Twenty-seven Pilots, One Bereaved Father,

And the Moral Dilemmas of the War We Are In

At homes and synagogues, around family tables and among friends, few topics pulled at the conflicting emotions of Israelis more this Rosh Hashana than the fierce debate over the “pilots’ letter” and the moral aspects of the present conflict. Two very different moral accusations were hurled at the Israel Defense Force High Command this week, in discordant dialogue with each other:

·        What we are doing is morally wrong, wrote 27 Israeli Air Force pilots (nine in active service) to their commander, Major General Dan Halutz—to some extent in response to an unwisely callous remark he had made in August of this year, after the targeted attack on Salah Shehadeh, a Hamas leader in Gaza, which killed, along with the terrorist, 14 civilians in the building and its surroundings. They announced their refusal to take part in targeted killings. This is not a just war, they argued, and it is not our business to be in the “territories” at all; and we certainly have no business going after individuals in densely populated areas, where the likelihood of harming innocent civilians is high.

·        Our troops in the fighting infantry units are the most moral anywhere in the world, lamented the father of a soldier (from the central Samaria settlement of Shilo, near the site of the biblical town by that name), who fell in a gun battle with a terrorist in a Gaza refugee camp. The IDF command, however, has taken an immoral decision, the father said over the open grave, to sacrifice my son’s life so as to save those of the Palestinians who could have been killed (if the house in which the terrorist was hiding had been attacked not by infantry, but by greater firepower.)

Both the pilots and the father spoke from the depths of pain; neither should be demonized (although the overt political nature of the officers’ public posture, and their abuse of their uniforms, does oblige the IDF to take stern measures to draw the proper line between moral doubts and political activism in the ranks). But they are also wrong, at both ends of the political divide, and, in fact, the IDF command structure deserves some credit for walking the treacherous path between the two temptations—to do too much or to do too little—through three terrible years.

Lt.-General Moshe Yaalon, the IDF chief of staff, and IDF officers on all levels have been facing, on a daily basis, extremely difficult choices in a war which is not fully a war, a campaign of murderous violence hidden among civilians. Neither the pilots’ political advice nor the father’s rage against being “soft” on the Palestinians can serve as a guide for solving such dilemmas. Indeed, both unintentionally do a disservice to the very causes they feel obliged to defend.

It is understandable, almost inevitable, that bereaved parents whose sons fell in pitched battles with Palestinian terrorists feel angry at the decision to put them in harm’s way without full use of the IDF’s immense firepower (while other parents have raised their voices against the price they paid “to protect the settlers”). And yet, for various reasons—moral as well as practical—this practice cannot be changed:

1.      In tactical terms, it is always better to try to arrest the terror activists— and find out what they know—than to destroy them (and those around them) by heavy fire. Such arrests—easier to carry out in the West Bank, where the IDF is fully deployed, than in Gaza, where it is not— are vital, when they succeed, in breaking the back of the terror networks.

2.      On the strategic level, it has long been understood by the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and hence by the IDF as a whole, that elements within the Palestinian leadership (in other words, Arafat, referred to by some of his own men as a tajir dam, “blood merchant”) are more than willing to sustain and even cause massive losses on their own side, if this would lead to a “Kosovo” effect, causing an international intervention to impose terms on Israel. To use unrestrained force in densely populated areas would have served Arafat’s purpose—indeed, would amount to a major strategic breakthrough for the Palestinian side, akin to the one they hoped to achieve in April last year by lying about the Jenin “massacre.”

3.      Finally, on the moral, political, and ideological levels, it should be clear by now that for many Israelis, if the war requires indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians, it had better not be fought at all. A radicalized demand for ever more violent action thus threatens the very same purpose it is supposed to serve. “Let the IDF win” need not— and must not—be translated into body counts.

            Much the same, and more, can be said about the officers—gentlemen all—who wrote the letter to Halutz: morally upright but wrong. They are off- target in more ways than one:

1.      Ideologically and historically, they buy into the argument that this war is “about the occupation.” So did Avraham Burg, in a fierce diatribe recently carried by papers around the world. But it is not. The occupation was already coming to an end through the Oslo process, could have ended at Camp David, and can still now, if the Palestinians begin to meet the requirements they undertook under the Road Map. It is, therefore, a war about the manner in which the state of occupation, brought about by years and years of the Arab refusal to negotiate, can be ended: on terms dictated by Arafat’s campaign of violence (which would invite the next campaign, soon enough), or on terms of political change and territorial compromise, which will reflect the inutility of terrorism to those who instigate it.

2.      Since this is so, politically the pilots’ letter can be seen as a deliberate act of disunity, a breach of what they see as a “false consensus” (and others would see as the remarkable resilience of a democratic society under siege). It does not help the prospects of moving ahead—it hinders them. Like many other attempts to short-circuit the democratic political process in Israel, it might tempt some Palestinians, wrongly, to await further disruptions within the Israeli defense establishment and body politic, rather than sit down to the table and agree to uncomfortable compromises.

3.      In tactical terms, this is not treason—but in the short term, if their advice were followed, it would amount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy; in other words, it would put the murderous criminals on notice that the Government of Israel is unable to defend its citizens—indeed, to carry out the obligation to fight terrorism, sanctioned by UNSCR 1378—as long as they shelter amidst a dense civilian population, while sending others (including children) to kill (again, including children and babies—a seven-month-old girl has just been murdered by a jihad terrorist) and to die.

4.      In operational terms, therefore, the pilots’ advice—if taken—might even lead to the opposite conclusion and outcome than what they clearly hope to achieve: not “an end to occupation” but the re-occupation, by ground forces, of such areas that now remain under Palestinian control. This is precisely why the targeted attacks are not “extrajudicial killings”; where Israeli jurisdiction runs or reruns (as in reoccupied “A” areas in the West Bank) no Air Force raids are necessary; arrests are made, or at least attempted, by ground forces. This is occasionally done in Gaza, but much of the strip remains under effective PA rule. If denied the option of striking enemy commanders from the air, the IDF would much sooner face the option of an invasion: With organizations such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose position on Israel as a state can best be described as exterminatory, the range of options cannot possibly include Israeli submission to their will.