17IntheMiddle271202

A year ago, a letter signed by IDF officers calling on soldiers to refuse to serve in the territories created a public uproar. Behind the letter stood a small group calling itself Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse), and at a gathering last year, one of the refuseniks tersely explained why he'd joined the cause. "I'm not interested in Mohammed. I'm thinking about us, and I'd like to know why I have to stand at a checkpoint and watch a sick old woman wait there for three hours," he said. Whereupon someone gently remarked to him: "Has it occurred to you that she's suffering more than you are?"

This little incident can illuminate the paradox in which the members of Ometz Lesarev have found themselves caught since the group's inception. On the one hand, they did not present themselves as part of the left and never sought to join the radical left circles in Israel - and ended up incurring criticism from that quarter. And in the meantime, they were unable to enter the Israeli consensus, which was their goal. "We came up empty on both scores," says one of the group's activists.

That's not entirely true. So far, 509 reservist combat soldiers and officers have added their signatures to the refuseniks' letter. For sheer numbers, all would agree that this is an impressive achievement. When the small founding group first came together, its members probably never imagined that, within a year, such a large number of declared refuseniks would join them. "I was afraid that we wouldn't even make it to 10 people," recalls Ariel Shatil, 31, a computer specialist who is a sergeant-major in the artillery corps. "When we have 500 people, they'll have to decide - occupation or the IDF," predicted David Zonshein, one of the authors of the letter, in the debut interview in which the refuseniks were first publicized on the cover of Yedioth Ahronoth's Seven Days weekend supplement. The group's public launch was reinforced the same evening with the airing of a report about them on Channel Two's Friday news magazine "Ulpan Shishi."

The fact that Zonshein, a 29-year-old software engineer who, as a reservist, serves as a lieutenant in the paratroops, mentioned the number 500 was anything but random. The late Prof. Yeshayahu Liebowitz said the same thing 30 years earlier, and Leibowitz's prophecies are generally regarded with awe among the left. But, as it turns out, this time he was wrong. In the past year, two things happened that left Zonshein and company surprised: They crossed the 500 threshold, but somehow, nonetheless, the occupation did not collapse; some would say that it wasn't even slightly shaken.

The refuseniks' influence on public discourse, the political establishment and the army seems to have been steadily dwindling over the last months. "People on the street come up to me and ask me where we've disappeared to," reveals group spokesman Amit Mashiah, 30, a sergeant-major in the artillery corps who works in communications. "I tell them that not only have we not disappeared, new people are joining us every day. But I can easily see why they ask me that."

"Frustration. I have the sense that in this most difficult period for the nation, most of the people have chosen to sit on the fence and to wait and see what happens. We jumped into the water. We feel responsible for everything that this nation does and we even go to jail as part of our attempt to steer it toward greater sanity. And then people still come to us and ask, `Whatever happened to you?'"

Rami Kaplan, 29, a major in the armored corps who is studying for his master's degree, says Operation Defensive Shield was the turning point that halted the refuseniks' momentum. "In three months, we were up to 450 people. We had a dramatic effect on public opinion in the first months. Polls showed that between a quarter and a third of the country's Jews felt it was legitimate to refuse to serve in the territories. February-March were the only months in which Sharon's support in the polls was below 70 percent. The media began to take notice. Yedioth started a regular column featuring tough stories from the territories. This all ended after the Passover attack at the Park Hotel.

"Ever since Defensive Shield, the entire left has kept silent, and since then, our achievements have also been just a drop in the ocean. We needed another six months just to pass the 500 mark. People who before Defensive Shield were debating whether or not to join us stopped debating the idea. There was also a lot of silencing done in the media, which reached its peak with the Yaffa Yarkoni affair, when she dared to voice her support for us."

A senior IDF officer who has been closely following the struggle between the army and the refuseniks agrees that things changed dramatically after Defensive Shield. "In the beginning, they were able to penetrate public consciousness and they had another major achievement: They received public legitimation from figures like Michael Ben-Yair and Ami Ayalon. But after the Park Hotel, they didn't stand a chance against the public mood. There was tremendous public support for the operation. Reservists who received a call-up order felt that they were going off to defend their wives and children and not the settlements. It astounded me how many people from the left and from the kibbutz movement - precisely those people whom the refuseniks could have caused to waver in their readiness to serve in the territories - willingly went off to do reserve duty in the territories on behalf of the Sharon government. When citizens are coming back from abroad just to sign up for duty, who wants to listen to the refuseniks?"

But the effects of Defensive Shield were not completely clear-cut: While leftists were reporting for duty in droves, the number of refuseniks who went to prison also swelled. In the first week of the operation, 100 new refuseniks were added to the list; in April, 38 refuseniks were being held in the military prisons, the largest number in the state's history. So many and yet so few. Itai Sibirski, 28, a lawyer who is a lieutenant in the paratroops: "In the first months, we were just waiting for the IDF to embark on a major operation in the territories. We were so naive. We thought that we'd have a big influence. I remember that after the operation, Yaniv Itzkowitz, who composed the letter, said that our accomplishment was that we caused each one of the thousands of reservists who were enlisted to take part in the operation to consider, however briefly, the option of refusal. But on the other hand, it means that these thousands ignored everything that we said. It was a sobering moment."

Chen Alon, 33, an actor and director and major in the armored corps: "I thought that we were going to be the spark that would start a huge wave that would get us out of the territories. I thought that we'd inspire throngs of reservists to take to the streets but it didn't happen. To be honest, it really surprised me."

Amit Mashiah: "When we published the first letter, I thought that we were about to strike a real blow to the wall that would lead to a general awakening. Now I see that this wall has to be taken apart brick by brick, and I consider it a success that we exist, that we are recruiting new people and maintaining the ones we have, and that we're trying to keep widening the crack. Apparently, this is also the maximum that we can do."

"More realistic. For people like us, thinking about refusal is a long process during which you doubt yourself dozens of times. When you finally reach a decision, you are so determined that you're sure you will immediately convince the whole world. It takes time to realize that it's not happening."

Two weeks ago, there was an evening seminar at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem on the topic of security and human rights. After the IDF's Judge Advocate General, Brigadier General Menachem Finkelstein, gave a talk in which he condemned the refuseniks, the audience was surprised when Prof. Matanya Ben-Artzi, brother of Sara Netanyahu, took the podium. His son, Yonatan, has refused to enlist in the IDF and is currently serving his sixth stretch in military prison, where he has spent over 160 days. Ben-Artzi began reading a poem by Natan Alterman, but he was unable to finish: The microphone was taken from him and he was forcibly led off the stage.

Then an interesting discussion developed. To explain his opposition to the refuseniks, the JAG used the famous argument of Immanuel Kant ("the categorical imperative"), whereby, when deciding how to behave, a person must consider what would happen if everyone was to do as he does. The implication: Refusing to serve is forbidden, because if everyone refused, there would be no more democracy. Dr. Niv Gordon, who teaches political thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, asked to respond. "If you're relying on Kant, I must remind you that all of the great philosophers supported the right to conscientious objection. All except for one - Thomas Hobbes, who propounded the culture of despotism. Is this what the IDF wishes to take as its moral and spiritual inspiration?"

Chen Alon was released from prison a few days ago. He spent 21 days is Prison Number 6, but he remains optimistic. He would not by any means characterize the group's first year of activity as a failure. "The question is how you define failure - by the number of media appearances? I look at the reality in the field and it's different. It seems that the ones who are always asking where we've disappeared to are the people who don't do reserve duty and don't know what happens in the army. Anyone who's in the reserves system, knows that refusal has a very significant presence. In my battalion alone, there are five refuseniks who signed the letter. Of the five, two of us have gone to jail."

"The only failure that I'll admit to is that we didn't manage to have more of an impact, and I'm basing this on things I heard just a few days ago. I was sitting with a group of 10 combat platoon commanders who served in Defensive Shield. They told me that because we refused to serve during the past year, we have no idea what's happening there, that it's an entirely new ballgame now. They described the horrors that were committed in their units - looting, abuse, you name it. Everything but rape. The experiences that caused us to come out with the letter pale in comparison to this. I said that I didn't understand what they were waiting for, because I don't have to wait until our soldiers crush cars with their tanks and loot laptops to realize that, as with the Kinneret, the red line keeps going lower and lower."

Alon is convinced that the refuseniks did the right thing. If their influence is limited, then Israeli society must ask itself why. Perhaps surprisingly, the refuseniks have no complaints about the treatment they received from the media, certainly not in the first months of their effort. But this doesn't mean that they have an easy time of it with the press.

Amit Mashiah: "The harsh daily news inundates everything. The first six pages of the newspapers are devoted to security and political reports that come from the establishment, from the IDF Spokesman or from the prime minister. They're the ones who generate the news and the agenda. We have no chance of penetrating this wall. In the best case, after a lot of hard work, we might generate a report on the bottom of page seven."

In following the conduct of the refuseniks in the media, one must keep in mind that they're not the only players on the field. They face a worthy opponent - the IDF - which after a faltering start, became much cannier in waging the battle. In the first weeks, the army reacted with panic: Senior officers, led by then chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, criticized the refuseniks - and thus played right into their hands. They said that they were impostors, that some of them weren't even supposed to do reserve duty in the territories, and they accused them of sticking a knife in the back of the fighting forces. Every time they were attacked, the refuseniks were given the chance to respond, and so the issue was kept alive in the news studios and remained on the public agenda. They couldn't have asked for more.

But within a few weeks, the army got a better grip on the situation. Then deputy chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, who was responsible for overseeing the reserves, decided to take matters in hand. Together with a small number of senior officials in the IDF Spokesman's unit, he formulated a new strategy. From now on, the army would not create confrontations with the refuseniks. It would not provide the media with a pretext to give them coverage. They would be practically ignored, and thus they would have no one to fight with. When there's no argument, there's no news item.

The IDF made it clear that, from its perspective, there was no phenomenon of refusal to serve. There were a few individual refuseniks and their cases were being handled like any other disciplinary problem. The refuseniks were sent to be tried by their commanders, and were generally not severely punished. The idea was to create the minimum fuss. David Zonshein petitioned the High Court to compel the IDF to try him in a military court; he thought that this would be a more suitable venue for a political debate, which of course would be covered in the media. The army objected. The High Court has yet to rule.

"This way, the IDF has managed to take the sting out of the trials of the refuseniks," says a senior army official. "When one of them goes to jail and they report to the press that an officer was tried by his battalion commander, the army tells the press that on the same day, another reservist was tried by his platoon commander because he fell asleep on guard duty, so why isn't that reported? That's how the story is diminished."

The IDF keeps telling the press that the refusenik phenomenon is a fiction, "the invention of a few refuseniks and reporters," and points to the apparent gap between the number of signatories to the letter and the number of actual refuseniks as evidence. But the facts tell another story: 110 members of Ometz Lesarev have served prison terms during the past year, in addition to 40 other refuseniks - current conscripts and some who were about to be drafted - who were jailed. But this doesn't change the fact that the IDF still feels that it is winning. "At first, there were 50 of them and the army's mistakes created the impression that there were 500 of them," says a senior officer. "Now there are 500 of them, but the feeling is as if there are only 50."

The founding core of the refusenik group is made up of men who for the most part share a similar socioeconomic profile: They are either university students, university-educated or professionals - the elite, in other words. Unsurprisingly, the group has no women, no Arabs and no non-combat soldiers. In the beginning, most of the members knew very little about the radical left movements, which have a long tradition of conscientious objection, and they certainly felt no affinity for them.

The separation between the new refuseniks and other leftist groups goes way beyond statements in the media. There is minimal cooperation between them. The new refuseniks were wary of what some of them call the "bear hug" of the radical left; they were afraid of losing their legitimacy among the broader public. When attempts were made to work together, sharp differences were exposed. The refuseniks showed up at a joint demonstration with people from Ta'ayush (the organization for Jewish-Arab cooperation) with lots of Israeli flags. Many of the Ta'ayush activists, and not just the Palestinians among them, were put off by this. In preparation for a demonstration of solidarity with their imprisoned comrades, members of Ometz Lesarev spread out a huge Israeli flag on the hill opposite Prison Number 6. A small group of demonstrators refused to demonstrate under the flag, which it considered a symbol of the occupying oppressor establishment. This group chose to cross the street and hold its own separate demonstration.

Activists in radical left-wing organizations are cautious in their criticism. They all admire the refuseniks for the way they made their way from the heart of the consensus to the protest tents and the cells of the military prison, but at the same time, they attribute the group's fading over recent months to the fact that the "new" refuseniks prefer to act as lone wolves. Yishai Menuhin, spokesman for Yesh Gvul, waged similar campaigns during the Lebanon War and the first intifada. Last Thursday, he brought together at Tzavta a number of Israel Prize laureates (including Yirmiyahu Yovel, Dan Meron, Shulamit Aloni, Meir Wieseltier and Hana Meron) who all spoke in favor of conscientious objection. But that wasn't enough to get the media to report on the gathering.

Menuhin thinks that the Ometz Lesarev people have given "a tremendous push to the readiness to actually refuse to serve and to pay the price. Just look at the big leap in the number of refuseniks in the past year." But he also has plenty of criticism for the group. "Again and again, I hear that in forums in Israel and abroad, they're careful to stress the difference between us and them. They encourage skepticism about our refusal to serve and present us as being primarily concerned about the Palestinians."

Prof. Gadi Algazy, once a renowned refusenik and now an activist with Ta'ayush, says that the refuseniks' expectations of a speedy revolution were unrealistic to begin with. "They fell for the illusion of direct change," he says. "It's tempting to think that it's possible to bring about rapid change, because the occupation is dependent on the cooperation of the middle class and its fine sons. When the latter say, `We're not playing,' it has an immediate effect: `If there are enough of us, the government won't be able to carry out its policy.' There's a desire to change everything without going through the whole long and complicated political process, but it's not reasonable.

"In their case, they got stuck because the armor of the Israeli political collective was rebuilt, with Ariel Sharon at its center. He derives his power from saying, `There's no one to talk to, and if there was, then I killed him yesterday.' Today, the collective has no positive vision of the future. The way to break this armor is to rebuild, gradually, by convincing the citizens that there is life in the Middle East outside of the armed ghetto. The refuseniks do not offer such a vision. They only repudiate the existing situation, and that's why their refusal in itself simply isn't enough. It's one component within a range of strategies that must simultaneously aim to get under the armor of the national collective."

Tal Evgar, 25, a reservist in the air force, was the refuseniks' coordinator of activities in Jerusalem this year. Now he is hardly active anymore. His university studies require most of his time and when he's not studying, he's working at the pet store in the Malha Mall. Evgar: "We tried not to anger population groups that were considered centrist. I believe that had we added some radicalism to our protest, something might have happened. For instance - if we'd demonstrated in uniform in front of settlements, to fight the lies of the IDF Spokesman head-on, if we'd done more revolutionary things. Maybe we wouldn't have drawn a lot of people to join us, but our voice would have been heard all the time. Now it hasn't been heard for several months. The reason we didn't do that has a lot to do with the sociology of the group, but, on the other hand, if the sociology were different, this group would never have come into being. The group's fate was virtually preordained: We wanted to be the prophets of doom and to be embraced by the nation at the same time, but society never embraces its prophets of doom."

Lately, such misgivings are even being felt by the group's core members. Rami Kaplan: "After a few months, some of us felt that the letter was an avant-garde move that was successful and had an impact, but after that initial impact, we were stuck and didn't know what step to take next. We became a bigger, established and democratic organization, and it's very hard to convince everyone to make avant-garde leaps. In such a situation, you need two or three people to act on their own."

Ariel Shatil: "In the first stages, I thought that we needed to make much more dramatic moves, maybe even a hunger strike. I remember that at one of the meetings at Tzavta, there was a very civilized discussion about war crimes. Everyone listened very attentively and then went serenely home. Maybe we should have marched out of the hall and blocked the roads in Tel Aviv so the public would know what was happening."

Amit Mashiah: "We were used to being Mom and Dad's, and the state's, good little boys. We didn't manage to define who we were. If we make a decision to go for the consensus, we have to turn into a movement, a party, and try to draw people in from there - something like Yisrael Aheret, but with a different agenda. And if we decide that we want to be a commando group, then we have to make more radical decisions, and wage a revolt - to chain ourselves to tanks or disrupt conventions. What happened is that we didn't go all the way in any direction. We stayed in the middle, alone."

David Zonshein doesn't buy it: "Our strength is derived from the fact that we're not perceived as the starry-eyed radical left. People understand that I'm the company commander who led them in the Lebanon War and my relatives, some of whom are settlers, who contacted me all these years to ask me to help them get into one of the elite reconnaissance units, cannot suddenly repudiate me. It's no coincidence that we did not hook up with leftist elements. There are five people whose gut instincts determine our strategy, and we cannot connect with something that isn't who we are. I refuse to serve in the territories because I am a Zionist. I refuse in the name of what I perceive as Zionist values, and I know that a large part of the mainstream thinks like I do but just doesn't have the guts to do what we've done."

Itai Sibirski: "Theoretically, there's something to the arguments about our remaining separate from the left, if you consider that most of the people simply aren't capable of [identifying with the radical left]. We're in a different place. We cannot connect with radical leftist organizations because they often relate to IDF soldiers as criminals, while I know that, until not too long ago, I was doing the very same things. I don't think that they're less ethical than I am. They're victims of the situation."

The refuseniks are not about to let their regrets and the sense of missed opportunity dissuade them from carrying on. You don't abandon the battlefield at the height of battle. They've just launched a new campaign with the aim of regaining the public's attention. More than 200 signs put up all over the country invite new reservists to join the refuseniks. The refuseniks say that they've stopped just short of the fine line that, if crossed, would make them guilty of sedition; detractors say they've stomped right across it. The campaign costs several hundred thousand shekels; the refuseniks are proud of their success in raising such sums (most came from Jewish donors in America), which are far from the norm for other left-wing organizations.

Over the past year, they've had to adjust their expectations - to get used to the fact that while they were once at the heart of the consensus, they're now a marginal group hovering at the edge of public legitimacy. Outwardly at least, they still project optimism, but of a much more cautious nature. Amit Mashiah: "We live in an intolerant society, and we were also being judged after just two or three weeks. But even if we didn't foment a revolution, we do have importance. We're a cloud that is darkening the skies over the occupation. You may be able to ignore us for a while, but in the end, it's just a question of time until we are a thousand, then two thousand and more in number."