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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
A young Israeli draft resister isn't challenging just the Israeli occupation, but the very foundation of this warrior nation.
May 30, 2002 | Haggai Matar is standing in an ornate Brooklyn church on a warm night in May, trying to explain why he started a movement among young Israelis to refuse to serve in the army. It began during the summer of 2001, when Israeli society was convulsed by suicide bombings. Matar was a 17-year-old activist who'd worked for Palestinian rights, and he knew that the following year he'd be faced with going to the occupied territories to implement policies he despised.
So he and a few friends he'd met in the peace movement drafted a letter to Ariel Sharon informing the prime minister of their refusal to join the army. By the time they sent it in late August, it had been signed by 62 high school students, mostly people they knew; now the number is up to 170.
"We, the undersigned, youths who grew up and were brought up in Israel, are about to be called to serve in the [Israel Defense Forces]," read the so-called Seniors Letter. "We protest before you against the aggressive and racist policy pursued by the Israeli government and its army, and to inform you that we do not intend to take part in the execution of this policy." The letter went on to decry human rights violations by the military, and concluded: "We will obey our conscience and refuse to take part in acts of oppression against the Palestinian people, acts that should properly be called terrorist actions."
Standing before a crowd of a 100 or so in the Brooklyn church last week, Matar addressed his government with measured fury, saying, "You are criminals, you are terrorists, and I'm not going to take it." Most of the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Some screamed and booed. One livid Israeli woman insisted he was an imposter and challenged him to speak Hebrew.
Matar's words and actions have touched off an even more intense reaction in Israel. Certainly, there have been Israeli army refuseniks since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but they were drawn from the ranks of soldiers -- indeed, they relied on their army affiliation to bolster their legitimacy. Matar and his friends are different. Many of them aren't just refusing to serve in the occupied territories -- they're refusing to serve, period. While the Seniors Letter includes the signatures of some who object only to the army's actions toward Palestinians, Matar's agenda is much broader: He wants to challenge the very foundation of a culture he says defines itself by war.
Matar and his allies' quest might seem comparable to the movement among Israeli reservists to refuse to serve in the occupied territories. A few months after the Seniors Letter, 50 reservists signed an Officers Letter, saying, "We shall not fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people." Since then, hundreds have added their name to the petition. But many reservists oppose the young refuseniks who reject conscription entirely.
"I think Haggai should join the army," says Ishai Sagi, a 25-year-old reservist and a veteran of the IDF Artillery Corps who has known Matar for years. Sagi served a month in prison for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. "He should go through basic training and learn how to defend our country," Sagi says. "If he is stationed at the Egyptian border, he should go. If he is stationed at the Lebanon border, he should go. If he decided to refuse only when called to the territories, I will support him fully."
In a country where conscription is nearly universal among secular Jews and the army forms the center of society, the burgeoning refusal movement has threatened not only the military but also Israel's conception of itself, prompting a furious outcry. Two of the signers are currently in jail. According to Matar, some were thrown out of their homes by their parents. Many were mocked by their teachers. The movement was attacked in the press. "It was like an earthquake in Israeli society," says Aron Trauring, an Israeli army veteran whose son, Asaf, helped write the Seniors Letter. "In Israel, serving in the military is a sacred duty in the real sense of that word." To reject that duty, he says, is "blasphemy."
If that's true, then 18-year-old Matar is a heretic. While military refuseniks are often emphatically patriotic -- several don't give interviews to the foreign press for fear of stoking anti-Israel sentiment -- Matar feels little need to defend his country to the world. He talks with a strange combination of blazing idealism and weary fatalism, throwing around the word "fascist" in a way not exactly calculated to win the wary to his cause.
"Israeli society is growing more and more fascist by the day," he tells me. "In any instance of growing fascism in a society in history, it's usually been opposed by a small number of people, but it did no good, because the vast majority of people don't care." With Israeli society behind Sharon's hawkish policies like never before, Matar and his friends are engaged in a struggle they see as both urgent and hopeless.
Matar will probably be imprisoned this summer, when he's supposed to report for duty. He used one of his last months of freedom to come to the United States and to rally support for his quixotic cause. His trip was organized by Courage to Refuse, an American group formed to support the Israeli refuseniks (who have a group by the same name). Matar traveled to Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Wis., and New York, speaking at synagogues, churches, schools and community centers. He came, he said, because he'd given up on Israel's ability to find peace on its own. "If there will be any change in Israeli society, it has to come from the U.S. That's why I'm here," he says.
