Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

some of the “refuseniks” formed a group called Yesh Gvul—There Is a Limit. This spirit might not have moved as many soldiers in a more forbidding Middle Eastern country: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, say, where suspected deserters were routinely jailed or executed. But Israel was a democracy. It prided itself on having an army where rank-and-file soldiers exercised independent judgment. Soon after the Lebanon War, hundreds more began exercising such judgment by refusing to serve in the occupied territories during the First Intifada, when Palestinians marched, demonstrated, and threw stones in a popular uprising many Israelis concluded was justified. The soldiers who did so were often pilloried as traitors and radicals, but they rarely looked the part. Unlike American conscientious objectors who grew their hair long and denounced the “war machine” in the 1960s, many of Israel’s refuseniks were decorated combat veterans who’d proudly fought in previous wars. They hailed mainly from the Ashkenazi elite that had traditionally been overrepresented in the army’s top units and senior ranks. They were not pacifists but selective resisters who took the IDF’s claim to uphold high ethical standards seriously, which is perhaps not surprising. In his book Obeying Orders, the legal scholar Mark J. Osiel argues that soldiers steeped in traditional notions of military honor are more likely to resist unjust orders than conscripts with more jaundiced attitudes.