June 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
“My body is telling me to leave Hebron,” he said, collecting himself for a few moments before setting forth into the city where he had spent months as a combat officer guarding an enclave of 800 Jewish settlers in the midst of 200,000 Palestinian residents.
He passed the spots where he saw settlers attack Palestinian civilians with impunity, the doors he busted down on nighttime raids, all the places where he came to view his country’s military presence as an unjust, unsustainable occupation.
It was here that he decided he would leave the army after his stint was up, and devote himself to opposing that occupation and what he sees as Israel’s drift toward right-wing autocracy.
Drill is among the growing ranks of veterans and reservists at the center of the mass protest movement mobilized against Israel’s new far-right government. Every day since demonstrations erupted six months ago, the New Jersey native has pumped out press releases, videos and field interviews, becoming the English-speaking face of the protests.
He hopes to use the combat cred he gained in Hebron to aid the movement. “No one can say I don’t know what is really going on,” he said.
But he’s also using the protests to help him heal from Hebron, and the experiences here that still echo in his psyche. It took months of intense treatment to ease a case of post-traumatic stress disorder so acute that a holiday firecracker could cause him to collapse on the sidewalk.
These return visits, exposing himself carefully to the streetscape of painful memories, help. But so does his work with the protest movement that has let him trade a gun barrel for an iPhone camera as a means of expressing the love for Israel and Zionism that led him to join the army in the first place.
“Doing the right thing is helping me to heal,” he said.
The growing involvement of vets and reservists was considered a key factor in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s move in March to temporarily shelve the government’s explosive plans to weaken Israel’s independent judiciary and Supreme Court.
But few have been as vocal and public as Drill, whose transformation from gung-ho warrior to anti-occupation evangelist has led to an open question among some of his army buddies, and even some of his family: “Is Josh okay?”
Back in New Jersey, young Yehoshua Moshe Drill (named for a Holocaust victim) had been a good enough point guard to draw a few Division III college scouts to his games at Golda Och Jewish day school in West Orange. But when Drill called after a senior-year visit to Auschwitz, the death camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, to say he was skipping basketball, postponing college and enlisting in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), no one was particularly surprised.
His big sister had been an IDF sniper instructor. Family life revolved around the synagogue, Jewish summer camp and trips to Israel.
In their liberal Jewish circles, the conflict was seen as a tragic reality for both Israelis and Palestinian civilians; his parents opposed the spread of Jewish settlements across the West Bank as an obstacle to peace.
But there were no doubts about the morality of Zionism — securing the Jewish homeland — or the righteousness of the soldiers protecting Israel. “Go get the bad guys,” was his uncle’s toast at the goodbye party.
He excelled right away, enduring 18 months of training and eventually testing into the hyper-select special forces track he coveted. His first posting was at a base guarding Mevo Dotan, a small settlement eight miles from the West Bank Palestinian city of Jenin.
The job was mostly guard duty. But he also had his first experience with no-knock raids on Palestinian houses, bursting the hinges with a hydraulic jack, rousting men into one room, women and children into another, taking the phones, searching the closets.
“It was hard waking up a family in the middle of the night,” he said. “On the other hand, we were told there was a Hamas [the Palestinian militant group] operative in there. It was always mixed.”
A few weeks after he arrived, he heard shots. Running 50 yards from the guard post, he came across two soldiers who had been stabbed. They were alive; the 16-year-old Palestinian girl who had attacked them was lying in the road. She died at an Israeli hospital.
Drill can still picture her intestines in the dust, still hear her screams, the settler voices yelling “Shoot her in the head!”
He was picked for officers’ school. As a new lieutenant, he caught a trainee’s ricocheted bullet fragments in his neck and face. It was one of the many stories he told his father, a lawyer, but not his mother, a yoga-teaching rabbi who encouraged her son to look for the larger meaning in his work and to journal every night.
He was thrilled to become a platoon commander in the storied Golani Brigade and intrigued when he learned he was headed to Hebron, the biblical West Bank city where Israelis have built settlements near the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The traditional burial site of Abraham is sacred to both Jews and Muslim and a flash point.
It was wrenching from the first.
On his recent return visit, Drill paused at the playground in the settlement, filled with children, where he and his patrolling soldiers would rest in the shade. The busy Palestinian streets were just yards away, beyond barrier walls and locked gates.
He pointed out the spot where a Palestinian sniper shot and killed a 10-month-old Israeli baby in her stroller in 2001. Seven years earlier, around the corner at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a Jewish settler had entered the mosque section and gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers.
“That’s Hebron,” Drill said.
He noted the gate that soldiers opened once a week for Jewish settlers to tour the Palestinian blocks, and for a yearly march when they would chant “May your village burn.”
“If there was a fight between a Jew and a Palestinian, it was always, always the Palestinian we arrested,” he said.
Not much has changed, said Idris Zadeh, a 74-year-old Palestinian butcher whom Drill befriended after their morning greetings on the street evolved into coffees at Zadeh’s house near the army base. Now, sitting under a grape arbor in his courtyard, Zadeh tells Drill that the current battalion of IDF soldiers in Hebron “is the most brutal I’ve seen in 10 years.”
“They tell me ‘shut your mouth’ when I say good morning,” he said. One of the officers delayed an ambulance for more than 90 minutes at a checkpoint when Zadeh was being taken to a hospital in Jerusalem after being kicked in the groin by a sheep.
Drill reached his own breaking point with the army during a house raid a few weeks into his Hebron posting. It was the sight of a little boy, trembling and wetting his pajamas in a room full of Israeli soldiers, that sparked “a spiritual reckoning” in the young officer.
“For some reason, all I could think of was how it would be for that to happen to my family,” he said.
Afterward, he climbed some rusty stairs on the base armory, up to a rooftop with privacy and a good signal and called his mother. She told him that there was a reason he was there, even if he couldn’t see it yet. She told him to write in his journal.
He did, about a dream that night in which he was being chased by IDF soldiers.
“My relationship to the place changed right away,” he said. “I would finish my eight months, but I knew I would leave the army.”
Yishai Fleisher, a longtime spokesman for the Jewish settlement in Hebron, said Drill is not typical of IDF soldiers, most of whom find their experience in Hebron “memorable and positive,” according to exit surveys.
“He is part of a tiny minority,” Fleisher said of Drill and other Hebron vets who voice objections to the army presence. “Consciously or not, with or without malice, what they are doing is strengthening the narrative of getting rid of Jews in Israel.”
Drill left the army in late 2019, but he found the army wasn’t leaving him. At a dinner back home in New Jersey, his story of the 16-year-old Palestinian killed in his first settlement post ended with him sobbing at the table.
“At first I didn’t understand what it was,” said his mother, Julia Drill. “I taught him yoga and breathing, but it became clear that he needed treatment.”
It was only after a holiday firecracker exploded near him in Tel Aviv — Drill collapsed in panic — that he signed up for army PTSD treatment. After five months, it helped. He’s still in therapy, but finishing his degree at Tel Aviv University, planning for graduate school and working to turn his 15 journals into a memoir — he plans to settle in Israel, where he is a citizen.
And he protests the government.
On a June Saturday night, Drill shot a video message on the main stage of the weekly Tel Aviv demonstration, an estimated 95,000 chanting, flag-waving protesters behind him. He had already conducted shouted interviews in the crowd, engulfed in the kind of cacophony that once would have sent him into a panic.
Other organizers say Drill’s perfect English, growing list of press contacts and social media following have made him a valuable asset.
“We needed someone like Josh, and his personal story shows how much he cares about Israel,” said Nadav Galon, a Hebrew-language spokesman for the loose coalition of protest groups. “We talk five or 10 times a day.”
Not everyone is happy with Drill’s rising profile. Some of his more religious cousins in the north of Israel have sent worried queries to his parents. Some of his IDF comrades are concerned.
“There are some members of our crew, they have a hard time with Josh being in the media, saying the soldiers are just cops keeping the West Bank quiet,” said Itai Barnahor, 26, one of the army buddies he remains close to. “I love Josh and I believe his idealism is based on love for Israel, but I told him, ‘Josh, some of the guys think you have lost your way.’”
Drill understands he may lose friends. But he doesn’t think he’s lost.
He thinks he has found a healthy future for himself and, he hopes, his country.
Eleanor H. Reich in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.
