
The greatest crimes in history were all crimes of obedience, stemming from criminal orders that were carried out by regular, ordinary people, not necessarily sadists or psychopaths.
Idith Zertal is an Israeli historian and professor at the University of Basel. Her publications include Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and From Catastrophe to Power: The Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (University of California Press, 1998).
In her harrowing book about Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt attempted to discern the internal and external mechanisms that create a bureaucratic mass murderer, a functionary of evil who passionately and eagerly commits atrocious crimes by virtue of orders he received and the spirit of the Führer and the times. Yet the real, hidden hero in her book about the Eichmann trial is a rebel, a conscientious objector named Anton Schmidt, whose name came up almost by chance in one of the testimonies at the trial. The brave soldier Schmidt, who assisted Jews in the ghetto during his service in Vilna in 1941, secretly providing them with food, information, release certificates, and escape routes into the forests, was the exact opposite of the senior functionary Eichmann, the careerist eager to obey and advance within the hierarchy of evil.
Schmidt’s actions were based on the choices of a man freely thinking for himself. In one defining moment, he turned himself into a rebel, a renegade from the norm, from his comrades, his unit, and his army, and ultimately from his life. Day after day, for months, he worked to save persecuted Jews, until he was caught, tried, and executed in April 1942. In the few pages she devoted to Anton Schmidt, Arendt turned her book upside down. No longer just a book about an evil of colossal proportions, opaque, blind, spreading and contaminating, capable of destroying an entire world in a daily routine, but also a thrilling vision of the true alternative, of the history that could have been and was not.
Conscientious objection is a rare occurrence. Very few can handle the weight of its burden. It only occurs when a person finds themselves pushed by the government, law, or certain actions imposed on them into an intolerable conflict with their views, beliefs, personality, and deepest being, and when all other avenues of resistance have been blocked. Such objection in the military context supposedly undermines the primary duty of every citizen – the duty to defend their country — and constitutes a challenge to their country’s democratic character.
Discussing the question of conscientious objection, thinkers from Henry David Thoreau, through Arendt, Albert Camus, John Rawls, to researchers and thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s saw it as a fundamental test of liberal democracy, defining and signifying the democratic essence of a state. According to those standards, Israel does not pass the test. “The only democracy in the Middle East” with its national, state, and military ethos and the mythological place of military service within it, which saw and sees itself as an eternal victim and as perpetually threatened, trapped in a fateful, deterministic war, has managed for decades to defeat the desire for justice and the impulse of conscience of most of its citizens. Alongside the few conscientious objectors, others find quiet paths of evasion for themselves, called “grey” refusal.
Conscientious Objection in Israel
The history of conscientious objection in Israel, from its founding until today, is the history of what could have been and was not, except for a few moments that marked the road not taken — like a ghost existing as a threat or a promise in the consciousness and discourse more than in historical reality. Out of the millions of Israelis who served in the army over more than 70 years, only about 10,000 men and women challenged the state and the organized apparatus of force and violence it operates and refused, for reasons of conscience, to serve in the army, to take part in its wars, or to participate in certain military operations and campaigns.[1] The state persecuted these few thousands, defining them as an existential threat, a danger to the rule of law and to democracy itself, putting them on trial and imprisoning them, sometimes for long prison terms.
The public history of conscientious objection in Israel extends from the few soldiers in the 1948 war, who refused to take part in the expulsion of Palestinians from their villages and lands, to the “refuseniks” (objectors) in the context of the occupation and its recurring wars and operations directed against civilian populations, even today. Every Israeli conscientious objector embodies a story of thinking and civic courage. Their acts of refusal, their personal stand in full public view, their declaration of truth to the government, to the majority and its leaders and the general spirit, did not change the course of history, but left behind a trail of historical texts and documents, testimonies of personal choice and courage, and of what could have been.
The military victory of 1967 and the occupation of the Palestinian territories created a new Middle East. With it, another army was born, the great victor of what was defined and understood in the public consciousness as a war of survival for the homeland, which prevented a new Holocaust. That new army also underwent a process of sanctification. This deep political fracture has marked the terrain of conscientious objection in Israel and its boundaries since the early 1970s.
The reduction of conscientious objection to a disciplinary issue has prevented a more principled discussion in military, legal, and political forums about the reasons for going to war, its goals, and the way war is conducted.
The first to refuse to serve in the occupation army and beyond Israel’s recognized international border (“the Green Line”) were outsiders who did not belong to the Zionist mainstream, children of Communist families or of recent immigrants. The most prominent of them, considered the “first refusenik”, was Giyora Neumann, a skinny boy, the son of educated parents, immigrants from Poland in the 1950s, who was raised on humanistic and universalist values. Upon receiving a draft order in the summer of 1971, he announced his refusal to serve in the “occupation army”. According to him, the entire army as an organization was “tainted” by the crimes of the occupation, and every soldier in it — even on the home front — was complicit in these crimes, even if unwillingly, and enabled them. Neumann was tried five times by junior judicial officers, who each time imprisoned him for a fixed period of 35 days. He was subjected to threats and intimidation and the press vilified him,[2] but he stuck to his refusal. His five terms of imprisonment totalled 175 days in prison, until he was put on trial in a military court on 5 July 1972.
Israel’s repressive actions in the Gaza Strip at that time, which were intended to “pacify” and left “scorched earth”, were the catalyst for Neumann’s refusal. “There is no liberal occupation, and there cannot be one”, he told his judges.
Occupation breeds resistance, resistance breeds oppression, and vice versa. That’s not what I was raised on. Both at school and at home, I was raised to love people, to treat everyone with respect — we were taught how despicable the oppression and humiliation of others are. To the best of my understanding, the IDF’s actions in the occupied territories are oppression, humiliation, expulsion, and expatriation.
The explanation for justifying the occupation by claiming that “we are about to be destroyed” has no basis, he stated. “I stand trial today not because I committed a crime, but because I listened to [and followed] my conscience.” Neumann’s case sparked outrage and petitions both in Israel and around the world. The military court sentenced him to a year in prison, but his term was shortened to two months for tactical reasons to curb and silence the demonstrations of sympathy and support for him.
Denial of Conscience
The Lebanon War in 1982 took conscientious objection to a new level. The war was seen as a political, aggressive, and “unjust” war from day one and was launched for all the wrong motives. Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, who was the brains and driving force behind the war, primarily wanted to eliminate the Palestinian leadership and elites, who lived and operated in the diaspora in Lebanon, and to establish a “new order” in the Middle East. At the same time, Prime Minister Menachem Begin sought to find a remedy, albeit belated, for his personal Holocaust trauma through it. “The alternative is Treblinka”, Begin said at a cabinet meeting on the eve of the war. Arafat hiding in Beirut was likened to “Hitler in the bunker”.
The thousands of soldiers from all walks of Israeli society who refused to serve in the early days and throughout the war did not affect the course of the conflict. The organization Yesh Gvul (“There Is a Limit”), founded by politicized young people who had previously been active for the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories, arose spontaneously at the beginning of the war and was the most comprehensive and organized expression of defiance. “We have killed too many and too many of us were killed in this war. We have conquered, bombed, destroyed too many”, the group’s leaders wrote in an open petition against the war.
Today it is clear to us: Through this war you are trying to solve the Palestinian problem militarily. But there is no military solution to the problem of a people. We did not enlist to impose a “new order” on the ruins of Lebanon. We swore to defend the State of Israel. Instead of Peace for the Galilee,[3] you brought a war with no end in sight. There is no national consensus for this war on Lebanese soil, for these lies, for this occupation. Bring the soldiers home!
Hundreds of refuseniks, mainly older reservists, some of whom already had families, were put on trial, sentenced, and sent to detention or imprisonment in military prisons. Their guilt was not their rebellious conscience — this conscience was denied and continues to be denied in all systemic discussions of conscientious objection, on the grounds that it is “political” and therefore not conscientious, as if conscience cannot be political, and the political is by definition not conscientious.
What justifies going to the [Occupied] Territories and ruling another people through brutal means? What justification is there for carrying weapons against a civilian population?
Lieutenant Colonel Eli Geva, the son of a general and the highest-ranking Israeli conscientious objector, was an exceptional case. He was apolitical, did not oppose the war in principle, but “only” the mass slaughter of Lebanese civilians and the unnecessary killing of his own soldiers and therefore refused the order to enter West Beirut at the head of his armoured brigade. Using his rank, connections, and family ties, Geva tried everything to prevent entering Beirut, to remain in the army and serve as a combat medic, a simple soldier, but he was dismissed from the army with no option to return. His refusal has become a model for many conscientious objectors after him.
This was and still is the army’s way, approved by the courts, including the Supreme Court, of disregarding conscientious objection, the concept itself, and what it represents, thereby also denying the refuseniks their dignity and humanity as human beings with a conscience and moral demands. The accepted reason for persecuting conscientious objectors is their “disciplinary” delinquency. The reduction of conscientious objection to a disciplinary issue has prevented a more principled discussion in military, legal, and political forums about the reasons for going to war, its goals, and the way war is conducted. Such a discussion is also completely lacking in the current war that began on 7 October 2023.
The Lebanon War and Israel’s violent and belligerent suppression of the Palestinian civil uprising known as the Intifada that broke out in late 1987 were, in fact, one continuous war against the Palestinian people. They were a turning point in the history of the conflict – in the persecution of an entire people, in the use of violence against the population, and in the mass casualties among civilians. Since then, the goal of all the wars, initiated and disproportionate, has been to strengthen and deepen the military occupation of the Palestinian territories and prevent any political settlement.
A Huge Black Flag
Except for a certain lull during the years of Yitzhak Rabin’s government until his assassination on 5 November 1995, the 1980s and 1990s were peak years for conscientious objection. Resistance and conscientious objection groups such as Ad Kan (“That’s It/Stop”), The Twenty-First Year [of the Occupation], Women in Black, or Dai LaKibush (“End the Occupation”) arose and challenged the army, the government, and the occupation, as well as violent Israeli notions of masculinity. Hundreds of refuseniks spent long periods in prison.
The army’s policy of punishment and vindictiveness made Rami Hason, a 29-year-old reservist from Jerusalem, the local Nelson Mandela of the Intifada refuseniks — a symbol of human strength and individual freedom that no prison can overcome. He was an apolitical young man, a descendent of an old, apolitical Sephardic Jerusalemite family. For the crime of refusing to be a soldier of oppression, he was repeatedly sent to prison. “It’s not that I shouldn’t be in the [Occupied] Territories”, he said, “We shouldn’t be there.” When asked how he justified his refusal to serve there, he replied that he was “flipping the question around and asking what justifies going to the [Occupied] Territories and ruling another people through brutal means? What justification is there for carrying weapons against a civilian population?” And to the question of what would happen if all IDF soldiers would decide “at once” to leave the occupied territories, he replied: “I would be very happy if that were to happen, but I’m afraid it’s not realistic.”
So far, Hason has been the conscientious objector most often put on trial. In his third trial, he said, “The day will come when my judges will stand trial.” While in prison, he wrote to his friends on Independence Day, “Happy Independence Day to us and soon to the Palestinians.”
Even the spectacular civil-society protests against the coup that the anti-democratic Netanyahu government began immediately upon its formation pushed the occupation and conscientious objectors to the margins, rejecting any mention of the occupation.
The Second Intifada, which began in the early 2000s, gave rise to its own group of conscientious objectors, Ometz LeSarev (“Courage to Refuse”). The group was the product of a new, sophisticated, communicative, and self-conscious era. Its members saw themselves as a select unit, a conscientious-objector start up, a commando force to eliminate the occupation, imbued with both faith and hubris that they would succeed where all their predecessors had failed.
The group’s founder, a retired lieutenant colonel and computer scientist by profession, David Zonsheine, told a journalist: “I am the last peg that can stop this country before it becomes history.” After completing reserve service in the Gaza Strip in October 2001, during which he led his soldiers on missions of destroying houses and greenhouses, uprooting trees, and abusing Palestinian residents — “because soldiers don’t ask questions. That’s the policy and that’s what they do” — he vowed to stop the madness, the apocalypse. Together with a friend, a reserve officer in the same special unit, they began to operate using the “a-friend-brings-a-friend” method, and in January 2002 they went public with a letter of refusal, published in the press.
“We were raised, we donated, we served, we volunteered, we sacrificed, we were the first to carry out every mission to protect the State of Israel”, they declared.
We feel today that the orders we received there [in the Occupied Territories] are destroying all the values we internalized in this country. [We] understand today that the price of the occupation is the loss of the IDF’s human face and the corruption of Israeli society as a whole. [We] hereby declare that we will no longer fight the war for the peace of the settlements, we will no longer fight beyond the Green Line with the aim of controlling, expelling, starving, and humiliating an entire people.
The statement contained nothing new, but the fact that the banner of rebellion was raised by people who belonged to the core of Labour Zionism serving in the army, a service-aristocracy of obedient and volunteering members who experienced the hopes of the Oslo Accords and their collapse with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing nationalist Jew, was also evidence of heartbreak and a rift within the establishment. They believed that when they reached 500 signatures, “they [the army] would have to decide — occupation or the IDF”. Many of them asked to continue serving in their units, solely within the Green Line, and were rejected.
In contrast, Ovadia Ezra, who had already refused during the First Lebanon War, said in early 2002, after serving his third term in prison: “I’m no longer a Zionist, no longer a patriot. … If after three terms in prison, I am not given the opportunity to serve according to my conscience, then I no longer want to serve in this army.” About 500 people from Courage to Refuse were tried and imprisoned in 2002–3 for their refusal to serve in the occupied territories. Their rhetorical power and social standing — all members of combat units, often graduates of the best schools in Israel and academics — enabled them to gain many fans and supporters, even in the senior ranks of the army. At the same time, they also attracted a flood of condemnations and predictable threats, such as “deserters”, “traitors”, or “threat to the security and existence of the state”.
Israeli society in general does not hear the cries of the Palestinians, does not see their suffering nor itself as the cause of this suffering.
The subsequent cases of conscientious objection, mainly against the backdrop of the violent, deadly military operations that Israel carried out against the Gaza Strip and its residents that claimed thousands of victims, were more performances of refusal, rhetoric of conscience and resistance than acts that entailed heavy penalties. Most of the conscientious objectors in the 2000s were reservists. Since they had belonged to the most prestigious units in the army, such as the General Staff Patrol, the huge intelligence unit 8200, and pilots and combat navigators of the Air Force, their demonstrations of refusal and reprimand were met with stormy, albeit fleeting reactions.
Moreover, dozens of women joined the community of conscientious objectors during these years. When they refused to serve the occupation, they were forced to face “Conscience Committees” composed of junior officers who lacked knowledge and training in questions of citizenship, law, morality, and conscience (the embodiment of Arendt’s term of thoughtlessness). These committees automatically sent the conscientious objectors to repeated and lengthy terms of imprisonment. The conscientious objection and subsequent imprisonment of these young women exposed the moral weakness of the mighty Israeli army and its fear of the mirror that forces it to see the crimes committed by its officers and soldiers in the Occupied Territories, and thus those who refuse to be complicit in these crimes.
Rendering the Suffering Visible
“When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard”, Berthold Brecht wrote. Israeli society in general does not hear the cries of the Palestinians, does not see their suffering nor itself as the cause of this suffering because it does not see the Palestinians, neither as human beings nor as a people with rights to life, freedom, thinking, movement, and to recognition and self-determination.
It does not hear the cries of the Palestinians because the occupation itself is denied and silenced in every possible way and because the people living under the occupation have become transparent, invisible. Even the spectacular civil-society protests against the coup that the anti-democratic Netanyahu government began immediately upon its formation pushed the occupation and conscientious objectors to the margins, rejecting any mention of the occupation.
The barbarity of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 has also erased the concept of “context” for any attempt to understand the dimensions of the horrors and the very possibility of its occurrence. The current war, which began as a war to eliminate Hamas’s military power, has long since become a cruel war of revenge, a tyrant’s war to preserve his rule at the expense of his citizens, bringing destruction and devastation of biblical proportions to Israel, the Gaza Strip, and Lebanon, and the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. So far, in this entire period, there has been one conscientious objection recorded, by a young man, on the eve of his enlistment in the army.
Translated by Ursula Wokoeck Wollin.
[1] This is only an approximate number. Conscientious objection comes in many forms and shades, and many cases of “grey” refusal have not been defined and recorded as conscientious objection.
[2] “The Nazis, too, were idealists by their own standards”, wrote author Yehoshua Bar-Yosef, comparing the idealism of Israeli conscientious objectors to the idealism of the Nazis and the members of the NKVD [Soviet secret police], in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, 3 September 1971. Herzl Rosenblum claimed, “it is our right to have our own prostitutes, refuseniks, und burglars”, Yedioth Ahronoth, 9 August 1971.
[3] Translator’s note: “Peace for the Galilee” was the official name given to the Lebanon War in 1982.