Israeli fear of capture is 'an insanity' says former general

Soldiers mourning their fallen comrade Hadar Goldin at his funeral, Sunday, August 3, 2014. Lt. Goldin was shot dead by a fellow-soldier on orders from above. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Has the Hannibal Protocol run its course?

Drafted in 1986 to prevent the abduction of soldiers, the order has come under intense scrutiny after being executed in full in Rafah

By Mitch Ginsburg, Times of Israel
August 12, 2014

On Friday, August 1, some 75 minutes after the onset of a ceasefire, a three-person IDF squad advanced toward a suspicious location along the outskirts of the city of Rafah. The squad apparently did not ask for the standard fire support to accompany it, Haaretz reported, because a 72-hour truce was already in place. Instead it advanced on foot, surreptitiously.

Hamas operatives were waiting in ambush. Two soldiers, Major Benaya Sarel and Staff Sergeant Liel Gidoni, were killed, and a third, Lt. Hadar Goldin, was abducted.

Other members of their unit, Sayeret Givati, moved under fire to the fallen soldiers but did not at first realize that one of the three bodies was a fallen Hamas man, perhaps in IDF uniform, according to the Haaretz report. When it became clear that Goldin was missing, though, the officers in the field did not have to unfurl a long explanation over the army radio frequency. All they needed to do was utter a single word: Hannibal.

The Hannibal Protocol was drafted in the summer of 1986 – one year after the lopsided Jibril Agreement, in which Israel traded 1,150 security prisoners in exchange for three Israeli soldiers, and several months after the ensuing abduction of the soldiers Yosef Fink and Rafael Alsheikh. The idea was to establish a set procedure, known to all soldiers, to limit the success of any abduction operation.

“What we needed was clarity,” said former national security adviser, Maj. Gen. (res) Yaakov Amidror, one of the three officers who drafted the order.

What arose was a protocol that ordered soldiers to thwart the abduction of a fellow soldier “even at the price of harming or wounding our soldiers,” but without directly attempting to kill them.

I asked Amidror if that meant, as I often heard officers say in south Lebanon, that soldiers are required to open fire with their rifles at a retreating vehicle even if it means putting one of their mates in acute danger, but to refrain from firing, say, a guided missile that would almost surely kill everyone in the vehicle, and he said, “Exactly.”

In Goldin’s case, it meant more. The IDF, already on a war-time footing – a crucial difference from previous cases, such as the Gilad Shalit abduction in June 2006 – brought immense power to bear, swiftly. A column of tanks charged into Rafah’s inhabited neighborhoods, according to Haaretz’s Amos Harel and Gili Cohen. Bulldozers tore down houses. Artillery batteries, tanks, and aircraft opened fire, isolating the abduction zone and reportedly targeting all vehicles leaving the area.

The death toll reached 150, according to Palestinian reports.

Goldin, the army determined late the following night, had been killed in the initial attack.

Yehezkel Dror, a member of the commission of inquiry that examined the shortcomings of the Second Lebanon War, said Monday on Army Radio that the Hannibal Protocol should not be activated “instinctively” and that the situation in the densely populated city of Rafah was utterly unlike the sparsely populated hills of south Lebanon and, therefore, required the authorization of the political echelon.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) deemed the protocol “illegal” and urged Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to instruct the government and the army that such military actions are impermissible, both because of the threat to the abducted soldier and the carnage inflicted on civilians.

The implementation of the Hannibal Protocol in a densely populated area, the organization’s chief legal counsel Dan Yakir opined, “fundamentally violates the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law,” and constitutes “an illegal method of warfare that violates the laws of war.”

The permission granted to soldiers to cause “harm to a soldier to prevent his abduction,” Yakir wrote, is illegal.

Ya’akov Amidror, appointed by PM Netanyahu as his national security adviser in March 2011. ‘A former head of research in Military Intelligence who is identified with the right-wing’, he ’caused controversy last year after he told a conference that soldiers should kill anyone who gets in the way of completing their mission – and that soldiers who refuse to attack should be shot, too.’ wrote Barak Ravid in 2011.

Amidror rejected both parts of the determination out of hand. “War,” he said, “is a dangerous thing.” Soldiers are killed. Soldiers are asked to stand and charge the enemy under fire, even at the cost of near-certain death. Soldiers, therefore, are also instructed to do everything possible, short of intentionally killing one of their mates, in order to foil an abduction attempt. “It’s a military operation to return a hostage soldier,” he said. “Soldiers [lives] can be risked.”

The proportionality of the response and the consideration of the civilian battlefield, in the instance of an abduction, he added, should be taken into account only if “you want to help the enemy.”

After castigating ACRI as attuned only to the needs of Palestinian civilians, he conceded that Israel imposes on itself restrictions regarding the killing of civilians when considering offensive action such as an assassination, but argued that there was “a big difference” between targeting an enemy and saving a captive soldier, and said that in the latter case overwhelming force was fully justified. “How will they fight?” he asked of IDF soldiers, if they don’t “know you will do everything to save them” from captivity.

If this preference for probable death over certain captivity sounds alien to civilian ears, it is, nonetheless, a prevailing ethos among combat troops. The commander of Golani’s 51st Battalion expressed this in an extreme way in a briefing to his troops on the eve of Operation Cast Lead’s ground invasion in early January 2009. The abduction of a soldier, he told his troops, was Hamas’s “Judgment Day” weapon.

“I don’t need to tell you this,” he said in an audio recording published by Channel 10 News, “but no soldier from the 51st Battalion is getting abducted, not at any cost, not in any case, even if it means he detonates his grenade on whoever tries to take him.”

Elazar Stern was elected to the Knesset in 2013 as a member of Hatnua, the party led by Tzipi Livni.

MK Elazar Stern, himself a former general who is married to the bereaved sister of a soldier from his paratroop company, wrote on his Facebook page Sunday that many families would be “happy” to learn that their loved ones were being held in captivity rather than killed.

The Hannibal Protocol and the force it unleashes, he said in a Channel 10 interview over the weekend, are a symptom of a larger problem: the societal “insanity” regarding abductions. The willingness to “do almost anything” to stop an abduction, he wrote later, was born of a common understanding that a captive soldier is a crisis of national proportions.

Lives will be saved, on both sides of the border, and Israeli society will be more healthy, he wrote, if “sanity is restored to all of us in the way we relate to abductions and the price we are willing to pay.”

Rabbis Ido Rechnitz and Elazar Goldstein, in a 2013 book, “Jewish Military Ethics,” largely agreed with Amidror’s position, stating that Halacha, or Jewish law, permitted endangering the captive soldier but not intentionally killing him. Suicide, and perhaps even assisted suicide, as evidenced in the fall of King Saul, was justified in certain cases, the two wrote, but one “cannot deduce from this that it is permissible to [intentionally] harm a captive [soldier] when he himself did not request that sort of assistance.”

Asked if, as an observant Jew and an officer, he had consulted the army’s chief rabbi back in 1986 before drafting the once-secret order, Amidror croaked, “Are you crazy?”

When people are sick, Amidror said, the rabbis rule based on the expert opinion of the doctor. “In this case, I’m the doctor.”

Mitch Ginsburg is The Times of Israel’s military correspondent.

Hannibal is an IDF ‘Putsch’ Against the State

By Richard Silverstein, Tikun Olam
August 12, 2014

Tonight will be the third critical Haaretz article about the Hannibal Directive which the paper hasn’t chosen to translate and publish in its English edition. One has to wonder why there’s been relatively little critical of this semi-secret, immoral military regulation in Haaretz’s English edition. I’m guessing the powers that be don’t want the English-speaking Diaspora audience to have to deal with the moral embarrassment it represents.

Uri Misgav published (Hebrew) a powerful denunciation of Hannibal in yesterday’s Haaretz. I translated a significant portion of it below. It begins with the columnist’s critique of the Israeli media campaign which has turned deputy commander “Eitan,” the soldier who rushed into the tunnel into which Hadar Goldin had been dragged by his captors (after being commanded to explode a hand grenade before entering):

Thousands of words which Deputy Eitan dispensed to the Israeli public enable us to understand fully the horror embodied in what ‘s called in the IDF, the Hannibal Directive. About how radically it’s changed operationally over time. How it was implemented in Rafah and what’s the significance of its use. It wasn’t the first time it was used by the IDF. Not in general and not even in the specific case of Operation Protective Edge. According to military reports, before the Rafah incident there were between one and three “minor Hannibals.” But the Rafah Hannibal was the real thing. They talk about it a great deal, though it seems to me that they’re not seeing the trees for the full, monstrous forest it is…

The Hannibal Directive was developed to sabotage “kidnappings” in the course of battle with Hezbollah…Even the use of the term “kidnapping” is a bit misleading. We’re really talking about being taken captive. Hamas fighters arrested by the IDF are not considered kidnapped.

Whatever the term, Hannibal was devised to respond to a weakness the security apparatus identified within Israeli society at the political level: the sensitivity to the fate of the captives and the missing and even the bodies of the fallen, and the prisoner exchanges which occurred due to this sensitivity.

In reality we’re talking about a mini-putsch. The army doesn’t trust the State to know what’s the correct thing to do in the case of a captive soldier. So it [the army] sabotages the very possibility of this happening.

The directive is purposely vaguely defined. But everyone who’s served in the field in the past twenty years understands what it means: in order to stop a kidnapping a massive effort must be made, up to and including endangering the life of the captive. It’s essential above all that he not fall into captivity because then there would be a need to redeem him, God forbid.

The way Hannibal was used in Operation Protective Edge has exposed this picture in all its fulness. They took a regulation developed for the purpose of a potential pursuit in southern Lebanon (a mountainous, stony, thinly inhabited with the exception of a few villages and small towns) and transferred it to the most densely populated city in the world…

Even before Rafah, the evidence in the field was clear: Hannibal was meant to take down the captor and the captive; to kill them. The chance to free someone, tiny to begin with, became a dead letter. Firing and aerial bombardment and artillery barrages are meant to kill. In other words, the captive becomes, at the moment the directive is invoked, a dead man. For all intents and purposes, he is considered part of the cell that captured him. There is no difference. In practice, he becomes a terrorist, a Hamasnik. After he dies it will be possible to praise and eulogize and sanctify him (as Goldin has been). But first you must ensure he’s dead.

We must pay attention to the insane transformation that’s occurred. If the IDF once prided itself upon its ethos of not leaving any man behind on the field of battle, even if he was held captive, today it does everything possible to eliminate him. This isn’t Hannibalism. This is cannibalism. An army prepared to kill its own.

There have been armies in the past that expected that their troops not fall captive. To perform hara kiri or to shoot themselves with a bullet to the brain. But here we’ve taken a step forward: we don’t even give the captive the option [of taking his own life]. We decide for him.

Every Hebrew mother must understand which this means. Her son will be a hero in Israel when he goes to fight in Gaza. They’ll embrace him, they’ll sing songs about him, they’ll send him care packages. But if he has the bad luck to fall captive, they’ll kill him.

The army is not a democratic body. Israel too is increasingly shaking off its democratic identity, but in this case it may be worth making the parents sign a form at the induction center; to ask them in the event that their son falls captive, God forbid, would they be interested in the IDF doing everything possible to eliminate him and prevent an embarrassing prisoner exchange–despite everything they’d prefer he remain alive in Hamas’ hands, if there was a chance to return him home one day…It may even be necessary to ask the fresh recruits if Hannibal is acceptable to them, or perhaps to clarify to them its actual meaning.

For anyone who thinks what’s written here is exaggerated or extreme, let’s return for a moment to the interviews of Deputy Eitan. According to his account, when he understood Goldin was in the hands of the Hamas cell…he took his unit and decided to pursue it into the tunnel. He himself attests that he didn’t know at that moment whether Goldin was dead or alive. He also understood at that time that he was violating clear orders and endangering himself and his troops. He was so anxious about a soldier being captive, and preventing such a catastrophe, that he took a considered gamble that he might increase the number of captives or dead.

He began by entering with a drawn pistol and afterward was accompanied by his soldiers. He and his troops laid down indiscriminate fire into the tunnel. “This is why I joined up, this is why they made me an officer. I lead the kid next to me. We proceed and I give permission to open fire with my authorization. When asked about the chance that the firing would hit Goldin, he answered: “That may be. But we don’t deliberate. I never gave an order to fire. I told him [the subordinate] you identify [the target] and open fire. Even if it meant killing Hadar…that’s what happens despite our sorrow [about it], it’s preferable [to the alternative].

Explicit words. “Despite our sorrow,” it’s preferable that IDF soldier Hadar Goldin be injured or dead rather than held captive. This is the Hannibal Directive in all its glory. In a single sentence.

On a related subject, though IDF “ethicist” seems a supporter of Hannibal, there are religious figures deeply troubled (Hebrew) by its implications. In fact, two rabbis have written a halachic tract, Jewish Military Ethics, in which they’ve called the directive unethical. NRG (formerly Maariv, but now the website of the Adelson-owned Makor Rishon), even says:

…The directive is opposed to Jewish ethics and presents very grave moral problems.

Despite the fact that killing an IDF soldier may prevent a future prisoner exchange that may free Palestinian prisoners who may kill Israelis after their release:

It is deeply problematic ethically to take upon ourselves to decision of who may live and who may die. Recent Jewish history [presumably referring to the Holocaust] proves that there is no benefit to such conduct…

The regulation that it’s permissible to intentionally harm a soldier in order to prevent his falling into captivity is deeply damages the ethical value of mutual responsibility, including comradeship and cohesion of the military unit. Because if there is a directive to intentionally harm one’s own comrade in arms unit cohesion cannot be preserved. It turns the men [in the unit] into potential enemies…

The “kidnapped” soldier does not endanger the security of the State due to the price that will be paid for his return because the State isn’t forced to accept this price. If it does decide to pay it, it isn’t the captive who’s made this decision.

I’ll take the wisdom of these rabbis over a thousand Asa Kashers!