Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, set the tone, denouncing the letter as "baseless slander." The army said the soldiers would be "sharply disciplined." The defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, termed them "criminals."
The head of the opposition, Isaac Herzog, of the supposedly leftwing Labor party, characterised their protest as "insubordination," while Smola, a party established this month to revive the left, called the soldiers' act "evil."
In the Israeli media the group were dismissed as deluded eccentrics, "trippy" losers and "spoiled brats." If there is a constituency of concern among the public, it has kept stoically quiet.
Revealingly, Herzog was himself once a senior officer in 8200. He must have been party to the same ugly secrets but used his political influence to shield the system rather than blow the whistle.
It seems that when the barbarity of the occupation is at its most transparent, when it is hardest for Israelis to avert their gaze, they simply shut their eyes instead.
The wall-to-wall condemnation of the refuseniks mirrored Israelis' almost-universal support for the recent attack on Gaza, even as they learnt of mounting Palestinian civilian casualties.
Over the past decade, one intelligence veteran lamented: "We've seen a decline in how much the soldiers and the Israeli public care that innocent people are dying." That observation was firmly verified this summer in Gaza.
Thousands of Israelis who have passed through 8200 did not sign the letter, noted a commentator. Another pointed out that 43 dissenters were "insignifcant" compared to the 600,000 who serve in the military or the reserves.
None of this suggests Israelis are uniquely evil. Rather, it indicates how deeply dysfunctional their society has become -- as one might expect after years of being collectively complicit in the oppression of another people.
Netanyahu is only too aware of how to keep the Israeli public compliant. Last week he warned of an apparently alarming new threat: Hamas had responded to the operation in Gaza by waging "cyber attacks" on Israel, aided by Iran.
The insinuation was clear. Unit 8200 is all that stands in the way of the Jewish state's destruction by the mullahs of Tehran. Those who undermine intelligence work endanger Israel's survival.
Netanyahu knows it is a message that will find favour with Israelis. Their military is no callous and brutal leviathan. And they can continue to sleep easy at night, still history's victims.
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