When Ariel Sharon first became Prime Minister of Israel, I expected that he would have both the courage and fortitude to bully the professional political hacks of the Knesset into a peace process and into dismantling the settlements. Even though as Minister of Housing Sharon launched the settler movement following the Six-Day War, in 1978 he made a well-timed phone call to then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin at Camp David to support an exchange of the Sinai for peace with Egypt.
Mocked by Ha'aretz and detested by the European public intellectuals, this pariah politician rebuilt the Likud party that would ultimately become as much of a personal stumbling block as the universal hatred of the political left. Now, however, as the date to dismantle settlements in Gaza draws ever closer, the state of Israel has larger problems to deal with: that the Prime Minister is permitting the use of force against fellow Israeli citizens.
These problems threatening to rend Israel asunder -- of refuseniks, of national conscience, of the entire national project as a whole -- regain personal importance after considering the two drafts of bills before the House and Senate concerning [mandatory] national service. Many soldiers, of whom one expects adherence to the socialized and ingrained law of obedience to superior officers in most circumstances, have refused to serve in Israel's current day colonialist project -- of which Sharon was a, if not the, major architect. Some rightist soldiers, in the footsteps of their leftist counterparts, have become refuseniks to protest the alleged campaign of ethnic cleansing that removing the settlers would entail.
It is not surprising to me that Israel has refuseniks. Of all the nations of the world, one would expect Israeli citizens to be particularly sensitive to any politico-military apparatus whose existence and tactical deployments are daily reminders of the sub-human status of the persons so governed. Viewed in this light, the leftist refuseniks, by opting out of the banalizing boot of occupation, grant voice and visibility to the victims of an Israeli national project. However, given this profound individual courage when the national apparatus is handling a class of person deemed alien and type-casted as hostile, what shall become of the military when Prime Minister Sharon deploys it against the profound beliefs of many of its citizens the settlers?
How many speakers who have been invited to campus over the past three years to address the Israel question painstakingly maintained that Israel must dismantle the settlements? As a political, moral and strategic necessity, this statement is quite true; there is no reasonable person on either "side" of this question who believes in the defensibility of the settlements. What is always left unspecified by such speakers, reveling as they are in being part of the moral majority, concerns the actual implementation of this idea in reality and the affect it would have on the Israeli national consciousness. The precedent set by such act of political boldness -- of a government forcibly relocating its most fanatical citizens, acting against massive protests and facing a potentially huge level of conscious objectors -- would not be negligible. Such an action raises a whole host of questions, the foremost being: when ordered to do so should a soldier act against a fellow citizen?
I have seen evidence in international newspapers and on private websites that rightist opposition to Sharon have invoked this legacy of the obligation to opt out (they are, of course, silent on the question of their complicity with the maw of the occupation) through humanitarian rhetoric familiar to us. They offer that evacuating the settlements is population transfer, a crime against humanity, an illegal military order with a black flag waving over it. Legality aside -- I believe that the Israeli Supreme Court has not permitted Israeli law to have dominion over the territories -- when substantial portions of the Israeli and international left have been explicitly or implicitly legitimizing political refusal to obey military orders, they too draw upon the international illegality of the Israeli occupation.
If we learned anything from witnessing the universally condemned horrors of the Nazi regime, or of the totalitarian terror inside the Soviet Union (with whom a number of academics sympathized at the time), it should be this: soldiers, when asked by superior officers to execute an order against a non-combatant, especially a fellow-citizen, has a moral obligation to disobey. In the back of our minds, I think that we always knew that a day would come when an Israeli government would have to decide to evacuate and dismantle the physical manifestations of its colonialism, the settlements, against the wishes of its settler-citizens. Soldiers and policemen would have to execute this decision, many of them in contravention of their own beliefs and conscience, going against the ethical idea of non-violence against fellow-citizens that is the essence of post-Nazi military obligations.
When the debate in Israel inexorably turns toward the question of the duty of persons in uniform to obey orders concerning the evacuation of the settlements, what will those intellectuals who glorified and praised the refuseniks of the left have to say? The simple answer that the just beliefs of leftists justify refusal and the unjust beliefs of rightists do not will not suffice. The questions of who will protect the Jewish nation from external enemies in the face of often hostile world -- the Middle East is a rough neighborhood -- when any objector is allowed to refuse and is praised for this refusal is a compelling problem indeed.
This debate, seemingly in the obscure province of Israel, a state that most people forget is attempting to negotiate its problematic existence, will have great relevance for American students if Congress passes S89 and HR163, the Universal National Service Act, which would create a national service draft without exemptions for students or women. Maybe the debate in Israel is not so obscure after all. Given that many of us have strong objections about what the American military is and isn't doing (though I have come around on the Iraq question), and about the social and moral contexts of hegemonic projection of military power in an age of unipolarity, what shall we do when are called to serve a country that we are proud to be in but often ashamed to be associated with?
