JERUSALEM: Dozens of reserve soldiers from Israel’s top electronic surveillance unit say they will no longer spy on Palestinians living under occupation, in an unprecedented rebuke to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security policies.

A protest letter signed by 43 veterans of Unit 8200, sent to Netanyahu and armed forces chiefs, was excerpted and published by Israel’s biggest-selling newspaper on Friday.

By decrying the sweep of eavesdropping on Palestinians, and the role such espionage plays in setting up air strikes that have often inflicted civilian casualties, the move has opened a window on clandestine practices that usually go unreported.

An open letter signed by 43 personnel questions the abusive gathering of private information

It also tapped into an international debate over the ethics of state surveillance following last year’s media leaks by Edward Snowden, a former contractor with the National Security Agency, the US counterpart to Unit 8200.

“We refuse to take part in actions against Palestinians and refuse to continue serving as a tool for deepening military rule in the occupied (Palestinian) territories,” Yedioth Ahronoth daily quoted the letter as saying.

“Intelligence allows ongoing control over millions of people, thorough and intrusive monitoring and invasion into most aspects of life. All of this does not allow for normal living, fuels more violence and puts off any end to the conflict.”

The letter said information gathered by Unit 8200 was used by civilian intelligence agencies to coerce Palestinians uninvolved in militant activity.

No signatories’ names were published, in keeping apparently with the daily’s non-disclosure commitments to Unit 8200, which monitors enemy Arab states and Iran as well as the Palestinians.

Several signatories were interviewed anonymously by Yedioth and by Israel’s Army Radio, however, and complained about what they described as the abusive gathering of Palestinians’ private information — for example, sexual preferences or health problems “that might be used to extort people into becoming informants”.

When monitoring its own citizens, including the 20 per cent Arab minority, the Jewish state requires court or parliamentary oversight. Israeli spies have a far freer hand against Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu’s office had no immediate comment on the protest letter. There was praise for it from the Palestinian administration, which has pursued uneasy West Bank security coordination with Israel even as peacemaking remains stalled.

“If there are, among the Israelis, 43 soldiers who reject the idea of occupation, we view this as a moral act,” Palestinian security services’ spokesman Adnan Damiri said.

“We salute humanitarian ideas like this towards an oppressed people.”

Yedioth said the letter was unrelated to Israel’s July-August war in Hamas-controlled Gaza, in which around 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died. But some of the protesters rued their contribution to earlier air strikes on Palestinian militant chiefs which harmed innocent bystanders.

“We now understand that the responsibility is not just that of the soldier standing at the checkpoint, the soldier who squeezes the trigger,” one signatory, identified as a Unit 8200 reserve captain, told Army Radio. “We have responsibility.”

Another signatory said: “I think that all of us who signed the letter did so because we understood that we are unable to sleep well at night.”

Most Israeli men perform three years of compulsory military service after school, and the women two years, followed by regular spells of reserve duty for years afterwards.

The military spokesman’s office said in a statement that Unit 8200 personnel were held to ethical standards “without rival in the intelligence community in Israel or the world”, and had internal mechanisms for filing misconduct complaints.

That process had been circumvented by the letter writers, the spokesman’s office said: That they went first to the media “raises serious doubt as to the seriousness of their claims”.

Israel has in recent years seen similar statements by a small number of conscientious objectors among reservists of its air force and its premier infantry unit, as well as an Oscar-nominated documentary in which former directors of its Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency questioned the sustainability of the occupation.

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2014