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In Withdrawal

(The New Republic) Yossi Klein Halevi - * Major General Elazar Stern, commander of the IDF's personnel branch, is one of the army's highest-ranking officers. And wears a knitted skullcap. In the last year, three Orthodox Jews, including Stern, have joined the IDF's general staff, until recently entirely secular. Like kibbutzniks a generation ago, religious recruits have become the group most ideologically committed to serving; their motivation has helped the army win the war against terrorism. * "Once a decision is made [about the disengagement]," Stern said, "the army will do everything - everything - to fulfill the government's policy. I know soldiers who have defended settlements they don't believe should exist. It's not easier to die for a settlement you don't believe should be there than it is to evacuate it." * Stern recently told cadets at the IDF's combat training school: "In this room are all the contradictions of Israeli society, secular and religious, new immigrants and veterans, Bedouins and Jews. The army is the meeting point of clashing values. Your dilemma at a roadblock [in the territories] is between respect for the value of human dignity and the value of protecting lives from terrorists." * "The withdrawal also presents us with conflicting values. But there's no such thing as one army that defends synagogues and another that defends discotheques; one army that eats kosher and one that doesn't; one that protects settlements and one that evacuates settlements. We've been in that story before. How long did [ancient] Jewish sovereignty last? Each camp then thought that its position was right. The result was two thousand years of exile."
2005-03-03 00:00:00
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