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Fighting For What?

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A band of protesters argues against "left-wing" revisions
in Israel's military ethics code.

Remembering
Nuremberg

An international conference will
discuss the modern implications of the
famous post-World War II trials.

JULIE EDGAR STAFF WRITER

"They don't risk their lives for
resents] a slippery slope, that at
every opportunity they have to ad- a state; they risk their lives for
dress these issues. There's now their homeland. There's nothing
a Likud government in power. about love for the Jewish people,"
What did these people want? For- Mr. Dallen said.
protester
Fellow
tunately, it didn't have
any impact on the Major Ge n. Yoram Hymie Cutler, head of
the Michigan Committee
Yair arg ues with
evening."
The basis of the pro- Michael D alien and for a Safe Israel, said he
testers' rancor is the Mike Ha rrison (in learned about the re-
abandonment of Zionist cap) at t he FIDF making of the ethics code
din ner.
from a newspaper arti-
values in the code, which
cle, after he was asked to
proscribes the behavior
and mission of every Israeli sol- participate in the rally. It
dier during peacetime and "shocked" him, he said.
`The very essence of [Israel] is
wartime.
"The new code is largely the the fact that it is a Jewish state.
product of radical, left-wing To remove that from the ethical
philosophers at Tel Aviv Univer- code is a strange thing," Mr. Cut-
sity who repudiate the values of ler said.
Before dinner, Gen. Yair, whose
our people and the values we were
honoring at that gathering," said nickname is "Ya Ya," left the syn-
Michael Dallen, a leader of the agogue to talk to the protesters,
protest and head of the local chap- who held signs that said, "No, no,
ter of Americans for a Safe Israel. Ya Ya" and referred to him as a
In a flier he wrote and distributed flunky. Mr. Dallen said he re-
at the rally, Mr. Dallen claims the gretted the slur, knowing the gen-
code was revised to avoid offend- eral is considered a major Jewish
ing Israel's Druze and Bedouin war hero.
"I want to emphasize that the
populations and progressive' Jews
who deplore all Jewish national- general is a genuine hem, and we
honor him and honor the values
ism."
He objects to the document's that made him such a hero. It's
failure to mention the love of Is- the code that repudiates the very
rael or the love of the Land of Is- values he stands for. He bowed to
rael or even the fact that Israel is the political correctness that was
a Jewish state.
ETHICS CODE page 22

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NUREMBERG page 22

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sraeli soldiers are being
asked to conform to a "po-
litienlly correct' ethics code,
and that rankles a group
of mainly religious Jews
here.
About 10 people, half of
them children, showed up
Sept. 17 at a dinner of
the Michigan chapter of the
Friends of Israel Defense Forces
(FIDF) at Congregation Shaarey
Zedek to protest revisions in the
ethics code of the Israel Defense
Forces. Holding signs that de-
nounced guest of honor Major
General Yoram Yair as a "politi-
cal flunky," they passed out fliers
and argued with him when he
confronted them outside the build-
ing.
Gen. Yair, Israel's military at-
tache to the United States, head-
ed the commission of politicians
and academicians that revised
and released the code last year.
The scene, said an FIDF board
member, was all the more strange
because the protesters admitted
to the general that they hadn't
read the revised code.
"I think they were slightly
sheepish about the whole thing,
though evidently not enough for
them to leave," said FIDF board
member Mark Lichterman.
"Maybe they think [the code rep-

enry King Jr. was a young lawyer in 1946, ready to
tell a friend about his new job in New York.
But the friend turned the tables with news about
his new job, with the U.S. prosecuting staff at the war
crimes trials in Nuremberg, Germany.
The next day, Mr. King took a train to Washington to ap-
ply in person for a similar position.
Fifty years after the famous Nuremberg Trials, Mr. King,
other prosecutors, historians and legal experts are coming
to Detroit for an international conference on what Mr. King
calls "the seminal legal event of the 20th century."
The opening program of the conference, 7:30 p.m. Sun-
day, Oct. 13, at Congregation B'nai Moshe in West Bloom-
field, will feature Mr. King and fellow prosecutor Whitney
Harris discussing the trials.
Federal Judge Avern Cohn will chair the panel. The pro-
gram is free and open to the public.
On Monday, Oct. 14, the experts will participate in a day-
long conference at Wayne State University's McGregor
Memorial Conference Center. There is a $25 fee that in-
cludes lunch.
When Mr. King was growing up in Connecticut in the
1930s, his father posed questions at the dinner table. One
night he asked, "How do you stop wars?" Henry Jr. always
remembered his father's answer, and it led him to Nurem-
berg: "People don't want wars. Their leaders start wars. To
stop wars, you have to punish the leaders."
Mr. King said the
Nuremberg Trials af-
firmed for the first
time that internation-
al rules were binding
on individuals and su-
perseded national
rules. "For example,"
he said, "the persecu-
tion of Jews was OK
under German law
sanctioned by Hitler.
But the Nuremberg
Trials said there were
higher laws."
An international
tribunal convicted 21
German officials and
high command offi-
cers, and 11 were exe-
cuted. The United
States prosecuted 177
war criminals in "sub-
Henry King: Prosecutor of Nazis.
sequent proceedings."
"Because of those trials," Mr. King said, "we now have
some benchmarks to deal with: Leaders are not exempt
[from law] because. they are leaders of a nation, and 'fol-
lowing a superior's orders' is no defense."
After his 18 months at Nuremberg, Mr. King and his wife
returned to the United States. He subsequently served as
general counsel of the U.S. Foreign Economic Aid Program,

S E P TE M B

ALAN HITSKY ASSOCIATE EDITOR