Folder: Justice Education
Military Honor, Military Shame
Page Contents
A Soldier's Chilling View of Zionism | A Venerable Voice in Israel Is Muted After Questioning Army's Actions | Air Force Officer Suspended Criticizing Bush | Chicken hawks | Courage to Refuse: Combatant's Letter | Dangerous mortar fire ordered in Gaza Strip reservists charge | Documentary of US 'war crimes' shocks Europe | Faculty from Multiple Universities Support Refuseniks | I Am No Occupier, Period. | Israeli Soldiers Tattoo Swastika, Star of David, on Palestinian's Forearm, Cheek | Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan... | Medals of honor awarded to Jenin bulldozer operators | Military Training Programs: A Need for Oversight and Human Rights Courses | Officers threaten to quit over commander accused of abuse | Reservists call on PM to stop sending them to illegal outposts | Reservists Shun Duty In Territories | Suspects beaten near minister | The Americans... They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave | The Infamous Bulldozer Driver in Jenin | This futile campaign: Western intervention has done little for the Afghans | Why Every Jewish Soldier Should Refuse | Why I Refuse to Fight for Sharon's Settlements | Why I Won't Serve Sharon | Why Israel's 'seruvniks' say enough is enough
A Soldier's Chilling View of Zionism
"You can call me anything you like. Call me a monster or a murderer.... Better a live Judeo-Nazi than a dead
saint.
"Even if you prove to me that the present war in Lebanon is a dirty immoral war, I don't care. Even if Galilee is
shelled again by Katyushas in a year's time, I don't really care. We shall start another war, kill and destroy more
and more, until they will have had enough.
"Let them tremble, let them call us a mad state. Let them understand that we are a wild country, dangerous to
our surroundings, not normal, that we might go crazy if one of our children is murdered, just one! If anyone even
raises his hand against us we'll take away half his land and burn the other half, including the oil. We might use
nuclear arms.
"Even today I am willing to volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport
them, to expel and burn them, to have everyone hate us.... And I don't mind if after the job is done you put me
in front of a Nuremberg Trial and then jail me for life. Hang me if you want, as a war criminal.
"What you don't understand is that the dirty work of Zionism is not finished yet, far from it."
-- "Z," pseudonym of an Israeli soldier, about 50 years of age, heavyset, a prosperous farmer, and with a military history similar to Ariel Sharon (as quoted in the Israeli daily, Davar, by Amos Oz, a leading Israeli author, December 17, 1982)
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A Venerable Voice in Israel Is Muted After Questioning Army's Actions
Published on Monday, April 29, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
A Venerable Voice in Israel Is Muted After Questioning Army's Actions
by Mary Curtius
JERUSALEM -- To generations of Israeli fans, Yaffa Yarkoni has been "the Singer of the Wars." Whenever troops marched into battle, they could be sure Yarkoni would follow. Clad in fatigues, she raised spirits at the front with her rousing renditions of patriotic songs.
So it seemed natural for Army Radio to interview the iconic singer in her home a few days before Israel's Independence Day this month. Once again, Israeli troops were at war, this time in the West Bank, where they were sweeping through Palestinian towns and refugee camps in Israel's largest military operation there since the 1967 Middle East War.
But this time, Yarkoni offered no words of encouragement. Instead, she bitterly criticized the troops, the government and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in an anguished tirade that shocked her interviewer and enraged many Israelis. "When I saw the Palestinians with their hands tied behind their backs, young men, I said, 'It is like what they did to us in the Holocaust,' " Yarkoni said. "We are a people who have been through the Holocaust. How are we capable of doing these things?"
Her words were deemed so offensive that the union representing the nation's performing artists called off a planned tribute to Yarkoni that had been in the works for two years. The head of the union said it was forced to make the move after members of the public flooded its offices with complaints and returned tickets purchased for the event, and after sponsors canceled their financial support.
Government ministers denounced Yarkoni. The town of Kfar Yona canceled her performance at a Memorial Day event to honor Israeli soldiers who have fallen in battle. Youth movements declared a boycott of her music. The septuagenarian received so many hate calls, her daughter said, that she is now too frightened to appear in public.
At a time when many Israelis believe that they are locked in a battle for their existence with the Palestinians, Yarkoni's remarks, and the backlash against her, have stirred a debate here about freedom of speech and the nature of patriotism.
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Air Force Officer Suspended Criticizing Bush
Published on Wednesday, June 5, 2002 by Reuters
Air Force Officer Suspended Criticizing Bush
MONTEREY, Calif. - A U.S. Air Force officer has been suspended from duty after he wrote a letter to a California newspaper accusing President Bush of allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to happen "because he needed this war on terrorism," a military official said on Tuesday.
Lt. Colonel Steve Butler was relieved of his duties as vice chancellor for student affairs at the Defense Language Institute pending an investigation into his letter, which was published in the Monterey County Herald on May 26, a military spokesman said.
Butler's letter accused Bush -- the commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces -- of allowing the Sept. 11 attacks to occur for his own political ends.
"Of course Bush knew about the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. His daddy had Saddam and he needed Osama," Butler's letter said.
"His presidency was going nowhere. He wasn't elected by the American people, but placed into the Oval Office by the conservative Supreme Court...the economy was sliding into the usual Republican pits and he needed something to hang his presidency on."
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Chicken hawks
Matthew Engel
Tuesday August 20, 2002
The Guardian
[snip] (I)t starts with the president, who missed Vietnam by securing a cushy number in the Texas air national guard after (so everyone assumes) his congressman father pulled strings to get him in. It is less well-known that Dick Cheney avoided the draft by getting deferments, first because he was a student, then because he was married. "I had other priorities in the 60s than military service," he has said. Fine. Me too, Dick. Some people have got other priorities now. How about you?
Consider Washington's two most prominent superhawks: Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy) and his adviser Richard Perle. Who's Who in America is curiously vague about their precise whereabouts in the late 1960s, though it is fairly clear where they were not. As the shrewd and sceptical Republican senator Chuck Hagel said last week: "Maybe Mr Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad."
The two Democrat leaders in Congress, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle, served; their Republican counterparts, Trent Lott and Dick Armey, did not. Tom DeLay, the most powerful hawk in the House of Representatives, missed Vietnam too: he was working as a pest exterminator. Reportedly, he once complained that he would have served; but, he said, all the places were taken up by ethnic minorities.
There are similar stories about almost every other prominent rightwing Republican of recent vintage. Newt Gingrich, ex-Speaker of the House, went the Cheney route; Kenneth Starr, Clinton's legal nemesis, had psoriasis; Jack Kemp, Dole's running mate in 1996, was unfit because of a knee injury, though he heroically continued as a National Football League quarterback for another eight years; Pat Buchanan had arthritis in his knees, though he soon became an avid jogger. [snip]
Admission: I did not serve in Vietnam either. My country was not there, and did not ask me, or anyone else. Like those named above, I was unenthusiastic about that war. Unlike most of them, I am profoundly alarmed about the one now being plotted.
matthew.engel@guardian.co.uk
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Courage to Refuse: Combatant's Letter
Courage to Refuse - Combatant's Letter
¥ We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel, who have always served in the front lines, and who were the first to carry out any mission, light or heavy, in order to protect the State of Israel and strengthen it.
¥ We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people. We, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this Occupation exacts from both sides.
¥ We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories, destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.
¥ We, who understand now that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDF's human character and the corruption of the entire Israeli society.
¥ We, who know that the Territories are not Israel, and that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end.
¥ We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.
¥ We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.
¥ We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel's defense.
¥ The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose - and we shall take no part in them.
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Dangerous mortar fire ordered in Gaza Strip reservists charge
Saturday, November 09, 2002
Dangerous mortar fire ordered in Gaza Strip, reservists charge
By Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Correspondent
Senior IDF officers in the Gaza Strip gave orders to fire mortar shells in a way that endangered the Palestinian civilian population, without any operational justification, a group of reserve soldiers who recently completed a tour of duty there charged yesterday. The reservists claimed that one of the shells fell in the heart of a densely populated Palestinian neighborhood.
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Documentary of US 'war crimes' shocks Europe
June 12 2002 at 05:28PM
Source: IOL (Independent Online) - www.iol.co.za
By Clive Freeman
Berlin - American soldiers have been involved in the torture and murder of captured Taliban prisoners, and may have aided in the "disappearance" of up to 3 000 men in the region of Mazar-i-Sharif, according to Jamie Doran, an Irish documentary film-maker.
Doran's latest film, Massacre At Mazar, was shown on Wednesday in in the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, and there were immediate calls for an international commission to be set up to investigate charges made in the documentary.
Andrew McEntee, a leading international human rights lawyer, who has viewed the film footage and read full transcripts, believes there is prima facie evidence of serious war crimes having been committed by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
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Faculty from Multiple Universities Support Refuseniks
Open Letter from Faculty Members
We, faculty members from a number of Israeli universities, wish to express our appreciation and support for those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories. Such service too often involves carrying out orders that have no place in a democratic society founded on the sanctity of human life.
For thirty five years an entire people, some three and a half million in number, have been held without basic human rights. The occupation and oppression of another people have brought the State of Israel to where it is today.
Without an Israeli declaration of an end to the occupation, accompanied by appropriate action--unilateral, if necessary--the present war is not being fought for our home but for the settlements beyond the green line and for the continued oppression of another people.
We hereby express our readiness to do our best to help students who encounter academic, administrative or economic difficulties as a result of their refusal to serve in the territories. We call on the University community at large to support them.
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I Am No Occupier, Period.
Thursday, August 22 2002
By Uri Ya'acobi
In another two days I am not going to enlist. I will go the Soldiers House, and will board the bus together with all other conscription candidates and after we get off the bus at the Induction Center in Tel Hashomer, I will, unlike the others, refuse to enlist, and I will almost certainly be sent to prison.
In the prison I will meet two of the fellow signatories of "the letter of the highschool pupils" - Yoni Yechezkel and Dror Boimel.
Those two were imprisoned during the last week - because of their own refusal to enlist.
They, just like me, and as it turns out: like a lot of other Israelis, understand that this war which the state of Israel is conducting, in the territories that it occupied in '67, is not a war of the sons of the light against the sons of darkness (exactly like many more of the wars which took place in the course of history).
When one hears via foreign media of Israeli tanks rampaging in the streets of Palestinian cities (for some reason it's hardly ever on the news of the Israeli media), then we don't hear the whole truth.
The sad truth is that what the Israeli army does in the territories is not limited to tanks rampaging in the streets and the destruction of the civilian infrastructure. The military actions are also not limited to delaying ambulances and pregnant women at roadblocks or just insensitivity towards Palestinian citizens.
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Israeli Soldiers Tattoo Swastika, Star of David, on Palestinian's Forearm, Cheek
Sunday, June 02 2002 @ 05:02 PM GMT
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: Palestinian officials on Sunday urged the international community to condemn Israeli occupation army's "Nazi-like" treatment of Palestinian civilians, saying Israeli humiliation of Palestinians transcended reality.
"Israel is doing to Palestinian civilians what the Gestapo and Hitler's youths did to the Jews in 1939 and 1944," said Palestinian Authority official Ahmed Abdul Rahman.
His remarks came after Israeli soldiers manning a roadblock north of Jerusalem arrested a Palestinian boy Saturday afternoon, beat him mercilessly before they tattooed the swastika symbol on his cheek and the Star of David symbols on his forearm.
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Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan...
Published on Saturday, June 1, 2002 by CommonDreams.org
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan...
by Fran Shor
Consider the following eyewitness accounts from distraught villagers in Bandi Temur, Afghanistan. As reported in the May 27, 2002 edition of the New York Times: "They shot my husband, Abdullah, and they beat me and bound my hands and eyes." From a wailing mother came the cry: "They shot my son, Muhammad Sadiq. He was 35. They shot him in the legs." Most distressing was the story of another mother whose 3 year old daughter ran in fear from the soldiers. "They were shooting....I could not see anything but she was running. We only found her the next day. She was in the well, she was dead."
Were these soldiers part of another in the all-too-frequent conflicts between rival Afghan warlords that render life outside of Kabul dangerous and deadly? No, this was another lethal raid in recent actions by US troops that have outraged Afghan villagers. Among the other egregious violence in this attack was the brutal death by "a blow from a rifle butt" of the 100 year old village chief. As General Akram, the regional head of police, explained: "The villagers really respected him, that's why they are so angry." Angry enough, according to the General, to view such raids of the American-led coalition forces as similar to the Soviet activities of the 1980's.
But it is not just Afghan Generals and villagers who are becoming increasingly alienated from US military operations in Afghanistan. Even some British military officials are deploring the tactics of such operations.
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Medals of honor awarded to Jenin bulldozer operators
WAFA: Israel awarding medals of honor to war criminals
Jerusalem, June, 5, 2002, Wafa - Commander of the Central Command of Israel occupation forces, IOF, General Itzhak Eitan, will award medals of honor to twelve Israeli soldiers who participated in the massacre in Jenin and the destruction in the old city of Nablus.
Amongst those receiving the awards are Captain Elon Mandes, commander of the paratroopers company brigade which led the house to house assault in Nablus, during which the Israeli occupation soldiers destroyed large sections of the old city of Nablus, prevented the civilian population (which was under curfew) from having access to medical treatment and ambulances and killed and detained Palestinian medical teams. An additional medal will be given to Captain Nimrod Eloni, commander of the paratroopers commando, for his actions in the Balata refugee camp!!.
Central Commander Eitan will also give medals of honor to the engineering platoon of the central command, which was responsible for the operation of the D-9 bulldozers in Jenin. According to Moshe Nissim, who operated a bulldozer for 75 straight hours in Jenin:
"No one refused an order to take down a houseÉWhen they told me to destroy a house I exploited that in order to destroy a few more homesÉOn the loudspeaker (the Palestinian residents) were warned to get out before I came in. But I didn't give a chance to anyone. I didn't waitÉI'm sure that people died inside of those housesÉ From my perspective we left them a football field, they should play there. The 100x100 was our present to the campÉJenin will not return to be what it was."
[original article]
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Military Training Programs: A Need for Oversight and Human Rights Courses
by Lora Lumpe
June 4, 2002
Beginning the first week of June, the Senate is debating an "emergency" supplemental budget bill to fight terrorism--and part of that White House request should be rejected. President George W. Bush is asking for a sharp increase in foreign military aid--including an extra $1 billion for training programs and other forms of military assistance--and he also wants Congress to lift all aid restrictions based on human rights concerns.
The problem is that fighting the enlarged war on terrorism the way the Bush administration wants it done, a significant portion of the $1 billion earmarked for new military training and aid will go to many new allies with poor human rights records--thus we run the risk of creating the terrorists of tomorrow.
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Officers threaten to quit over commander accused of abuse
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Officers threaten to quit over commander accused of abuse
By Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Correspondent
Around half of the senior officers in the reservist engineering regiment could soon quit their positions in protest at the Israel Defense Force's decision not to suspend the regiment commander, who has been charged with severely mistreating a Palestinian.
In April, Lieutenant Colonel Geva Saguy was charged with using threats during his interrogation of a Palestinian youth. According to the charge sheet, which was filed in July to a special military court in Tel Aviv, Saguy and his subordinates went to the home of a wanted terror suspect, where they believed weapons were being held.
On discovering that the wanted man was not at home, Saguy ordered his teenage son to strip naked, and then demanded that he reveal the location of the weapons.
As part of his "interrogation" the commander held a burning piece of paper close to the youth's groin. He also tried to insert a bottle into the youth's rectum, aimed his gun him and threatened to shoot him.
In a separate incident, it is claimed that the commander used a woman as a "human shield." According to the charges against him, Saguy held the woman - a Senegalese worker employed as a housekeeper - at gunpoint while combing the house for terrorists.
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Reservists call on PM to stop sending them to illegal outposts
2002/10/08: Reservists call on PM to stop sending them to illegal outposts
Wednesday, October 09, 2002
By Amos Harel, Ha'aretz Correspondent
Dozens of soldiers, most of them reservists in an elite unit, have signed a petition in recent days which is to be sent to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his government, and which demands the evacuation of all illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank.
The signatories are calling on Sharon to cease sending soldiers to protect these outposts and to dismantle them.
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Reservists Shun Duty In Territories
Sunday May 26, 2002 6:30 AM
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) - When David Zonshein completed three weeks of army reserve duty at the beginning of the year, he didn't know he was about to launch a movement that would infuriate the military, reinvigorate the country's peace movement and cut him off from much of his own family.
All he knew was that as a decorated officer who was the grandson of Holocaust survivors, he could not serve another day in the Palestinian territories.
"As a Jew, I cannot do the kinds of things that I'm expected to do on reserve duty. Even if the whole world collapses around me, I will never bust into a Palestinian home again and interrogate and humiliate a father in front of his children," Zonshein said in an interview with The Associated Press.
So when the 29-year-old software engineer finished his reserve duty in the Gaza Strip in January, he called his commanders to say he wouldn't be back.
Then, he and a friend published an anonymous letter on the Internet vowing never to be part of an occupation.
"We were so angry, so traumatized by what we had seen in Gaza that we decided to write the letter and agreed that if we got 10 more officers to join us, then we'd sign our full names."
"A friend told us it would never happen but I knew that if someone like me could feel this way, then there must be hundreds more."
He was right.
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Suspects beaten near minister
2002/08/12: Suspects beaten near minister
Jonathan Steele in Jerusalem
Monday August 12, 2002
The Guardian
An unusual exercise in fact-finding backfired when it emerged yesterday that the Israeli attorney-general, Elyakim Rubinstein, was nearby as soldiers badly beat a Palestinian child and two men at an Israeli checkpoint in Ramallah last week.
Mr Rubinstein spent five days at the checkpoint on volunteer service as a reservist. His presence was only publicised afterwards. Newspapers quoted him as saying he wanted to get a proper look at how Palestinians were treated.
It now turns out that while he was there soldiers arrested and, without his knowledge, beat the men and boy so badly that a judge freed them.
According to yesterday's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Judge Michal Agmon wrote: "The sight was shocking. The backs of two of them were bloody and bruised, and the back of one of them was still bleeding. There is no explanation."
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The Americans... They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave
Published on Sunday, June 2, 2002 in the Los Angeles Times
'The Americans... They Just Drop Their Bombs and Leave'
Afghanistan: U.S. airstrikes were highly accurate, but hundreds of civilians still died. Now, some survivors want compensation
by David Zucchino
TORA BORA, Afghanistan -- After the American warplanes were gone and the hilltop village of Mudoh lay in ruins, survivors tried to collect and bury their dead.
There were problems. Most of the men and boys who had survived the Nov. 30 airstrike were bloodied and dazed. The village cemetery was not big enough to accommodate the dead. And the remains were not intact.
"No one should ever have to bury a baby's hand," said Janat Khan, the silver-bearded mayor of Mudoh, who said he collected the body parts of 15 villagers, wrapped them in plastic shopping bags and buried them in a single grave. A new cemetery carved from a rocky bluff where the village once stood holds the remains of 150 men, women and children, according to villagers and pro-American commanders. They were killed, and the village obliterated, by American warplanes during the battle that drove Taliban and Al Qaeda forces from nearby Tora Bora.
The carnage at Mudoh is the residue of a bombing campaign that, while exceptionally accurate, nonetheless killed, at minimum, hundreds of civilians and wounded thousands more. At 25 sites visited by The Times, witnesses said U.S. warplanes killed and maimed civilians because of unreliable intelligence, stray ordnance and faulty targeting, or because enemy fighters mingled with civilians.
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The Infamous Bulldozer Driver in Jenin
2002/06/15: Parts of An Interview with Moshe Niseem, Known as Dubi the Kurd
Friday, June 14 2002 @ 03:27 PM GMT
By Ydiot Ahranot Newspaper (Published at Miftah.org)
Moshe Niseem, who is known as Dubi the Kurd is the person who was working the Bulldozer (9) that caused the most damage in Jenin [during the Israeli incursion in April 2002]. He speaks of how he leveled Jenin Camp during (75) hours while drinking a bottle of Whiskey and eating nuts.
..."I entered Jenin with madness and despair; the worst condition possible. I told my wife, if anything bad happens to me, at least you would be taken care of.
I didn't have prior experience of how to work the bulldozer (9), but I learned that within two hours. I learned how to drive the bulldozer forward to level the ground and make it flat.
The whole time I drank whiskey to fight being tired. I didn't see people dying underneath the bulldozer, but even if it had happened it wouldn't have moved me at all.
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Also printed by mifta.org
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This futile campaign: Western intervention has done little for the Afghans
This futile campaign: Western intervention has done little for the Afghans and less to beat terrorism
Madeleine Bunting
Monday May 20, 2002
The Guardian
There was almost relief in Brigadier Roger Lane's voice on Friday morning as he told the Today programme that they'd finally found and killed some AQT - al-Qaida/Taliban - in the remote mountain valleys of eastern Afghanistan.
They had engaged their enemy, hitherto as elusive as the snow leopard, and around 1,000 British soldiers were being flown in for the battle.
Twenty-four hours later, Operation Condor, as it was named, looked about as farcical as every other operation in Afghanistan has done in the past six months.
You can take your pick from at least three explanations for Operation Condor. Option one is the claim of locals that far from being AQT, these were tribesmen in a shoot-out over some woodland. Option two came from the Pakistan-based Afghan press agency which reported that these were tribesmen celebrating a wedding by shooting AK-47s into the air. Option three was the Ministry of Defence's modified version by Saturday night that a) they were definitely AQT, but b) the marines had not yet made contact with them.
The problem with option three is how the MoD in London can be so sure they are AQT when everyone else is having such difficulties identifying them. You have to sympathise with the marine quoted as saying: "It's impossible. They all look the same and they all carry guns."
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Why Every Jewish Soldier Should Refuse
By Shamai Leibowitz, Attorney, Tank Gunner in Reserve Duty, Tel Aviv
Ruling Over a Hostile Population
Our rule over three million Palestinian Arabs in the territories has perforce put us in a position of committing a number of moral outrages. Continued rule will necessitate not only continued denial of many basic rights to Palestinians, but will require our taking additional steps which are reprehensible, if not morally questionable. While we certainly did not set out intentionally to kill hundreds of innocent civilians, these are willy-nilly consequences of such a position. To maintain our rule we will have to continue to mete out collective punishment that often cruelly affects those who are not guilty.
Among the steps we have taken is the enclosing of millions of humans in their cities, towns, and villages. We often deny basic rights such as the right to earn a living,, to study, to move freely, to purchase basic necessities, to vote, to travel for medical care, to move sick or injured to medical facilities, etc. But most severe is that innocent civilians die. What is happening now is more than unintentional collateral deaths of civilians. Israel has resorted to forays of terror which are severe violations of the Geneva Convention and the Hague Convention.
The IDF is certainly not bloodthirsty and has no daily quota of corpses. Nevertheless, it seems that a large number of the hundreds of Palestinian civilians who die are not killed because Israeli armed forces are acting in self-defense. In this respect, the IDF is not to blame because to put down a popular uprising, drastic measures (i.e., maiming and killing civilians) are often needed, in addition to the enforcing of curfews, establishment of blockades, abrogation of civil rights, and condoning of inhumane treatment. The governmental decision to remain in the occupied territories and to oppress a whole nation is the source of the problem. Unless this changes immediately, Israel will continue its shocking behavior as a dictatorship, which has so far departed from the morality of order that it ceases to be a legal system.
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Why I Refuse to Fight for Sharon's Settlements
Published on Saturday, May 11, 2002 in the Washington Post
Why I Refuse to Fight for Sharon's Settlements
by David Zonsheine
TEL AVIV -- My parents instilled in me the notion that I must do everything for the state. In Israel, serving in the army is a central expression of that ethos. When I was a high school student, it was not only obvious to me that I would go to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), but it was also vital that I become a paratrooper and serve in a special unit. It was also clear to me that my service to the state and my patriotism would require that I participate in an officer's course and serve an extra year.
Now that I have done several tours of duty in the West Bank as a reserve officer, this axiom that the army and the state are one and the same, and my belief that the army serves the vital security interests of the state have been eroded.
There was no single development that made me an objector; rather it was a succession of small incidents. It became increasingly clear to me that the little orders that I was issued, and then the orders I gave my soldiers to carry out, had precious little to do with protecting the state. They had everything to do with protecting a group of zealots and their settlements, and maintaining a Kafkaesque system that spelled misery for ordinary Palestinians.
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Why I Won't Serve Sharon
Published on Friday, July 5, 2002 in the Guardian of London
Why I Won't Serve Sharon
by Shlomi Segall
It is remarkable how easily one learns to live with occupation. When I was born, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories was already three years old. When I became 18 the occupation was still in full force, only by then the Palestinians had had enough of it.
That was the first intifada. I was there, along with many others, ready to serve as the iron fist to crush the Palestinian resistance.
Elsewhere people our age contemplated going to university or traveling around the world, but I and many young Israelis found ourselves in the narrow alleys of Jebaliya and other refugee camps. We should have known better, but almost without exception we didn't.
Nearly eight years later I was still serving in the occupied territories, this time as a reserve soldier. I was manning a roadblock, stopping Palestinians from entering Israel en route to their low paid jobs in the Israeli "slave market". I remember talking to a friend, trying to justify why I'd collaborated with a policy that denied a Palestinian father the only means of bringing food to his children.
No more. No more excuses. We members of Courage to Refuse, reserve soldiers who have vowed not to serve in the occupied territories, will not set foot beyond the 1967 line unless it is in civilian clothes and as invited guests.
Ariel Sharon will tell you that Israel is fighting a war for its survival against a bloodthirsty enemy. Not so. Sharon and his cronies are fighting a colonial war to keep their pet settlement project in place, to perpetuate the Israeli occupation and the subjugation of the Palestinian territories. It is a one-sided war with a not-so-covert purpose of destroying any hope of a Palestinian homeland and independent national life.
Any suicide attack within Israel, deplorable as it is, is used by Sharon as a pretext for inflicting ever-increasing misery on the 3.5 million inhabitants of Palestine. And if suicide attacks are not forthcoming, you can count on Sharon to provoke them with his so-called "targeted killings", which usually leave alleged terrorists unharmed but often leave women and children dead.
In this so-called war, any pretext is used to inflict a second Nakba (the catastrophe of 1948) on the Palestinians. Just look at the wanton destruction of the Palestinian ministry of culture, the bureau of statistics, the ministry of education; look at the destruction of such national symbols as the Palestinian international airport and the Voice of Palestine radio station, not to mention the shameful episode of Arafat's virtual house arrest. All this is aimed not at some terrorist infrastructure but at the basic foundations of a society struggling to attain independence and develop its future from under the Israeli army boot. This is something conscientious Israelis are no longer willing to take part in.
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Why Israel's 'seruvniks' say enough is enough
The laywer representing Israeli conscripts who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines explains why a growing number of soldiers are disobeying orders, in order to protect the basic values on which Israel was founded.
Observer Worldview
Michael Sfard Sunday May 19, 2002
It is said that in the first few years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, no one seriously thought of holding on to these territories forever. It was at the time widely assumed, that these newly conquered lands were to be handed back to the Arabs as part of a peace agreement. I don't remember those days.
I was raised in a different Israel. In my Israel the small fundamentalist group of Jewish settlers has always enjoyed more political power than their relative share in the Israeli population. In my Israel both left-wing and right-wing governments enabled the colonialisation of these occupied Palestinian lands. My Israel paid, and is still paying, a heavy moral price for ruling another nation by the force of the sword. My Israel, built on the founding values of humanism, pluralism and democracy is being lost.
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