was with an ISMer. "The general idea sounds very lovely, all kinds of people with good intentions hear about people who have a miserable life and they go and help them - maybe if I hadn't been in the army I would stop there, but I have dealt with them, they are very political and they intentionally disturb our work and make things more dangerous for everyone, for us soldiers and for themselves. They hate us. With all the beauty that's inside them, they hate. I had a chance to talk to several of them, I tried to understand. I define myself on the left, I know from bitter experience that it doesn't help to destroy a neighbourhood in revenge for a bomb in Israel, but there was one lady from San Francisco I must confess I said very harsh things to. Sometimes the beauty of the soul can make you sick."

Recently, it crossed Udi's mind that when he travels abroad on the post-army journey all soldiers take before jobs or university, he will be judged first as an Israeli and an Israeli soldier. "I will be an emissary of Israel," he said, "so I will try not to get into too many arguments. If I meet people who have opinions about our country and if I feel he is a reasonable person, I will be glad to talk, I know I could give him a lot of knowledge, because I know many people are talking from no knowledge, but if he is very extreme, I must be careful. You cannot not think about what it means to be an Israeli, it's so inside you. I don't think there is another nationality that is so different and complicated. There are people in my nation I am ashamed of, but this is my home - I have no other. I met a girl from the Netherlands and she talked about Holland in such a cold way, like it was just any country. When I heard that, I realised that, with all the troubles and rough times, after all, I am still an Israeli."

We shook hands on the windy street. He looked so young, years younger than when I'd seen him in uniform, and I wished I could make myself a human shield against all the hate and demonisation he would encounter from those for whom life is a collection of symbols and slogans which stamp themselves on the faces of others, obscuring their features, like a helmet.