Tel Aviv, September 14 – A letter from a group of disgruntled intelligence corps reservists refusing further participation in duties that they claim treat Palestinians with unnecessary harshness has prompted a public outcry and caused the Israeli military to call off a highly touted training course in insubordination.

More than 40 reserve soldiers who serve in the critical intelligence Unit 8200 signed a public letter announcing their intention not to return to serve, in protest over assignments that, according to the letter, involved abusive treatment of Palestinian residents in those locations. The reaction of the defense establishment was swift, denouncing the attitude of the self-styled “refuseniks” in questioning the military necessity of assignments and in taking their complaint to the media instead of the military or political leadership, a move that plays into Israel’s enemies on the battlefield and in the public arena. As a result, the IDF has removed from its training curriculum a component that teaches soldiers how to disobey direct orders.

The course, called Officer Capacity and Honor Enhancement for Reservists in Israel (OCHER Yisrael), has been an essential element of training since the 1980’s. It was originally conceived as a vehicle for keeping the disciplinary arm of the forces at peak levels of performance by maximizing the number of soldiers undergoing court martial and imprisonment. The IDF is generally considered the world’s most combat-tested army as a result of its many wars over its relatively short existence, and then-Chief-of-Staff Raphael Eitan instructed the military to exploit that phenomenon throughout the service to ensure efficient and effective performance even in non-combat units.

OCHER Yisrael began as a course for junior officers, but its success was limited until the program began training newer recruits better suited to outright insubordination. Once that phase began in 1990, the brigs and other detainment facilities were filled almost to capacity with soldiers charged with disobeying orders, a situation that finally gave the Military Police the experience necessary to optimize the performance of tasks such as barking, sneering, and engaging in over-aggressive behavior to compensate for not being fit or intelligent enough to serve in a combat role.

However, the recent spate of disobedience with political overtones has the IDF senior staff questioning the strategic value of the course, which may constitute more of a liability than an asset in the current international climate. “In its first two decades the OCHER Yisrael training course reliably produced the kind of insubordination that all armies face from time to time,” said military commentator Ron Ben-Yishai of Yediot Acharonot. “It also had a healthy side-effect of causing soldiers to think outside the box and to devise new, previously unconsidered ways of approaching all sorts of challenges. But now some graduates have gotten out of hand, and they’re challenging the very assumption that an army should actually engage in missions to defend the country’s citizenry if a bunch of bourgeois declare that they, being more moral than everyone else, have decided not to participate.”

Ben-Yishai refused to speculate on what, if any, disciplinary measures await the refuseniks of Unit 8200, but suggested leaving them unarmed in the midst of the population for whom they express so much humanitarian concern.