Amos Harel and Yaniv Kubovich reported Friday in Haaretz that talk among Israel Air Force reserve pilots of refusing to comply with call-up orders or certain directives “is topping the list of the concerns of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces.”
The elite of the military elite is joining the spreading protest. According to the reports, one of the main motivations for this protest is the fear that in the wake of the government’s judicial coup, and in the absence of a proper judiciary in Israel, pilots will be vulnerable to prosecution abroad for war crimes. It turns out that the pilots have indeed committed war crimes, that the judiciary has papered over, and now they feel abandoned in the face of international law, tasked with prosecuting war criminals.
Personal concerns take precedence: Israelis in high-tech fear investor flight, the pilots fear for their reputations and their liberty. Conscientious objection is suddenly legitimized and respected. Ehud Barak preached it at Haaretz’s emergency conference last week. Suddenly Israel’s Soldier No.1 stands up and talks about orders with a black flag of illegality waving over them, that should therefore be disobeyed, as if he turned into the head of Breaking the Silence.
Channeling Bertrand Russell, he said: “History will remember those who gave orders and those who followed them. They will go down in infamy.” Truly, the end times must be upon us. Barak has become Yonatan Shapira. Suddenly he remembers there are illegal orders that must be disobeyed. Suddenly refusal is not just a right, but a positive moral duty.
The bombings under his command and that of his cohorts, the killing of hundreds of women and children and the destruction of thousands of homes and futures in the Gaza Strip, the flattening of the Dahieh quarter of Beirut and the devastation of Lebanon in general, were all legal and ethical to Barak. Only reserve service at a time of a judicial coup is obeying an illegal order. How twisted is this morality. How hypocritical.
Two differences distinguish Shapira, the brave pilot objector, from the new prophet of service refusal, Barak, as they distinguish the reserve pilots refusing to fly now from their friends who refused to so during the bombings of Gaza and Lebanon: These are the motivation, and the price. When Yiftach Spector, Yigal Shochat, and 25 of their comrades published the pilots’ letter in 2003, they wrote that the Israel Air Force attacks on population centers are illegal and immoral, and therefore they refused to take part in them.
They declined to participate in the IAF’s dance macabre, to kill 11 children just to get Salah Shehadeh or a bunch of teens idly playing on a Gaza beach. That’s what their comrades did at the time. Then-IAF Commander Dan Halutz castigated them: “Political objection is the root of all dangers to this people,” he said. Now Halutz is sort of in favor of political objection: “If officers and soldiers should recognize that there’s a dictatorship here, they didn’t sign up to be a dictator’s mercenaries.”
Conscientious objection is a moral duty. What is unacceptable is the hypocritical use thereof. Halutz formerly attacked political objection, now he supports it, like Barak. Welcome to the club. But heavens above: How can you think that bombing helpless innocents is not justifiable cause for objection, but the changes to the judicial system are a legitimate reason? Why was Spector a traitor, and the colonel who won’t even identify himself by name is now considered proper and even heroic?
The protest has moved Israelis to take unprecedented steps. This is an auspicious sign. The pilots and other service members who intend to refuse due to the danger of the coup should be saluted. But there’s a sneaking suspicion that the rules of the road change not according to moral standards, but in direct proportion to personal harm.
The bombing of Gaza harmed none of the pilots, and objection exacted a heavy personal toll, so few objected. The judicial reform might harm the pilots and the cost of refusal is low, and so it is permissible and even desirable to refuse. The best become pilots, to paraphrase the Hebrew slogan, and now the best refuse orders as well. The only pity is that it took them so many years.