“IN every classroom in Israel there is a map,” says Nadav Weiman. “But it is a map without any green line and without any names of Palestinian villages or towns. Between the river to the sea, it’s only Israel.”

Weiman is the executive director of Breaking the Silence, an organisation of veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem since September 2000, who seek peace and an end to the Israeli occupation.

Before leading Breaking the Silence, Weiman was a history teacher and before that, he was a sniper in the IDF. The green line refers to the internationally recognised “pre-1967” borders between Israel, the West Bank and Gaza that have been erased from official Israeli maps.

“You have to understand, Israelis we don’t see Gaza, we don’t see the streets of Gaza, we don’t see Gazans, we don’t hear about what is happening inside Gaza,” Weiman said, speaking at a Washington, DC press conference alongside US veterans peace group, Common Defence, the day before Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, addressed the US Congress.

“There is an iron curtain between the people of Israel and the Gaza Strip.”

That harsh isolation is what prompted Zwelivelile Mandela, grandson of South Africa’s revered former president, Nelson Mandela, to declare that “the Palestinians are experiencing a worse form of the apartheid regime, worse than that we have ever experienced as South Africans.”

Weiman remembers: “The first time I met Palestinians in my life was as a combat soldier in Jenin in 2006 after finishing my training in the special forces. And it was from two sides of the barrel of a gun.”

On the other end was “a kid I dragged from his bed in the middle of the night.” But his peers in Israel know nothing about him. At a talk he gave to 18-year-old high schoolers in Tel Aviv, Weiman said: “They asked me to explain to them what is the Gaza Strip. Who lives over there? What is going on over there? We don’t have any idea.”

During a 2008 operation in Gaza, Weiman recalls calling in a bulldozer to destroy greenhouses that were blocking the view from the house they’d commandeered for an ambush, “because our line of sight was more important than anything else in that operation.”

Although an Israeli soldier had been taken hostage at the time, the operation was not there to free him, Weiman said. It had only one purpose; to provoke.

“The goal in that operation was to create an atmosphere where the Palestinians would attack us and then us as IDF snipers and soldiers can shoot them back,” Weiman said. “It was the day-to-day routine of the Israeli occupation.”

He recalled how “in Gaza every couple of years we have a very big operation where the IDF kills a lot of Palestinians, and a lot of soldiers die as well.”

Civilian collateral damage used to number around 14 civilians per target, Weiman said, but today “we are seeing collateral damage of sometimes three digits” and military leaders are “considering collateral damage as something that is almost OK. And me personally as a soldier who fought over there, I don’t think it’s OK. I don’t think civilians should die, period. Not Israelis and not Palestinians.”

What helps IDF soldiers slaughter Palestinians with such an apparent lack of remorse or empathy is also a result of the pervasive rhetoric that overtly encourages the erasure of everyone in Gaza.

“What we saw now after this war started on Gaza,” says Weiman, “are government officials, MKs [members of the Knesset], ministers in our government, religious leaders, are using the dog whistle, ‘Amalek.’ We had Xerxes and we had Hitler and now the Palestinians are called Amalek.”

According to the Old Testament, after the Amalekians attacked Jews leaving Egypt, God issued a command to wipe them all out, including their children and livestock, and to destroy everything they owned.

“You can hear it, you can see it in videos that soldiers are uploading from the Gaza Strip to social media and again you can hear ministers from our government using that word,” Weiman said.

“And that helps IDF soldiers to feel comfortable shooting inside Gaza.” It’s based on hatred and racism, he says, but also “not seeing Palestinians as people just like me, who have ambitions and dreams and kids and they are afraid and they are happy and only seeing them as the enemy.” That, he said, “helps us with the 57 years of occupation.”

In the occupied West Bank, says Weiman, it’s also based on the Israeli rule of law. “We have two separate law systems,” he said.

“We have the Israeli criminal law system for settlers and we have the Israeli military law system for Palestinians. And the Israeli criminal law system basically lets settlers do whatever they want.”

On the morning we spoke, Weiman had received a video “showing settlers with metal clubs with spikes on the edge of it, beating Palestinians, sending three of them to the hospital, one of them a 38-year-old woman with a broken skull. Next to them, in the same video, you can see two soldiers protecting them,” he said, referring to the settlers.

The soldiers are told they are protecting Israel but, says Weiman, “it’s not true, it’s not protecting Israel, it’s controlling Palestinians.”

Weiman says he supports Israel’s right to protect its civilians but not the way the Netanyahu government is going about it.

“It’s protecting the settler enterprise. It’s not protecting Israel. Protecting Israel is being with the 1967 borders.” The ones that aren’t shown on Israeli maps.

Absent the green line there is only a red line today in Gaza, an endless river of blood.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.