You, Amnon Rubinstein, professor and Knesseth member, you who sit in your ivory tower in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and enjoy the pleasures of power for the past 20 or so years, you who perceive yourself morally superior to other politicians, when was the last time that you served as a combat soldier in the territories? It must have been long ago, if ever. Were that not so, you would not have dared today to have attacked conscientious objection to serving in the territories.

It is obvious from the pride you take in literally defining 'moral' and 'conscience' that you are unable to truly understand and fully comprehend what you have required soldiers to do when sending them to the territories for the past 20 years. You have never seen a child screaming a few meters from you because his knee was shattered by a lead bullet; you have never stood at a check point and determined fates; you have never been present when soldiers from your company less cultured than you used knives to slash the faces of Palestinian children; you have never slapped the faces of weeping Palestinian women whose misfortune it was to have their homes burst into in the middle of the night, and have never tramped your army boot on the heads of Palestinian men strewn on the ground. In short, you never have participated in the horrors of occupation. For you this occupation is virtual. You know it solely via deliberations in the Knesset committee with its borekas and glasses of juice, via statistics, via the mass media, which, as you undoubtedly realize, never represents reality but instead creates an alternative reality. You are familiar with the occupation via polite conversations in north Tel Aviv. You are defective in one of the most dangerous defects a leader could have: a gap between how you perceive reality and how facts show reality actually to be. Such a leader rapidly destroys trust in his judgments.

During the time that you were a member of the Knesset and the government the past 9 years, we soldiers served in the regular army and on reserve duty and carried out the dirty work in the territories. You were the statesman, the leader, we were the pawns on your chess board, those who carry out your orders. Year after year we carried out what was demanded of us without complaint, sealing our hearts and noses to the stink of horror, struggling, each alone, to overcome the harm incurred by our psyches, our buddies, and families. The greater number of our comrades refused to continue and to pay this price, and found their way out of reserve duty on various pretexts. Only a few of us faithfully remained; we continued because we trusted you, Amnon Rubinstein, and believed that while we were there that you, our pilot, would surely find a way to get us out of there, to bring about peace, to create a country in which life did not rely on wounding the soul.

You had 9 years (actually, 20) to educate and to extricate us from the despicable, the necrophilic labor in the territories. You failed miserably. Yet, this failure did not stop you today from continuing to call upon us (without so much as a slight tremble in your voice) to remain your henchmen. Does it not distress you that you persist in sending this country's sons to keep on committing war crimes? Are you sure that you are qualified to demand this of us? What have you tucked away in your knapsack to offer us--to continue to smell dead bodies another 9 years so that you can feed us more of your excuses? You apparently don't understand that you have lost your moral privilege to lead us further in this matter, that you have lost the trust of your herd, that you have stretched your credit as a leader to its limits.

Now that our obedience is no longer in your hands or in the hands of the state, due to the lack of responsibility on your part and on the part of fellow leaders, you are forced to seek for different solutions to the problems. This is the task of a leader. If you are unable to accomplish it, let others more qualified do so.