MIDDLE EAST: A prominent West Bank rabbi is facing police investigation for suggesting that Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories might be liable for execution under Jewish religious law, writes David Horovitz, in Jerusalem
While the overwhelming majority of Israeli reservists have responded with alacrity to call-up orders in recent months for service in the West Bank, several hundred reservists have signed a petition refusing to serve there. The current "Operation Determined Path", which has seen the army reinvade seven of the eight major West Bank cities, is set to continue for months, and the defence ministry said yesterday that plans to withdraw some troops and ease curfews, travel and other restrictions on hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been cancelled because of Tuesday's West Bank bus ambush and Wednesday's twin suicide-bombings in Tel Aviv.
In an article written for distribution via synagogues, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, from the settlement of Beit El, cited earlier rabbinic sources to support the assertion that soldiers refusing to serve in the territories, and thus "weakening the army", could be put to death by their commander.
Mr Yossi Sarid, the leader of Israel's main opposition party, the left-wing Meretz, urged the Attorney General to prosecute Rabbi Aviner for incitement to murder. A complaint against the rabbi has also been filed with the Attorney General's office.
Rabbi Aviner said yesterday his article had been merely theoretical, that only the army's chief of staff would have any conceivable authority to act on the religious rulings, and that he knew there was no prospect whatsoever of the chief of staff doing so.
In the months before the assassination of the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995, a group of rabbis debated the question of whether, under religious law, Mr Rabin merited the death penalty for relinquishing to Mr Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority biblical land, divinely promised to the Jews, under the Oslo peace process. When an Orthodox Jew gunned down Mr Rabin, the rabbis insisted the murder could not be tied to their deliberations, which they, like Rabbi Aviner yesterday, said were solely theoretical. Asked whether, now as then, there was not a danger that learned theoretical arguments might be misinterpreted by extremists as a call for action, the rabbi said he did not believe there was anything to worry about.
Meanwhile, 25 of those injured in Wednesday's Tel Aviv bombings were still in hospital last night - 10 of them foreign workers. Two of the three people killed (police had initially incorrectly put the toll of those killed by the two suicide-bombers at five) were also foreign workers - one from Romania, the other from south-east Asia.
The bombers had apparently targeted the south Tel Aviv district where thousands of Eastern European, African and Asian workers live because most shops and cafes elsewhere were closed for a Jewish fast.
Israeli officials said they would not ease restrictions on Palestinians until the ongoing alerts about more such bombings subsided. Arab, European and UN officials have urged Israel to withdraw troops and renew diplomatic contacts with the Palestinians at the same time as demanding that Mr Arafat act to thwart the bombers. US President Bush, however, is standing by his demand that Mr Arafat and the current PA leadership be replaced as a precondition for substantive diplomatic progress and is endorsing Israel's West Bank deployment as self-defence against the bombers.