Israeli Air Force Pilots refuse to take part in "illegal and immoral" bombings

[Goldstein]

Halutz: Pilots refusing to serve in territories will face law
By Amos Harel and Gideon Alon, Haaretz Correspondents, and Haaretz Service

Air Force Commander Dan Halutz on Thursday issued an order to ground nine pilots who signed a letter refusing to take part in operations in the territories.

Altogether, 27 reserve pilots signed the letter, details of which were published last week in Haaretz, but only nine of them are still on active duty with the force.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee said Thursday it would discuss the letter next Tuesday, after the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

The signatories, who sent the letter to Halutz, described aerial activity in the territories as "illegal and immoral."

Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said Thursday that any IDF activity that is
conducted according to the directives of the Judge Advocate General Corps, the attorney general's office and the Supreme Court is legal.

Rubinstein said that although the army does not generally consult with the attorney general's office before a specific operation, legal experts do conduct discussions and issue instructions on issues such as the extent the army should go to aovid wounding innocent civilians during an operation.

After the Israel Defense Forces attempted to assassinate Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin about three weeks ago, military leaders said the reason the operation had failed was that the army used a relatively small explosive device so as to minimize civilian casualties.

Halutz told Haaretz on Wednesday night he planned to treat the signatories "in the same way as the IDF has dealt with refuseniks until now. This method has proven itself."

The nine pilots will be called to meetings with the heads of their bases in the coming days. If they do not retract their statement, they will be dismissed from active service.

Halutz has also ordered the grounding of those pilots who signed the letter and who serve today as flight instructors at the flight school at the Hatzerim base in the south of the country. "These are not the people who should educate the next generation of pilots," Halutz said.

The signatories to the letter wrote they would refuse to take part in aerial attacks on populated Palestinian areas in the territories. "We, both veteran and active pilots, who have served and who still serve the state of Israel, are opposed to carrying out illegal and immoral orders to attack, of the type Israel carries out in the territories," the letter states. "We, for whom the IDF and the air force are an integral part of our being, refuse to continue to hit innocent civilians... The continued occupation is critically harming the country's security" and moral fiber, it added.

Among the signatories is Brigadier General Yiftah Spector (res.), who was a squadron leader during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

"We must keep things in the right proportions - we are talking about only 27 out of thousands of pilots," Halutz told Channel 10 news. "There is no corps and army more humane and moral than us."

Former president and one-time air force commander Ezer Weizman attacked the group, saying they lacked "morality," that their act of publishing a letter was a "disgrace," and that they should "put their tail between their legs" and get out of the air force "as quickly as possible."

He likened the call to refuse orders to a "cancer" which had to be cut out "immediately, before it spreads."

Halutz added that he personally was completely at one with the deployment of the air force in the territories, saying that a great deal of consideration was employed.

According to one military source, many of the signatories had stopped flying some 15 years ago because of their age. Only one flies an Apache of the type that takes part in targeted assassinations and one flies an F-16 fighter bomber, used sometimes for bombing targets in the territories. It is not clear if either of
the two has actually been involved in activity in the territories.

Two others are pilots of Blackhawks, a transport plane, and another teaches cadets to fly an F-15.

"This is an attempt to inject new blood into a subject that is dead both from the public and media point of view - refusal. It is not clear why the pilots did not first speak to their commanders. Their behavior was not ethical," one senior source said Wednesday night.

Halutz sent a circular Wednesday night to senior air force commanders with details of the affair. "Most of the signatories have never participated in targeted assassinations in the territories. They are not active fighers or do not serve in squadrons which deal with that," he said.

Halutz noted that "no order had ever been issued to hit innocent people. Sometimes we took decisions that were not optimal because we wanted to avoid hurting innocent civilians."

Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon described the affair as "a political statement made in army uniforms. This is in no way legitimate," he said.

The initiative for the letter was formulated over a period of about three months following the death of a large number of civilians during the aerial attack on Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh in Gaza last year. The idea met with a great deal of soul-searching inside the IDF.

Captain Yonatan, speaking on behalf of the signatories, said Wednesday night: "We are all loyal citizens of the state of Israel. We have taken this step after deep thought and much soul-searching. As officers and pilots, we have been given the heavy responsibility of operating a most powerful war machine. As
people who were educated with the moral code of the IDF and the state of Israel, we have decided to ... obey the order that obliges us not to carry out an order that is blatantly illegal."

Former Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna said that "collective refusal" was not acceptable, but he did not denounce the letter, saying it has to be seen mainly as a "political" letter that was written by "the best of our people."

Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On said the letter was further evidence of the corrupting influence of the occupation. "What the pilots did is irregular, but it has to serve as a warning light to the IDF, that when it sends its best to carry out orders that are illegal... there will be people who cannot go ahead with this. This requires that the senior officers in the IDF and the political leaders rethink their
policies, in whose name they send our sons, the best of our sons, who injure and get injured without need."

Minister Without Portfolio Uzi Landau (Likud) said the refusal phenomenon had to be "cut out at the root... these gentleman have to be released from the army."

Education Minister Limor Livnat (Likud) accused the group of exploiting the army to "spread their political views. Their motivation is political, not moral."

 

[revolutio]

I have heard of this sort of thing before. Something similar happened a while back when ground troops were refusing to be assigned to details in which they would be raiding Palestinian homes.

 

[john crawford]

May God Bless all conscientious Israelis! There's hope yet.

 

[Satisfied]

Amen, John, the conscientous Israelis are truly blessed in the sight of Heaven.

Satisfied

 

[Voegelin]

Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said . . . any IDF activity that is conducted according to the directives of the Judge Advocate General Corps, the attorney general's office and the Supreme Court is legal.

Rubinstein should consider how statements such as that sound to others and whether Israel would like other countries to adopt a similar stance as a country Jews are very familiar with once did.

People in the military refuse orders or undermine command, don't explain, justify or debate--prosecute them.