IDF Soldiers “Edge of Tomorrow” (Courtesy MoD)
As many as 10,000 IDF reservists are now threatening to refuse call ups for service should the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s judicial reform program pass through the Knesset. This has left many former top Israeli security officials concerned with the country’s ability to defend itself should an emergency arise.
And as many as 500 reservists serving in the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate are also threatening not to serve. In an open letter, this group called the government’s plans “dictatorial moves that violate the contract between the government of Israel and its citizens” adding, “Although we have called many times for negotiations and broad agreements on the issues at hand, unfortunately not only did the negotiations at the president’s residence not go well, but the government continues to advance the coup all the more forcefully.”
Eyal Nave is one of the leaders of “Brothers in Arms,” an organization of IDF reservists opposed to the judicial reforms planned by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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In a press conference Nave said, “We’ve tried everything. This is where we draw the line. We pledged to serve the kingdom and not the king. We are determined, we are fighters, we love this country and we will not give up on it.”
One former senior Mossad official and a reserve captain (res.) and former commander of the Israeli Navy’s elite Shayetet 13 commando unit Nevo Erez said he supports the call for refusing to perform reserve duty because he feels should the reforms pass then Israel would become a dictatorship and not a democracy.
And therein lies the theme of the IDF reservist protest movement. Its members say they would no longer be obligated to perform their required military duties since the country would cease to be a democracy and, as such, their “social contract” with their nation will have been broken by its government.
The members of the Netanyahu government condemn the threats not to serve saying they are outside the bounds of legitimate political discourse. The Prime Minister made a speech to that effect saying that those calling for people not to perform their military duties are the real threat to the country’s democracy.
“Citizens of Israel, all of the remarks about the destruction of democracy are simply absurd,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu. “This is an attempt to mislead you over something that has no basis in reality. What does endanger democracy, is refusal to serve. Refusal to serve endangers the security of us all, of every citizen of Israel.”
But dozens of former senior Israeli security officials, such as former IDF senior officers and senior officials of both the Mossad and Shin Bet disagree. They include former IDF chiefs of staff Ehud Barak, Moshe Ya’alon and Dan Halutz as well as former Mossad heads Nahum Admoni, Efraim Halevy, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom and Tamir Pardo.
They released an open letter to Netanyahu accusing him of being “directly responsible for the serious harm” being cause to Israel’s security. “The legislative process is violating the social contract that has existed for 75 years between thousands of reserve commanders and soldiers,” they wrote.
Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, who served only recently and is considered a Netanyahu “loyalist,” in an op-ed for the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, personally called for the government to suspend the judicial reform process writing that it “endangers the national security resilience of the State of Israel in the immediate timeframe.”
But the current IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi issued an open letter to all IDF personal asking them to leave politics out of military service.
“If ours is not a strong and unified army, and if the best do not serve in the IDF, we will not able to continue to exist as a state in the region,” wrote Halevi. “We have acted to keep [the IDF] out of the debate, but due to its intensity in Israeli society, we were pulled into it, and the cohesion has been harmed.
“It is our duty to prevent these cracks from widening,” he added.
