Ideas and Opinions of Religious Leaders on the Disengagment
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The Observant Soldier and Disengagement - Harav Shlomo RiskinEntered: 22/Mar/2005 |
Jerusalem Post - March 4, 2005
The Observant Soldier and Disengagement
Harav Shlomo Riskin
I oppose rabbinic calls on soldiers to refuse military orders, but individual choice is another matter.
My government voted to "disengage" - to leave Gazaand dismantle the settlements of Gush Katif, forcing more than 8,000 citizens of Israelto leave their homes. I feel their pain; after all, I am a proud settler-citizen of Efrat, feeling a profound connection to every meter of landof Efrat, to every brick of Jerusalemstone, 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 grandchildren have grown up in Efrat, and our dead lie in the cemeteryof 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 believes in Greater Israel or who maintains that the Landof Israelis not ours to give away. Israelhas the right to arrive at decisions regarding borders. After all, did not King Solomon give up 20 cities in the Galileeto King Hiram of Tyre? Did not Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai give up Jerusalemin order to secure from Vespatian the city of Yavnehand its Sanhedrin? Hence, great religio-legal authorities like Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Hakham Ovadia have accepted the halachic possibility of the government ceding parts of the Landof Israel.
Moreover, I even believe in a two-state solution. In the Greater Israel model, we would have to give the Palestinians the right to vote, for we could not treat a minority in our state any differently than the way that we wished to be treated when we were a stateless minority. 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 our committing 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 The Case for Democracy that any nation which does not give its own people freedom and individual human rights will never give its neighbors the opportunity to be free from fear of attack or 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 statehood to democratic rule in his speech of June 24, 2002.
· Why did you not demand the unequivocal removal of the PLO's Charter's avowal of Israel's destruction before agreeing to dismantle Gush Katif?
· Why is unilateral disengagement not another prize to terrorism?
· And if the Palestinian Authority is perceived to be "democratizing" itself and granting fundamental rights to its citizens, why must a Palestinian state be Judenrein? Palestinians in Israelhave the right to vote, to 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 central body of leadership - not ratified by a national referendum?
Having asked my questions, I am nevertheless committed to carrying out the decisions of the democratic government of Israel. I am unalterably opposed to those rabbinic voices that are calling 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 for civil war. Israelcan 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 "afarid or tenderhearted" he may return to his home (Deut. 20:8); and both Ibn Ezra and Rabbenu Bahya interpret these words to mean "whether he is 'afraid' to inflict hurt upon another (human being) or 'tenderhearted' because he himself may be hurt by the other."
Such an individual "right of conscience" deferment has nothing to do with a religious, halachic deferment. Our Bible respects the right 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 military orders of evacuation, albeit with a heavy heart and tears streaming down their cheeks. But, if they truly believe that on an individual level they cannot bring themselves to do so, and they are willing to suffer a penalty rather than evacuate others who may even be their relatives, then halachah 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.
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