Dan Rabinowitz,
writing in Haaretz, constrasts the traditional, if growing, refusal of soldiers on the left to obey immoral orders, with the imminent threat from newly aggressive messianic theocracy, which is calling on soldiers on the right to refuse orders they consider contrary to the imperialist will of God--such as evacuating Gazan settlements.
In Israeli society, which in many ways presages what a Bush America will be like, the two trends,refusal and theocracy, have combined in a new alarming way.
Unlike progressives here, folks on the Left in Israel understand the threat of theocracy all too well, and speak openly and frequently about it. They have no problem separating "moral values" from religious extremism, as many here seem to. And they don't seem to confuse support for rational secular government with "antireligionism"
Not for the first time, we learn something by paying attention to this closest of world allies, both from both the frank openness of their discussion of religious authoritarianism and the powerful growing menace of their theocratic Right.
Israeli secular society has been battling the theocrats for a long time, in a nation with no wall of separation. Religious political parties have controlled the balance of power in the parliamentary system since Ben Gurion made a deal with them in the early 50's, and thus a theist minority has held a stranglehold on Israeli domestic policy for decades.
But even there, where marriage and divorce and adoption are controlled under a monopoly by orthodox religious courts, where Bible study is part of public school education, where democracy has struggled to sustain itself under a sea of authoritarian religiosity, Israel now stands at the brink of a new theocratic apocalypse--for many of the same reasons as we do, as frightened citizens turn to demagogues with easy, preordained answers for comfort, and an organized, single-minded zealous army of unquestioning believers exploits the natural diversity and tolerance of democracy to subvert it.
The hints about the growing progressive refusal in the military are interesting, and wildly underreported here and even in the mainstream Israeli press---but far more significant is the discussion in the article about theocrats newly extending power even to the previously sacrosanct nonpartisan military.
The big difference between the situation in Israel and the new Dominionist rise to power in the US, is that, while in Israel the religious extremists are organized in a handful of minority parties, and wield some power because of their balancing role, their ultimate influence is limited, because under desperate conditions a national unity government could exclude them and save democracy.
In the US today, by contrast, the extremist theocrat element has not only taken over the Republican party, which now controls all branches of government, they have also, systematically, over the past twenty-plus years, worked to insinuate themselves into key policy and disbursement positions at every level of our system, from dominating school boards to introduceg creationism and fire gay teachers, to dominating state houses guaranteeing gerrymandering at the national level, to the entire leadership of both houses of Congress and as much as 40% of the membership, leadership positions throughout the Executive branch and a growing role in the precedent setting lower courts - and soon, a majority on the higher and the highest of all, the Supreme Court. So, unlike in Israel, theocrats now hold all the cards in this country, and there is nothing we can do at the establishment level to block them - they ARE the establishment, just about ready to implement their plan.
In any case, Read the excerpt below, and just change a few names and a few terms and you could be talking about America and the coming Dominionist threat. Only, we don't have the "permission" to discuss it as openly here in the US Left. Nor is even a discussion of even the possibility of soldier's refusal of immoral orders tolerated here, even among progressives.
The refusal of the left is benign both because of what it contains and what it does not. It pays tribute to the individual and regards his conscience as a quantity that can, and sometimes must, have priority over the need to obey or the desire to keep the law. But it does not propose an organized institutional hierarchy that will compete with the rule of law or overshadow it.
Refusal on the right, on the other hand, endangers the rule of law in a substantive way. Not because of the vague threat that perhaps there will be several hundred or thousand soldiers with kipot who, on the day of the order, will feel that they are not able to evacuate settlements and will refuse.
The true danger is that for years the messianic right has allowed the cauldron to simmer with the type of values that will prepare people's hearts to accept a messianic version of nationalist Judaism as an alternative and preferable source of political legitimacy.
The call to refusal in the name of Halakhic doctrine, which supposedly is morally superior to the rule of law, is what endangers the regime in Israel. The fact that these calls emanate from the rabbinic establishment, which sanctifies the right of its leaders to establish the limits of the rule of law and to define where it should be annuled in the face of theocracy, of course enormously increases the gravity of the danger.
Sharon and Shamgar and Ya'alon and Mofaz, who did not loose their cool over the conscientious objection of individuals on the left for dozens of years, are doing so now before even one person on the right has actually refused. Perhaps they realize that the true threat to the rule of law and to governance in Israel does not stem from refusal as such, but rather from the determined attempts to create a source of alternative political authority in Israel.