March 7th, '05
The Observant Soldier and Disengagement

Another disturbing radio broadcast in anticipation of "disengagement" from Gaza and the northern West Bank. An expert in environmental safety was recently interviewed about the potential for massive air pollution in Israel's population centers. The cause? The plan to raze all the settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Gevalt! An environmental catastrophe!

And what about the people who are slated to be thrown out of their homes? What about the published plans to wrestle children from the arms of their parents, and not return them until the parents climb onto the "disengagement" trucks? What about the detention camps being built for Jews who resist? You don't hear about that on the radio.

I don't believe Israel can, or should, stay in Gaza forever. But I have serious doubts about my leaders' sanity in their rush to complete the pull-out now. I still trust the Israeli government more than I trust Mahmoud ("The Tel Aviv nightclub was a military target") Abbas.

But not by much.

Here's a recent editorial by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin that resonates with my ambivalence - and pain - over the upcoming disengagement.

The observant soldier and disengagement
By SHLOMO RISKIN

My government voted to "disengage" - to leave Gaza and to dismantle the settlements of Gush Katif, forcing more than 8,000 citizens of Israel to leave their homes. I feel their pain; after all, I too am a proud settler-citizen, feeling a profound connection to every meter of land of Efrat, to every brick of Jerusalem stone, to every tree and flower.

Our parents, in-laws and many of our siblings live in Efrat, our children have built their homes and established their lives in Efrat, our grand-children have grown up in Efrat, and our dead lie in the cemetery of Efrat. And I cannot deny the possibility that what happens in Gush Katif could just as easily happen in Efrat.

I am not one of those settlers who believe in Greater Israel or who maintain that the Land is not ours to give away.

Israel has the right to arrive at a decision regarding its borders. After all, did not King Solomon give up 20 cities in the Galilee to King Hiram of Tyre? Did not Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai give up Jerusalem in order to secure from Vespasian the city of Yavneh and its Sanhedrin?

Hence, great religio-legal authorities like Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Hacham Ovadia have accepted the halachic possibility of the government ceding parts of the land of Israel.

Moreover, I even believe in a two-state solution. In the Greater Israel model, we would have to give Palestinians the right to vote, for we could not treat a minority in our state any differently from the way in which we wished to be treated when we were a stateless minority. And if that were to happen, demography would soon turn Greater Israel into Greater Palestine.

Every individual has the right to be free; no nation ought to rule over another people which does not wish to be ruled by it. So, I wish to see a Palestinian state which is free - but not one which is free to destroy us.

Establishing such a state is tantamount to suicide, an act which is psychopathic when executed by an individual and certainly by a nation. And I believe that Natan Sharansky proves conclusively in his new book The Case for Democracy that any nation which doesn't give its own people freedom and individual human rights will never give its neighbor the opportunity to be free from fear of attack and destruction.

THEREFORE, I must ask my government a number of agonizing questions:

Why did you not link disengagement from Gush Katif to certain parallel steps of democracy within the Palestinian Authority? Even President George W. Bush linked Palestinian statehood to democratic rule in his speech of June 24, 2002.

Why did you not demand the unequivocal removal of the PLO Charter's avowal of Israel's destruction before agreeing to dismantle Gush Katif?

Why do you not consider unilateral disengagement another prize for terrorism?

And if indeed the Palestinian Authority is perceived to be "democratizing" itself and granting fundamental human rights to its citizens, why must a Palestinian state be Judenrein?

Palestinians in Israel have the right to vote, to have freedom of expression, to be elected to the Knesset. Were we to expel the Arabs of Israel, we would legitimately be condemned for ethnic cleansing, excoriated by the world as well as by all freedom-loving Israelis.

Why is it not ethnic cleansing when Palestinian authorities demand that Jews be exiled from their communities - areas which in 1967 were mostly no man's land?

Above all, why was such a destructively divisive decision - taken despite its rejection by the Likud's central body of leadership - not ratified by a national referendum?

HAVING ASKED my questions, I am nonetheless committed to carrying out the decisions of the democratic government of Israel. I am unalterably opposed to those rabbinic voices that call on IDF soldiers to refuse military orders of evacuation, claiming that such orders are against absolute Torah law.

I humbly insist that this is not the case; that Torah law grants the right to the sovereign state of Israel to determine its borders, and that a call to refusal on religious grounds is tantamount to a call to civil war. Israel can withstand the evacuation of settlers from Gaza; it cannot withstand a civil war.

At the same time, according to many authorities the Bible itself does grant the individual soldier a "right-of-conscience" deferment from military service, provided that the military directive is not within the context of a defensive war against an enemy out to destroy us.

Hence, if a soldier is "afraid or tenderhearted," he may return to his home (Deuteronomy 20:8); and the medieval commentators Ibn Ezra and Rabbeinu Bahya interpret these words to mean "whether he is 'afraid' to inflict hurt upon another [human being] or 'tender-hearted' because he himself may be hurt by the other."

Such an individual "right-of-conscience" deferment has nothing to do with a religious, halachic refusal. Our Bible respects the rights of a conscientious objector above the military - as long as the war is not a matter of life-and-death survival for the nation at that time.

Hence I urge my students and congregants who serve in the IDF to carry out the military orders of evacuation, though they do with heavy hearts and tears streaming down their cheeks.

But if they truly believe, on an individual level, that they cannot bring themselves to do so, and they are willing to even suffer a penalty rather than evacuate others (who may be their relatives), then Halacha respects such an individual decision.

The government ought to respect such a personally motivated decision as one of the rights granted in a truly democratic country.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is Chief Rabbi of Efrat. This article appeared originally in the Jerusalem Post.

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