REHOVOT: When Zohar, Avner and Moshe sent their letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon some weeks ago, it triggered an uproar in Israel. With 10 other commandos of the army's most elite unit , the men refused to serve any longer in what they declared is Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

What sparked the headlines, hate mail and death threats was not that they were the first soldiers to declare Israel's war unjust. Since the current round of Israeli-Palestinian warfare began 40 months ago, hundreds of soldiers have done so. In September, 27 reserve or retired air force pilots wrote a similar letter.

The shock for many Israelis is that the latest dissidents are fighters of Sayeret Matkal. Militarily, these men are like the US Army's Delta Force commandos, but as politically glorified symbols of patriotism, they have no equivalent in America.

Sayeret Matkal's heroes have freed Israelis held hostage - as in their epic assault on hijackers at Uganda's Entebbe Airport in 1976 - and have drawn Israel's most dangerous military missions, including a 1992 plan, never carried out, to infiltrate Iraq and assassinate Saddam Hussein.

On Dec 21, the 13 Sayeret Matkal men wrote to Sharon that they could no longer serve, "out of a deep sense of foreboding for the future of Israel as a democratic, Zionist and Jewish state."

Since then, the army has made clear that the men face dismissal or jail if they don't recant. But in an interview last week, Zohar, Avner and Moshe said their conversion from gung-ho warriors for the Israeli state to conscientious objectors has been a painful evolution that they will not reverse.

The men declined to have their full names published or their faces photographed, saying they could become targets for Palestinian militants when they travel abroad.

They also refused to discuss details of their operations in Sayeret Matkal - including the abuses of Palestinians that they said they have witnessed - because they said they remain bound by their unit's code of secrecy.

Moshe, 33, a father of three who recently got his license to practice medicine, said he could define no precise moment for the change. "It was a process," he said.

"There are things that you don't question and then you realize that nothing is beyond question. In the last few years, the whole situation has become very troubling. It then became clear that I had to do something, that I couldn't wait for others to do the job for me."

Zohar, 35, an actor when he is not pulling reserve duty, also had no doubts at first. "What brought us to serve in the Sayeret Matkal was maximum loyalty to Israel and its system of government, and absolute confidence" that the targets they were being ordered to attack were people guilty of crimes, he said.

Sayeret Matkal is known to perform some of Israel's most sensitive counter-terrorism operations, and has been involved in clandestine attacks on Palestinian militants in the occupied territories.

Moshe's doubts began "the first time I went to the occupied territories," he said. "What struck me was that all the roads from the Palestinian villages were blocked. As a medical student, my first thought was, 'What if someone has a heart attack or a woman needs to give birth? How will they get to the hospital?' People in Israel may read about these things, but they don't appreciate what they mean."

Israel declares that, in this war, it is seminally different from its foes because it makes strenuous efforts to strike only those guilty of violence against Israelis, and to preserve the innocent. In public view, the military routinely upholds - and routinely violates - that principle.

Avner, 27, voiced concern at what the war's brutalization of Israeli soldiers is doing to life here. For the commandos, the truth is the reverse. Their dissidence "is very Zionist," Zohar said.

"If a plane is going to crash, you can jump out or you can try and prevent it from crashing. That is how we feel about the state of Israel."-Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post-The Newsday.