Three young Israelis, calling themselves the Shministim, have taken the SA Jewish Board of Deputies to task (see here) for disputing the comparisons that have been made between them and the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) that was active in South Africa during the apartheid era ("Why we refused Conscription into the IDF", 11 October). Their stance is supported by Laurie Nathan and David Bruce, two leading lights within the ECC. For them, the parallels are sufficiently strong - both movements object on moral grounds to rendering military service "on grounds of conscience" (including "objecting to involvement in a defence force that maintains an illegal occupation, defies international law, resorts to excessive force and pays insufficient attention to the safety of civilians").
What the Shministim and their South African backers only succeed in doing is misrepresenting the respective histories of apartheid South Africa and the Middle East conflict as well as revealing the blinkered denialism that characterises the Israeli hard left's understanding of the existential threats that Israel faces.
The crucial difference between the two situations is that whereas Apartheid South Africa faced no significant threat from enemies across its borders, Israel has throughout its history had to defend its very existence in the face of external aggression on the part of its neighbours. While to a degree that menace has subsided - both Egypt and Jordan, for one, are today officially at peace with Israel - there remain extremist movements fully backed by Iran that remain implacably committed to Israel's violent destruction.
On the Lebanese border, there is Hezbollah, whose long-term aims were neatly encapsulated in its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's statement: "If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." (New York Times, 23 May, 2004). In Gaza, not to mention in Syria and the West Bank as well, there is Hamas, an Islamist supremacist organisation explicitly committed to destroying the whole of Israel and replacing it with a strictly Islamic state. Israel has no choice but to maintain a strong, permanent conscript army to protect its citizens and indeed its very national sovereignty against this implacable menace.
It is the ongoing Israeli presence in the West Bank - both military and demographic - that the Shministim really object to being a part of. Here, one can sympathise with them to an extent. It is undeniable that West Bank Palestinians live under conditions of the harshest repression, particularly where restrictions on their freedom of movement are concerned. This clearly has to stop, if there is to be any hope of a peaceful resolution to this most fraught of international conflicts being achieved.
What the writers of the article neglect to acknowledge is that this view is not just their own but is overwhelmingly held by most Israelis as well. Successive Israeli administrations, whether left or right-leaning, have stated unambiguously that Israel has no desire to rule over another people, and for its part will take far-reaching steps to ensure that this will cease to be the case. Israel was even prepared to act unilaterally in this regard, despite the considerable risks involved. In 2005, it withdrew not just its troops from the Gaza Strip, but also controversially uprooted 8000 of its own citizens that were living there. The results, as we all know, could not have been more discouraging. Instead of seizing the opportunity to govern themselves in peaceful co-existence with their Israeli neighbour, the Palestinians elected the hardline Hamas movement into office, drove the relatively more Fatah movement underground in a short and bitter civil war and then proceeded to launch a sustained bombardment of Israeli towns across the border.
The Gaza fiasco has made impossible any similar unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. Indeed such an act, if not accompanied by the strongest guarantees that it would not be followed up by attacks on Israel proper, would be tantamount to national suicide. It was bad enough that towns in the relatively sparsely populated South of Israel were rendered all but unliveable by almost daily missile assaults in which civilians were the primary targets. Should Palestinian extremists be allowed to launch a similar close-range onslaught into the demographic and industrial heartland of Israel, it would effectively bring the country to a standstill.
This is where the stance adopted by the Shministim and those from that ideological camp is not just flawed, but harmful. There is at bottom an unwillingness to see the Palestinian side as being anything other than passive victims who by virtue of their victimhood have no reciprocal obligations to uphold. But Palestinians do have obligations. No matter what historic grievances they might be nursing, if they truly wish to live as a free people in their own land it is incumbent on them to commit themselves to living in peace with their Israeli neighbours.
In the past twelve months, in fact, encouraging progress has been made in this regard. While a final peace agreement remains elusive, de facto changes on the ground have seen a lessening of border tensions, leading in turn to Israel's dismantling many (perhaps most by now) of the checkpoints that have become the most visible and hated sign of the occupation. The Palestinian economy has grown dramatically as well - between 5% and 7% - despite the global crunch. All this fosters tentative but still real hopes that normalisation on the ground will lead in time to Israel being able to withdraw its forces to its own side of the border. If, and hopefully when, that day finally comes, not just the Shministim but all of Israel will celebrate.
David Saks is associate director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies
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