A Religious War in Israel’s Army/Israeli soldiers wore T-shirts making light of killing Palestinian civilians

A Religious War in Israel’s Army
AT ODDS Some secular liberals say religious nationalists set a tone that encouraged abuses during recent fighting in Gaza.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Copyright by The The New York Times
Published: March 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/weekinreview/22BRONNER.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp


JERUSALEM — The publication late last week of eyewitness accounts by Israeli soldiers alleging acute mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in the recent Gaza fighting highlights a debate here about the rules of war. But it also exposes something else: the clash between secular liberals and religious nationalists for control over the army and society.

AFTERMATH A sign of the intense violence: A donkey’s carcass lies where it was shot.
Several of the testimonies, published by an institute that runs a premilitary course and is affiliated with the left-leaning secular kibbutz movement, showed a distinct impatience with religious soldiers, portraying them as self-appointed holy warriors.

A soldier, identified by the pseudonym Ram, is quoted as saying that in Gaza, “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.”

Dany Zamir, the director of the one-year premilitary course who solicited the testimonies and then leaked them, leading to a promise by the military to investigate, is quoted in the transcripts as expressing anguish over the growing religious nationalist elements of the military.

“If clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren’t representative of the whole spectrum of the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population, what can we expect?” he said. “To whom do we complain?”

For the first four decades of Israel’s existence, the army — like many of the country’s institutions — was dominated by kibbutz members who saw themselves as secular, Western and educated. In the past decade or two, religious nationalists, including many from the settler movement in the West Bank, have moved into more and more positions of military responsibility. (In Israeli society, they are a growing force, distinct from, and more modern than, the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox, who are excused from military service.)

In many cases, the religious nationalists have ascended to command positions from precisely the kind of premilitary college course that Mr. Zamir runs — but theirs are run by the religious movements rather than his secular one, meaning that the competition between him and them is both ideological and careerist.

“The officer corps of the elite Golani Brigade is now heavily populated by religious right-wing graduates of the preparatory academies,” noted Moshe Halbertal, a Jewish philosophy professor who co-wrote the military code of ethics and who is himself religiously observant but politically liberal. “The religious right is trying to have an impact on Israeli society through the army.”

For Mr. Halbertal, like for the vast majority of Israelis, the army is an especially sensitive institution because it has always functioned as a social cauldron, throwing together people from all walks of life and scores of ethnic and national backgrounds, and helping form them into a cohesive society with social networks that carry on throughout their lives.

Those who oppose the religious right have been especially concerned about the influence of the military’s chief rabbi, Brig. Gen. Avichai Rontzki, who is himself a West Bank settler and who was very active during the war, spending most of it in the company of the troops in the field.

He took a quotation from a classical Hebrew text and turned it into a slogan during the war: “He who is merciful to the cruel will end up being cruel to the merciful.”

A controversy then arose when a booklet handed out to soldiers was found to contain a rabbinical edict against showing the enemy mercy. The Defense Ministry reprimanded the rabbi.

At the time, in January, Avshalom Vilan, then a leftist member of Parliament, accused the rabbi of having “turned the Israeli military’s activity from fighting out of necessity into a holy war.”

Immediately after Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 and then from several West Bank settlements, there was a call to disband certain religious programs in the army because some soldiers in them said they would refuse to obey future orders to disband settlements. After the rise of Hamas in Gaza and the increase in rocket attacks on Israel, that discussion died down.

But Yaron Ezrahi, a leftist political scientist at Hebrew University who has been lecturing to military commanders, said that the call to close those programs should now be revived because what was evident in Gaza was that the humanistic tradition from which a code of ethics is derived was not being sufficiently observed there.

The dispute over control of the army is not only ideological. It is also personal, as all politics is in this small, intimate country. Those who disagree with the chief rabbi have vilified him. Those who are unhappy with what Mr. Zamir did by leaking the transcript of the Gaza soldiers’ testimonies last week have spread word that he is a leftist ideologue out to harm Israel.

In 1990, Mr. Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony involving religious Jews visiting the West Bank city of Nablus. For some, that refusal is a badge of honor; for others it is an act of insubordination and treason. A quiet campaign began on Thursday regarding Mr. Zamir’s leftist sympathies, to discredit the transcript he publicized.

At the same time, Rabbi Rontzki’s numerous sayings and writings have been making the rounds among leftist intellectuals. He has written, for example, that what others call “humanistic values” are simply subjective feelings that should be subordinate to following the law of the Torah.

He has also said that the main reason for a Jewish doctor to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath, when work is prohibited but treating the sick and injured is expected, is to avoid exposing Diaspora Jews to hatred.

Mr. Halbertal, the Jewish philosopher who opposes the attitude of Rabbi Rontzki, said the divide that is growing in Israel is not only between religious and secular Jews but among the religious themselves. The debate is over three issues — the sanctity of land versus life; the relationship between messianism and Zionism; and the place of non-Jews in a sovereign Jewish state.

The religious left argues that the right has made a fetish of the land of Israel instead of letting life take precedence, he said. The religious left also rejects the messianic nature of the right’s Zionist discourse, and it argues that Jewish tradition values all life, not primarily Jewish life.

“The right tends to make an equation between authenticity and brutality, as if the idea of humanism were a Western and alien implant to Judaism,” he said. “They seem not to know that nationalism and fascism are also Western ideas and that hypernationalism is not Jewish at all.”





Israeli soldiers wore T-shirts making light of killing Palestinian civilians
By MATTI FRIEDMAN
Copyright 2009 Associated Press
11:37 AM CDT, March 23, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-ml-israel-shocking-shirts,0,3201470.story


JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli soldiers wore T-shirts with a pregnant woman in the cross-hairs of a rifle and the slogan "1 Shot 2 Kills," adding to a growing furor in the country over allegations of misconduct by troops during the Gaza war.

"The smaller they are, the harder it is," says another shirt showing a child in a gun sight. Soldiers wore the shirts to mark the end of basic training and other military courses. They were first reported by the Haaretz daily.

The military condemned the soldiers involved, and it was not immediately clear how many wore the shirts. They were not manufactured or sanctioned by the military, and it was not clear how widely they were distributed.

The shirts "are not in accordance with IDF values and are simply tasteless," the military said in a statement. "This type of humor is unbecoming and should be condemned." The army said it would not tolerate such behavior and would take disciplinary action against the soldiers involved.


Haaretz showed pictures of five shirts and said they were made at the unit level — indicating that they were made for small numbers of troops, perhaps several dozen, at a time. It said they were worn by an unknown number of enlisted men in different units. The Tel Aviv factory that made many of the shirts, Adiv, refused to comment.

Few people in the Palestinian territories appeared to be aware of the T-shirts. In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said it "reflects the brutal mentality among the Zionist soldiers and the Zionist society."

Hamas-controlled media consistently glorify attacks on Israelis, and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers frequently use classic anti-Semitic images of Jews as hook-nosed, black-hatted, wily and unscrupulous characters out to rule the world and oppress Arabs.

The Islamic militant group's TV station ran a children's show in which a Mickey Mouse knockoff fulminated about Israel before it was killed by a purported Israeli agent. Hamas also mocked Israeli suffering over its attacks, staging a play about its capture of an Israeli soldier in which it makes fun of the serviceman crying for his mother and father.

Israel's military has come under increasing scrutiny after unidentified soldiers alleged that some troops opened fire hastily and killed Palestinian civilians during the Gaza war several months ago, including children, possibly because they believed they would not be held accountable under relaxed open-fire regulations. The military has ordered a criminal inquiry into soldiers accounts published in a military institute's newsletter.

On Monday, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, defended his troops.

"I tell you that this is a moral and ideological army. I have no doubt that exceptional events will be dealt with," Ashkenazi told new recruits. Gaza "is a complex atmosphere that includes civilians, and we took every measure possible to reduce harm to the innocent."

The three-week Gaza offensive, launched to end years of rocket fire at Israeli towns, ended on Jan. 18. According to Palestinian officials, around 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis died, three of them civilians.

Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups fire rockets from heavily populated areas, and Israel says Hamas is to blame for the civilian deaths because it leaves the military no choice but to attack them there.

U.N. human rights experts said Monday that Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the Gaza offensive. The military ordered the boy on Jan. 15 to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in a Gaza neighborhood and enter buildings before them, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Israeli army spokesman Capt. Elie Isaacson denied that the military used human shields, saying "morals and high ethical standards are paramount" in the army.

Uzi Dayan, a former Israeli deputy chief of staff, said he was "shocked but not surprised" by the T-shirts.

"I spent many years in the army and I know that if you don't pay attention all the time, these things can happen. These are very young people in a combat situation, so you need to have a finger on the pulse," he said.

American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have also come under criticism for heavy civilian casualties in those wars.

The Israeli military misconduct allegations have struck a nerve in Israel where the military is expected to observe a higher moral standard.

"We have to face this challenge, not because we're the most moral army in the world, but because there are democratic norms and laws of war that we have to keep, and because we want to win and continue living in a democratic society," Dayan said.