Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
By Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom
30 December, 2003
Some
years ago, when the jury for the annual Israel Prize announced its award
to Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I decided to invite him to give a
lecture to the Israeli Council for Israeli-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 to serve in the occupied territories." For him,
that was the alpha and omega of the fight against the occupation.
I told him that
he was free to speak about whatever he saw fit, even if I myself did
not quite share his view.
(The lecture, by
the way, had an unexpected result. In his usual provocative style, Leibowitz
compared 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 Leibowitz himself 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
with Yonathan Ben-Artzi, who is standing trial now because of his uncompromising
pacifistic stand. He is a wonderful and admirable youngster. But as
a member of a generation that experienced the war with the Nazis, I
cannot accept the principle that every war is evil. Once the Nazis had
taken hold of Germany and started to carry out their aggressive designs,
there was 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 21st
century), no country can do without with a defense force. And as long
as there is no world government that enables every people striving for
liberty to attain its goal by peaceful means, freedom-fighters will
need to use arms.
But Leibowitz was
no pacifist. He did not advocate a general refusal to bear arms, but
the refusal to serve the occupation. He believed in the moral value
of this refusal, in the duty of every moral person to draw a line between
himself and an unjust regime and to declare that he will not lend his
hand to a policy that is inhuman, immoral and illegal by its very nature.
He also believed that the personal example of the objectors was bound
to influence the general public.
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 government
that 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 "categorical
imperative" of Immanuel Kant, you have to behave "as if the
principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal
law of nature". If A has the right to refuse to serve the occupation,
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 of the immoral ones. The checkpoints will be manned exclusively
by Arab-haters, operations will be executed by sadists. But if the decent
people remain in the army, they can influence its spirit, preventing
by their very presence injustices and atrocities, or, at least, bringing
them to light.
I have always had
a lot of respect for conscientious objectors. I know how much courage
is needed 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 moral fortitude 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
ready to call upon young people to follow this line. My position was
that persons must decide for themselves where they will best serve the
fight against the occupation--inside or outside the army.
But I feel that
my position is changing.
First of all, many
soldiers have convinced me that it is almost impossible to withstand
the pressure inside the army. The brainwashing is intense and unrelenting;
those in the higher ranks are more and more like robots with blunted
senses, the products of the occupation; not to mention the members of
the religious academies connected with the army, Arab-haters and settlers
with "knitted kippas" (associated with the extreme right-wing
national-religious party.)
Second, the occupation
itself has become a monster that nobody can serve without losing his
humanity. When the members of the "cream of the Israeli army",
the Sayeret Matkal (General Staff commandos) say so and refuse to go
on, their testimony is persuasive. When the Airforce combat pilots revolt
against their commander, who has said that he "feels nothing but
a slight bump" when he releases a bomb that kills women and children,
respect is due to them. When five 19-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
categorical imperative.
Does this refusal
prepare the ground for the refusal of right-wing soldiers? There is,
of course, 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 to refuse for reasons
of conscience, one must apply Kant's principle to them, too. If there
ever is an evacuation of the settlements, the right of a soldier to
refuse to take part for reasons of conscience must be assured.
Is this a blow against
democracy? Most certainly. But this is a blow for the good. Israeli
democracy is being whittled away with every day of occupation. We are
witnessing an continuous decline: the government has become Sharon's
kindergarten, the Knesset attracts general contempt, the Supreme Court
has largely become an instrument of the occupation, the media are marching
in step. It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into
the public discourse.
The accumulation
of refusals, with one act inspiring the next and one military unit influencing
another, is bound to have a lasting effect on the general public. It
is both an expression 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
despair that has infects every part of the collective body. It restores
faith in the State of Israel and its younger generation.
Of course, the objectors
are few. They are a small minority of the people and the army. But the
course of human history would have been quite different without such
minorities--people who had 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 have hope.