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I am the grandfather of Omri Evron, who was recently jailed in a
military prison for refusing to serve in the army or even wear an IDF
uniform, and about whom Yossi Sarid wrote a brilliant piece in Haaretz
of Nov. 3rd. Yossi and I have fought for many years for the same causes,
and I am proud to count him among my friends. But we are diametrically
opposed in the matter of conscientious objection. I would like therefore
to present here my arguments on the behalf of civil disobedience, which
only very seldom are allowed space in the media, not even by those who
support conscientious objection.
THE LIMITS OF CIVIL OBEDIENCE
As is well known, Israel is now prosecuting a policy of oppression
against the Palestinian people, in which it gradually dispossesses the
Palestinians of their land and livelihood, systematically kills or
imprisons any of them who dare to rebel against this ongoing process,
allows free rein to the pogroms of the Jewish settlers in the
territories, covering up these atrocities with lies transparent to
anyone who is even minimally aware of the true situation.
The Israeli army is the chief instrument of this criminal policy, which
is in blatant violation of international conventions signed by Israel
and which has been denounced innumerable times by the UN, with the sole
exception of the United States, which itself is today the world's
foremost lawbreaker. Were it not for the special forbearance with which
much of the world still bears towards us, on account of the past, we
might well have been treated as Serbia was a dozen years ago. Even
today, certain Israeli army officers risk arrest and indictment by the
International Court of Justice in the Hague if they visit certain
countries, and Ariel Sharon would have been regarded and treated as
another Slobodan Milosevic.
An Israeli citizen who refuses to serve in an army which implements such
a policy would be behaving according to the international criteria of
law and morality and be entitled to the protection of the international
community. Not he would be the true transgressor against the law but the
country which he is the citizen of, whose army violates on a daily basis
the basic moral rule the IDF is supposed to adhere to: The obligation to
refuse to obey an order which bears as it were the black flag of
illegality, as Justice Benyamin Halevy phrased it in the case of the
Kafr Kassem massacre. And the fact that the Israeli courts cover up and
whitewash this policy by legalistic casuistry and blatant excuses will
eventually boomerang and undermine their standing and status.
The Right has no compunctions about this policy. Being survivors of the
Holocaust, they argue, we are exempt from any moral duty toward others.
The world, being anti=Semitic, has abandoned us to our fate, and
therefore all those conventions and standards are not binding on us.
Anyway, this country has been promised to us by God in his Covenant with
Patriarch Abraham in the Book of Genesis and so it is also ours by right
and divine law (one may comment on this that the wording of the divine
promise to Abraham "I have given this land to you and to your seed"
includes Ishmael, the purported ancestor of the Arabs, who was also a
son of Abraham. And if one raises the issue of the Holocaust, the truth
is that if it were not for the sacrifice of tens of millions of soldiers
and civilians of the allied nations in the 2nd World War, very few Jews
would have survived it}. But how does the atheistic Zionist Left, which
does recognize our debt to the world and to its moral standards, justify
its uncompromising opposition to conscientious objection?
At first glance, the arguments against refusing to serve of the Zionist
Left seem highly persuasive: If every person decides on the morality or
otherwise of state policy according to his private conscience and sets
political conditions for his or her military service, the state and the
army will disintegrate. The correct way to go about it is to fulfill
one's civic duty while struggling in a democratic manner to change the
state's policies. Moreover- one must remember that Israel, unlike any
other country, lives under the threat of its neighbors' refusal to
accept its very right to exist, hence it is still uniquely in danger of
annihilation.
This is the specious myth which all of our chauvinists cling to, and
deplorably the Zionist Left too. Any Arab military might is represented
as an "existential threat" which should be monitored and destroyed at
the first opportunity. Thus the Hizbollah with its missiles (lacking
atomic weapons, jet planes, tanks and artillery) is painted as a
frightening "existential menace." And we are promised that "in the next
war" we shall know already how to eliminate it. That is, we are already
preparing the next war, a war to restore the military caste's honor, or
as they put it "to restore the IDF's deterrence capability."
If such a threat really exists, why don't we try to remove it by trying
to achieve peace with our neighbors, as we have already done with Egypt
and Jordan? But the well=known fact is that any peace feeler from the
Arab side is completely ignored or rejected outright.. Why haven't we
responded to the Saudi initiative? Or the peace proposal of the Arab
League? Or to the Beilin=Abu Mazen compact? Or Assad's readiness to
negotiate for peace? When you press, you get the sour, evasive reply
that all of these proposals "weren't serious." Which all adds up to the
fact that we know very well that Israel is under no threat to its
existence, and that all of our recent wars (except the Yom Kippur War,
which also was caused by our refusal to negotiate) were aggressive,
terroristic wars caused by us.
In this situation, where there is not much to choose between Labor and
Likud governments, the chance that Meretz will ever win power, form a
government and change the country's policies is infinitely smaller than
the quite realistic, frightening prospect that a fascist=racist like
Lieberman will gain the premiership. His opinions are already being
aired freely over the the country's electronic media, without the
present prime minister voicing any objections to his views.
The question which the refuseniks are then posing to the Left is very
simple: Do you have any red lines, any point beyond which you refuse to
play any more the game of the loyal opposition? Will you permit your
children to be criminalized and bestialized by being ordered to commit
ethnic cleansing and mass murder by a fascist right wing government? And
isn't the present government very close to undertaking such actions?
Does the "patriotic duty" outweigh the human one? Don't you realize that
such a criminal policy actually weakens Israel, as we have seen in the
last war? Does'nt your true patriotic duty demand that you back the
refuseniks? That you declare : "thus far and not a step further"? That
you come out and warn that we are digging our own grave, that Israel
lives in an Arab region and that its power preponderance is purely
temporary, like any power preponderance in history. Shouldn't you warn
that our nuclear monopoly will end much sooner than later, and that it
should serve us to achieve peace on the best terms still available, not
in order to avoid it.
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