Of pogroms and pullouts
By Lily Galili
Haaretz, December 31, 2004
It was difficult this week to conduct an uninterrupted conversation with the Vobnoboy family. People called their home in the settlement of Neveh Menachem, near Karnei Shomron in the West Bank, from all over the country, with words of support. Most of the conversations were held in Hebrew, the others in Russian, the family's native tongue. In both languages the large numbers of callers expressed solidarity and offered help.
It was like this all week, they said, after the parents learned that their son, Y., a cadet, had been expelled from an Israel Defense Forces officers' course after declaring, in a group meeting with his commanding officer, that he would refuse to evacuate settlements should he be ordered to do so. Two hours later he was no longer a cadet. Now he is a "jobnik" - army slang for low-level noncombatants - a term he finds beneath contempt, and his parents are fighting a battle to get him reinstated in the course. In the meantime, Y. has become something of a hero among certain larger circles. The character and the number of those who have called hardly constitute a referendum, but those two elements are definitely cause for concern.
Between one phone call and the next, the family offered its account of the events that led to Y.'s removal from the course. In a lesson about "army and democracy," given by an officer with the rank of captain, the cadets viewed the film "Checkpoint," which documents the charged encounter between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. After the screening there was a discussion of the letter that was composed by a group of pilots, in which they declared their refusal to conduct missions in the territories. The captain explained that the army will not tolerate refusal to serve from the right or the left and said that if the soldiers in the course will not be sent to evacuate Gush Katif - the settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip - he will request that they be sent on a voluntary basis.
It was apparently the comparison with the pilots that riled Y. "He just couldn't remain silent," his father, Vitaly, said this week. "He said he takes a grave view of the comparison between defectors who are not willing to attack the enemy in wartime to defend their nation, and soldiers who do not want to evict innocent people from their homes. He maintained that the order to destroy Jewish communities is flagrantly illegal and conflicts with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, he added that he does not intend to carry out the illegal order and that he would refuse to accept such an order."
Inevitably, Y.'s remarks caused a furor. An hour later, he was summoned to the battalion commander, who tried to persuade him to retract what he had said. Y. refused. An hour later he was out of the course. In between, his friends told him he had been wrong to speak out as he did. They didn't quarrel with his views, but thought he should have kept quiet. A few of the cadets said quietly that they too would not evacuate settlements but would not say so in advance. A few said it had been a deliberate provocation by the officer and Y. had fallen into the trap.
Vitaly, a senior engineer in a leading high-tech firm, says he thinks that the army is simply afraid. "As I understood it from my son, the majority backed his opinion not to throw people out of their homes and shoot them. I was at the evacuation of Havat Maon [a settlement south of Hebron], which seemed to be a case of thousands of soldiers who came during a black night to destroy the farm."
In response to a comment that his description of the evacuation of an illegal outpost sounds like a pogrom by Cossak leader Chmielnicki, he said: "That's exactly what it was, and it is only the start. What will happen when tens of thousands of people will march toward Gush Katif and they open fire at them?"
When told the only people the security forces have opened fire on in Israel were Arabs, he replied, "Now they will shoot Jews, too. I see here an extremist left that is hungry to start a civil war. Our boys will be sent to kill Jews."
It's difficult to refute Vobnoboy's contention that the army is afraid. Indeed, the army has admitted that it fears refusal by soldiers. At the same time, there is something disturbing about Y.'s story. He has not yet refused, but has expressed an opinion. The army chose to punish him not for a deed, but for a point of view. It's like administrative detention (arrest without trial) - an unacceptable procedure that deprives people of their freedom, not for something they have done in the past but for what they are liable to do in the future.
The army is sticking to its guns. The IDF Spokesperson's Office stated in reaction: "The cadet was removed from the course due to unsuitability, unbecoming behavior and infringing military discipline ... After that procedure the commander of the Officers' School, in consultation with the GOC Army Headquarters, Major General Ron Tal, decided to remove him. A declaration of intent can be grounds for removal in the case of a personal statement, proximate to carrying out an order."
Even taking this response into account, the IDF's decision to make Y. an engineering instructor in a base in the north now is peculiar, as he will have the ability to "poison the minds" of younger soldiers. At the same time, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel does not think that the decision to remove a cadet who announced his intention to disobey an order is an infringement of human rights. The ACRI, too, makes no distinction between acting and expressing an opinion.
The next, and frightening, stage is liable to be the creation of "thought police" and prior clarifications of the opinion of officer candidates about the evacuation of settlements. It's also hard to escape the impression that the army chose an easy target. It's doubtful that the cadet would have been expelled from the course if his name were Wallerstein, say, or if he were the son of settlement activist Daniella Weiss. A plain "Russian" cadet looks like an easy object through whom to send a warning.
If this aspect, too, trickled into the army's calculations, even unwittingly, it made a serious mistake. Since immigrating to Israel in 1991 and settling in Karnei Shomron, the family has become a kind of settler aristocracy and influential within the Russian extreme right. In the wall of the living room in their handsome home, they left one exposed stone on which are engraved the words "If I forget." Y.'s mother, Asia Antov, is a central activist in the camp of the ultranationalist Moshe Feiglin in the Likud and was one of the party's candidates for Knesset in the last elections under the "new immigrants" rubric.
When Ariel Sharon decided to focus efforts on the Russian immigrants, Antov, a gifted writer with radical views, was a senior member on the editorial board of the Likud's Russian-language paper, Golos. Y., who was six when the family immigrated to Israel, grew up in a very ideological home. In a conversation with them this week, the evacuation and pogroms - which, for them, are the same thing - were interwoven in the conversation along with Zionism and perestroika, Solzhenitsyn and post-Zionism.
After the Dolphinarium
After completing elementary school in Karnei Shomron, Y. attended Shevah Mofet high school in Tel Aviv. Students from his year were among the victims of the terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in June 2001, which claimed the lives of many Russian youngsters. In retrospect, his parents say, that trauma may be the reason that led many of Y.'s friends to join combat units, even though they could have joined the officer candidate academic studies program. Y., too, dreamed of being a combat soldier, and a year and a half ago was inducted into the combat engineers. He completed a platoon commanders' course a few months ago and was invited to an officers' course. "The terrorist attack raised their level of motivation," his father says.
Y. was an outstanding student in mathematics and physics, two subjects because of which he decided to attend Shevah Mofet, where he had the same teacher who taught his mother at the special school of mathematics in Moscow. Contrary to popular opinion, Antov says, the perestroika revolution in the Soviet Union originated with the mathematicians. "In Russia everything is upside down," she says. "But this is understandable. They did a calculation of two plus two, and it didn't come out communism."
Another telephone call interrupts the conversation. Someone from Tel Aviv calls to express solidarity. Vitaly reassures him that his son was not expelled from the army, only from the course. Most of the callers are veteran Israelis, Antov says. The Russian speakers are less upset. They naturally take a less severe view of disagreement with the army, she says.
"It's the Israelis who still think the army is God," she says. "I find that strange. I am very proud that my son is serving in a Jewish army, but it would be exaggerated to say that we returned to the Land of Israel to establish an army. We returned to establish a state and the army is only a tool."
The phone rings again and someone who identifies himself as "Haim from Ramat Gan" says, "Well done." He goes on to relate that he is "proud of this wave of immigrants, which is bringing us sons like this." Some of the callers, though, wondered why Y. took the risk of expressing an opinion. The parents say that this point is perfectly clear to them. "That's how we raised him," they say. "We explained to him about a totalitarian state, about a concentration camp and a gulag. We told him that in a country like that one can still preserve freedom of the mind. He understood what we meant psychologically."
They read him a famous letter written by Solzhenitsyn, entitled, "A Life Without Lies." In it the distinguished writer explained that neither force nor arms, but rather lack of support for the lie of the Soviet Union, would break the system. Vitaly Vobnoboy notes that even the dissidents and "refuseniks" in the Soviet Union faced the dilemma of when to tell the truth.
In contrast, there was a joke bandied about to the effect that the IDF has a special order for an emergency: forbidding soldiers to give advice to officers. Everyone liked the joke, as it expressed the spirit of Jewish freedom. "The Jews could not help giving advice," Vobnoboy says. "That is contrary to the Soviet army, where everyone is a small cog that carries out every order. I don't want an IDF like that." They do not, however, apply this approach to the refusal of the left, which they view as something else entirely.
In the analogy they use, Israel and its government, with its democratic decisions, are the U.S.S.R., which should be "broken" by the telling of the truth in real time. The parents think it is very important that Y. said what he did already now - without waiting for an order. "All those who do not intend to take part in expelling Jews have to say so today, and maybe thanks to them that order will not be given," Vitaly says. "In any event, they will at least preserve their soul."
Moshe Feiglin, the leader of the Jewish Leadership group, took the same approach in a phone call to the family. Prime Minister Sharon, who spoke with Antov in the past about the newspaper Golos, did not call. "Maybe he doesn't know," Antov says.
About a year and a half ago, Antov told Haaretz that Feiglin is not a radical, but a "Romantic." These days, nothing looks romantic to her. She has forsaken her intensive devotion to politics in favor of a doctoral thesis on the subject of "National ideology and identity among new immigrants from the Soviet Union." In the past few days she has been mostly a worried mother.
Vitaly Vobnoboy has already asked the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud), to summon the commander of the course who removed his son for a clarification. He also plans to take legal action. A lawyer he consulted said there is no doubt that the army's action is illegal. In the meantime, Y. will receive a citation of honor from the council of the Hebron settlement.
