Conscientious objectors: Why some Israeli teens refuse army conscription

Eighteen-year-old Tal Mitnick became the first conscientious objector since Israel began its military offensive in Palestine’s Gaza in early October last year. A military tribunal sentenced him to a 30-day prison term and soon after Mitnick will have to report to the recruitment centre again. Another refusal will likely lead to another jail sentence.

An anti-apartheid campaigner, Mitnick has been a vocal critic of Israel’s oppressive policies and has participated in protests in Tel Aviv along with other anti-war activists.

“I’m refusing to take part in the war in Gaza...slaughter does not end the slaughter,” Mitnick spoke to reporters outside the military prison where he is being held.

Mitnick is part of Mesarvort, an Israeli refuser support network connecting different initiatives and groups that have taken up an ideological stance against Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinians.

His decision to go public is a testament to his courage for his friends.

“My friend Tal, we knew he was going to object way before the war, and I have known him since I was first imprisoned. I told him it was very brave to not only object but to object now and to show his face,” former conscientious objector Nave Shabtay Levin, 19, spoke to TRT World. He is also a Mesarvort activist who refused to enlist last year and spent 115 days serving six prison sentences. He also helped prepare Tal Mitnick for his time in prison.

Nave, which means oasis in Hebrew, grew up in a political household. “I come from a very political family. I have a leftist mother, and my father is a soldier. They used to argue about politics through me.”

His journey as an anti-apartheid and anti-war activist in Israel came through questioning the turmoil during his childhood. “You see yourself in this country, in a war after war. You see all these deaths, and you start thinking, how can we stop that madness? And it's a difficult question to ask,” says Nave to TRT World.

“I hated the fact of death since the day I was born,” Nave says that he started taking more interest in the Occupation and even went to protests in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem.

After following alternative media websites and Israeli human rights watchdog B'Tselem's documentation on Israel’s human rights violations against Palestinians, Nave realised the Israeli army.

“The army that I was told my whole life was this great organisation that's protecting me and doing everything for my protection is not doing that; it is focusing on occupying another people. Seeing that, I was shocked because the army is at the heart of Israeli society.”

Breaking the news to his family, Nave’s mother was pretty happy with it but his father who had served in the Israeli army struggled to come to terms with Nave’s decision. “It was very difficult for him, but he is still my father. And he told me that he loves me no matter what.”

Nave says that conscientious objectors come from a small privileged class especially when it comes to family support. “The day I objected, I saw someone who was enlisted in the army. And this woman told me ‘well done’. I was confused. I said, well if you support what I'm doing, why are you becoming a soldier? And she told me because she would lose [touch with] her family.”

In Israel, defying it means risking your safety, exposing yourself to social ostracisation, which could go to the extent of losing ties with your own family, as military conscription is seen as a unifying factor, a part of Israeli national identity and a rite of passage.

“From the second you are born, you are born to become a soldier; it's not only the law in Israel, it's the society,” says Nave.

According to Israeli law, Jewish Israeli citizens over the age of 18 are required to perform military service.

Once enlisted, men serve for three years, and women serve for two years. Following this, men are required to perform a period of ‘reserve service’ each year, while it’s voluntary for women.

However, there are some exemptions. The Israeli army does not conscript Arab Israelis, but they may choose to volunteer. Exemptions are also granted on medical, legal, and religious grounds. The ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews are not obliged to conscript either. While some religious minorities are allowed to not enlist in the military, Israel takes a strong objection against those who refuse to enlist on political grounds.

A military tribunal in 2004 ruled that refusing to serve based on political grounds falls under the umbrella of civil disobedience, hence the reason why conscientious objectors are imprisoned and condemned.

Like in the case of Yiftach Spector, a brigadier general in the reserves, who took part in the bombing of the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

In 2003, he, along with 26 other Israeli Air Force pilots, refused to take part in military operations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, causing national fury and condemnation.

In the same year, a letter was signed by 13 reservists of an elite commando unit who refused to take part in the occupation of Palestinian territories. In 2014, 43 veterans of Israel’s intelligence unit refused to participate in any actions against Palestinian civilians in the occupied territories.

A month, before the war in Gaza started in October, over 230 Israeli high schoolers, signed an open letter and announced they would be resisting the military draft as conscientious objectors. This was in protest against the increasingly authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu government and advocated the demand for the restoration of democracy.

However, a month later, the stakes were never so high for the current generation of objectors. Israeli citizens opposed to the war in Gaza have been suspended from universities, fired from jobs, or arrested for being critical on social media.

Public support for Israel’s military offensive has also surged, with a survey by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies showing that 96 percent of Jewish Israelis rally behind the government’s stated objective of dismantling the ‘Hamas government.’

“The war turned Israeli society the other way; people who were leftists became right-wingers because the war boosted the feelings of nationalism,” says Nave on the shifting attitudes of Israeli society.

But for activists like Nave Shabtay Levin and Tal Mitnick, the anti-war stance is moral in the objectors' movement. “We won't turn a blind eye to the genocide in Gaza and be patient just because that's what we are supposed to do.”