The Unmaking of Israel (17 page)

Politically, universal conscription and extended reserve duty have had contradictory effects. They can encourage citizens to think as soldiers, to identify with generals and expect military answers to every threat. Yet reservists have repeatedly brought the message to civilian society that something has gone wrong in the separate universe of the army. Reserve soldiers revealed in 1972 that the IDF had expelled thousands of Beduin from their homes in the occupied Sinai on General Ariel Sharon’s orders. Reservists protesting the failure to prepare for war in 1973 drove prime minister Golda Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayan from office. Protests against the 1982 invasion of Lebanon grew as reservists returned from the front. For worse and better, a citizen’s army cannot be completely separated from politics.

The strongest statement that a citizen-soldier can make is selective refusal to serve. Israeli law requires a soldier to disobey an order that “bears a black flag of illegality.” This principle was established after a 1956 massacre in which troops followed orders to shoot anyone returning to an Arab village after curfew. The problem—so a tall, gaunt reservist named Itai Haviv told me in 2002—is when no single order is patently immoral but the sum total is. Haviv, a captain in the artillery corps, had refused to continue serving in occupied territory. “You’re told to demolish a house, because it commands a road and [Palestinian gunmen] have been shooting from it. Militarily, it’s the absolutely right thing to do . . . but when it goes on for thirty-five years [since 1967], it turns into a black flag.”

Most of the Israeli left has rejected that stance as bringing politics inside the military and violating the rules of democracy. In the Supreme Court’s 2002 ruling against reservists who refused to serve in the occupied territories, Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote, “The line dividing opposition to one policy or another and conscientious objection to carrying out that policy is thin, sometimes thinner than thin.” Were selective objection allowed, the army could break into a collection of separate units, each unwilling to carry out certain tasks, he said. “Today, the objection is to serving in Judea and Samaria. Tomorrow the objection will be to removing outposts,” Barak wrote.

Barak was right—particularly about how difficult it is to distinguish between political and conscientious objection. In an imperfect world, countries need to defend themselves, and an army needs discipline. Decisions on using the military must be made by the elected government, not by each soldier.

Yet unless we are to surrender utterly to relativism, there are moments when a person must obey a moral principle rather than a democratically enacted law or policy. When my son was small, I read him a children’s book about a devout Christian family in antebellum America that helped slaves on the Underground Railroad to freedom. The father in the book explained to his son that he believed in obeying the law, but he could not obey the law requiring him to return fugitive slaves.

And if we are not to surrender utterly to relativism, it matters which principle a soldier cites as obligating him to refuse the order of an elected government. Barak was right that selective conscientious objection corrodes both discipline and democracy. Nonetheless, there is a distinction between someone rejecting an order because he believes it would require him to violate the sanctity of human life and dignity, and someone refusing an order because it means giving up land that he regards as the sacred territory of his nation, as “ours.” It seems to me that the difference between the two is not a thin line; it is the gulf between ethical concern and national egotism.

In the run-up to the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the threat of religious soldiers selectively refusing orders became a national issue. In October 2004, former chief rabbi Avraham Shapira, then the religious right’s leading authority on Jewish law, spoke out. He declared that religious soldiers must tell their commanders that they would no more follow an order to evacuate settlers than they would obey an order to eat pork. “Heaven doesn’t want this,” Shapira asserted, supremely confident that he knew the divine will, in an interview published in the settler newspaper
Besheva
. The following day, sixty rabbis—including several prominent heads of
hesder
yeshivot—issued a proclamation stating, “It is forbidden for any Jew to participate or assist in dismantling settlements.”

When the evacuation ended, IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz announced that sixty-three soldiers had been tried for refusing orders, among them twenty-four
hesder
soldiers. The numbers were small enough that it seemed that military discipline and religious Zionists’ loyalty to the shared “people’s army” had more or less held up. Sanguine analyses noted that many well-known rabbis had publicly disagreed with the calls for insubordination. Besides, it was argued, Orthodox soldiers’ requests for direction from their rabbis more often dealt with how to maintain a religious lifestyle in the army, or with combat ethics, than with the disengagement.

In fact, the official number of soldiers disciplined is a poor indication of what happened in the summer of 2005. It would be a mistake to use those figures to dismiss the risk of future insubordination or mutiny. What took place before and during the disengagement is better understood as a portent of a growing danger.

It’s true that the religious Zionist community is anything but monolithic. Not all Orthodox soldiers are on the right, and not all those on the right phrase their politics in theological terms. It’s also true that some religious Zionist rabbis joined in calling on Orthodox soldiers to “recognize the authority of government and Knesset decisions” and obey orders. They provided a reminder—sadly necessary at that moment—that Orthodox Judaism and democracy are compatible. Some of the best known among them, however, were already tainted in the eyes of the religious right as being far too moderate—men like Rabbi Yehudah Amital, dean of the Har Etzion
hesder
yeshivah, who had accepted the idea of relinquishing land for peace since the 1980s.

Some rabbis from what became known as the
mamlakhti
, or statist, side of the theological right also called on soldiers to obey orders—lest the sacred state be endangered and the chance of overcoming its secular character be lost. Rabbi Avihai Ronski, head of the
hesder
yeshivah in Itamar, articulated that view. Ronski, a colonel in the reserves, worried that political insubordination would weaken the army. But besides that, he argued, “Our sons and students have been enlisting . . . in the best units and slowly climbing the ladder of ranks and responsibilities.” (“Our” in that sentence referred to Orthodox settlers and their ideological supporters.) Deciding which orders to follow, he said, would “mortally injure” progress toward the change they sought—having “the leaders of the country and commanders of the army rooted in the tent of Torah.” The investment in creating an entirely different Israel would be squandered.

A more influential dissent came from Shlomo Aviner, rabbi of the settlement of Beit El and, like Shapira, a highly regarded authority on religious law among settlers and their supporters. Aviner sought to adhere unbendingly to the sanctity of both the state and the Land. A soldier could not contribute to the destruction of the army by explicitly rejecting an order, he wrote. But the army’s job was to guard the Land, not give it up. So it was unthinkable that a soldier would be capable of carrying out such orders. As the disengagement approached, Aviner wrote an article stating that anyone “expelling” Jews—alluding to the expulsion of Jews from various lands during their history—would be violating nine of the Ten Commandments. Aviner admitted that he had not yet found a way in which evicting settlers constituted adultery.

With his contradictory counsel, Aviner was actually recommending “gray refusal,” finding a quiet way to avoid evacuation duty. He was not alone.

The association of pre-army academies, religious and secular, also issued a statement against refusing orders. It made sense that the deans of the Orthodox academies assented. They had an ideological investment in the military and the advancement of religious soldiers, which would be undermined by mass insubordination. The head of the association was Rabbi Moshe Hagar, dean of the Beit Yatir academy and a colonel in the reserves. Hagar later described to me a conversation with his students before the disengagement. He instructed them not to refuse orders. He also told them, “I wouldn’t be able to carry out this mission.” Rabbi Yitzhak Nissim, head of the Elisha academy, gave a similar message: “I told my students, ‘It’s impossible to call for refusal, because that’s a mutiny. But no one should carry out such orders.’ ” The result was that “of my students who were there, none refused, and none carried out orders.” In short, whatever the statement for the public said, they agreed with Aviner.

By the nature of gray refusal, there are no exact numbers on its extent.
Besheva
challenged the army statistics on how many soldiers were disciplined, reporting that it had found over a hundred soldiers who were court-martialed. There were many more cases, the settler paper asserted, in which commanders “preferred . . . to end the affair quietly” when soldiers refused orders or avoided carrying them out.
Besheva
clearly sought to magnify the problem. But the army had an institutional interest in showing that all was well in the “people’s army,” and did not acknowledge the full extent of resistance in the ranks.

Moreover, the government and the army’s top command carefully chose who would carry out the disengagement in order to avoid more dissent. Ten thousand police were assigned to the operation—over a third of the total police force in Israel. The police could be expected to see the job professionally, not politically. The IDF contingent numbered 15,000. Units such as Golani and Givati brigades, with large numbers of Orthodox soldiers, were not assigned to evict civilians. To help the police remove the settlers, the army created temporary units consisting of career officers from support units and command posts and of cadets training to be pilots or naval commanders. Like the police, they were committed to a career in uniform and could be counted on to identify with their orders, as Israeli political sociologist Yagil Levy wrote afterward. The IDF also deployed a large number of women soldiers—who were less likely to belong to the religious right, since many Orthodox women opt out of army service.

All these measures were needed to remove 9,000 settlers, almost all from the Gaza Strip, to which the army could control access with relative ease. The national police force stretched its resources to the maximum, and had to be backed up by troops drawn from select, limited sources. Despite the IDF’s effort to avoid using units in which refusal was likely, political resistance in the ranks did take place—some visible, more beneath the surface.

A pullback from the West Bank would be a challenge on a different scale. At the unrealistic minimum often discussed in Israel—a peace agreement based on withdrawing to the security fence—over 65,000 settlers would have to return to sovereign Israel. Any more realistic map of Israel’s borders with a Palestinian state would mean a larger evacuation. The ideological settlement movement would face not a setback but the final shattering of its vision of redemption through the Whole Land of Israel. Its core communities—Kiryat Arba, Ofrah, Elon Moreh, Yitzhar, and many others—would face evacuation. The army would have to confront a young generation of settlers determined not to repeat the “shame” of Gaza. It would have to operate in a larger area, where its opponents could move much more easily.

Yet since 2005, the army’s dependence on soldiers coming out of the Orthodox academies,
hesder
, and other yeshivot aligned with the theological right has increased. Graduates of those institutions have taken a larger place in the officer corps, advanced to higher ranks, and gained command of larger units. By playing down what happened in 2005, the state and the army have allowed the threat to democratic control of the military to grow.

Following the disengagement, Chief of Staff Halutz did take one step aimed at convincing pro-settlement soldiers to obey orders. In 2006 he appointed Rabbi Avihai Ronski of Itamar to be the IDF’s new chief rabbi. Ronski had been a battlefield commander. He was a founder of Itamar, one of the extremist settlements ringing Nablus. He’d studied at Ateret Kohanim, Rabbi Aviner’s yeshivah, provocatively located in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Probably unknown to Halutz, he had also been a founder of the far-right Od Yosef Hai yeshivah. As listed in the Sasson Report, Ronski’s yeshivah was located in an illegal outpost outside Itamar, a detail Halutz either didn’t know or didn’t see as significant. Yet Ronski had supported obeying orders to evacuate settlements. He believed in doing what your commander said because he was a Spartan in the original sense: he was a militarist. Halutz’s aim was transparent. Soldiers from the extreme right could see Ronski as a spiritual authority—and hopefully be swayed by his views on army discipline.

Ronski, however, had views on other matters. In the past, he’d written to an army medic that keeping the Sabbath took priority over saving a gentile’s life. The medic could treat a wounded Arab captive on the seventh day only because it was necessary to avoid causing hatred toward Jews, and to interrogate the captive, he wrote. Challenged by a leading figure in the moderate Orthodox camp, Ronski added that in any clash between religious law and the army’s ethical code, religious law took precedence. In context, the implication was that religious law required less concern with non-Jews’ lives—a view I can only describe as defiling Judaism.

In office, Ronski quickly showed that he was not satisfied with catering to soldiers’ religious needs. He wanted the rabbinate to take over the task of educating the army, stiffening its will by teaching his militant version of Judaism. During Operation Cast Lead, the IDF invasion of Gaza in January 2009, the rabbinate issued a booklet for soldiers, containing selections from the teachings of Shlomo Aviner. In it, Aviner wrote that the Torah forbade “giving up a millimeter” of the Land of Israel to gentiles, even by allowing Palestinian autonomy. Jews were commanded to go to war to conquer the Land, Aviner said. He explicitly rejected the idea that saving Jewish lives might be more important than territory.