Hell no, Bibi's nephew won't go

Israel is throwing the book at Netanyahu's refusenik kin, as the number of young people evading military service continues to rise.

By Michelle Goldberg

Feb 28, 2003 | In less than two weeks, 20-year-old Jonathan Ben-Artzi will likely become the first Israeli conscientious objector in three decades to be tried before a military tribunal, where he could be sentenced to up to three years in prison for refusing to serve in the military. He's already been locked up for nearly eight months without a trial. His family is firmly behind him, arguing that the government is getting tough on so-called refuseniks because they challenge not just Israeli policy in the occupied territories, but the entire structure of Israeli society, built as it is around compulsory military service.

Well, maybe not his whole family. Ben-Artzi's parents are committed Israeli progressives, but his uncle is none other than the ultra-hawkish former prime minister and current finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man to the right of Ariel Sharon. Ben-Artzi's connection to Netanyahu has made his story big news throughout Europe and the Middle East. Though Netanyahu hasn't involved himself in the case, Ben-Artzi's sister, Ruth, a 31-year-old doctoral student at Columbia, believes that the publicity about his famous nephew has spurred the Israel Defense Forces to try first to cajole and then to force Ben-Artzi into line. The head of IDF personnel has even been put in charge of dealing with Netanyahu's outspoken nephew.

"It's either embarrassing the army or putting them in a position where they feel they have to set some kind of example or scare other young men," Ruth Ben-Artzi says. Army spokespeople couldn't be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, Ben-Artzi, a longtime pacifist whose family and friends call him Yoni, isn't backing down. Instead, he, his family and his attorney hope his trial will force a public debate on conscientious objection, a deeply taboo subject in a country where the army is held sacred. "This trial is very important for the force of conscience in the Israeli legal system," says Michael Sfard, Ben-Artzi's lawyer. "If we win this trial it means the Israeli legal system has allowed respect to the human conscience."

Since he's been in prison, Ben-Artzi's family says, a series of high-ranking officers have told him that if he'd simply let himself be drafted, he'll be stationed in a hospital and won't have to fight. But Matania Ben-Artzi, Jonathan's father (and Netanyahu's brother-in-law), says his son refused. "He told them the following," says the obviously proud father, himself a military veteran. "Whatever organization I'm going to join, I'll try to do the maximum in that organization, not the minimum. I am a pacifist. I don't want to join this organization. It does not act in my name. It's morally weak for me to be in the organization and yet to avoid doing what others are doing."

Ben-Artzi was also offered the opportunity to see a military psychologist who could declare him mentally unfit, but again he refused. "I'm not mentally ill," his sister quotes him as saying. "I'm a pacifist. That's not a mental illness. Don't tell me to go to a psychologist who will sign a letter so it will give you a way out so you don't have to deal with me."

Right now Israel isn't sure how to deal with men like Ben-Artzi. Israeli law allows most Arabs, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and females who declare themselves pacifists to be exempted from military service, but it makes no such provision for secular Jewish male objectors. Ben-Artzi wants to do his service under civilian auspices, as Orthodox Jewish girls are allowed to do, but he wasn't allowed to. Refuseniks like him must go before a military panel that is bound by no legal standard and that almost never rules in their favor -- out of 53 requests between 1998 and 2000, only three were approved.

But as the military's overtures to Ben-Artzi suggest, it's gotten relatively easy for men to escape military service in indirect ways. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 45 percent of the young people who are fit to serve in the army don't. That number includes Israeli Arabs and Orthodox Jews, but it also includes many mainstream Israelis who claim to have psychological problems. "The army encourages people who don't want to serve to get out the back door, to play crazy or fake mental problems," refusenik Haggai Matar told Salon last year before he was imprisoned. Those who refuse to lie about their politics go to jail.

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