“What makes a country good isn’t whether it is happy or not, it’s the ethics and morality of the country. When soldiers are conditioned and persuaded on a daily basis to subjugate and humiliate people and consider other human beings as less than human, I think that seeps in, and I think that when the soldiers go home they bring that back with them.” Those words – precise, pained, obvious – are from Cpl. Shachar Berrin, 19, a lone soldier who wears a knitted skullcap and serves as a combat soldier in the Home Front Command rescue unit in the Jordan Valley.

They were said about 10 days ago in Jerusalem during the recording of “The New Arab Debates,” a show for the German TV channel Deutsche Welle, as Gideon Levy reported in Friday’s Haaretz.

The program, moderated by former BBC journalist Tim Sebastian, dealt with the proposition that “the occupation is destroying Israel.” The panel included settler activist Dani Dayan and Meretz activist Uri Zaki. After Dayan said that Israel had been ranked 11th in the World Happiness Report, and thus the occupation is not destroying it, Berrin, who was in the audience, stood up and told of his personal experience. “Just the other week, when some Border Police soldiers were rough with Christian tourists, another soldier, a colleague, said she couldn’t believe what they were doing: ‘I mean, come on, they are people, not Palestinians’ ... I think that once you are conditioned to think something, you bring it back with you and that it deeply affects Israeli society and causes it, as our president says, to be more racist.”

Instead of listening to the content of Berrin’s words and appreciating the courage and morality he showed, his commander charged him with “participating as a soldier in a political meeting, in uniform and in the presence of the media, against army regulations.” The fact that this was not a political meeting – and that Berrin had not really been interviewed – did not deter the army. When the supreme goal is to shut critics up, discretion gives way with dizzying speed to procedures of silencing and punishment.

The Israel Defense Forces probably doesn’t recognize the irony in the story: that same damage from the occupation, against which Berrin warned, pursued him to a conference hall in Jerusalem and then sent him to prison for a week. In the words of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, “The soldier was tried for speaking to the media without authorization and approval, as required by army orders.” Or, put more simply, the soldier was tried and jailed for telling the truth, contrary to the army’s orders.