Army ‘facing moral crisis’

Press, 7 March 1983, Page 8

Army ‘facing moral crisis’

By

ALAN ELSNER.

of Reuter (through NZPA) Jerusalem

The Israeli Army's boast that it combines high moral standards with tough fighting ability has been tarnished by recent examinations of its behaviour on the occupied West Bank and during the Beirut massacre.

A picture of indifference to Arab casualties emerged from a court-martial in Tel Aviv of seven soldiers accused of maltreating Palestinians during violent unrest on the West Bank last year.

The judicial inquiry into the slaughter in September of hundreds of Palestinian civilians by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies found that senior Army officers and politicians had ignored the danger of a massacre when deciding to let Right-wing Christian Falangist militiamen into two Palestinian refugee camps. Israel’s Military Intelligence chief, Major-General Yehoshua Saguy, stepped down last week after being censured by the inquiry’s report for not giving enough warning of the risk. An Army spokesman denied that General Saguy had resigned, say-

ing only that he had "concluded his -mission.”

In its report, the inquiry team quoted the Israeli commander in Beirut, BrigadierGeneral Amos Yaron, as telling an officers’ meeting that the entire political and military establishment had shown insensitivity.

The Tel Aviv court-martial came after revelations by officers who happened to be members of the Left-wing “Peace Now” movement and who had arrived for reserve duty in the West Bank area.

Soldiers had been authorised to use clubs, teargas and rubber bullets, and in some circumstances to fire live bullets to break up demonstrations and enforce curfews, but the court cited several cases in which senior officers had gone too far.

It said that written orders by the Chief-of-Staff, Lieuten-ant-General Rafael Eitan, to punish parents for the offences of their children, were 1 of doubtful legality.

Orders by the military commander of the West Bank telling soldiers to herd residents of the Dahariya refugee camp near Bethlehem into classrooms, beat them up and smash their watches were clearly illegal and

should not have been obeyed, it said. The Israeli Communications Minister, Mr Mordechai Zipori, a former Deputy Defence Minister, told the “Koteret Rashit” weekly magazine recently that the Army was facing a moral crisis.

“There is an over-confid-ence . . . that the justice of our cause is proportional to the measure of our strength. Already in 1973 I began to worry about human standards ... in the Army," he said.

The military correspondent

of the "Jerusalem Post,” Hirsh Goodman, said that in the five years General Eitan has commanded the Israeli Defence Force he has applied a double standard, acting in one way towards Jews and another towards Arabs. “The Chief-of-Staff is not a racist. He simply believes that the Arabs want to destroy Israel and that in war, honesty is not always the best policy,” he wrote in a recent article. The double standard was seen in April when Jewish ultra-nationalists opposing Israeli withdrawal from Sinai illegally barricaded themselves in the Sinai town of Yamit and resisted the Army’s efforts to evict them. Despite being punched, kicked, spat on, and stoned by hundreds of Jewish protesters, the soldiers had orders not to retaliate, and as a result there were no casualties in several days of violence.

By contrast nearly 20 Palestinians were killed by Israeli bullets and scores were wounded in the West Bank disturbances which were at their height earlier in the same month. In November General Eitan halved the six-month jail sentence of a soldier convicted of beating Arabs, and

in January a sergeant-major received a three-month suspended sentence for shooting an Arab dead on the West Bank. In 1978. at the start of his term as Chief-of-Staff. General Eitan commuted the sentence of an officer convicted of murdering Palestinian prisoners during the Litani River operation of that year. Mr Zipori believes that part of the problem lies in the Army’s rigid command and career structures, which make it hard for soldiers to make moral judgments.

"I believe that moral strength is found in the Reserves and not in the Regular or career sectors. Ultimately, the Reserve army is free of hierarchical pressures, the race for promotion and the 'yes-man' syndrome,” he said.

The Beirut massacre inquiry gave an example of soldiers stifling moral qualms in the face of policy dictated from above.

On the first day of the massacre a lieutenant wanted to report the killing by Falangists of a group of women and children, but was told by colleagues that the brigade commander was following a policy of nonintervention.