You, Amnon Rubinstein, professor and Knesseth member, you who sit in your ivory tower inJerusalem and Tel Aviv and enjoy the pleasures of power for the past 20 or so years, you whoperceive yourself morally superior to other politicians, when was the last time that youserved as a combat soldier in the territories? It must have been long ago, if ever. Were that notso, you would not have dared today to have attacked conscientious objection to serving in theterritories.
It is obvious from the pride you take in literally defining ‘moral’ and ‘conscience’ that youare unable to truly understand and fully comprehend what you have required soldiers to do whensending them to the territories for the past 20 years. You have never seen a child screaming afew meters from you because his knee was shattered by a lead bullet; you have never stood at acheck point and determined fates; you have never been present when soldiers from your companyless cultured than you used knives to slash the faces of Palestinian children; you have neverslapped the faces of weeping Palestinian women whose misfortune it was to have their homesburst into in the middle of the night, and have never tramped your army boot on the heads ofPalestinian men strewn on the ground. In short, you never have participated in the horrors ofoccupation. For you this occupation is virtual. You know it solely via deliberations in theKnesset committee with its borekas and glasses of juice, via statistics, via the mass media,which, as you undoubtedly realize, never represents reality but instead creates analternative reality. You are familiar with the occupation via polite conversations in northTel Aviv. You are defective in one of the most dangerous defects a leader could have: a gapbetween how you perceive reality and how facts show reality actually to be. Such a leaderrapidly destroys trust in his judgments.
During the time that you were a member of the Knesset and the government the past 9 years, wesoldiers served in the regular army and on reserve duty and carried out the dirty work in theterritories. You were the statesman, the leader, we were the pawns on your chess board, thosewho carry out your orders. Year after year we carried out what was demanded of us withoutcomplaint, sealing our hearts and noses to the stink of horror, struggling, each alone, toovercome the harm incurred by our psyches, our buddies, and families. The greater number ofour comrades refused to continue and to pay this price, and found their way out of reserve dutyon various pretexts. Only a few of us faithfully remained; we continued because we trustedyou, Amnon Rubinstein, and believed that while we were there that you, our pilot, would surelyfind a way to get us out of there, to bring about peace, to create a country in which life did notrely on wounding the soul.
You had 9 years (actually, 20) to educate and to extricate us from the despicable, thenecrophilic labor in the territories. You failed miserably. Yet, this failure did not stopyou today from continuing to call upon us (without so much as a slight tremble in your voice) toremain your henchmen. Does it not distress you that you persist in sending this country’s sonsto keep on committing war crimes? Are you sure that you are qualified to demand this of us? Whathave you tucked away in your knapsack to offer us–to continue to smell dead bodies another 9years so that you can feed us more of your excuses? You apparently don’t understand that youhave lost your moral privilege to lead us further in this matter, that you have lost the trust ofyour herd, that you have stretched your credit as a leader to its limits.
Now that our obedience is no longer in your hands or in the hands of the state, due to the lack ofresponsibility on your part and on the part of fellow leaders, you are forced to seek fordifferent solutions to the problems. This is the task of a leader. If you are unable toaccomplish it, let others more qualified do so.