Similar to the way American conscientious objectors were treated in World War I
On December 26, 2023, Tal Mitnick, then 18, entered an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) enlistment center in Tel Aviv and publicly announced that he would refuse military service.
Subsequently, he was forced to serve 185 days in a military prison and was released in July 2024.
Mitnick recently told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that “I had a choice: to be part of this force currently genociding my neighbors, that is killing people’s loved ones, or I had a choice to refuse.” Honorably, he chose to refuse.
At the time of his arrest, Mitnick called the Israeli response to October 7 “a revenge campaign” against not just Hamas but all Palestinians, marked by “indiscriminate bombings of residential neighborhoods and refugee camps in Gaza, full military and political support for settler violence in the West Bank and political persecution on an unprecedented scale inside Israel.”[1]
Mitnick is a leftist who was inspired by his father, a journalist who spent a lot of time in the Israeli-occupied West Bank telling stories from the Palestinian side.
He was among 200 high school teenagers who signed onto a letter saying that they would refuse to be conscripted in protest of the government’s judicial overhaul that threatened what was left of the country’s democracy and Israel’s decades-long control over the West Bank.
In March, Mitnick embarked on a cross-Canada tour with fellow refusenik, Einat Gerlitz, 21, who refused Israeli military service in 2022 and spent 87 days in a military prison.
As part of their speaking tour, Mitnick and Gerlitz were featured in a March 16 webinar hosted by the World Beyond War peace group in collaboration with the Refuser Solidarity Network.
Both Mitnick and Gerlitz urged people in attendance to lobby their governments to halt weapons supplies to Israel that have enabled the genocide in Gaza, to promote campaigns to divest from Israeli products, and to issue an arms embargo on the Israeli state.
When asked about prison conditions when they were incarcerated, Gerlitz said that the experience was tough but nothing like what Palestinians experience in Israeli prisons where they are subjected to completely inhuman conditions and are routinely tortured.
Mitnick said that, while he was in prison, his approach was to try to build personal relationships with other inmates so that, with time, they might consider some of his political viewpoints.
A number of refuseniks had been sent to solitary confinement for voicing political opinions that were critical of the Israeli government and considered to be leftist.
Mitnick said that there was a general climate of hatred for Palestinians and leftists in Israel that worsened after October 7.
Before October 7, he said, many Israelis were open to the idea of peace but, since October 7, a large majority have come to “favor destruction and killing.”
The webinar speakers were introduced by Ron Van Norstrand, a Vietnam-era veteran and member of the Veterans for Peace organization living in Syracuse, New York.
Van Norstrand said that, if people could remove the blinders of “profit and power,” they could see the wisdom of Native American groups who formed a peaceful confederacy in the 18th century, and of Israeli refuseniks who have followed in their tradition.
The first speaker, Atalya Ben-Abba, was the social media manager for the Refuser Solidarity Network who spent 110 days in an Israeli military prison for refusing service in the IDF in 2017.
She said that she refused to join the military out of protest of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which she did not want to participate in.
This was not an easy position to take because Israel is a very militarized society, she said, whose culture venerates military service.
Ben-Abba grew up in Jerusalem, not far from where Palestinians live, and was exposed to the hardships and humiliations they endure on a daily basis.
Atalya said that her experience was rather unique as most Israeli youth were “never given the opportunity to interact with Palestinians” and, hence, do not understand “how they have been oppressed and that their land was stolen.”
According to Atalya, Israeli schools teach kids a false historical narrative, which claims that Israel was an empty land before Jewish settlement and that it was established as a safe refuge for Jewish people.
The media contribute to people’s ignorance by failing to spotlight the Palestinians’ experience, while often promoting outright hatred toward them.
Since October 7, Ben-Abba said, there has been a “gross environment” where genocidal language toward the Palestinians is openly adopted and people are supporting war crimes and calls for the extermination of the Palestinian people.
In such an environment, speaking out is exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, she and other refuseniks believe that it is especially important to show people that there are different ways of thinking and to amplify voices for peace.
The next speaker after Ben-Abba was Mattan Helman, executive director of the Refuser Solidarity Network, who gave a history of Israeli conscientious objectors.
Helman said that the first conscientious objectors came out during the 1948 Israeli independence war when they refused to participate in the violent displacement of Palestinians in the Nakba.
The next wave of objectors came out after the 1967 Six-Day War when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was formalized.
The largest number of objectors to date came out during the 1980s Lebanon War, which was referred to by some analysts as Israel’s Vietnam. Many reserve soldiers refused service and formed a community that hosted a Woodstock-type concert and other peace-oriented events.
In May 2000, the Israeli government was forced to end IDF’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon because of manpower concerns, which Helman said exemplifies the “ability of refusers to affect governmental policy.”
The Israeli government felt similarly constrained, Helman says, during its brutal suppression of the second Palestinian Intifada when the number of refusers was relatively high.
Some Jewish settlements were removed from the occupied West Bank at this time and Israel had to pull back from occupied Palestinian lands.
Helman said that he only learned about the oppression of the Palestinians at the age of 15, even though he grew up only 20 kilometers from the West Bank.
At the time, he was becoming more critical of Israeli society, in part because he felt somewhat like an outsider since he was not Jewish (his father was Jewish, but not his mother).
Helman said he grew up on a kibbutz, whose members engrained in him humanistic socialist values.
Paradoxically, the kibbutz was strongly Zionist and militaristic, he said, because of the belief that kibbutzniks had helped build the State of Israel.
When Helman joined a youth group, he was expelled because of his left-wing outlook and critical attitudes toward the Israeli military.
Helman said that many people who expressed hatred toward leftists when he was imprisoned and in other contexts did not understand what leftists actually believed.
For example, people thought leftists wanted all Jews to be killed, which obviously is not true.
When Helman explained to one person that he was against the killing and oppression of Palestinians but did not want all Jews to be killed, the person responded by saying, “oh, so you are then in the center. The right wants all Palestinians killed, and left all Jews.”
In reality, only the first part of what he was saying was true (the right indeed wants to kill all Palestinians), but not the second.
American Comparisons
The Israeli refuseniks are brave people whose principled position has come at a heavy personal price.
Their harsh treatment compares with conscientious objectors in the U.S. during World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War, during which more than 3,000 men were jailed for draft resistance.
In 2017, the National World War I Museum in Kansas City unveiled a plaque honoring two conscientious objectors, Joseph and Michael Hofer, who died in late 1918 in Ft. Leavenworth military prison after having undergone weeks of torture in a dungeon at the notorious Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay.
Part of a Christian religious group (Hutterites) that believes in pacifism, the Hofer brothers were two of 504 conscientious objectors to the Great War in the U.S. who faced imprisonment and torture.
In World War II, around 6,600 American men were imprisoned for refusing to register for the draft or rejecting alternative service.
Psychological studies found that these men—like their modern Israeli counterparts—tended to be idealists with high levels of intelligence and educational achievement who were more interested in artistic and social service occupations than careers in business.[2]
One World War II conscientious objector, Bayard Rustin, the future civil rights leader, wrote: “By some prison officials we were considered the worst scum of the earth because we had refused to fight for our country.”
The same attitudes prevail in Israel today, though history will surely look kindly on Israel’s conscientious objectors—and unkindly on the youth of their age who did not follow their lead.
In a statement published on social media at the time of his act of refusal, Mitnick had written that, “even with all the violence in the world, we could not erase the Palestinian people or their connection to this land, just as the Jewish people or our connection to that same land cannot be erased. Violence cannot solve the situation—neither by Hamas nor by Israel. There is no military solution to a political problem. Therefore, I refuse to enlist in an army that believes that the real problem can be ignored, under a government that only continues the bereavement and pain.” ↑
Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 48. See also Mulford Q. Sibley and Philip E. Jacob, Conscription of Conscience: The American State and the Conscientious Objector, 1940-1947 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952); Steve McQuiddy, Here on the Edge (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2013). ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
