Letting their conscience be their guide

Israeli refuseniks are not pacifists. They just maintain a consciousness about the fact of a border.

by Chris LaVigne <clavigne@republic-news.org>

In a home tucked away on a quiet street near Dunbar, I recently had the opportunity to talk with Peretz Kidron, one of Israel's leading peace activists. We sat on two floral-print sofas in a living room with walls covered in photos of Kidron's host family. I asked him questions about his faraway country and his current speaking tour of North America. At first, talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict in such banal domestic surroundings struck me as odd and out of place. By the end of the interview, however, I could see that it really was the most appropriate location.

The problems of Israel and the occupied territories are not foremost in the minds of many Vancouverites. I, for one, had spent the morning cursing my lack of umbrella and bemoaning the inconsistent weather patterns plaguing our city. Israelis and Palestinians don't have the luxury of such ignorance, of course. They live under a shadow of violent conflict very different from the one cast by our rain clouds, though no less constant.

In Israel, Kidron tells me, "You really have to work very hard to not be involved." For most of his life, Kidron has done the opposite sort of work. His involvement in Israel's peace movement includes co-founding Yesh Gvul, an organization for soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied territories. In Hebrew, Yesh Gvul means "there's a border," which reflects both a political border that soldiers should not cross as well as a moral one. "There's a limit to what a soldier should do," Kidron explains, "He shouldn't do everything and anything he's told to do."

In Israel such a soldier is known as a refusenik, which is also the name of a recent book compiled by Kidron about this movement. Kidron borrowed the word from its previous use as an epithet for those Russian Jews who struggled to emigrate to Israel when the Soviet government declared it illegal to do so. Kidron sees a natural link between the two groups: "In both cases, [it's] people acting on their convictions and standing up to a very powerful bureaucracy and standing up for their convictions and even suffering for them."

Israeli citizens must serve in the military for two to three years after high school and for one month of every year afterwards as a reservist. Even immediately following their military victory in 1967, many Israelis were uncomfortable with having to fulfill this duty in the newly occupied territories. During the Lebanon War in 1982, the forced service often jarred with soldiers' personal beliefs that the war was unnecessary and immoral. Kidron explains, "We had people fighting in Lebanon and maybe bombing or bombarding a Lebanese village and then coming back, finishing their military duty and sort of taking off their uniform and demonstrating against the war in Lebanon." In the face of this legislated hypocrisy, Kidron and a group of soldiers founded Yesh Gvul as a solidarity group for those imprisoned as a result of their refusal to participate in the invasion.

Military sources have said that the refusenik movement was one factor that ended the Lebanon War and Kidron hopes that it plays a role in ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as well. He believes that the occupation is not only destroying Palestinian society, but Israel as well. "[Because of the occupation] there's been enormous physical and economic damage," Kidron argues, "Our economy is in recession. Lots of people are out of work. The government is short of money and tax revenues have fallen. Social services and welfare are starved of funds."

Yesh Gvul's main effort is to educate reservists and teenagers who are reaching conscription age about the kinds of acts they will be expected to commit in the occupied territories. One successful campaign featured a memorable poster of a young Palestinian girl whose eye had been shot out by an Israeli rubber bullet. The caption underneath read: "Daddy, what are you doing in the occupied territories?"

Kidron tells me that many Israelis are unable to discuss their conduct as soldiers because of the shame they feel. "God help you if you start behaving at the dinner table the way you behaved in the occupied territories," he says, "You know, [a soldier] can behave like a brute towards a Palestinian and he doesn't come home and boast to his mother that he's just beaten up a Palestinian woman who's her age or stopped her [from] taking her children to a hospital. He doesn't tell his mother about that. It's not the sort of thing you talk about at the dinner table. There, he's a hero defending the country."

For Kidron, the solution to the problem is to make sure that Israeli soldiers give careful thought to what they do and not simply obey every order. He emphasizes that Jews, in particular, should realize the consequences of such a blind submission to authority. Kidron is passionately against allowing refuseniks to abandon their military service altogether, however. "What happens is, as a result of that," he explains, "you get all the good kids, the bright kids, the ones who are politically aware, taking up the alternative service and then you have all the gung-ho, gun-toting skinheads in the army, making the army that much more of a menace."

The refusenik movement--of which there are now over 1,300 official members--is not based in pacifism, then, but in a belief that soldiers and society as a whole must think for themselves and behave according to their moral values. "If you look back on the 20th-century, I don't know who was worse: the fanatics or the conformists?" Kidron wonders, "The fanatics were usually very few. It was the conformists that went along with them and that made it possible for them. So, the guy who says, 'I will not conform.' Well, that takes guts and that's very often an important statement in whatever form."

In a conflict like that of Israel-Palestine, then, important decisions aren't always made on the battlefield. They can be made by a young conscript who chooses to tell her family about the horrors to which she contributed, rather than maintain the silent lie of false heroism. They can be made by a reservist sitting on a floral-pattern couch in his home, choosing not to participate in a war of occupation. Wherever and whenever they choose to act, Israeli refuseniks remind us that listening to the voice of one's conscience is never out of place.

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