Israeli army warns rabbis on soldiers' revolt

Israel faces protest from radicalized soldiers acting on orders from extremist settler rabbis.

TEL AVIV - The Israeli army has warned a group of radical rabbis that anti-government protests by their students while serving in the military would not be tolerated, the army said on Wednesday.

The warning follows two incidents involving soldiers who publicly held up banners vowing to refuse to participate in any future evacuation of illegal Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.

The soldiers came from Jewish seminaries, or yeshivas, where students combine military service with religious study.

In a meeting with the rabbis running the seminaries, Major General Avi Zamir, who heads the army's human resources directorate, said such protests "could cause a serious rift and undermine the standing of the IDF as the army of the people," an army statement said.

Zamir asked the rabbis to come up with a "real, clear and determined plan to deal with the issue," the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) statement said.

In the past right-wing rabbis have been accused of urging their students to refuse orders to evacuate illegal settlements on religious grounds.

Many radical Jews claim that their God gave all of historic Palestine to the Jewish people alone, with no room to Palestinians, the original inhabitants of the land.

An umbrella organization for yeshivas whose students serve in the army said in a statement on Wednesday that it was "opposed to political demonstrations in the heart of the army that put in peril the army's foundations and the social unity at the core of the army."

It also called "for a debate within Israeli society on the use of soldiers for police missions."

Within the past month, six soldiers have been sentenced to prison and two to other punitive measures for publicly vowing not to evacuate settlements if ordered to do so.

The issue of illegal Jewish settlements is one of the thorniest in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the main stumbling block in stalled US efforts to restart peace negotiations.

Settlement outposts built without government authorization are considered illegal under Israeli law. The international community considers all Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land illegal.

Israel illegally occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.

Around 200,000 illegal Jewish settlers are estimated to have moved into the dozen or so Israeli settlements in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

There are about 300,000 more illegal Jewish settlers currently living in settlements the Palestinian West Bank.

The settlers adhere to radical ideologies and are extremely violent to almost-defenseless Palestinians.