The stand of the young Israeli refuseniks – declining to serve in the IDF because they object to the injustice of the occupation of the territories – should be supported. The following is from an article by Chris McGreal yesterday:
Until now, objectors have generally been allowed to walk free, or have received administrative sentences of a few weeks in jail, to save the military public embarrassment.
But Mr Matar and his colleagues went public with their protest, and encouraged others to join them, at a time when the Israeli army is confronting a wave of objections.
Nearly 1,000 school leavers and reservists have signed refusal letters…
The occupation is not, and for a long time has not been, simply about the defence of Israel’s existence. The settlements are testimony to that. The refuseniks are entitled not to participate in enforcing an unjust and oppressive occupation. This is irrespective of whether one agrees with all that they say. McGreal quotes one of them:
Every day people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip suffer abuse, humiliation, poverty and hunger – things that happen because of the occupation
You begin to understand that there is a reason for the bombings, the terror attacks. You ask how people can get to the situation where people kill themselves and kill others, and you realise they are desperate.
The second paragraph here is an oversimplified inference from the first. Suicide bombings may draw upon the legitimate grievances of Palestinians but they are not a spontaneous product of them. They are the result of a deliberately chosen strategy by political organizations which recruit and tutor those who are to kill themselves and others – mostly innocents – in the process. As such they amount to a campaign of mass murder and constitute a crime against humanity under the Rome Statute of the ICC and under any viable construction of the concept of crimes against humanity in any case. There can be no justification for such crimes, except for someone who is willing to see all moral constraints on conflict go by the board. It cannot be repeated too often, so prevalent is woolly thinking about these issues – which is why I do repeat it.
Yet, the refuseniks shouldn’t have to enforce an unjust occupation, and this is a separate matter.