A prominent West Bank rabbi is facing police investigation...

A prominent West Bank rabbi is facing police investigation for suggesting that Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories might be liable for execution under Jewish religious law.
While the overwhelming majority of Israeli reservists have responded with alacrity to call-up orders in recent months for service in the West Bank, several hundred reservists have signed a petition refusing to serve there. In an article written for distribution via synagogues, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, from the settlement of Beit El, cited earlier rabbinic sources to support the assertion that soldiers refusing to serve in the territories, and thus "weakening the army", could be put to death by their commander.
Yossi Sarid, the leader of Israel's main opposition party, the left-wing Meretz, urged the Attorney General to prosecute Rabbi Aviner for incitement to murder. A complaint against the rabbi has also been filed with the Attorney General's office. Rabbi Aviner said his article had been merely theoretical, that only the army's chief of staff would have any conceivable authority to act on the religious rulings, and that he knew there was no prospect whatsoever of the chief of staff doing so.
In the months before the assassination of the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, in November 1995, a group of rabbis debated the question of whether, under religious law, Rabin merited the death penalty for relinquishing to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority biblical land, divinely promised to the Jews, under the Oslo peace process. When an Orthodox Jew gunned down Rabin, the rabbis insisted the murder could not be tied to their deliberations, which they, like Rabbi Aviner, said were solely theoretical. Asked whether, now as then, there was not a danger that learned theoretical arguments might be misinterpreted by extremists as a call for action, the rabbi said he did not believe there was anything to worry about.