The other Israel

Submitted by Anon on 17 June, 2004 - 6:06

The horrifying events in Rafah, the display by the Israeli state of naked ferocity and indifference both to human life and public outcry, can seem paralysing. And the plight of the Palestinians appears utterly helpless. But there is opposition even with the Israeli state; its own army is in ferment. Young conscripts, appalled at what they are being asked to do in the occupied Territories are refusing to serve. By 2003, over a thousand had declared their refusal to take part in the repression of the Palestinians. Proportional to the country's population, that is like 10,000 British troops or 40,000 US soldiers refusing to serve in Iraq. Refusenik! (Zed Books) compiles the statements and protests of many of them.

At the recent launch for the book, Peretz Kidron, its editor, himself a refusenik from the Lebanon war and a refugee from Nazism, spoke and introduced a film about five of the refuseniks.

What struck me watching the video of the jailed five refusers (Noam Bahat, Haggai Matar, Adam Moar, Shimri Tzameret and Matan Kaminer) was their youth. We are constantly bombarded by the media with anxiety-provoking reminders of our children's vulnerability - paedophiles, internet porn, video nasties.

What these young people, barely over the threshold into adulthood, are being asked to do is not play-act scenes of graphic violence, but enact them for real, shooting children, burying people alive in the rubble of their own homes.

As Peretz Kidron describes below, how could that not be corrupting?

The other speaker at the meeting was one of the current refuseniks, Eilat Maoz. I listened to someone who seemed to me like a little girl (forgive me) - younger than my own daughter - who talked in a voice too quiet for my tape to catch, about standing up to the Israeli military authorities, risking imprisonment. Amid the horrors of Rafah, the courage and thoughtfulness of these young people gives me hope that, as an Israeli general feared, the hundreds will become thousands and tens of thousands, and the one "flaw" in the Israeli war machine will bring it grinding to a halt.

Gerry Byrne

Peretz Kidron

To understand the Refusal movement you have to understand it as saying no, and let's look at what those fine courageous youngsters are saying no to.

In English it has the rather innocent-sounding name "occupation", a very bland name. The English-speaking peoples haven't really experienced what it is to live under foreign domination for centuries so they can settle for an innocent word like "occupation".

Occupation is an act of hijacking, an act of mass terrorism, of state terrorism. A people that are living under occupation are denied every right you consider normal. I'm not just talking about the right to vote or anything of that sort. Do you have the right to go to school, to go to your place of work. Do have a right to go see a doctor? Do have a right to go down to the beach and spend a few hours with your kids? You have no rights.

If the soldier at the check-post, or the officer at the military command centre allows you, you can do it. If he doesn't, you can't. That's not a right, it's something that may be granted to you as a favour. And the lack of rights may extend to having your house demolished because maybe once a member of your family belonged to the resistance.

You may have your trees uprooted because the Israeli settlers in the nearby settlements decide that they want to clear fields. There's no limits practically to what can be done to you, but there are clear limits to what you may do.

This happens in many countries, in many colonial situations that nations endured for centuries. But here we are at the beginning of the third millennium, and we have a people who have lived under this kind of regime for 37 years. For a Palestinian to be able to remember when he wasn't under Israeli occupation he would need to be 50. Any younger and the Israeli occupation is the normal state of affairs, with no prospect of that changing.

It is against this situation that the five youngsters [shown in the film] have, amongst others, protested. They are now serving a one year prison sentence. Prior to this some of them served up to 14 months in cumulative one-month detentions. The army tried to break their spirits, sentenced them to four or five weeks, called them back, told them to put on uniform again, and again they would refuse and again they would be sentenced. As you can see, they are supported by loving and proud families, but that doesn't make it easier.

The refusal movement is very significant because these are Israeli conscripts. It's no big deal to get some people together and call a demonstration, but it's entirely different when it's published that a young man or young woman who is a soldier has gone to prison for refusing to take part in some of the abominations that we have heard about.

The occupation is a big abomination which enfolds within it hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of smaller acts of minor harassment at checkpoints - a woman in labour not being allowed through, so she has her baby at the roadside, and sometimes the baby lives, and sometimes it doesn't. Or homes that are built literally with the fingers of hard-working people, and in one moment a bulldozer comes along and demolishes it. The individual acts are horrendous, but you have to see the overall picture and that is one which makes these acts inevitable.

In all our efforts in all our campaigns we never blame the soldiers. The individual soldiers are not to blame. They're nice kids, not worse than the kids you see in this film. They go there, not malicious, not necessarily evil… but they're faced with a situation in which they have to be evil because that's what they're required to do, it is the assignment of an army of occupation. They are hijackers and the job of a hijacker, whether they take over a bus or a plane or a country, is to terrify the people, to subjugate them and make them do whatever it is that their commanders want them to do. That's the job.

They don't have to be sadistic. A couple of friends of mine were on the Israeli airliner that was hijacked at Entebbe. They came back, they said "there were two hijackers guarding us, one was a real son of a bitch but the other was very nice - he brought us sandwiches." They were both terrorists. They were both hijackers. That is more or less the extent. That's the range of options of an army of occupation.

The ordinary youngster who goes into the army without ideals, contrary to what people may believe, doesn't go there necessarily with a racist ideology, but he certainly comes out with a racist ideology. He doesn't do the things because he has a racist ideology, he develops his racism because of the things he does. That is because when he finishes his duty in the evening, and looks at himself in the mirror, the only way he can justify all the things that he's done today is by seeing [the occupied] as an inferior people. In order to convince himself that he's still a decent human being he has to dehumanise the Palestinians. There is enormous damage on the Israeli side

The refuseniks are not just idealists. There's a lot of enlightened self-interest because the occupation is destroying Israel as it destroys Palestinian society. It eats away at the moral fibre. Those kids who don't have the guts to stand up to it will go in there and after three years will come out behaving like armed thugs. Nobody can guarantee that the day they take off that uniform is the day they'll take off that mode of behaviour. Israel today is much more of a violent and angry and criminal place than any of us remember…

The occupation is costing at every level. One in every three Israeli children grows up in poverty. Our education system is being destroyed. People used to come from all over the world to see the Israeli health system but there's not much to see now. Of course the Palestinians - they have it far, far worse.

We have pretty good testimony that in the Lebanon war, the refusal movement was one of the factors that put an end to that war. The then commander-in-chief said, a couple of years later, "We stopped the war [when] the refusals were in their hundreds... we could see a day where there would be thousands or tens of thousands."

I don't think the refuseniks are relevant only to the Israeli-Palestinian situation… While there are nation states there will be armies, and it is vital to educate those soldiers, to teach them to think.

Bertold Brecht said it many years ago:

General, your tank is a powerful vehicle
It smashes down a forest, it crushes a hundred persons
But it has one defect
It needs a driver...
General, man is very useful
He can fly, and he can kill.
But he has one defect.
He can think.
(Bertolt Brecht, 1938)

My hope is that when we can teach enough soldiers to think, maybe maybe we can stop the tanks.

  • Peretz Kidron's organisation Yesh Gvul is asking for groups to "adopt" a jailed refusenik. This involves moral support, letters and emails to their families; political support, calling protests for their release; and financial support. Reservists on active duty get an allowance to replace their civilian salary but the families of the refuseniks get no support.peretz@yesh-gvul.org

Eilat Maoz

Eilat Maoz is one of the signatories of the letter of the "Shministim" (top year high school students awaiting call-up) to Ariel Sharon, refusing to take part in "acts of oppression against the Palestinian people, acts that should properly be called terrorist actions."

When we first wrote the Shministim letter of June 2001, we didn't come to a decision to write a letter as refuseniks, we came to find the best way we could to resist the occupation. We were all activists before. At the beginning we were about 10 activists.

We looked back on the history of our country and the things that were done before us by Yesh Gvul, and others, and we realised that one of the most strong actions you can take against the policy of your government is to refuse to take part in it, because no occupation could be held without soldiers. So we wrote a letter where we declared that we would not be a part of the repression of the Palestinian people.

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