The Unmaking of Israel (18 page)

Gentile life, however, was cheaper in Aviner’s view. Erasing any distinction between enemy combatants and civilians, he advised fighting from a distance, with air and artillery attacks, to avoid losses to Israeli troops, stressing, “Cruelty is a bad quality but it all depends when.” Providing another reason for going to war, Aviner said that any time the Jewish nation is humiliated, “it is a desecration of God’s name,” which a Jew should give up his life to prevent.

The pocket-sized booklet showed how the religious right had taken the principles of the secular Zionist far right from the 1930s and ’40s—militarism, national pride, the Whole Land of Israel—and dressed them in theology. Aviner’s comments on cruelty directly contradicted the IDF’s official ethical code, which instructs a soldier to “do everything in his power to prevent harm” to noncombatants. His explanation of “desecration of God’s name” turned the classic Jewish concept on its head. In the traditional view, a Jew sanctifies God’s name—that is, shows the purity of his religion and God—when he is strictly honest or avoids anger. When he is crude, dishonest, or cruel, he “desecrates the Name.” In Aviner’s description, God’s reputation in the world rested on whether Jews looked strong or weak.

When a dovish Orthodox soldier, upset that this had become “the official voice of Judaism in the IDF,” turned the booklet over to Breaking the Silence, an organization that publishes testimony from soldiers about serving in the occupied territories, Ronski claimed he hadn’t seen it. Meanwhile, Ronski’s rabbinate published an article in its weekly Sabbath leaflet for soldiers, describing the war in Gaza as shattering the “materialist culture and blurring of values” that afflicted Israeli society. In a lecture later that year at a
hesder
yeshivah, Ronski said that a soldier who “keeps his sword from blood” and “shows mercy toward his enemy when he should not” is “cursed.” He added that in Operation Cast Lead, “one of the great innovations” was that the army had finally behaved as if it were really at war.

The IDF’s behavior in Gaza, especially toward Palestinian civilians, was intensely controversial—not just abroad, but within Israel. Half a year after the war, Breaking the Silence published firsthand testimony from twenty-six soldiers who fought in Gaza. They reported that in order to prevent casualties, the army had used firepower with less restraint than in the past, ignoring the price to enemy civilians. If that description is correct, Ronski’s “educational” activity was certainly not the main cause of the change. Yet he did provide legitimation, from within the military, for ideas that sharply diverged from the IDF’s official position—and that some officers had already heard from their rabbis in pre-army academies and yeshivot. On the religious right, I should note, the standard criticism of the army’s behavior in Gaza is that it was altogether too worried about Palestinian civilians.

Ronski served as the IDF’s chief rabbi for four years—a year longer than his original appointment. His successor was the dean of a pre-army academy. Attempting to co-opt rightist rabbis to shore up discipline, the military was instead legitimizing the religious right’s antihumanistic attitudes and its claim to be the voice of Judaism, and eroding the IDF’s own standards of behavior. In its own way, it was proving the truth of the traditional Jewish warning, “One sin leads to another.”

Next to Gilad’s Farm, on a country road through the West Bank mountains, I picked up two young men hitchhiking. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps popular among outpost settlers. It was an autumn day in 2009. Four years had passed since the disengagement, less than a year since Operation Cast Lead. One of my passengers lived at the outpost and studied at the yeshivah in Yitzhar, the nearby far-right settlement. He was nineteen, recently married, and said he intended to avoid service in an army that “hurts Jews” and “goes against the laws of the Torah.” His latter accusation reflected his view of how the IDF had fought in Gaza the previous winter. The army “doesn’t want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world,” he said, and had thereby endangered its own soldiers. The other hitchhiker, son of a prominent Kiryat Arba disciple of Meir Kahane, lived at Gilad’s Farm. He’d ignored his first draft order, been arrested, was inducted into the army, and discharged after three months as “unsuitable,” an outcome that suited him, for reasons like those of his friend.

Earlier, in the living room of his mobile home at the outpost, Itai Zar told me that “the IDF has betrayed its people,” meaning the Jewish people. He was a reservist in the Givati Brigade. After the disengagement, when he got a call-up order for training, he told his commander, “I’m not coming to an army that evacuates Jews.” He was court-martialed before a higher-ranking officer who “didn’t want to screw me” and wrote “that I’d been sick or something” rather than disciplining him. Zar noted that the former spokesman of the Gaza settlements, Eren Sternberg, had gone to school with him. After the disengagement, Sternberg began urging Orthodox youth not to serve in the IDF. Sternberg called it “the army of destruction”—using the traditional Hebrew word for the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans.

When Zar was called up to fight in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza in 2009, he decided to report for duty, because “I love my buddies” in the unit. In Gaza, though, he was “outraged” by the army’s concern for Palestinian noncombatants. In the command post, “there was an officer from our army who was in touch with the Arabs in Gaza and
was concerned about their rights
,” he recounted, with utter disbelief. “He’d say not to shell a neighborhood because they were evacuating the wounded. And we’d let the ambulances evacuate them—tell me, is this a war? They’re crazy! . . . In the last five, ten years, the army has turned into a welfare office for Palestinians.”

After the Gaza pullout, doubts about idolizing the IDF were to be expected. Indeed, draft dodging by potential soldiers who object to the IDF’s ethical code and its commitment to carrying out democratic decisions is a gain for the army, not a loss.

But the hilltops around Nablus are home to a radical fringe, and outright refusal to serve hasn’t been the standard answer to the “uprooting” of Gaza’s settlers. The more common reaction is to believe more fervently than ever that army service is holy, and at the same time that orders to dismantle settlements are sinful—in the best case, a sin that must be accepted.

One portrait of this dissonance comes in a study of religious Zionist boys approaching draft age. The researcher, Bar-Ilan University graduate student Keren Levi, gave a series of questionnaires on religious identity and values to students at yeshivah high schools, the most respected and most ideological of the Orthodox Zionist schools. The test group was split between teens living inside Israel and settlers.

The results showed that both groups saw the army as sacred. The difference was that young settlers were even more eager than the Orthodox teens from inside the Green Line to serve in combat units and become officers. At the same time, nearly a third of settler teens would disobey orders if national policy conflicted with religious demands. More than half were unsure what they’d do.

The difference between the two groups, in short, was that the young settlers identified even more with the IDF—as long as it fulfilled what they saw as its God-given purpose. If the government chose to use the army differently, if the IDF wasn’t guarding the Whole Land of Israel for the Jews, they didn’t know why they should follow orders.

Nonetheless, the gap between the two groups wasn’t huge. Religious Zionist teens on both sides of the Green Line had been taught to see the state as sacred because it gave Jews power, conquered the Land of Israel, and thereby advanced redemption. The idea of a state as a human institution, subject to the consent of the people it governed, meant to serve their needs within moral and legal limits, had a small place, if any, in their curriculum.

Levi’s study dealt with boys who had not yet enrolled in pre-army academies or
hesder
yeshivot, as many would do. There they would meet rabbis whose debate on insubordination has only grown sharper since the Gaza pullout. Yet even among educators belonging to the religious right’s
mamlakhti
camp, which stresses continued identification with the state, the message can be ambivalent.

One of the best-known
mamlakhti
rabbis is Eli Sadan, dean of Bnei David, the oldest and largest of the pre-army academies. Bnei David takes pride in the fact that over half its alumni have become officers. In the spring of 2006, Sadan published an impassioned plea to Orthodox youth not to “disengage from the state.” He denounced calls to use violence to prevent any future “expulsion” from settlements, warning that civil war would destroy Israel. He affirmed the feeling that the government had betrayed settlers, but insisted that the process of redemption continued, and promised that the Gaza settlements would yet be rebuilt.

Sadan defended the honor of religious soldiers who carried out orders in the summer of 2005—on the grounds that their units had not been asked to participate directly in evacuating settlers. By speaking of the past, Sadan did not say what religious soldiers should do in the future if they received order to remove settlers. A stand on that question is strikingly absent from his “Letter to Youth.”

Other teachers left no room for uncertainty. In his column on Jewish law in
Besheva
, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed repeatedly called on soldiers not to take part in evacuating settlements. Melamed headed the
hesder
yeshivah in Har Brakhah, another of the settlements ringing Nablus. In 2003 he explained that historically, rabbis had only allowed cooperation with secular Zionists in order to fulfill the commandment of settling the Land of Israel. That partnership did not extend to “actions uprooting this great commandment,” such as removing outposts. In a column a year after the disengagement, Melamed affirmed that Orthodox men should serve in the IDF “to fulfill the tremendous obligation of defending the [Jewish] people and the Land”—but only if they could stand up to commanders and refuse to take part in “expulsion.” Mass refusal would not cause the army to collapse, he asserted, since, “If many refuse, such an order will not be given.”

Melamed’s views gained attention outside the settler media after two incidents involving
hesder
soldiers in the Kfir Brigade, a unit created to maintain order in the West Bank. In October 2009, at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the brigade’s Shimshon Battalion held its swearing-in ceremony for recruits finishing basic training. Several times in the weeks before, the brigade had removed settlers who had returned to the site of Homesh, one of the four West Bank settlements dismantled in the disengagement. During the ceremony, two soldiers held up a sign reading “Shimshon Won’t Evacuate Homesh.” For the unprecedented political protest at an army ceremony, the two men got twenty days in the stockade.

The following month, six soldiers in the Nahshon Battalion, also part of Kfir, unfurled a sign at their base that said, “Nahshon Also Doesn’t Expel.” That day, the police had demolished two buildings at an illegal outpost, with Nahshon troops deployed nearby to secure the operation. The Nahshon protesters also received brief sentences in the stockade. The two ringleaders were demoted and removed from combat duty.

In the chain of events after the protests, defense minister Ehud Barak ejected Melamed’s yeshivah from the
hesder
program. According to Rabbi Haim Druckman—the head of another
hesder
yeshivah, a central figure in the Orthodox settlement movement since its start, and a former Knesset member—Melamed’s writings on refusing orders contributed to the decision, along with his refusal to sign a letter against demonstrations within the army.

On the surface, Barak had finally taken a stand. Yet the sanction against Melamed obscures the government’s acquiescence as clerics of the theological right continue to politicize the military. No action was taken against other
hesder
rabbis who called for insubordination. Interviewed on the Melamed affair, Druckman himself said that if a soldier was ordered to do “something forbidden—like evacuating settlements in order to turn them over to the enemy, as with the Katif Bloc—absolutely,
he shouldn’t do it
.”

In reality, a vicious cycle is at work. Israel continues to hold the West Bank and expand settlements. Policing occupied territory and protecting settlers are military burdens, increasing the need for combat soldiers and officers who have no qualms about the occupation. To meet that need, the army depends ever more on recruits from the religious right. Yet this increases the danger of fragmenting the military when an Israeli government finally does decide to pull out of the West Bank.

For politicians, this is one more reason to postpone difficult, necessary decisions. The longer they wait, though, the greater the risks. The problem is not one of individual conscientious objectors. There are already whole units that the IDF fears using. As men who believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Whole Land of Israel climb the ladder of command, possibilities loom that are worse than refusal: outright mutiny, even decisions by senior officers to deploy their units to prevent withdrawal.

Watching this process is like watching a film of the
Altalena
affair run in reverse: the smoke returns to the ship, the shell to the cannon. The opposition unloads its arms at the Kfar Vitkin beach. Israel evolves backward, returning to the moment of a fragile state facing an armed faction dedicated to fantasies of power and expansion.

Chapter VI
The Labor of the Righteous Is Done by Others

I’m standing in the Kerem Avraham neighborhood of Jerusalem. Across the street is the stone-faced building where Israeli novelist Amos Oz grew up in a small ground-floor apartment.

Back then, in the 1940s, Kerem Avraham was home to “petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers or cinema ticketsellers, schoolteachers or dispensers of private lessons,” as Oz writes in his memoir,
A Tale of Love and Darkness
. They observed the last vestiges of Judaism—lighting Sabbath candles on Friday night, attending services on Yom Kippur—and avidly argued the fine points of secular Zionist ideology.