JERUSALEM, Aug 7: Israel plunged into bitter debate over the source of authority for many of its soldiers on Tuesday after a group of troops refused orders to evacuate hardline Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

The four-hour operation early on Tuesday in the flashpoint town of Hebron sparked fiery rhetoric over the future of the Jewish state's army after a dozen soldiers decided to listen to their parents and rabbis, instead of their commanding officers, and refused to participate.

Media warned such subordination was becoming a trend, military leaders slammed it as unacceptable, the religious right hailed it as a sign of things to come, and the secular left warned it could paralyse the army.

When they were given the order on Monday to back up police forces removing the Hebron settlers, dozens of mostly religious soldiers in the Kfir regiment called their parents and rabbis for advice.

Some were told they had to follow the orders, others were advised to take sick leave to avoid insubordination, but two company commanders and 10 soldiers refused outright to carry out the orders.

The 12 were later slapped with sentences in military jail of up to a month, but not before the incident quickly reached the press, raising a storm of debate.

“The ideological refusal to carry out military orders to evacuate settlers is no longer a marginal phenomenon,” warned the liberal Haaretz daily.

“More rabbis are directing their students to refuse evacuation orders, more right-wing public figures are supporting the refusals, and more religious soldiers feel that they have the public and family backing to refuse.” Defence Minister Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier who regained the post in mid-June, warned that refusing orders undermined the strength of a state where military service is compulsory for both men and women.

“Any state that wishes to live can have only one army. Soldiers are given orders from their company and regiment commanders only and not from any other person, as respectable as he may be,” he told reporters.

But supporters of the troops hailed them as heroes and warned that Israel had not seen the last of such subordination. “I am happy with what my son has done,” Avner Cohen, the son of Sergeant Haim Cohen who was among those sentenced to 28 days in military prison, told public radio.

“He is paying the price for the outrageous removal of Jews anywhere in the land of Israel,” said Cohen, whose family had lived in a settlement in Gaza until the 2005 pullout of settlers and troops after 38 years of occupation.

“The army's duty is to protect Israel's citizens and not to expel Jews,” he said.

Aryeh Eldad, a lawmaker of the far-right National Union Party, said that Monday's incident “was a message to the government that if they try to harness the army for expelling Jews, they will remain with no army.” The two families removed for squatting illegally in Hebron were just one of more than 100 wildcat settlement outposts in the occupied West Bank and the problems encountered with their removal could repeat themselves if Israel decides to carry through on its promise to remove the settlements.

Many religous soldiers in Israel — whose military service sometimes combines studies at a yeshiva religious school — identify themselves with right-wing national religious ideology and themselves live in settlements.

Although there are no figures on their exact number, they form the backbone of many elite combat units. During the 2005 Gaza pullout, a number of them refused to follow orders to forcibly remove the settlers who refused to leave.

“The Jewish bible is above the laws of the state of Israel,” Rabbi Yishai Babed of the Judea and Samaria, as the West Bank is known in Israel, rabbis council said.

“Expelling people from their homes contradicts the Bible and therefore the morality overrides any military orders,” he said.

The chief rabbi of the Israeli army yeshivas, David Stav, rejected such claims.

“To say that the soldiers’ orders contradicted the halakha (Jewish biblical law) goes too far,” he said. “If this were the case, the army would have to be dismantled immediately.” MP Avshalom Vilan of the left-wing Meretz party warned that politicising the army from any side of the political spectrum risked paralysing it.

“Left-wing soldiers will refuse to defend settlements, right-wing soldiers will refuse to remove settlements,” he said.—AFP