ONE OF the Israeli army’s leading infantry battalions has become the centre of a political war of words after some of the unit’s soldiers complained that they were being forced to take part in evacuating Jewish settlers from an illegal West Bank outpost.
The left-wing Peace Now organisation yesterday called on the army, which traditionally tries to steer clear of politics in this highly politicised country, to dismiss any soldier encouraging “insubordination”.
Peace Now issued a statement accusing “rightist elements of making a supreme effort to divide the Israel Defence Forces and turn the Shimshon battalion into a private voice for the settlers”.
The controversy began last month when a banner was held up during a military swearing-in ceremony for new recruits in front of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Soldiers in the Shimshon battalion, named after the Biblical warrior Samson, held up a banner reading “Shimshon Doesn’t Evacuate Homesh”.
Homesh was one of the four West Bank settlements dismantled, together with all 21 Gaza Strip settlements as part of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2005.
Since then right-wing activists have made repeated attempts to resettle Homesh.
The two cadets who held up the banner were sentenced to 20 days in a military prison and were expelled from the unit, with the army describing the incident as “unusual and shameful”.
Yesterday, 25 Shimshon reservists sent a letter to the battalion commander urging the unit to “stop acting on all kinds of political whims and go back to the real national mission of crushing terrorists”. The reservists accused the unit of “persecuting Jews as if they were terrorists”.
Some prominent rabbis and settler leaders voiced their support for the two soldiers and an anonymous US donor sent each of them a cheque for almost €4,000.
The army responded by stressing that it was “subordinate to the elected government and follows its instructions”.