the exile within

I breathe in the sea air on Dimi’s terrace. A myopic vision of the Jaffa lights under quickly darkening skies is weighing me down. Sometimes the mind forgets that night is only a temporary arrangement, that dawn is always on the other side. For all I know, these are the last hours of day, ever. No more grief, no more joy, no more movement. Maybe. 

I think back to when I was 18. It felt like the very first conscious, deliberate choice I had made in my entire life. I sat my parents down and said: “I’ve decided to not join the army. I don’t know how things will turn out, but this is how it’s going to be.” And that was it. Army officials showed more resistance, but even they decided, some months later, that I would only become a waste of time and money if they forced me to serve. Three years of military service were removed from my agenda with a stroke of a signature on a measly A5 piece of paper which I would then carry with me for several years when flying abroad, to dispel any doubts about my freedom to travel. I was declared mentally unfit to serve. 

According to the IDF, 27.7% of people due to be enlisted in 2007 (excluding, of course, Israeli Arabs) have “dodged the draft”. This figure includes 11.2% orthodox Jews, who under Israeli law are exempted from service as long as they dedicate their time to religious studies (35% of all Jewish women are exempted in this way). 4.2% move abroad while the rest are exempted on medical, mental or criminal grounds. 

Then there are several hundred young people a year who declare a conscientious objection to serve in the military. Based on a Supreme Court ruling, the state has  ten years ago appointed a special army committee made up of reserve psychiatrists and psychologists  whose job it is to determine the legal and moral validity of any conscientious objection to serve. “Selective objection” to serve in the occupied territories is more readily punishable by imprisonment than a general pacifist objection, though the absolute majority of male pacifists or political objectors will have spent at least 3 months in jail and a considerable amount of money in legal fees before being released on the grounds of “incompatibility”. Very few are officially released on conscientious grounds, for fear of seeing the trend increase. A good resource on these matters is www.newprofile.org.

Now there are those who will say: “but you are turning your back on the state! This country has given you so much and you don’t even give anything back! Why should others do the dirty work for you? We need defending!”.

The sentimental and pseudo-heroic connection to the state as the exclusive facilitator of healthy social relations is perhaps not surprising, but certainly perverse. States, if anything, are a whole lot better at robbing people of their freedoms rather than facilitating them. In other words, the state does not enable my freedom of speech - that is my job - but it may well disable it in various means. So the idea that I have a debt to society that can only be redeemed through military service (and not through social activism, critical journalism and civil networking) is suspect, to say the least. As for the dirty work being done for me - let me be quite clear. I did not and do not ask the government to spend billions of dollars from the state budget on an intricate and devilish system of control and oppression that has been in place in the West Bank and Gaza since the 1990s. “Peace Summits” come and go, but for people living under the ongoing Occupation, they mean very little. By gradually making it more difficult for Palestinians to travel, trade and live, especially for those Palestinians living in the now hermetically-sealed Gaza strip, the Israeli state is undermining Palestinian sovereignty to the point where it will soon be easier to replace the two-state solution with a special arrangement between Israel, Jordan and Egypt that will keep Palestinians out and fortify Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Israel knows that healthy relations with a neighbouring Palestinian state will naturally spell an opening up of the borders, both physical, economical and demographic - after all, around 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab Palestinians themselves. But as long as a minimum level of conflict and tension is maintained, the justification and consensus for aberrations such as the Separation Wall still persist. Given this state of affairs, I am left with the conviction that the IDF’s main purpose is not, in fact, to defend the lives of all Israelis, but rather to support an exclusive mode of social engineering that will always produce resistance from both within and without. If the Israeli and US governments are so anxious to prove me wrong, let them start by ending the Occupation and the siege on Gaza completely and unconditionally. 

When Israel refuses to even discuss a ceasefire with Hamas, presumably because its generals are too busy planning for the next war, is it really surprising that “youth motivation” is on the decrease? How much longer will generations of young people be willing to fight and die in recurrent wars for a cause that, increasingly, eludes rational description? For surely, if it is survival that is our business, then better, much less violent paths to achieve this are readily available. This will mean our society, that was built on the premise of social domination, will have to change. But if survival only do as an unchanging, uncompromising force that is the trampling foot of Israeli politics today, then it will never work. Like many before us, we will only be learning in the slow, hard way.