The commander of the Israel Air Force (IAF) met with reservists this week and warned them against signing letters opposing the war in Gaza.
Air force chief Maj Gen Tomer Bar said the reservists would be dismissed from service if they signed the letter.
Two separate letters by reservists are circulating, according to Israeli media reports, but have not yet been published.
One letter, circulated on social media, calls for an immediate end to the fighting so as to secure the release of hostages in Gaza. “We demand the return home of the hostages without delay, even at the cost of stopping the war immediately,” the letter reads. “At this time the war primarily serves political and personal interests, and not security interests.”
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The second letter calls on reservists to stop volunteering if the government insists on pressing ahead with three courses of action: renewing the war in Gaza without an operational objective; firing attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara; and firing Ronen Bar, the director of the domestic intelligence service Shin Bet.
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The government has declared no confidence in the attorney general, but moves to dismiss her may take months. Israel’s high court issued an interim injunction on Tuesday night preventing the government from dismissing Mr Bar this week as planned and stipulating that he remain in his position until a final decision is made.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) relies heavily on hundreds of thousands of reservists in times of war to supplement the standing army. Military leaders are scrambling to prevent a repeat of the events of 2023 when, as part of the campaign against government plans to overhaul the judiciary, thousands of IDF reservists declared that they would no longer show up for duty. The protest was seen by some as having encouraged the October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel.
The military warned that the reservists’ protest undermined Israel’s security, but when Hamas attacked that October 7th, nearly 300,000 reservists showed up for duty in the largest mobilisation in the nation’s history.
Senior generals are trying to prevent the letters from being published and to prevent as many active reservists as possible from signing them. IAF commanders have spoken with some of the more prominent people behind the letters, stressing the repercussions they could have for the air force and national security.
President Yitzhak Herzog has previously said that, given Israel is a democracy, soldiers have the right to protest, but that refusal to serve is not permitted: “We have one state and we have one army, which must remain above all political disputes,” he said.
