Breaking Ranks

CHAPTER ONE

Sergeant First Class (Res.) Assaf Oron

The following letter was written by one of the refuseniks, Assaf Oron, in response to a wave of vehement protests by the Jewish community in the United States following the Tikkun organization’s full-page announce­ment in the New York Times supporting the refuseniks. It establishes why their cause is not merely a local Israeli issue, and it addresses the meaning of the Jewish collectivity. (The letter has been edited and revised for its publication in this book.)

AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICAN JEWS AND FRIENDS OF ISRAEL WORLDWIDE

Dear People,

Yesterday I was informed of an interesting phenomenon: a peace­ supporting Jewish organization called Tikkun published an ad in our favor, expressing their support for the Israeli-reservist refuseniks. They were immediately bombarded with hate mail and phone calls from other Jews. What’s more interesting is that even the Jews who consider themselves supporters of peace have denounced the Tikkun ad. Some Tikkun Advisory Board members resigned to minimize any personal damage to themselves. This has so saddened, disturbed, and angered me that I find myself setting aside half a day on the eve of Passover to write this open letter.
Most of these “civilized” attacks, so I understand, were aimed at this or that detail of the Tikkun ad. Here in Israel, in the past two months since we published our own open letter to the Israeli public in favor of refusal, I’ve also heard many arguments about the specifics of our acts. The general theme is the issue of tribalism. A loud voice (and in Israel today a loud voice is the only voice allowed to be heard) keeps shouting that we are in the midst of a war between two tribes: a tribe of human beings, of pure good-the Israelis-and a tribe of subhu­mans, of pure evil-the Palestinians. Only one tribe will survive. Even if we are not purely good, we must put morality and conscience to sleep. We must shut up and fight to kill. Otherwise the Palestinians will throw us into the sea.
Does this ring a bell for you? It does for me. As a child growing up in Israel, all I heard was that the Arabs were inhuman monsters, that they understood only force, and that, ever since the IDF won the Six Day War, they knew not to mess with us anymore. And, of course, we had to keep the “liberated” territories in our hands. Then came the Yorn Kippur War. For a child of 7, it was the perfect proof that indeed the Arabs wanted to throw us into the sea. What a great opportunity it was for our glorious IDF to teach them a lesson. I was too young to evaluate how the war really ended. All the ceasefires and talks were too complicated and boring, far more boring than war.
A few years went by, and a funny thing happened: those “we’ll throw you into the sea” Arabs came to talk peace. In exchange for all of Sinai, they were willing to sign a full peace agreement. Already a teenager, I went and protested against the withdrawal from Sinai. After all, it was a purely logical issue: the Arabs were not to be trusted; that’s what we’d been taught from day one.
But the “throw us into the sea” paradigm immediately found new arenas. The reality of the northern border was unpleasant. Even though the forces on the other side had strictly adhered to a secret cease-fire agreement for about a year, they were Arabs and therefore could not be trusted. So we talked ourselves into invading Lebanon and setting up a friendlier regime there. The mastermind of the invasion was then-Min­ ister of Defense Ariel Sharon. Shimon Peres, the head of the opposition at the time, voted together with his party in favor of the invasion. For me, at 16, this was also a turning point. When I understood that the government had lied to me in order to sell me this war, I turned from “center-right” to being a leftist. Sadly enough, it has taken me almost 20 more years, in a slow and painful process, to understand how deeply these lies and delusions are rooted in our shared perception of reality.
When Peres withdrew most of our forces from Lebanon in 1985, the Arabs could still not be trusted. To soothe our endless paranoia and suspicion, we created that perpetual source of death and crime ironi­cally called the “security zone.” It took many years, a lot of blood, and Four Mothers against almost all politicians, generals, and columnists to finally pull us out of Lebanon.
As for the Palestinians, they are painfully close to us. Like rival siblings, we have singled them out for hostility. We perfected our treat­ ment of them in that strange no-man’s-land created in 1967 and now known as “the territories.” We have created an entirely hallucinatory reality, in which the true humans, members of the nation of masters, could move and settle freely and safely, while the subhumans, the nation of slaves, were shoved into the corners, kept invisible, and con­trolled under our IDF boots.
I know. I’ve been there. I was taught how to do this, back in the mid-1980s. I did it, and I was witness to deeds that I’m ashamed to remember to this day.
When a fledgling and hesitant peace process tried to work its way through this mess, one major factor (perhaps the factor) that under­mined it and voided it of meaning was our establishment’s endless fear and suspicion of the Other. To resolve this fear and suspicion, we chose the insane route of demanding full control of the Other throughout the process. When this Other finally decided that we were cheating him of his freedom (and had too many mental disorders of his own to accommodate ours as well), violence erupted, and all our ancient instincts woke up. There they are. Now we see their true face again, we said in relief. The Arabs want to throw us into the sea. There’s no one to talk with, there is “no partner,” in the words of our beloved ex­ prime minister, and they understand only force. And so we respond­ed with more and more and more force, so they would know not to mess with us anymore. It was like putting out a fire with a barrel of gasoline. And that’s the moment when I said to myself, “That’s it, I’m not playing this game anymore.”
But what about the threat to our existence, you may ask. Well, I ask you, don’t you have eyes? Don’t you see our tanks rolling into Palestinian streets every other day? Don’t you see our helicopters hov­ering over their neighborhoods, choosing which window to shoot a missile into? What type of security need are we answering by tram­pling down the Palestinians?
Prevention of terror, I hear you say. What a joke.
We have sown the seeds, grown them, and nurtured them. And then our blood is spilled, and the centrist-right-wing politicians reap the benefits. Indeed, terror is the right-wing politician’s best friend. You know what? When you treat millions of people like subhumans for so long, some of them will adopt inhuman strategies to fight back. Isn’t that what the Zionists and other Jewish revolutionaries argued about a hundred years ago in order to explain the questionable strategies of survival that Jews used in Europe? Didn’t our forefathers say, “Let us live like human beings, and see how we’ll act just like other human beings”?
I hope that the first part of this letter made it clear that I don’t buy the “they want to throw us into the sea” argument. It’s a delusion of ours. More important, I don’t see the world in tribal terms. I see peo­ple, human beings. I believe that the Palestinians are human beings like us. We must treat them as human beings without demanding anything in return. And to all die-hard Barak fans, I say that throwing the Pales­tinians a couple of crumbs to set up pitiful, completely controlled Ban­tustans between our settlements and bypass roads, and believing this to be a great act of generosity, does not come close to answering this basic requirement. This requirement is not negotiable. In a perfect demon­stration of historical justice, it is a vital requirement for the survival of our own state.
Based on the lessons of modern history, especially the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I believe that the Palestinians will find calm, and that the elusive “security and peace” will finally happen for us as they did, incidentally, for almost two whole years between the Wye Plantation Accord of 1998 and Camp David 2000. I don’t have any insurance policy for that, except the solemn promise of the entire Arab world. In any case, we see now what the opposite paradigm ensures us. In the meantime, I refuse to be a terrorist in my tribe’s name.
That’s what this is, not a “war against terror,” as our propaganda machine tries to persuade us. This is a war of terror. In retaliation for Palestinian guerrilla warfare and terror, we employ the IDF in two types of terror. The more visible one is the violence of killing and destruction, which some people still try to explain away as surgical acts of defense though they result in the acceleration of conflict and blood­ shed. The worse type of terror is the silent one, which has continued unabated since 1967 and through the entire Oslo process. It is the ter­ror of occupation, of humiliation on a personal and collective basis, of deprivation and legalized robbery, of alternating exploitation and star­ vation. This is the base of the iceberg.
I live in terrible fear of the moment our government will sense a “blackout” situation, a huge terror attack, an American attack on Iraq, and there will be a horrible bloodbath in the territories, compared to which the last year and a half will look like a picnic.
I would like to dedicate a few lines to an unavoidable issue: the Nazi allusion. There is a great deal of self-righteousness and hypocrisy on the part of those Israelis who complain that a parallel is drawn between Israeli and Nazi behavior. Parties that support the essentially Nazi idea of deporting all Palestinians from the country have been part of our Knesset and our “legitimate” political map since 1984. Recent opinion polls show that 35 to 45 percent of the Jewish public currently supports this “solution,” as it is sometimes called. Last weekend, Reserve General Effi Eitam, fresh out of the military and ready to take up the leadership of the national-religious movement, was the subject of a flattering cover story in the Ha’arett weekend supplement. He unfolded his chilling ideology, calling for the expulsion as serfs to Jor­dan of those Palestinians who don’t want to remain in the Galilee and West Bank, and as the same from Gaza to Sinai. And he basically said: Why should we, the country poorest in natural resources, bear the bur­den of solving the Palestinian problem? That recalls some of the Nazi rhetoric in that dark period between the Kristallnacht of 1938 and the beginning of the war, when the Jews were expelled from Germany but could find no safe haven anywhere else. When I see a retired IDF gen­eral and rising political star use the exact same Nazi rhetoric in what is considered Israel’s most liberal newspaper, without any criticism by his interviewer or the editors, my hair stands up in horror.
Some two months ago, around January 25th, one of the top com­manders in the territories was quoted in Ha’aretz. as saying that, in order to prepare for potential battles in dense urban neighborhoods, the IDF must learn, if necessary, how the German army “operated” in the Warsaw Ghetto. A week later, the reporter confirmed the quote and the fact that it was a widespread opinion in the IDF, and then he went as far as to defend it on moral grounds. Again, this was published in Ha’aretz. without a hint of criticism. Beyond the disgust these senti­ments evoke, we soon found that they were not spoken in vain. A few weeks later, the IDF found an excuse to invade a refugee camp: an incontestable and inexcusable war crime. At the height of the invasion, we were hit with a series of bloody retaliatory suicide bombings. And lo and behold: the IDF high command patted itself on the back moral­ly and professionally, claiming that these invasions prevented terror­ism and merely killed dozens instead of thousands. In fact, the primary reason behind the limited carnage was the responsible decision taken by the “terrorists” not to turn the camps into all-out battlefields. But this could change in the next round.
I have little hope that the Israeli public will wake up and stop this escalation of violence. In their fear and confusion aided by politicians and the mass media, the Israelis have made a decision to go back to sleep and wake up only after it is all over. But it won’t be over. While the mind sleeps, our muscles tighten the nightmarish death grip. The only sensible thing is to let go, and that requires an open mind. Will you join the hypocritical mobs that sing lullabies to Israel and pounce upon anyone who tries to wake her up? Or will you finally take responsibil­ity and be the true friends that Israel needs now, even if this means not being “nice” to Israel for awhile?
Tonight, remember more than one thousand people, three quar­ters of them Palestinian and one quarter of them Israeli, who were here with us a year ago and who were murdered. Most of them could have been here with us today if we had acted sooner. We have now done what little we can. I beg you to think of the many thousands who may be doomed if you continue to sit on the fence. Please help us struggle to be free from fear, racism, hatred, and the deaths they produce.

Yours,
Assaf Oron