- JERUSALEM - Until recently,
Yaffa Yarkoni was one of Israel's most beloved singers. Since the modern
state of Israel was formed in 1948 and through subsequent wars and crises,
she has rallied national morale. She was even about to be honored last
month with a prestigious gala tribute in Tel Aviv.
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- But then Ms. Yarkoni crossed a red line: She criticized
the Israeli army's behavior in its recent West Bank offensive and came
out in support of a controversial group of reserve soldiers who refuse
to serve there. "We are a people who suffered the Holocaust. How can
we do such things?" she asked.
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- Retribution was swift. The Israel Artists Association
cancelled the tribute, saying the seats would be empty anyway. Leading
youth movements, which sang her songs, called for a boycott of her works.
Only one pop star, Gidi Gov, came to Yarkoni's defense.
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- Within days, Limor Livnat, the education minister, urged
the attorney general to prosecute for incitement Hebrew University professors
who backed the conscientious objectors.
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- The reservists started out as a group of 50 three months
ago. They published a document saying they were ready to defend Israel
but not "dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people"
and termed the fighting with the Palestinians, depicted by the government
as a war for survival, as "the war for the settlements."
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- Their numbers have swelled to 443. The success or failure
of the embattled reservists to gain more influence promises to affect whether
Israel leaves or stays in the occupied territories. Similar refusal to
serve in Lebanon during the early 1980s helped prompt the government's
decision to pull troops out of much of that country in 1985.
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- The objectors, whose group is called The Courage to Refuse,
have been increasingly shunned in recent weeks by the Israeli media, which
is largely caught up in the patriotic consensus of the country. The popular
Channel Two television station has a ban against interviewing them. Forty-one
soldiers are currently in jail for refusing to serve, the largest number
in two decades.
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- It is on university campuses that the ideological and
moral challenge they pose is reverberating most forcefully. Elli Hazan,
spokesman of the right-wing Lavi party at the Hebrew University arguing
against the petitioners: "Refusal to serve is the first sign of the
society falling apart," he said. "Everyone will do whatever he
wants, and there will be no laws. We are waging a just war, defending our
homes."
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- Mr. Hazan conceded, though, that the petitioners "are
having an impact, they have prompted discussion." He is trying to
organize a petition of right-wing academics to counteract the professors
who back the reservists.
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- The reservists have in mind nothing less than catalyzing
a full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the dismantling
of the settlements there. They say they are unfazed by the popularity of
the military's West Bank offensive, Operation Defensive Shield, launched
after a string of suicide bombings by Hamas.
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- "The price of the current quiet is total oppression
[of the Palestinians]. As people are asked to do worse and worse things,
support for us will increase," says Haim Weiss, a captain in the armored
corps.
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- In a society where the military is the most revered and
powerful institution, their website has a radical whiff: The entire system
in the West Bank is evil, they argue, and therefore it is not possible
to simply avoid carrying out individual illegal or immoral orders as the
mainstream left urges. "We have created an entirely hallucinatory
reality in which the true humans, members of the Nation of Masters could
move and settle freely and safely, while the sub-humans, the Nation of
Slaves were shoved in the corner and kept invisible and controlled under
our Israel Defense Forces boots," wrote Sgt. First Class Assaf Oron.
Another reservist, Capt. Dan Tamir wrote of how he had reached the realization
that his work as an intelligence officer on a seemingly innocuous project
to "reorganize civil neighborhoods" in the West Bank actually
amounted to "preparing the ground for the establishment of ghettoes."
That pushed him to sign the petition.
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- Gideon Ezra, the deputy minister of internal security,
says the reservists could harm the state "by damaging our deterrent
capability." But in Mr. Ezra's assessment, "they don't enjoy
a lot of support and are not impacting on the army."
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- The biggest disappointment for the refuseniks has been
the lack of support thus far from the moderate left. Most of the legislators
from Meretz, the only Zionist opposition party, say that opposition to
the occupation should be expressed through political protests and not by
refusing military service.
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- Gad Barzilai, a Tel Aviv University political scientist,
says the fate of The Courage to Refuse depends on the course of military
action. "If the military campaign will become tougher, longer, more
costly this might enlarge the scope of dissent. It all depends on the nature
of the conflict."
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- http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0507/p08s02-wome.html
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