Tuesday, 23 October 2018

B'Tselem: "If a soldier receives a flagrantly illegal command..." (Oct. 24, 2018)

Israeli human rights activist: “If a soldier receives a flagrantly illegal command, he is duty-bound not to follow that command."
Hundreds of people have been executed and more than 10,000 have been maimed by Israeli snipers during the Great March of Return protests. Not one of those people has been armed.
AMY GOODMAN: You also wrote in Haaretz, “What are the Palestinians supposed to do? If they dare demonstrate, it’s popular terror. If they call for sanctions, it’s economic terror. If they pursue legal means, it’s judicial terror. If they turn to the United Nations, it’s diplomatic terror. It turns out [that] anything a Palestinian does besides getting up in the morning and saying ‘Thank you, Rais’—’Thank you, master’–is terror.”
HAGAI EL-AD: Yeah. This has become so routine in Israel. This has become so normalized after 50 years, that people have difficulty even in accepting that basic rights—that people who live under oppression have the right to reject that reality. And any avenue that the Palestinians try is met with one form or another of condemnation.
But for Israel, this is part of a broader agenda. The agenda is not only to overcome Palestinian opposition to their oppression, but also to silence Israelis and to silence the international community. So, it goes further, right? You know, if an Israeli is against occupation, she or he must be traitors. If an international is speaking or acting against occupation, they must be anti-Semites, right? And I’m saying that with a lot of cynicism, but this is no laughing matter. This is actually quite an effective silencing mechanism that Israel is deploying continuously, all over the world.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, this week, the pope sainted Archbishop Romero, Óscar Romero, of El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980. The last speech he gave before he was gunned down was heard throughout El Salvador on the radio. And he ordered the soldiers, he beseeched them, he pled with them, to put down their arms, to defy orders. He said, “Stop the repression.” In April, your group, B’Tselem, called on Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to shoot unarmed protesters. Did they heed?
HAGAI EL-AD: No. We published ads. This is actually also like a legal responsibility, a moral responsibility, not only, I think, from like any decent person, but also according to like Israelis’ own laws. If a soldier receives a flagrantly illegal command, he is duty-bound not to follow that command. And commands that order soldiers to fire at unarmed protesters that are not endangering anyone, from a distance, these are flagrantly illegal commands. They should not have been given. And the responsibility for that is with the country’s leadership, with the prime minister, defense minister, chief of staff. And that’s where the responsibility begins. That’s where the brunt of the responsibility is. But if such orders are given, soldiers are duty-bound not to follow such orders.
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