Some years ago, when the jury for the annual Israel Prize announced its award to ProfessorYeshayahu Leibowitz, I decided to invite him to give a lecture to the Israeli Council forIsraeli-Palestinian Peace, the group that established the first contacts with the PLO.
“I am ready to come,” he said, “on one condition: I shall speak only about the duty to refuse toserve in the occupied territories.” For him, that was the alpha and omega of the fight againstthe occupation.
I told him that he was free to speak about whatever he saw fit, even if I myself did not quite sharehis view.
(The lecture, by the way, had an unexpected result. In his usual provocative style, Leibowitzcompared the Special Units of the Israeli army to the Nazi SS. His words were published,aroused a storm of protest and the prize jury wanted to cancel the award, whereupon Leibowitzhimself announced that he refused it.)
Since then I had an ongoing debate with myself about this hard and painful subject.
I am not a pacifist, in the sense of totally refusing to bear arms. My heart is certainly withYonathan Ben-Artzi, who is standing trial now because of his uncompromising pacifisticstand. He is a wonderful and admirable youngster. But as a member of a generation thatexperienced the war with the Nazis, I cannot accept the principle that every war is evil. Oncethe Nazis had taken hold of Germany and started to carry out their aggressive designs, therewas no way of stopping them other then by force of arms.
As long as there is no world order and no world government, no world legislature or world police(all of which I hope will be in place by the end of the 21 st century), no country can do withoutwith a defense force. And as long as there is no world government that enables every peoplestriving for liberty to attain its goal by peaceful means, freedom-fighters will need to usearms.
But Leibowitz was no pacifist. He did not advocate a general refusal to bear arms, but therefusal to serve the occupation. He believed in the moral value of this refusal, in the duty ofevery moral person to draw a line between himself and an unjust regime and to declare that hewill not lend his hand to a policy that is inhuman, immoral and illegal by its very nature. Healso believed that the personal example of the objectors was bound to influence the generalpublic.
This approach is beset, of course, with several pitfalls, which made me hesitate.
First, it undermines the democratic order. The army is supposed to serve the legal governmentthat was elected by the citizens. If you refuse to follow the orders of the legal government,you shake the very foundations of democracy.
Second, you legitimise the same actions by your opponents. According to the “categoricalimperative” of Immanuel Kant, you have to behave “as if the principle by which you act wereabout to be turned into a universal law of nature”. If A has the right to refuse to serve theoccupation, B has the right to refuse to remove settlements.
Third, you corrupt the army. If all moral people leave the army, it will remain in the hands ofthe immoral ones. The checkpoints will be manned exclusively by Arab-haters, operationswill be executed by sadists. But if the decent people remain in the army, they can influence itsspirit, preventing by their very presence injustices and atrocities, or, at least, bringingthem to light.
I have always had a lot of respect for conscientious objectors. I know how much courage isneeded for a young person (and an old one, too) to withstand the social pressure of family,comrades and neighbors and to bear the consequences. I am impressed much more by such moralfortitude than by physical heroism in battle, when you know that all the people are behind you.(And I speak as one who has served in a so-called “elite unit”.)
Therefore I have always supported an individual’s right to refuse. But I myself was not readyto call upon young people to follow this line. My position was that persons must decide forthemselves where they will best serve the fight against the occupation – inside or outside thearmy.
But I feel that my position is changing.
First of all, many soldiers have convinced me that it is almost impossible to withstand thepressure inside the army. The brainwashing is intense and unrelenting; those in the higherranks are more and more like robots with blunted senses, the products of the occupation; not tomention the members of the religious academies connected with the army, Arab-haters andsettlers with “knitted kippas” (associated with the extreme right-wingnational-religious party.)
Second, the occupation itself has become a monster that nobody can serve without losing hishumanity. When the members of the “cream of the Israeli army”, the Sayeret Matkal (GeneralStaff commandos) say so and refuse to go on, their testimony is persuasive. When the Airforcecombat pilots revolt against their commander, who has said that he “feels nothing but a slightbump” when he releases a bomb that kills women and children, respect is due to them. When five19-year old youngsters choose to go to prison rather than enjoy the freedom of the occupiers,Kant himself would have saluted them. The protest against an immoral regime is a categoricalimperative.
Does this refusal prepare the ground for the refusal of right-wing soldiers? There is, ofcourse, no symmetry between freedom-lovers, who refuse to take part in an ongoing injustice,and the settlers, who are themselves part of the injustice. But if one recognizes the right torefuse for reasons of conscience, one must apply Kant’s principle to them, too. If there everis an evacuation of the settlements, the right of a soldier to refuse to take part for reasons ofconscience must be assured.
Is this a blow against democracy? Most certainly. But this is a blow for the good. Israelidemocracy is being whittled away with every day of occupation. We are witnessing ancontinuous decline: the government has become Sharon’s kindergarten, the Knesset attractsgeneral contempt, the Supreme Court has largely become an instrument of the occupation, themedia are marching in step. It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into thepublic discourse.
The accumulation of refusals, with one act inspiring the next and one military unitinfluencing another, is bound to have a lasting effect on the general public. It is both anexpression of change and a stimulus for change.
But above all, the act of refusal shines like a beacon in the darkness. It drives out the despairthat has infects every part of the collective body. It restores faith in the State of Israel andits younger generation.
Of course, the objectors are few. They are a small minority of the people and the army. But thecourse of human history would have been quite different without such minorities – people whohad the courage to march on when the chorus of conformists shouted: “Stop!”
And not least: these people allow us to be proud again. A nation that has sons like these can havehope.