Parents Speak to Their Children About IDF Refusal

Avi Bieber was a grade school kid when he was our neighbor in Efrat only a few years back, just before his family moved to Tekoa.

Now we see his face flash on the TV screen over the past 48 hours, wearing his army uniform, with his simple, clear statement to his commander that he would not obey an order to beat up Jews. His statement that “It is simply not just and not right” was quite clear, as he laid down his weapon and was promptly arrested and jailed for refusing an order.

All day long, the next day, Avi’s father was on the air, saying clearly that his son acted on his conscience and that he would be supportive of his son, even if his son was thrown in jail for a long prison term.

Now our children ask what they should do. We have four older children and two younger children. We have two two boys — 23 and 19. One has just finished the army and the other is about to go in. And we have two big girls — 22 and 17, one who has finished her national service and one who is about to go in, and we have two little girls — 11 and 6, and they all ask us each in their own way, including our little ones, what is right to do at this moment in time.

Every parent in Israel now experiences this moral dilemma.

Speaking from personal experience, I have been through some of this before, when the Vietnam conflict was raging, when it seemed like fighting in that war was the wrong thing to do.

Despite intense patriotism for America, it hurt to come to the conclusion that I could no longer live or fight for my country. In good faith, I could not call myself a conscientious objector, since there was a nation that I could fight for — Israel.

There were heartrending talks that I had with my father, who fought for America in the South Pacific in World War II, and an even more difficult dialogue with my grandfather, who fought for America in France in World War I and went on be a proud leader in the American Legion.

Yet they both saw the injustice in Vietnam, and supported the tough decision to leave America rather than to fight for an unjust cause.

What reinforced my decision to choose Israel as a land to live and fight for was what I had learned in high school from a teacher who had been an Israeli army officer who taught us about the Israeli army’s code of conscience, which requires an Israeli soldier to disobey an order which the soldier believes is immoral.

Our teacher taught us about the Kfar Kassam case in 1956, when Israeli soldiers opened fire on a truck of Arab workers returning home after curfew, and how every single soldier was convicted for obeying an illegal order to fire and kill unarmed workers.

Unlike Lieutenant Calley and his troops who walked free after their trial for conducting the Mylai massacre in Vietnam, every Israeli soldier at Kfar Kassam paid a heavy price for following what the Israeli court determined to be an immoral order.

Israel is perhaps the only nation to apply the principle of the Nuremberg Trials that you cannot say that “I was only following orders”. Indeed, the principles of the Nuremberg Trials have been integrated into the moral code of the Israeli soldier.

And what I do say to my children, speaking as a social worker, a journalist and a father, is that there can be no moral justification to follow an orders issued under the current Israeli government, which again arms a PLO security force that is at war with the state and people of Israel, which cedes key strategic positions to threaten the entire western Negev and coastal plain of Israel, and which forcibly expels thousands of citizens from their private homes and farms.

We as parents must now bear the burden of supporting our children in prison rather than asking them to bear responsibility to follow an immoral order.

When I pondered the possibility of resisting Vietnam 35 years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and read the principles of civil disobedience, articulated in the 19th century by Henry David Thoreau, who would not participate in supporting the American war against Mexico.

And when Thoreau was finally imprisoned, the famed American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson came to see his friend in prison.

Emerson then asked his incarcerated friend, “What are you doing in there”, to which Thoreau responded, “As a man of conscience, what are you doing out there”?

Avi Bieber and many IDF troops will now suffer the indignity of long jail sentences for refusing an immoral order.

They will be vindicated in their conviction.