APPLAUD THEIR COURAGE!

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By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 29, 2002; Page A16

JERUSALEM, Jan. 28 -- More than 60 Israeli army reservists, half of them officers and all of them combat veterans, have publicly refused to continue serving in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the grounds that Israel's occupation forces there are abusing and humiliating Palestinians.

"We will no longer fight beyond the Green Line for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people," declared a petition signed by the reservists and published in Israel's best-selling daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. The Green Line refers to the border between Israel and the West Bank.

Over the years, eligible Israelis have sometimes declined to serve in the army or refused to serve in certain places for reasons of conscience or politics. What makes the current case unusual is that so many combat reservists, soldiers and officers have come forward publicly at one time.

The organizers of the petition -- a pair of reserve lieutenants in their twenties who have served in the Israeli-occupied territories -- say their goal is to collect 500 signatures in the coming weeks and launch a broad social campaign.

"We all have limits," reserve Lt. David Zonshein, 28, a software engineer and one of the men who drafted the petition, told Yedioth. "You can be the best officer, always be first . . . and suddenly you are asked to do things that should not be asked of you -- to shoot people, to stop ambulances, to destroy houses in which you don't know if there are people living."

Zonshein said his petition drive has triggered furious reactions. "We knew we'd get a lot of reactions, and some of them are not just critical, they're violent," he said. "These are hard people with very extreme beliefs."

Zonshein, who drafted the petition with reserve Lt. Yaniv Itzkovich, 26, a university teaching assistant, declined to grant interviews to foreign correspondents. But along with several other signatories of the petition, the two men told Yedioth about incidents in which they said Israeli troops opened fire on Palestinian children and other civilians who posed no apparent danger to their lives.

In a statement, the Israeli army's general staff said: "To serve in the Israeli Defense Forces is obligatory under the law and there is no place for reserve soldiers to choose what jobs they want and what jobs they don't want. The writers of the petition don't represent the soldiers and officers of the reserve who understand their mission and are working days and nights toward the security of the state of Israel and peace for its citizens."

Most Israeli men are required to serve as army reservists until they are 45 years old, typically spending at least a few weeks each year away from their families and civilian jobs.

The spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, said allegations of abuse by the army should be investigated, but he dismissed the petition and refusals to serve in the army as a "marginal phenomenon." The petition "undermines the basic tenet of Israeli democracy," he said. "You can't have a government in which people can decide they'll . . . bomb this target but not that target. You abide by the rule of the majority, and the majority has decided this is the government and this is its policy."

Since the current Palestinian armed uprising erupted in September 2000, more than 500 Israelis have refused to serve in the Israeli-occupied territories, including pacifists and veterans, recruits and reservists, according to There is a Limit, an Israeli group that monitors and encourages such objectors. Of that number, about 40, including 12 reserve officers, have been sentenced to relatively brief prison terms, the group said. Others have been ignored or given army jobs in Israel.

Ram Rahat, a former Israeli combat soldier who refused to serve during Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, said the current dissent mirrors patterns from previous conflicts.

"This says that people who have gone through [army reserve duty] a couple of times, going through the territories and seeing the reality of what's going on there, are starting to get fed up with it," said Rahat, 45, an accountant. "It's exactly what happened in the first intifada as well. As more and more people did reserve duty and came back for their second and third tours, there were more and more cases of refusal."

More than 1,000 people have been killed in the past 16 months of violence, about three-quarters of them Palestinians. American, European and Israeli human rights groups have criticized the Israeli army for using excessive force against unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, for opening fire on civilians who posed no apparent threat and for failing to investigate such cases.

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