WHAT would you do?
Youre an Israeli soldier engaged in a firefight with Hamas terrorists. One of them crosses an open space. You train your rifle on the running terrorist, but suddenly he grabs a bystander a child and shields his body with the youth as he opens fire on your position.
Or youre an Israeli soldier at a crowded checkpoint. A 14-year-old Palestinian youth shows up, wearing an explosive vest, clutching a detonator in his hand.
Or you watch Hamas fighters entering a UN ambulance, guns in hand, apparently uninjured. They close the door and speed away, knowing that if you shoot at the ambulance your action might trigger an international incident detrimental to Israel.
Do you fire on the child-clutching Hamasnik? Try to shoot the explosive vest-wearing teenager? Fire on the next UN ambulance you see, fearful that it might contain armed terrorists instead of wounded people?
In short, says Nadav Weinberg, a 25-year-old veteran of the Israel Defense Forces who regularly paints such scenarios for the listeners in his audiences: How do you fight a war like this?
He is referring to armed conflicts in which an organized and uniformed army faces off against a non-military and non-uniformed militia, difficult if not impossible to detect unless theyre literally shooting at you and whose members easily blend into civilian crowds once the shooting stops.
This is something that America dealt with in Vietnam, says Weinberg who served for two years in the IDF in the West Bank.
When you dont have a standing military, or its an elusive military, or when they have a complicated tunnel system the most complicated one is in Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah has; its just unbelievable how do you fight this enemy?
How do you fight an enemy when you dont necessarily know who they are?
According to international law, someone who picks up a gun with the intent to do harm is considered a combatant, he says.
As soon as that person puts down the gun and walks away, theyre a civilian. This is a very, very tricky situation. Who is your enemy, who isnt? Its not 1776. Its not the Redcoats facing the Bluecoats.
WEINBERG has been asking such challenging questions for the last year or so, in a presentation he calls Ethics of the Israel Defense Forces, mostly before Jewish and conservative Christian audiences, often on college campuses, across the US.
He was in Denver for several such presentations last week, at the invitation of StandWithUs, Action Israel, Americans Against Terror and Stand By Israel.
Born in Israel to an Israeli father and American Jewish mother, Weinberg spent most of his youth in Seattle and Cleveland, as a dual citizen.
He was under no legal obligation to serve in the IDF, he says, but he did have a personal commitment.
I had interned at Merrill Lynch in New York, I had a wonderful girlfriend, I had graduated college, I had everything you want.
But when I was 15 years old I watched the second intifada [2000-05] on TV. I remember watching it and knowing that all my cousins in Israel were serving. I knew that my father was an officer in the First Lebanon War [1982-85]. I knew that my great uncle was one of the five founders of the Israel Air Force.
The history of my family in Israel is very deep.
It simply didnt feel right, he says, not to serve Israel.
If America has a draft, Ill be the first one to sign up as well. Im a very patriotic person, a very nationalistic individual, and I believe that when your country has the obligation of service that you need to uphold that obligation.
The freedoms that we have dont come free. They come as a result of a lot of hardship and loss of American and Israeli lives.
Weinberg served in a sub-unit of the IDFs Nachal wing, in a group called Orev which he describes as an anti-tank and counter-terrorism unit. Most of his service was in the West Bank
The unit worked mostly to prevent terrorist attacks by arresting suspected terrorists, both Fatah and Hamas, based on intelligence information.
Special units like Orev were used discreetly in missions to arrest high-profile terrorists and patrols to make sure that there was calm and stability in those areas, particularly Jewish settlement areas, which is easier said than done, he says.
He saw plenty of tense moments on the West Bank, he says, but never had to fire his weapon something for which he is very grateful.
I do not want to ever have to use my weapon, he says emphatically.
Im going there to serve my people, to help promote peace and stability in the region and I do not want to ever have to kill somebody.
I feel that once you have blood on your hands, youve lost a little bit of your soul. Its something that will stay with you the rest of your life. I didnt want that to happen and luckily I was never put in a position where I had to.
What most impressed him about his commanders and comrades, was not so much their prowess as warriors but the emphasis they placed on ethical behavior.
It was drilled into the heads of raw recruits in their early training and continued to be emphasized even when his unit was in the field on a daily basis. Before missions and after their completion, he says, commanders would hold open and often intense discussions with their troops about whether their performance that day upheld the ethical standards the IDF has in place.
Such concentration paid off, Weinberg says.
There was nothing I saw during my service that made me question our ethical code of conduct. At no point, during any of our actions, did I ever feel that we upheld less of an ethical code of conduct than we should have.
Thats one of the reasons why Im so proud of what I do. If I didnt believe it and I hadnt seen it, I wouldnt be doing what Im doing today.
WEINBERG knows very well that trying to apply ethics to warfare is an incredibly difficult task.
You have war, which is killing and bloody, and you essentially have an oxymoron trying to combine that with ethics and morality, which are polar opposites.
Referring to the military scenarios detailed above, for example, he says that such spur-of-the-moment and unique situations seldom call forth easy answers.
The answers would be relatively easy for an army with no regard for human rights, Weinberg indicates, but for an army that values human life and regards itself as an ethics-bound institution such as the IDF they are far more complex.
Im not providing answers because I dont think there are good answers to these things, he says.
Theres never a 100% correct answer on what to do. What I am providing is what the IDF tells us. What are the protocols of soldiers?
The IDF is clear about what its troops should consider their first priority: Staying alive.
The number one thing that I care about is my life and that of the men around me, Weinberg says.
But beyond that, in situations in which a soldiers own life might not be directly threatened but in which other lives may well be at risk, subtleties and complications creep in.
The IDF tries to provide a basic ethical foundation to help soldiers cope with such decisions.
The IDF provides an ethical code of conduct that explains and every single soldier is tested on it what to do in these different situations. How am I supposed to uphold the supreme value of human life? How am I supposed to act as a responsible soldier?
It all goes back to one point: Israel is a Jewish country and in Judaism, the supreme value is human life. That is, in my opinion, the root and cornerstone of Judaism. You can ask any rabbi. You can break Shabbat, any holiday, to save a human life. So as a soldier I need to continuously think how to save human lives.
Making human life an ethical guidepost in a military firefight almost automatically grants an advantage to ones enemy, Weinberg concedes, especially an enemy ?like Hamas, which seems to value death almost as much as Israelis value life.
He believes, however, that the advantage this difference grants to Israels enemies is worth the values it upholds.
Weinberg points out that Israel could easily fight Hamas with F-15 and F-16 jets and just level out all of Gaza instead of sending ground troops to conduct extremely dangerous house-by-house searches for terrorists.
It could strike enemy targets by surprise, instead of dropping millions of leaflets, and making thousands of telephone calls and emails, to warn civilians of an impending strike.
We can use a $20,000 laser-guided missile to minimize collateral damage and just hit one person or one target, Weinberg says. Or I could use a $100 grenade to blow everything up.
Which is the more ethical decision to make? One is a lot more expensive, the other one could kill a lot more people, and Israel, 99% of the time, will choose to use the expensive missile.
Such actions do minimize Israeli military effectiveness while strengthening Hamas, he acknowledges, but Weinberg says he wouldnt want it any other way. He would want nothing to do with a nation or an army that stoops to the level of its worst enemies.
I refuse to be a citizen of a country, to serve in a military, that will bow down to the disgusting use of human shielding, of using women and children for shielding. I dont want to be a part of a military that does that.
And we dont do that.
MUCH of the world is unaware of that fact, acknowledges Weinberg, now back in the US and hoping eventually to live and work both here and in Israel.
Remembering how some of his American friends asked him whether he just wanted to kill Arabs when he told them he had signed up for the IDF, he says that many non-Israelis have no idea that the Israeli military takes ethics into consideration.
Hence his one-man mission to open eyes.
Weinberg has spoken to dozens of universities and high schools, but most of them are operated by Jews or Christian Zionists, those least likely to harbor harmful illusions about Israel.
Ive really tried to get out to public schools and other organizations, he says. A lot of times they feel its too touchy a subject. I would love to get out to more places.
Weinbergs public presentations are almost always attended by vocal anti-Israel activists who do their best to shout him down.
But every now and then, he says with a smile, I reach out to somebody.
Even among those who profess to detest Zionism.
At Arizona State, he recalls, virtually the entire audience walked out on him during his presentation, but one listener a youthful Palestinian student from Hebron who belonged to Students for Justice for Palestine stayed behind and spoke to Weinberg.
He had never heard an Israeli soldier speak, the student said, and he had never before considered the ethical challenges the IDF faces daily. He thanked Weinberg for his presentation, and said he respected his point of view, even if he didnt totally agree with it.
When that happened, I didnt care about the protesters. Weinberg says. I was able to make a positive impact, on one person, who was actually willing to come and listen.
If youre willing to come and have a civil discussion with me, youll realize that Im not crazy right and Im not crazy left. Im here as a person saying that the status quo isnt good and we need to create a positive solution to move forward. So lets do it.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
