By Reuven Koret
August 15, 2005
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| Soldiers and anti-expulsion protesters praying together, facing Jerusalem. |
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Reports coming from multiple sources, but largely suppressed by the mainstream media, indicate that the army, and to a lesser extent police forces, are facing the prospect of massive failures of soldiers and officers to carry out orders on "The Day of the Order" to evict Jews from their homes.
How could it be otherwise? These young men have been educated and trained to defend innocent people and, specifically, to defend the families of Gaza and Samaria from terrorist attacks. Now they are being asked to expel them from their homes, destroy their homes and synagogues, and hand over their communities to those who terrorized them.
This is not, first and foremost, an issue of refusal to carry out orders, an act of defiance. It is an issue of a young soldier of officer's constitutional inability to execute the dirty work of tearing men, women, and children from their homes.
The fact that the orders to expel 10,000 families resulted from a decision of a democratically elected government (elected precisely to reject unilateral withdrawal from Gaza) and an approval by a Knesset decision (made possible by Arab and far left MKs) is hardly relevant to the soldiers and officer who have been ordered to carry out the expulsion.
Israelis have been raised to reject the ethos of "just following orders." Since the Holocaust, and the conviction and hanging of Adolf Eichmann, blind obedience to government dictates has not been part of the Israeli ethos. Officers are expected to lead -- "After me!" is the famed cry of the commander leading, not ordering, his troops into battle -- and to act with a "purity of arms" unparalleled in the world.
That the man directing this expulsion is notorious for exploits that deviated from those moral norms -- and was sanctioned repeatedly for those excesses -- hardly reassures. The fact that this man has now joined forces with Shimon Peres and the supporters of Oslo, and plans to uproot 25 settlements which he contributed so much to planting and growing -- this gives the residents of those communities the feeling of deep betrayal. It appears that the people's army of the Israel Defense Forces has been perverted into a subcontractor of the US, the UN and the rest of the "Quartet" -- not to mention the Arabs who will inherit the benefits of this expulsion.
Israelis are proud of their independence as a people, and the soldiers and officers of the security forces do not like the idea that they are being used as the tools of foreign forces that aim to de-Judaize the Land of Israel. They don't want to be the pawns of corrupt leaders who have personal financial stakes in setting up casinos and resorts on the ruins of shattered Jewish communities, or helping those leaders to avoid trial and imprisonment for betrayals of public trust or misuse of public funds.
That is the reality that is now being forced on the soldiers and officers of the army and the police. They are not stupid, and they are not unconscious. They are being reminded, over and over, of the circumstances of this assignment and the consequences, personal and national, of their actions.
In recent months, hundreds of soldiers and officers have already risked their careers, and have accepted imprisonment rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. That phenomenon, it seems, is just the tip of the icebergs, and reports are being received of a plan for a "mass mutiny" on the day they are ordered to expel the Israeli families of Gaza and northern Samaria.
This is the nightmare scenario for Sharon and his lackeys. On Wednesday morning, when the orders are given to break into the communities who continue to resist expulsion, that those troops will not be able to trample and beat and crush the men, women and children who refuse to be forced from their homes.
They are terrified that soldiers will actually break ranks and join "the other side" or at the very least, as has already happened, repeatedly, break down in tears and emotional paralysis when faced with the prospect of breaking into the well-kept home of a Jewish family and pulling a child from her bedroom or an elderly man from his wheelchair. When they face the children whose legs have been blown off at the order of Muhammad Dahalan, will they have the strength to drive these Jews from their homes so that their home -- or the rubble that will be left -- can be handed over to that same Mr. Dahalan?
My guess is that this kind of crisis will not be rare, and I believe that there is a chance, not too small, that the phenomenon will be so widespread that the army and police forces will be paralyzed and unable to "motivate" the young men and women of the army and police to carry out this immoral dirty work.
We got a foretaste of this possibility today, when the police and army proved unable or unwilling to enter settlements, which refused to accept the eviction notices intended for them. While the police and army dismissed this failure as insignificant and not worth a fight, there is no questions that this kind of resistance was not what they expected.
Looking at the 18 to 20 year olds -- raised in a tradition of Zionism and love for country --who are expected to carry out the expulsion, with their bodies, the challenge of throwing out whole Jewish families from their homes and handing over their communities to the terrorist may simply be beyond their capability.
When confronted with a synagogue full of women, children, and men, wearing tefilin and tallitot and carrying torah scrolls, will they have the moral strength to tear-gas and beat them, to tear babies from their mothers' arm and to force grandmothers and grandfathers into cages?
Can these young men and women live with the idea that they are helping Hamas and Jihad to realize the destruction of the Jewish state, home by home, family by family, soul by soul?
Will they grasp that the settlers and their supporters they are ordered to evict represent the best of Israel, the cream of the Zionist crop, the courage of moral strength, righteousness and resistance that they were educated and trained to defend, and say, in purity of heart and pained honesty: "Commander, I cannot. I simply cannot. These are my people."
This would be a miracle, one firmly in the grasp of the best of Israel's young men and women, and the wisest and most courageous of its officers.
This would be the greatest of victories for the nation of the Jewish People.
Views expressed by the author do not
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