02Jan04-Haaretz-Background / A new arena of military refusal jolts Israel
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz correspondent
It is the curse - and perhaps the saving grace - of the Gaza settlement of Netzarim to function as a crucial test case of Israeli military policy and a barometer of the conflicting moods of the war-battered population of the Jewish state.
The powder keg settlement, a symbol for hard-liners both Israeli and Palestinian, has become the focus of a new arena of military refusal in Israel: a campaign by a decidedly non-pacifist father, a battle-seasoned major in the IDF's combat reserves, to keep his recently drafted daughter from obeying an order to report for service in Netzarim.
"When I had the option to choose whether to send her, at her level of readiness, to Netzarim, or the option that she'll be in jail, I preferred the option of jail, because she may come back to me from jail sad or somewhat hurt, but she will come back to me alive.
"From Netzarim, I'm not sure she'll come back at all."
In contrast to the ideological orientation of refusal movements thus far, Ofek emphasized that his concerns had nothing to do with politics, rather the army's willingness to post her in a hellish environment without having trained her to defend herself.
But his remarks underscored the centrality of Netzarim in the national debate over dismantling settlements. In an earlier phase of the uprising, amid calls by leftists to dismantle Netzarim and its vulnerable southern sister settlement of Kfar Darom, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismissed the talk as defeatist and a prize for terror.
"The fate of Netzarim is one with that of Tel Aviv," Sharon famously declared.
In recent weeks, however, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his deputy Ehud Olmert have hinted that Israel might force settlers to leave isolated, indefensible settlements even in the absence of diplomacy with the Palestinians - an unmistakable red flag to the residents of Netzarim.
Mounting a public relations counteroffensive, settlers and rightist allies affixed banners to highway fences nationwide, emblazoned with a somewhat incongruous flower and reading "It is in Netzarim that Israel will be victorious."
In subsequent radio commercials, the winning voice of a young boy cheerfully invited Israelis to visit Netzarim on the weekend, noting that he was born in the settlement, his father grew up there, and his grandfather had helped found it decades ago.
Netzarim is controversial, first and foremost, because of the difficulty of defending the position, a lone Israeli outpost in a teeming, tempestuous sea of Palestinian refugee camps, the only settlement between the vast Jebalya camp and Gaza City to the north, and the major Nusseirat, El Bureij, and Muazi camps to the south.
It is also notorious for the ferocity of the violence that is its lot. It was at Netzarim Junction that 12-year-old Mohammed Dura bled to an agonizing death, captured on film, during an endless crossfire at the outset of the intifada, instantly becoming a symbol for a billion Muslims worldwide.
The entire IDF battalion defending Netzarim, plus support staff like the maintenance unit in which Gali Ofek was to have joined as a non-commissioned officer, stands in stark contrast to the population of the settlement, which, more than 23 years after its establishment on a point overlooking the Mediterranean, still numbers barely 60 families.
Its location is one reason. To reach the settlement, visitors must pass what is persuasively the most treacherous stretch of highway in the Holy Land. Successive IDF campaigns to clear the roadsides of hiding places for snipers have lent the road's environs a moonscape quality. The attacks, however, continue unabated.
On Thursday, in the latest of uncounted thousands of such incidents, gunmen riddled an Israeli car with bullets near Netzarim. No one was injured in the shooting, which followed a Qassam rocket.
Settlers in Gaza lost no time in fixing the blame for the rise in such attacks, at a time when terror within Israel has been on the relative decline.
"The escalation is clear," said Eran Sternberg, spokesman of the settlers' Hof Aza Regional Council. "All these remarks on the subject of uprooting, ruination and devastation are interpreted by the terrorists, and correctly, from their standpoint, as a unequivocal message that encourages them to continue the terrorism.
Sternberg insisted, however, that in the face of constant mortar barrages, assault-rifle ambushes, bombs and rockets, "We are continuing to live, because we will not broadcast the message to the Palestinians that we are being broken.
"It's a shame, only, that - to paraphrase the prime minister's statement on the fate of Netzarim being one with that of Tel Aviv - that through his recent statements on Netzarim, he may be broadcasting to the terrorists that the fate of Tel Aviv may be one with that of Netzarim, and driving the terrorists to continue [there]."
Private Gali Ofek, meanwhile, remains at home, now in her fifth day Absent With-Out Leave. "As an officer in the reserves, I could have intervened in her assignment prior to her conscription," said Moshe Ofek, who spent two years fighting in Lebanon. "But I decided not to. And then my daughter telephones me to tell me 'I've been sent to Netzarim.' I told her at once: 'You're not going. Give the orders back to the assignment officer.'"
The army's treatment of the case struck a chord across Israel, where near-universal consciption lent the Ofek case millions of sympathetic and knowing ears.
The nation was riveted and appalled on October 24, when Palestinian gunmen entered Netzarim and opened fire in the soldiers' quarters, killing two women soldiers in their beds, and a male soldier nearby.
With the incident still under partial censorship and the dead yet to be publicly identified as soldiers, a Netzarim settler who acted as spokeswoman for the settlement later angered many in Israel when, without expressing condolences for the settlement's defenders, she voiced relief that the residents and their weekend guests had been spared.
Last week, after her father told her to return the orders, Gali Ofek was then told "Either you go to Netzarim, or you go to jail," the father continued. When she replied that she was afraid, the officer was quoted as telling her "Go to a Kaban [Mental Health Officer]."
"She has fired a total of 12 bullets, six by day and six by night, and that is her level of soldiering," Moshe Ofek said. "In my view, if you send our children into the eye of the storm, you must prepare them at least to the level that they can defend themselves."
"The training that she received was approximately that of someone in Gadna [an introduction to the army for Israeli high school pupils and foreign volunteers]."
IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon and other military brass have been increasingly vocal on the issue of refusal, and of calls for unilateral withdrawals from Palestinian territory.
This week, testifying before the influential Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Ya'alon pointedly told legislators that if Netzarim were dismantled, it would take an army division to assume the security duties now being performed by the battalion currently in the area. A division is generally larger than a battalion by a factor of more than 10 times.
Even military men who have advocated cutting losses and evacuating Netzarim's settlers, acknowlege its strategic geographic importance. "It is like a bone in the throat for the Palestinians," reserve general Zvi Fogel, an ex-general and former senior Gaza Strip commander, said last year.
"From a military perspective, it allows the army to put up checkpoints at any time they want and to divide the strip into three parts."
Refusal to serve - a response that was all but snuffed out early in the uprising by Palestinian suicide bombings that targeted the hearts of Israel's cities - has resurfaced among the elite of the military of late.
Last year, responding to an Israeli assassination campaign which targeted commanders of terror groups but often resulted in heavy civilian casualties, as well as new terror attacks in revenge for the "focused prevention" killings, a group of 27 air force pilots declared refusal to carry out such airstrikes.
More recently, reservists from the army's most prestigious commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, or the General Staff's Recon Unit, signed a letter forswearing service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
A handful of Israeli youths have refused all military service, while hundreds of reservists, most of them acting in response to Israeli policies at the outset of the uprising, have declared that they were through with service in the territories.
Moshe Ofek was adamant, however, that his daughter's refusal has nothing to do with issues of occupation. "If the army wants her to serve in Netzarim - let them train her as a combat soldier and then I will send her there. Until then, I forbid her to go to Netzarim."
Asked for a response to the Gali Ofek case, the IDF Spokesman's Office told reporters Wednesday that Moshe Ofek had described the order given his daughter as patently illegal.
In wooden wording that seemed only to confirm Moshe Ofek's arguments, the IDF said:
"After a thorough investigation, it was made clear to the father that the assignment of women soldiers is not carried out according to their rifle status [the ranking of soldiers according to their levels of weapons training], and are assigned to all units of the army. The assignment of the soldier was according to regulations."
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