Israel fears revolt by pro-settler troops

TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 23 (UPI) -- The Israeli military, under global scrutiny for alleged war crimes during its 22-day invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter, has jailed several soldiers who disobeyed orders to tear down settler outposts in the West Bank.

Their recent action has stoked concern that right-wing Orthodox soldiers who are being exhorted by extremist rabbis to oppose any moves against the ever-expanding settlements could mutiny on a larger scale, an action some say would endanger the Jewish state.

The Israeli government is under U.S.-led international pressure to end all settlement activity and eventually to return the West Bank to Palestinian control.

Two months before the Gaza operation began Dec. 28, Alex Fishman, chief military correspondent of Yediot Ahronot, Israel's leading daily, reported that the general staff was becoming alarmed at the growing numbers of religious soldiers in the combat infantry brigades.

Orthodox Jews comprise about 18 percent of Israel's 7 million people but make up about 30 percent of the students in the infantry officers' training program.

Some army units are now entirely made up of religious soldiers, many of them from the West Bank settlements.

Religious soldiers began emerging as a group within the military in the 1970s, according to J. J. Goldberg, an American Jewish writer and author who is editorial director of The Forward, a Jewish weekly in New York.

"Admired for their dedication and fighting spirit, they were entering elite combat units in disproportionate numbers," he wrote recently. "Many observers said this arose from the Orthodox community's new sense of mission as leaders of the settlement movement."

Back in 1995, the late Israel Shahak, a Holocaust survivor and bitter critic of Israel's religious zealots, remarked how the "messianic tendency" on the far right was systematically infiltrating the military, especially the officer corps and especially elite combat units that produce many of the army's top echelon.

This prominent Israeli commentator observed that "the messianic part of the national-religious tendency is now increasing its power in the armed forces and preparing, quite openly, a regime to be based on Jewish religious law."

He stated that "the aim of the rabbis of the 'messianic tendency' is, in my view, to prepare a coup d'etat and for this purpose they try to establish a majority of their devoted followers in chosen elite units since they lack the manpower for every unit."

On July 12, 1995, a group of influential rabbis issued an unprecedented decree that ruled that, according to the Torah -- the body of Jewish religious learning -- Jews were forbidden to withdraw from the West Bank.

Moreover it decreed that soldiers must disobey any order to tear down Jewish settlements or evacuate military bases as part of an Israeli withdrawal under a peace deal.

The ruling by the 1,500-member Rabbinical Association headed by former Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira caused an uproar among secular Jews and even some right-wing military commanders.

The rabbis' edict challenged the authority of the upper echelons of the Israeli military in a highly public way, reflecting the often rancorous debate between religion and state that has simmered in Israel for decades.

President Ezer Weizman, a former air force commander, warned: "I fear that the religious ruling will bring about a rift in the nation and lead to civil war."

Yigal Levy, a political sociologist who has written several books on the Israeli armed forces, says that the growing power of the religious right reflects the changing shape of Israeli society over the last two or three decades.

In the 1940s and 50s the military, and particularly the officer corps, was largely made up of men from the left-leaning kibbutz movement and other elements of the secular pioneers and middle class who spearheaded the foundation of the state.

"The vacuum left by their gradual retreat from the army was filled by religious youngsters and by the children of the settlements," Levy observed. "They now dominate in many branches of the army."

All this has stirred fears that large numbers of soldiers would join the heavily armed settlers, many of them reservists, to resist the state if some, or all, of the settlements have to be abandoned under a peace agreement.

"We've reached the point where a critical mass of religious soldiers is trying to negotiate with the army about how and for what purpose military force is employed on the battlefield," said Levy.