AWOL in New York - From Israeli Refusenik to OrganizerBy
ASAF SHTULL-TRAURINGarticle from
Counter-punch A car approached the checkpoint. Probably out of boredom, one of the soldiers on duty ordered the person in the car to start driving around in circles. The Palestinian driver played along with the armed soldier's game and laughed anxiously, unsuccessfully trying to hide his humiliation. What amazed me most about this event wasn't what the soldier did but what I didn't do: I didn't stop him from humiliating the helpless driver." My philosophy teacher, an extraordinary, poetic and gentle man, told me this story a few years ago. This event motivated him to declare his refusal to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and two weeks and two days before my draft date, I was on a plane leaving Israel to New York, running from what was supposed to be the next step in the natural pattern of my life, predetermined by law before I was born. Israel has a mandatory army service of three years for most eighteen-year-old Israeli citizens; I was defying it by leaving the country. When I was fifteen years old I had decided to refuse to take part in the army's violence, war crimes, self-destruction, hatred and stupidity. And so I did, and three years later I was on my way out.
Israel is a hard place to live these days. I vividly remember studying for an exam with a friend last year on the rooftop of his building, one of the highest in the city. Suddenly, we heard a great explosion. "Was that thunder?" I asked my friend, but the sky was almost cloudless. Looking down at the city below us, we saw a plume of smoke rising from the central mall. For a short moment we heard nothing, and immediately following we heard screams. Five minutes later the news reports were of another suicide attack. Two people were murdered, among them a sixteen-year-old boy.
This was not the first or last terrorist attack in my town. Weeks later, a militant started shooting in the street, killing a girl my age. A few months earlier a suicide bomber blew himself up in a bus in our city, and a bomb was uncovered just a few hundred meters from my house. Recently a girl from my grade was murdered in a suicide attack somewhere in the north of Israel.
The Israeli army usually responds to suicide attacks by putting sieges around cities, bombing civilian targets where suspected terrorists are located and sending troops into villages. The terrorist groups clearly know and enthusiastically anticipate these developments, because the more the Palestinian people suffer, the more powerful these extremist groups become. Many Palestinians see the Palestinian Authority (kept in power by the Israeli government so as to ensure there will be someone to blame) as powerless to deal with Israeli aggression; they then give their support to groups which bring upon them more suffering and little hope for a better future.
One might wonder why Israel automatically reacts to Palestinian terrorism with its own terrorism. Do they not know that this makes Israel an even less secure place to live by empowering groups such as Hamas? Many people are perhaps unaware of the fact that Israel, towards the end of the 1980s, actively helped in the establishment of the Hamas terrorist organization, hoping to create an Islamic opposition to the more moderate and secular PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization). Afraid of the PLO's demand for a state, Israel hoped that by creating a fundamentalist opposition to it, they could break its political monopoly in the occupied territories. More than a decade later, it seems that Israel has been very successful: The Hamas and extremist Islamic movements are gaining power and popularity in the Palestinian street. Israel's counter-terrorism is perhaps a continuation of this strategy of killing off the moderate voices by strengthening the Palestinian terrorist groups. This is a cycle of blood and death, where one side gains from the other side, all at the expense of Israeli and Palestinian lives.
The cycle of blood goes way back into the 1980s. Twenty years after their land was occupied by the Israeli army in the 1967 war, the Palestinians unleashed, for the first time, their anger against the military regime; this uprising came to be known as the first Intifada. During this period my father served in the army in the occupied territories. He recalls what his commanding officer had to say to the soldiers in his very first tour of duty in the Ramallah area: "All the Arabs understand is force. If we show weakness, then we will have trouble the whole 30 days we are here. We have to kill a few Palestinians as soon as we take up our position, and then we'll have quiet." The commanding officer eventually killed a teenage Palestinian stone thrower.
This is in no way an isolated event but a militaristic attitude accepted by the army and most Israelis, who see organized counter-terrorism as the only way to deal with violent Palestinian resistance. The mentioned officer, who was at the time a family friend (not anymore!), is today a member of Parliament in the Likud party. He is in good company: Ehud Yatom, another Likud member of Parliament murdered an unarmed and cuffed militant with his bare hands. Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister and head of the Likud party, is known for his involvement in the Sabra and Shatilah massacres and for the Kybia massacre, which was led by his notorious 101 unit.
My decision to refuse was very much influenced by my father's personal experiences during the first Intifada. Like other soldiers, he understood that he wasn't protecting Israeli lives but Jewish extremist settlements built on stolen land. A year after my decision, I sent a letter to the army stating my reasons for refusing to serve in the army. I summarized the letter with the following paragraph: "Without fighting manpower, or more correctly 'cannon fodder,' no general can achieve his goals, no matter what they are. As I grew up, I became interested in politics. I began to understand that I must oppose the corruption and militarism that has saturated Israeli society with blood-thirstiness and with a twisted moral conception which serve as the foundations for the war crimes being perpetrated in the occupied territories."
My refusal was never only a personal act, but an explicitly political one. During the second Intifada, which broke out in October 2000, I joined 61 high-school student refusers. Together we sent a letter to the army declaring that we "refuse to serve the occupation." As a result we got worldwide attention and brought the concept of conscientious objection into the Israeli consciousness. In a couple of years the Israel youth refusers became a fullgrown movement with hundreds of members and a small hardcore group of activists of which I was part. Our "Reveille for Refusers" was illegal and unprecedented in Israeli history.
Israeli students are taught to believe that the Israeli Army is the most moral army in the world. But one cannot ignore the reality in which Palestinian children are dying daily; 70% of Palestinian requests for ambulances cannot be granted due to restrictions on movement; sick people and pregnant women cannot pass through checkpoints; and Israeli bulldozers tear down one house after another. Israel is currently building a wall which encircles whole towns and villages, separating people from their land and water.
My decision to refuse was based on the freedom-responsibility principle: the more I reject societal law and taboo, the more responsibility I acquire as an individual. I see this as the fundamental process of becoming more human, for the difference between animals and human beings is in the amount of freedom and responsibility they have. The more a person relies on social norms, laws, and instincts to determine his life, the more he is giving up his individual self. I always ask my friends: if there was no draft law, would you still go to the army? Are you doing this because you are consciously deciding to do so or are you passively accepting the script of your life, written and signed before you were even born?
Looking at class reunion photographs, I see good friends my age wearing army uniforms. One of them will soon be flying a fighter jet, another will be driving a tank, and still others will be holding rifles. I wonder: why do these people, all my age, seem to possess a God-like power and right to decide who shall die and who shall live, who by fire, and who by water? Israeli military law defines soldiers as "military property" and as such perhaps they can be bargained, bought, sold and even vandalized. By that definition, soldiers can be used as a means but never as an end. Soldiers do not posses the God-like power to kill, but are olive-green-clad, obedient extensions of a greater machine of organized violence.
So where do soldiers fit into the freedom-responsibility principle? By a superficial glance, it may seem that soldiers have no freedom and thus no responsibility for their actions. The irony is that their power derives from the fact that human individuality was taken from them once they became soldiers, at least symbolically speaking. As opposed to Samson, the shaving of one's hair on the draft date is the symbol of "freedom" from individualism and "freedom" to become part of a powerful, violent collective. Once joining the fatalistic cycle of war, there is not much time or place to think. Even my teacher couldn't stop the poor driver going around in circles. His only way out was by refusing.
Soldiers should not be excused from moral judgment, for they chose to be killing machines much as a sober man chooses to be drunk. They chose to enter the cycle of violence from their own free will. Humans are born free and thus must ultimately be judged as such. During the second World War, a student came up to the French philosopher Sartre and asked him whether he should join the French Army or support his mother at home. The philosopher famously answered: You are free to choose.
Sartre claims that when willfully joining a war, a soldier must take full responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who does not want to take upon himself such responsibility (including that towards family members left behind), must desert, commit suicide or sit in jail. Sartre suggests that every action we take in our lives has implications and that as free human beings we must take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Soldiers, although forced into becoming the mindless property of the military, are still free and responsible human beings by the fact that they chose to be soldiers.
Once deciding to refuse to serve in the army, I developed what I now call an anarchist consciousness, which is very much based on the freedom-responsibility principle. I assume that such a consciousness started to develop earlier than my decision to refuse, perhaps resulting from the fact that as I matured I found out that many vital parts of my formal education (both religious and secular) were based on lies and misconceptions, mostly in the context of orthodox doctrine and ideological Zionist propaganda. I had been taught that Israel was built on lands without people. It took me many years to find out that 471 villages were wiped from the face of the earth by Israeli militias, and that more than 600,000 Palestinians fled from ethnic cleansing during the 1948 war. This disappointment probably led me to doubt pedagogical authority in particular and authority in general. My disappointment did not develop into a youthful rebellion, because my parents accepted my attitude as legitimate and even came to adopt many of my views.
Instead of becoming a rebellious 'punk', I became a political activist and conscientious objector. I cannot say that I did not have my share in draft burning and graffiti spraying, but these were thought-out actions for which I took full responsibility. I would not have felt ashamed if I had been caught writing graffiti saying "Refuse to serve the occupation."
The penalty for going AWOL (Absent Without Leave) is officially fifteen years in jail. Ironically, Omer, a guy from my class, is now in the army unit in charge of capturing AWOL soldiers and drug dealers. The army redefined the relationship between Omer and me; I am now a criminal, in the same category as drug dealers; this person who used to study with me might be the one who picks me up at the airport the day I return to Israel, sending me straight to military prison. Back in Israel, a criminal record has been opened against me, and perhaps also an unofficial social one. Refusing to serve in the army is an action that is considered treason in many political circles, even in the left.
By leaving Israel, I knew I will not be able to return for many years, until the day I feel I am willing and ready to sit in jail for unknown periods of time. Leaving my friends was a hard thing in and of itself, but in the context of my refusal, it was even more tense because all of my friends were going to the army while I was leaving to attend university. A few months after leaving for New York, a good friend sent an email to a few people with a picture of teenagers training for army service. In the email referring to the picture, he wrote: "It is amazing how our political discussions are turning into reality, from theory into practice. Excuse me but I just have to compare what you are doing there and what we are doing here... The contrast between our lives is amazing."
Many people back in Israel (people who were never politically active themselves) blame me for leaving the important struggle in favor of my personal interest. Beyond the fact that I am continuing the struggle here as well, I have to admit that in some way I do feel "guilty." Three of my fellow activists in the youth refusal movement who spent the last year in jail, were just sentenced for another whole year. Perhaps I need to join them. On the other hand, I know that by staying in Israel, my parents wouldn't have left me, and therefore my decision would have impacted them as well.
The sense of guilt, or more accurately duty I am experiencing is not towards Israel's law but towards humanity in general; my morality and conscience have no geographical boundaries nor nationalist inclinations. If something wrong is happening on the other side of the world, you have a moral duty to fight it if you can. Considering the fact that American tax money is subsidizing the Israeli military regime, I think my duty also has practical grounds.
The value of life has nothing to with national borders and states. Back in Israel this simple notion of the universality of human life has been forgotten. Most Israelis support dropping bombs on houses of suspected militants, even if this results in the death of innocent people, including children and women. But the reality is that one cannot achieve security through the destruction of others. In the famous case of the attack on the terrorist Sallah Shadeh, the bombing not only left thirteen innocent people dead, but also lead to a wave of suicide attacks in Israel after a relative period of quiet. Alas, the American military is trying to learn from the Israeli Army's experience in its war against terrorism. Unfortunately reality shows that Israel's "war on terrorism" is both immoral and unsuccessful.
Leaving Israel was not a negative experience. It was also a powerful existential event, which empowered me as a human being. It helped unleash the anarchist within me, in the sense that I realized that law and social taboos sometimes must be ignored in favor of human life and democratic freedoms. I understood that I must turn my privilege against itself and against other people's undeserved privileges. I knew that once I am in the army, it would be hard to change things; I would become part of the shaping forces themselves, in the role of an obedient soldier.
My teacher, the commanding soldier and the Palestinian driver all became slaves of the occupation and victims of their lost identities and freedoms. I freed myself from the cycle of blood, but this freedom gave me more responsibility as an individual. As I told my friends who are in the army now, I am ready to take this responsibility upon myself, and I invite them to join me.
Asaf Shtull-Trauring is an 18-year-old philosophy student at NYU. He went AWOL as a process of avoiding the draft in Israel and was part of the Israeli Youth Refusal movement. He can be reached at:
[email protected]
