Left vs. Right in Israel knows know moral bounds:
debka.com
Mofaz Raps Dissenting Israel Reserve
Officers
A DEBKAfile Special Analysis
2 February: The 50-60 Israeli Army reservists in combat units, who have taken a public stand against serving on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, on the grounds that “Israel occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating the Palestinians”, attracted little serious attention at first.
After all, Israeli army and security officers and men have been uncomplainingly stretched out in a grinding contest with terrorists for 16 long months.
Palestinian human bombs and gunmen raid Israeli towns on killing rampages at the rate of two or three a week.
The dissident officers’ petition sounded so far out of sync with reality that it circulated for two or three weeks before picking up national resonance.
Now, the petitioners report their number has swelled to 102, declaring “ the decision is in our hands”.
This has sparked counteraction from a group claiming 112 combat reservists signatures, who strongly condemn their fellow-officers’ refusal to serve “across the Green Line” as shameful and an abuse of the army service issue for political ends. This group wants the military, which does not make policy, kept outside the bounds of political debate.
Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz announced Friday, February 1, that he had ordered an inquiry into the dissident’s complaints and would publish its
findings.
Meanwhile, he said, a specially appointed officers panel had recommended individual, rather than collective, treatment of the petitioners. They would not be thrown out of the armed forces but interviewed by their superior officers and, if they stood by their refusal, taken off command duties and re-assigned to new units.
But, the general warned, if they were politically motivated, their campaign was incitement to rebellion and civilian authority would have to deal with them.
Mofaz held the dissident officers responsible for conduct unbecoming the serving men of a democracy in a state of war. He stressed that officers guilty of issuing illegal orders were subjected to the full rigors of the law, but compared with other armies, such instances were rare.
To place the dissenting officers’ campaign in perspective, DEBKAfile’s political analysts take a retrospective look at its history and motivations.
On Friday, February 1, in one of the many Israeli media interviews on the issue, a dissenting campaign leader, a lawyer named Leibovitz, was asked if he had ever been handed an illegal order by an officer. His answer: “I’d rather not go into specifics. Holding 3 million human beings under occupation is immoral. Immoral means illegal.”
Leaving aside the sweeping equation of morality with legality, Mr. Leibovitz needs to be asked: where does he come by his figures? The Gaza Strip has 1.1 million Palestinians; the West Bank, 1 million.
The missing million equals the size of Israel’s Arab community, voting citizens since 1948 with ten Arabs seated in Israel’s Knesset.
This dissenting reserve officer seems to suggest that Israeli Arabs live under Israeli occupation, which they themselves have never claimed, though complaining of being under-privileged.
If he is so hot on legalities, then why does Mr. Leibovitz fail to speak out against the illegal entry of Palestinian bombers and gunmen to “non-occupied” Tel Aviv, Hadera, Haifa, Afula and pre-1967 Jerusalem to murder civilians, most of whom were not in the country or even alive when the 1967 “occupation” took place.
And why does he fail to mention that Arab Palestinian terrorism against Israeli and non-Israeli Jews was rife decades before the 1967 war?
In those unmentioned years, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and much of Jerusalem were under Arab rule.
Wednesday, January 30, Thomas L. Friedman, a long-time icon of the Israeli Left, writing in the New York Time, called Yasser Arafat “a dead man walking because he shot himself – three times.”
For years he demanded a Palestinian state, but when it was offered at Camp David in 2000, the Palestinian leader, he writes, spurned it and insisted on the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to pre-1967 Israel.
“It turns out Arafat wanted two Palestinian states,” writes Friedman, quoting the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen.
“He wanted a Palestinian state for the West Bank and Gaza to be negotiated with Israel today. And he wanted a Palestinian state inside Israel that would be brought about by a return of Palestinian refugees and their soaring birth rate.”
Leibovitz and his fellow dissenters are not a new manifestation on Israel’s military landscape.
After the 1967 Six Day War, when Israeli forces conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, some of their predecessors left the country, never to return, rather than serve across the Green Line. Some were court-martialed for refusing to obey orders.
The movement revived in 1982 in protest against the way the Likud government’s defense minister, Ariel Sharon, conducted the Lebanese War.
When the Israeli army stood at the gates of Beirut and Arafat faced defeat, a group of Israeli officers, one as senior as lieutenant colonel, deserted their field commands.
Their stand gained momentum from the outcry set up by the terrible massacre carried out by a Lebanese Christian militia in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila.
A rainbow of opinion traditionally succors these dissenting campaigns from time to time.
It encompasses left-wing activists in the Labor and Meretz parties, urban salon liberals in moneyed, academic or artistic circles and sections of the oligarchy, who believe its interests would be best served by buying off Arab hostility instead of fighting it.
Top justices in Israel’s High Court have often favored these groups in their judgments - although less so since September 2000.
Some local political activists and thinkers, influenced by some West European circles and certain American liberals, have developed the thesis that Zionism is outdated and it is time for Israel to embrace the post-Zionist era.
All these groups celebrated the signing of the 1993 Israel-Palestinian Peace Accords in Oslo. The whisper going round at the time was that Israeli prime minister, the late Yizhak Rabin, had no option but to bow to terms, because “no one was left willing to fight Israel’s wars.”
This whisper, together with the post-Zionist ethic, gained extensive currency. It came to dominate political thinking in the country and its governing bodies from 1994 to 1999.
Its corollary was that the time for wars was past and Israel must henceforth base its security on its economic might and technological productivity. The time had come to reduce Israel’s armed forces.
Israel’s hero in those years was President Bill Clinton. His Israeli following, lumped together simplistically by its denigrators as “The Left”, ruled the roost.
But under the surface, five forces were preparing to bring this castle down.
A. The steady refusal of the Clinton White House to see the dark, terrorist side of fundamentalist Islam, thereby creating the conditions that confront America today with the need to apply military might for a world war on terror.
B. The only Middle East leader who saw this coming - and prepared to exploit Western weakness - was Yasser Arafat. In 1999, he joined up with Iran and its Lebanese surrogate, the Hizballah, and set in motion military preparations for the Al Aqsa Intifada and his conversion from Nobel Peace Prize honoree to Islamic Shahid martyr.
C. In 1999, two years before the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the technological bubble began to burst, slowing down American and world economies. The implications went far beyond the economic; it was proved that once computer and communication technologies became global, they could be harnessed equally for the good of America and its destruction by its foes – as Ground Zero in New York demonstrated so tragically.
D. The radical demographic revolution in Israel. Israel’s dominant political groupings were too busy with their Palestinian partners to notice the increment of one million new immigrants from the former Soviet Union - one quarter non-Jewish – and the growth of imported labor - who took over Palestinian jobs – to 350,000. Israel’s population balance, expanded by one-fifth, had shifted fundamentally. Its ruling bodies were completely lost to the upheaval in opinion and voting patterns.
E. The rising new star on Israel’s political firmament – Ehud Barak – who quickly moved into the top Labor slot that veteran figures like Shimon Peres had failed to fill. Some of Barak’s following claim that he was the only Israeli leader to understand the underground trends abuilding. He undertook the Camp David process with Clinton in mid- 2000, they say, for the purpose of exposing Yasser Arafat’s true face as an Islamist Palestinian terrorist.
Whether this was Barak’s intent or whether Arafat used the Camp David summit as a fulcrum for launching his uprising three months later – is moot. The impact of that summer summit and the subsequent Palestinian confrontation on Israeli politics was overwhelming.
A majority, made up of Russian immigrants and the nationalist elements of the religious bloc, rose up in February 2001 to overthrow “The Left”, blaming it for pandering to Arafat and precipitating his violent reaction.
Its pet bugbear, hardline Ariel Sharon, was returned as prime minister.
For almost a year, the defeated groups kept quiet. Now, The Left is once again on the march, heartened by a visit to the country of its old hero, Bill Clinton.
Tame media organs outdid themselves in lamenting the fact that Clinton was no longer in the White House.
Then came the assassination of the Lebanese drug deal and Syrian double agent Eli Hubeika in Beirut, offering an excuse for rehashing the Sabra and Chatila disaster, which cast Sharon into the political wilderness for nearly twenty years. Broad hints were disseminated that the Mossad had been “sent” to do the deed by its boss the prime minister, because Hubeika had allegedly offered to testify before the Belgian court that wants to put Sharon on trial.
After that, the dynamiting of more than twenty houses in the southern Gaza town of Rafah was splashed over front pages.
Israeli forces were accused of driving out their Palestinian dwellers. No sooner did that scandal quiet down - when it was shown that the houses were uninhabited but for the Palestinian arms smugglers – than the dissenting reservist officers came forward with their petition.
Clearly, many of those officers reflect the once-dominant groups’ nostalgia for the vanished era, when Sharon was history, the Oslo faction ruled the country, Arafat was a partner in peace, and Clinton sat in the White House.
Unfortunately, every bit of that roseate reality has been swept away. However much clamor the dissenting officers generate, Palestinian terror continues to stalk Israel’s streets, Sharon is head of government, Arafat is on his way out and George W. Bush occupies the Oval Office
DEBKAfile’s analysts have no doubt that as long as Bush is in office, so too will Sharon lead the Israeli government, if he plays his cards right. The dissenting officers may declare, “The decision is in our hands.” but the Israeli army will continue to perform its duties until Arafat and his reign of terror are vanquished and gone. |
