This was posted by Sara Robinson, but it is written by her friend, Charles Lenchner.
It is part one of a story by an Israeli young man who refused to fight in the military because he thinks they are not treating the Palestinians as humans. (Moral Mode 2.)
I hope I see the next two parts of this also, but there is no guarantee -- it's Facebook, after all.
--Kim
I've heard my old friend Charles Lenchner tell bits of this story over a wide variety of libations in bars from coast to coast over the years -- but this is the first time I've seen it written down, with all the details.
And it seems important now, in an era when the courage to confront a brutally wrong government directly -- and pay a steep personal price for your dissent -- is going to become far more necessary.
This is part 1. He promises to tell more later. What I take away from this one is the importance of trusted counselors and mentors, and the company of friends who are taking the dare with you. Even those who take lonely personal stances do best when they're not actually alone.
What comes next is how the stand Charles and his friends took changed an entire country's narrative about the inevitability of military service. Hope he doesn't make us wait too long.
I wrote a thing about that one time a group of us decided to become refuseniks.
Subbbbstakk Shmink in comment.
....
The Choice: How I Became a Refusenik in 1987
As many of you know, I am a former refusenik. That's the word used for Israelis who either refused conscription, reserve duty, or certain orders while in uniform. It's distinct from the better known 'conscientious objector' for a bunch of reasons; the biggest is that most of Israel's refuseniks were not pacifists nor did they (mostly) completely reject serving in the IDF.
In the last two years an invigorated movement of young refuseniks has become somewhat better known. Many or most of them are connected to and supported by the Mesarvot organization. These days the draft age refuseniks are engaging in total refusal; but the numbers of partial refuseniks in reserve duty dwarfs them. There has always been a more or less stark divide between conscripts and reservists engaging in refusal.
The Choice
Before all this happened, while I was still in high school, I went to one of my political mentors with a dilemma that consumed me. Like nearly all Israeli Jews, I received my first call up notice at the age of 16. It was clear to me that Israel's occupation was only possible due to ongoing human rights abuses against the Palestinians living there. Moreover, it was Israel's steadfast refusal to accept the Palestinians as people deserving equal rights, individually and collectively, that stood behind the ongoing cycles of violence from which both sides suffered. So what to do about my impending draft?
For months I did my best to research what it meant to be a soldier in the IDF. This will probably sound like a dumb question for most Israelis ("she'elat kitbeg") because 'everyone' goes to the army, including my sister. My experience was that asking normie Israelis didn't work very well. The assumption that everyone just does it was so strong and so unexamined meant that almost no one could break it down for me. For people who more or less supported Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, there was no cognitive dissonance. For me there was.
Nonetheless I learned that basic training in any army was designed to transform young people in a fairly coercive environment. The method was to subject recruits to high stress situations that can't be resolved individually, what some would call 'breaking' them1. Then the training regimen reconstructs your instincts so that you are conditioned to obey orders without question. Absent such a transformation how would any military unit be able to operate? My 16 year old self figured that the system must be pretty darn effective given how little resistance there was to ongoing occupation and human rights abuses. Was I in danger of being coercively transformed? How would I fare under those circumstances? What were my political ideas worth if in the end I decided to conform?
In the summer before my senior year it felt like the choice was between three undesirable options. To simply refuse service altogether, to fake mental illness and get a medical exemption, or to sneak away to the United States where my father lived. The first option felt like the most honorable one.
Among the adults I turned to for advice was one of my political mentors, future Knesset Member Dov Khenin. He asked me: do I want to find a personal solution for myself or make a difference? He explained that the social fault line in Israel wasn't between those who reject any military service and those that don't. It was between those who reject the Occupation and those who support it. My decision would have more impact if it highlighted an existing fault line in political opinion. And if I'm not prioritizing political impact, then why should anyone care about my act of refusal? Better yet, recruit others and make it a collective effort.
The Shministim Are (Re-)Born
Khenin persuaded me. I soon found out that organized groups of high school seniors facing conscription had written public letters before. The first one was in 1970, a time of ongoing military tension, especially between Egypt and Israel. It told then prime minister Golda Meir that it was wrong to send more young Israelis to die while she was rejecting the path of dialogue and possible peace. The press dubbed it 'The Shministim Letter' which translates to 'The High School Seniors Letter'. Dov Khenin was one of the signatories.2 However, unlike the first letter, it was explicit about the threat of refusal to serve as an Israeli soldier in the Occupied Territories.
Over the course of the next year I reached out to other young people I knew in left-wing youth organizations. By the summer we had dozens of interested parties and a core group was meeting every week or two to plan. Those were heady days; it felt like we were on the cusp of something big, not just in our own lives but in the real world as well. The majority of our families were either hostile or ignorant of what we were planning. We all understood that going public would result in significant backlash, publicly and privately, even before being drafted.
That long ago summer before my enlistment I was lucky enough to travel in Europe for the first time. My call up date was in late November, and I was one of the first in our group. Upon my return we learned that the army had changed my date to early October. It seems I would be the first one of our group to face the draft, followed by refusal and prison. Our band of future refuseniks had to get moving.
A week before my call up date, one of Israel's tabloidiest tabloids (Ha'olam Hazeh) interviewed me outside the call up center. A few days after that, our public letter of refusal dropped with 16 names on it. And a few days after that, full of anxiety and made semi-infamous in the press, I walked into the call up center and presented myself for duty.
(first of a series)
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