Introduction by Gilad
Atzmon: The following is a
superb article by Richard
Silverstein. It explores
the history and meaning of
the IDF’s Hannibal
Directive - an Israeli military protocol designed
to prevent IDF soldiers from being captured alive
by enemy forces. The directive orders commanders
to take necessary measures, including
endangering the life of an abducted soldier, to foil
a kidnapping. In practice, the Hannibal Directive
orders IDF combatants to kill their comrades in a
case of abduction.
Silverstein is horrified by the directive and its
ethical and legal implications. He also believes
that such a homicidal protocol is inconsistent with
the Israeli military’s alleged heritage of caring for
its soldiers. But Silverstein’s perspective may be
mistaken.
It must be noted that military and civil law are
distinctively different domains. While civil law
serves to protect societal and individual rights,
military law serves the system as a whole. This
explains, for instance, why collective punishment
is common and even acceptable within the context
of a military legal discourse. It serves the
military’s interests as opposed to the rights of
individuals. The amusing adage “military law is to
law as military music is to music,” captures the
ethical absurdity that is entangled with military law
The Hannibal Directive is consistent with Israeli
national and military interests. From the point of
view of Israel’s strategic interests, a captured
soldier entails compromises Israel would prefer to
avoid.
Silverstein writes, “The Hannibal Directive
embraces a fascist perspective in which the
individual is subsumed within the mass. He has
no specific individual value unless he is serving
the interest of the nation. And his interests may,
when necessary be sacrificed to the greater good.”
Silverstein is addressing the issue from an ethical
perspective within the spirit of enlightenment. But
Zionism and Jewish nationalism are inherently
anti-enlightenment ideologies. Zionism denotes
the birth of the ‘Jewish people,’ the idea that
every Jew is an integral part of a larger collective
with clear tribal interests that outweigh the
individual. Accordingly, in an extreme situation,
the interests of the tribe are far more important
than the individual rights. The Hannibal Directive
is a glimpse into the depth of the Jewish collective
bond and tribal commitment. It exposes the level
of commitment and sacrifice expected of tribal
members.
Silverstein identifies the directive as fascist, but
he should remember that Zionism predates
Fascism and unlike Fascism that was largely
defeated, Zionism has so far prevailed.
Israel Murders IDF Soldier to Prevent His Capture
by Richard Silverstein
I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to Israel. I’ve
studied, read, visited, lived, breathed it. Not in the
way diehard pro-Israel fanatics do. But in a different
way that matched my own intellectual and political
proclivities. It’s a subject that is rich, varied,
troubling, bedeviling, and exhilarating. But every once
in a while I learn something I never thought possible;
and I don’t mean this in a good way.
Tonight, my Israeli source informed me that Sgt. Guy
Levy, serving in the armored corps, was captured by
Hamas fighters. He had been part of a joint
engineering-armored-combat unit searching for
tunnels. Troops entered a structure and discovered a
tunnel. Suddenly, out of the shaft sprang two
militants who dragged one of the soldiers into it. By
return fire, one of the Palestinians was killed, while the
other fled, presumably with the soldier.
This Israeli report, which was censored by the IDF,
says only that the attempt to capture the soldier failed.
It says nothing about his fate. The expectation of
anyone reading it would be that the soldier was freed.
But he was not. In order to prevent the success of the
operation, the IDF killed him. Nana reports that the
IDF fired a tank shell into the building, which is the
same way another captured soldier was killed by the
IDF during Cast Lead.
I would presume that once the militant fled into the
tunnel with his prisoner that the IDF destroyed the
tunnel and entombed those within it, including the
soldier. I would also presume that the IDF knows he is
dead because they retrieved his body.
To the uninitiated this will seem a terribly strange,
uncivilized, even immoral act. But that’s where I
learned something I’d never known before about the
IDF. There is an unwritten secret regulation written by
the IDF High Command, but nowhere codified in
writing. Its existence is protected by military
censorship. Journalists have rarely written about it.
When they have it’s usually been in code or by
inference.
It’s called the Hannibal Directive. Though the
Wikipedia article doesn’t explain the reference to
Hannibal, I assume it relates to the death of the great
Carthaginian general, who took poison rather than
allow himself to be captured by his mortal enemy, the
Romans. Though Sara Leibovich-Dar wrote in
2003 that the name came from a military computer!
In my long history of dedication to this subject, I’ve
rarely seen anything that has disturbed me as much.
The Hannibal Directive is:
…A secret directive of the Israel Defense Forces with
the purpose of preventing Israeli soldiers being
captured by enemy forces in the course of combat.
…The order, drawn up in 1986 by a group of top Israeli
officers, states that at the time of a kidnapping the
main mission becomes forcing the release of the
abducted soldiers from their kidnappers, even if that
means injury to Israeli soldiers.
The order allows commanders to take whatever action
is necessary, including endangering the life of an
abducted soldier, to foil the abduction…
As happens so often in these cases, an IDF commander
instrumental in drafting the order denied the horrific
logic of the directive and then offered an example of
how he would proceed which only confirmed it:
In a rare interview by one of the authors of the
directive, Yossi Peled…denied that it implied a blanket
order to kill Israeli soldiers rather than let them be
captured by enemy forces. The order only allowed the
army to risk the life of a captured soldier, not to take
it. “I wouldn’t drop a one-ton bomb on the vehicle,
butI would hit it with a tank shell”, Peled was quoted
saying. He added that he personally “would rather be
shot than fall into Hizbullah captivity.”
In other words, the IDF will do almost everything in its
power to prevent capture of its soldiers including
killing him. It might not put a bullet directly in his
brain, but it would certainly shell a home or vehicle in
which he was situated.
Perhaps there’s a lingering bit of the liberal Zionist I
once was here, but I’d always heard that Israel
never leaves a soldier behind. It does everything
possible to bring all its troops home, and once
captured does everything possible to retrieve or
free them.
All this time I was sorely mistaken. When all hope is
lost of liberating the soldier from captivity, he dies.
What’s equally disturbing is that the existence of the
directive is an open secret. Commanders warn their
soldiers that no one may be captured and that if you
are you must commit suicide. If you can’t do that,
then they will do their best to kill you. Perhaps they
don’t articulate it precisely in those words, but that’s
the clear intent.
Lest you think Hannibal is a theoretical regulation, it
has been implemented before and captured soldiers
have been killed by the IDF. Most recently it happened
During the war there was a case where the Hannibal
directive was invoked. An Israeli soldier was shot and
injured by a Hamas fighter during a search of a house
in one of the neighborhoods of Gaza. The wounded
soldiers’ comrades evacuated the house due to fears
that it was booby-trapped. According to testimony by
soldiers who took part in the incident the house was
then shelled to prevent the wounded soldier from being
captured by Hamas.
You have every right to ask: what soldier in his right
mind would follow such an order. There are
thankfully examples of ones who refused. But there
are a number who didn’t including the tank
commander who fired on his comrade in that home in
Gaza, killing him.
You also have a right to ask how the IDF could
approve such a regulation. The answer is it didn’t. It
has never been vetted by military lawyers. If it had
been, the High Command might’ve been told it was an
illegal, immoral directive which had no standing. Then
the IDF would have to implement an order its highest
legal authorities had deemed treif. That would never
do. So neither the generals, nor the Judge Advocate
has ever delved into the matter. It is yet another
example of the national security state refusing to
examine the deepest, most troubling principles on
which it is based.
Implementation of the Hannibal Directive comes on the
heels of the freeing of Gilad Shalit after five years in
captivity. The nation freed 1,000 Palestinian prisoners
in order to release Shalit. Israeli hardliners screamed
bloody murder about freeing murderers with blood on
their hands. Some said it would have been better if
Shalit had died rather than face this ignominy.
I believe that Benny Gantz and Bibi Netanyahu aren’t
prepared to go through such a trauma again. They
believe their constituency would understand if they
killed a soldier rather than lose him to capture. Let’s
make no mistake about this: it is a purely political
calculation. A nakedly, cynical political calculation. It
suggests that the interests of the nation trump the life
of the individual. These are considerations of an
authoritarian state and not a democratic one. A
democracy values the individual. It recognizes that the
nation cannot exist without the individual. Even that
the nation should not exist unless it respects and
values that individual.
The Hannibal Directive perverts such principles. It
embraces a fascist perspective in which the individual
is subsumed within the mass. He has no specific
individual value unless he is serving the interest of the
nation. And his interests may, when necessary be
sacrificed to the greater good.
I thank Dvorit Shargel for raising an important, and
thorny issue. She implored me to consider the trauma
of Levy’s family hearing their son was killed not by
Palestinian fire, which would be painful enough, but
by his own comrades.
It’s very doubtful the IDF would tell the family the
truth unless it had no other choice. So then the
question is, should we allow the IDF to lie just to cover
up the use of the Hannibal directive and allow the
family to believe he was killed by the enemy instead of
his own?
My answer to this reluctantly is No. The greatest good
is served by transparency. By knowing the truth,
telling the truth, forcing everyone involved to explain
what they did and why. Secrecy and pandering helps
no one, even the dead soldiers’s family. I am sorry if
this causes them added suffering. But blaming me is
blaming the messenger not the real culprit.
Here is some of the discussion around the matter
conducted by military ethicists (if there can be such a
thing):
Dr. Avner Shiftan, an army physician with the rank of
major, came across the Hannibal directive while on
reserve duty in South Lebanon in 1999. In army
briefings he “became aware of a procedure ordering
soldiers to kill any IDF soldier if he should be taken
captive by Hizbullah. This procedure struck me as
being illegal and not consistent with the moral code of
the IDF. I understood that it was not a local procedure
but originated in the General Staff, and had the feeling
that a direct approach to the army authorities would
be of no avail, but would end in a cover-up.” He
his authorship of Israel Defense Forces’ Code of
Conduct, who “found it difficult to believe that such an
order exists,” since this “is wrong ethically, legally and
morally”. He doubted that “there is anyone in the
army” believing that `better a dead soldier than an
abducted soldier’.
On this point however Asa Kasher was apparently
wrong. In 1999 the IDF Chief of StaffShaul Mofaz said
in an interview with Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth: “In
certain senses, with all the pain that saying this
entails, an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier
who has been killed, is a national problem.” Asked
Force navigator captured in 1986) and Nachshon
Wachsman (an abducted soldier killed in 1994 in a
failed rescue attempt), he replied “definitely, and not
only.”
The legality of the order has never formally been
examined by the IDF’s legal department. According to
Prof. Emanuel Gross, from the Faculty of Law at the
University of Haifa:…”Orders like that have to go
through the filter of the Military Advocate General’s
Office, and if they were not involved that is very
grave,”he says. “The reason is that an order that
knowingly permits the death of soldiers to be brought
about, even if the intentions were different, carries a
black flag and is a flagrantly illegal order that
undermines the most central values of our social
norms.
I hate to harp on this, but liberal Zionists enjoy
claiming Israel is a nation of laws. That is upholds the
rule of law. But this is clearly not the case. No
democratic nation would permit such a directive after
undergoing legal review. So the answer in Israel is
simply to prevent it from undergoing any such review.
It allows the flourishing of a secret code that governs
critical aspects of the Israeli military.
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