Eradicating politicization

In a conversation with young people from my community, Ofra, shortly before the uprooting from Gush Katif, I told them: The soldiers among you must obey your commanders' orders. In a conflict between the dictates of your heart and those of authorized state institutions, you are obligated to obey the dictates of the state. If you refuse an order, your conscience may be assuaged, but by doing so you are liable to cause the disintegration of the Israel Defense Forces.

The disintegration of the army, I added, is liable to lead, God forbid, to the disintegration of the State of Israel, to the failure of the modern-day return to Zion. It is quite doubtful that the Jewish nation will get another opportunity to establish a state; it certainly won't be given to us. Without the continued existence of the Jewish state, I emphasized, there is also grave doubt as to the continued existence of the Jewish people. Only in a Jewish state, I told them, even the utterly secular don't assimilate, and maintaining the continued existence of the Jewish people may be the greatest challenge of your generation.

The gist of those comments expressed the collective ideology of religious Zionism on the eve of - and during - the evacuation. That's why there was no mass refusal of orders, and why most opponents of the plan did not engage in extended mass protests to prevent it, as they could have done.

Many saw the decisions to carry out the uprooting as having been reached through coercion, deception and fraud, and viewed the justice system and media as having jumped on the bandwagon for purely political reasons. Yet responsibility for the future of the state took precedence among the opponents of the evacuation.

Deep fissures have developed in religious Zionist ideology over the past five years. There has been a crisis of confidence between many of the young people who were convinced to obey state orders and those who did the convincing. Some of the best kids have interpreted their leaders' feelings of responsibility as collaboration with a corrupt regime, on a political and moral level.

The recent anti-evacuation protests by soldiers from the Shimshon and Nachshon battalions reflect this sense of injury. The protests were partly directed against yeshiva heads, Yesha Council leaders and right-wing parties - which the demonstrators say hasten to condemn them but don't do enough to keep the army from acting against civilians, despite having the political power to do so.

The prime minister is right to say that refusing orders "will bring about the collapse of the state," though the Shimshon and Nachshon soldiers didn't refuse orders, they protested. And the situation begs his response that the government will do everything to eradicate the phenomenon.

But if that "everything" results in the necessary act of ending the army's relationship with the two hesder yeshivas in question and putting the protesters in military prison, as well as the damaging act of ejecting the protesters from the ranks of the combat soldiers - damaging because some of the true heroes of the Second Lebanon War were among the protesters against the evacuation - the detriments of eradicating the phenomenon will outweigh its benefits.

When the soldiers are convinced that they are pawns in the defense minister's struggle for political survival, as in the Nachshon Battalion incident near Negohot, no military prison sentence will eradicate the protest. On the contrary, it will only spread further. Let us hope that the IDF knows this.

Although the protest phenomenon has support from combat soldiers in other units too, it can still be prevented. The main method of prevention is something soldiers, politicians, the media and the justice system all agree on: depoliticizing the IDF. The protesting corporals and sergeants have only a marginal role in that politicization. The parties primarily responsible for this - the same ones responsible for setting the army against civilians - are the prime minister and the defense minister.