The Official Campaign Call
By Colleagues and Friends
of Yigal Bronner
Statement
in Support of Yigal Bronner and Other Israeli Conscientious Objectors:
(Please forward this text
or the link to it)
On October 28, Yigal Bronner, a professor of Asian Studies at Tel-Aviv University, was jailed by the Israel Defense Forces for refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, in his words for refusing to participate in "the humiliation, dispossession and starvation of an entire people." (Please read Yigal's "Letter of Response to the General" at the end of this appeal.)
He is currently being held in conditions that are illegal and unacceptably
harsh, apparently intended deliberately to humiliate and to silence him.
As members of the international scholarly community, students and faculty committed to justice and respect for human dignity, we protest the army's vindictive treatment of our colleague and demand his immediate release, as well as the release of the other sixteen conscientious objectors currently in military confinement. No civilized nation imprisons those who, like Yigal, "will not pull the trigger" on grounds of conscience.
We intend to publish the above statement in the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" on November 8, along with a list of sponsors. We ask for your support in three ways:
conscienceobjector@yahoo.com
stating your first name, last name, and institutional affiliation (for purposes of identification only).
To be included in the Ha'aretz ad, signatures must be received at the Yahoo account by November 6, 8 p.m. EST.
SECOND, please consider making a contribution to cover the $8000 cost of the English and Hebrew ads (recommended donation: $25-50 faculty, $15-25 student). Payment can be made either by credit-card or by personal check:
|
To make a credit-card
donation: 1. Visit http://www.refusersolidarity.net/
donation on behalf of or in memory of:" |
Checks in U.S. dollars should be made out in the name of Assaf Oron and sent to:
Yigal Bronner Campaign, c/o Assaf Oron
POB 95511
Seattle WA 98145-2511
Checks in shekels should be made out to Ha'aretz and sent to:
Dr. Neve Gordon
Department of Politics and Government
Ben-Gurion University
Beer-Sheva, 84105,
Israel
Any funds raised above and beyond the cost of the ad will go to the campaign supporting Israeli conscientious objectors.
THIRD, please take a moment to send a message, preferably by fax, in support of Yigal and the other imprisoned resisters, to the following addresses; a copy sent to: yigalbronner@yahoo.com, will help us keep track of numbers.
Mr. Shaul Mofaz
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan St.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel.
E-mail: mailto:sar@mod.gov.il or mailto:pniot@mod.gov.il
Fax: ++972-3-696-27-57 / ++972-3-691-69-40 / ++972-3-691-79-15
Brig. Gen. Menachem Finklestein
Chief Military Attorney
Military postal code 9605
IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-569-43-70
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A Letter of Response to the General
By Yigal Bronner
GENERAL, YOUR TANK IS A POWERFUL VEHICLE
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
(Bertolt Brecht)
Dear General,
In your letter to me, you wrote that "given the ongoing war in Judea,
Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and in view of the military needs," I am
called upon to "participate in army operations" in the West Bank.
I am writing to tell you that I do not intend to heed your call.
During the 1980s, Ariel Sharon erected dozens of settler colonies in the heart
of the occupied territories, a strategy whose ultimate goal was the subjugation
of the Palestinian people and the expropriation of their land. Today,
these colonies control nearly half of the occupied territories and are
strangling Palestinian cities and villages as well as obstructing -- if not
altogether prohibiting -- the movement of their residents. Sharon is now
prime minister, and in the past year he has been advancing towards the
definitive stage of the initiative he began twenty years ago. Indeed, Sharon
gave his order to his lackey, the Defense Minister, and from there it trickled
down the chain of command.
The Chief of Staff has announced that the Palestinians constitute a cancerous
threat and has commanded that chemotherapy be applied against them. The
brigadier has imposed curfews without time limits, and the colonel has ordered
the destruction of Palestinian fields. The division commander has placed
tanks on the hills between their houses, and has not allowed ambulances to
evacuate their wounded. The lieutenant colonel announced that the open-fire
regulations have been amended to an indiscriminate order
"fire!" The tank commander, in turn, spotted a number of people
and ordered his artilleryman to launch a missile.
I am that artilleryman. I am the small screw in the perfect war
machine. I am the last and smallest link in the chain of command. I
am supposed to simply follow orders -- to reduce my existence down to stimulus
and reaction, to hear the sound of "fire" and pull the trigger, to
bring the overall plan to completion. And I am supposed to do all this
with the simplicity and naturalness of a robot, who -- at most -- feels the
shaking tremor of the tank as the missile is launched towards the target.
But as Bertolt Brecht wrote:
General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.
And indeed, general, whoever you may be-- colonel, brigadier, chief of staff,
defense minister, prime minister, or all of the above-- I can think.
Perhaps I am not capable of much more than that. I confess that I am not
an especially gifted or courageous soldier; I am not the best shot, and my
technical skills are minimal. I am not even very athletic, and my uniform
does not sit comfortably on my body. But I am capable of thinking.
I can see where you are leading me. I understand that we will kill,
destroy, get hurt and die, and that there is no end in sight. I know that
the "ongoing war" of which you speak, will go on and on. I can
see that if the "military needs" lead us to lay siege to, hunt down,
and starve a whole people, then something about these "needs" is
terribly wrong.
I am therefore forced to disobey your call. I will not pull the trigger.
I do not delude myself, of course. You will shoo me away. You will find another
artilleryman -- one who is more obedient and talented than I. There is no dearth
of such soldiers. Your tank will continue to roll; a gadfly like me
cannot stop a rolling tank, surely not a column of tanks, and definitely not
the entire march of folly. But a gadfly can buzz, annoy, nudge, and at
times even bite.
Eventually other artillerymen, drivers, and commanders, who will observe the
senseless killings and endless cycle of violence will also begin to think and
buzz. We are already hundreds strong. And at the end of the day,
our buzzing will turn into a deafening roar, a roar that will echo in your ears
and in those of your children. Our protest will be recorded in the history
books, for all generations to see.
So general, before you shoo me away, perhaps you too should begin to think.
Sincerely,
Yigal Bronner
* * *
IMPORTANT LINKS:
http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp
http://www.yesh-gvul.org/english.html
