More young Israelis are turning their backs on the Gaza war, but wider society shows little sympathy for Palestinians.
“One of the guards came up to me and asked if I was there to save Gaza’s children, then he punched me in the stomach,” Alon-Lee Green said, recounting his experience in an Israeli prison this week.
Green and eight others were arrested on Sunday for protesting with about 600 others along Israel’s border with Gaza, spending two nights and almost three days in prison before being placed under house arrest. Together, they represent part of a small but increasingly visible groundswell of resistance in Israel to a war that, for a variety of reasons, many Israelis are turning their backs on.
“Some people are protesting because they see it as a political war,” Green, who also serves as national co-director of the activist group Standing Together, said of the growing sense in Israel that the war on Gaza only serves to sustain Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition.
“Some are tired of fighting, some want the hostages [to be released from Gaza] , and some [are protesting against] what we’re doing to Palestinians. All are welcome,” he continued. “You want to resist the government? You’re welcome. You don’t want to enlist? You’re welcome. You supported the war until just recently? You’re welcome.”
Polls in Israel show that the majority now favour a deal that would secure the release of the captives held in Gaza, even if that means an end to the war on Gaza. Nevertheless, the war has continued.
“I don’t know if popular pressure’s going to ever stop the war,” said Green. “I mean, its supporters have been in a minority for a year. Refusing [to answer the call up] is our most powerful weapon: no soldiers, no occupation. We need more and more people to refuse.”
All the antiwar activists media spoke to talked of an uptick in interest in their movement following the Israeli government’s unilateral decision in mid-March to collapse the ceasefire it had previously agreed to after months of negotiation.
Others spoke of a dramatic increase in support when, after 11 weeks of unremitting siege on Gaza, Israel announced its latest mass ground operation in the devastated Palestinian territory on May 17, intended, according to one Israeli official, to lead to “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”.
However, despite the new offensive to recapture ground already largely destroyed by the Israeli military, dissent is gaining ground.
Open letters protesting the war from military units and reservists publicly refusing to turn up for service are becoming more frequent. In April, more than a thousand of Israel’s current and former pilots, generally regarded as an elite unit, wrote an open letter protesting a war they said served the “political and personal interests” of Netanyahu, “and not security ones”.
There are no official numbers for how many reservists have not turned up for duty. But, according to Israeli media reports, the number may be as high as 100,000. Those numbers are in addition to those refusing their initial period of mandatory military service.
Most of those are “grey” refusals, activists say. That is, people who gave no political reason for refusing to serve, officially refusing for other reasons, such as declining on medical grounds.
But Sofia Orr, a 19-year-old from Pardes Hannah in northern Israel, is one of a growing number of conscripts refusing their mandatory service and making that refusal as public as possible.
Orr refused to serve three times after first being called up on February 24, 2024. Her first and second refusals each netted her 20 days in military prison. Her third cost her 45 days.
“I’d already decided to refuse when I was 15,” Orr told media. “I asked myself, ‘If I go and serve in the military, what cause am I serving, does it align with my values, who am I actually helping?’” she said.
Orr is a member of “Mesarvot”, an Israeli organisation that has been supporting conscientious objectors in the face of calls from prominent politicians for refusers to be arrested and prosecuted, including from cabinet member and former Israeli military spokesperson Miri Regev.
“There’s been a steady growth of refusers since October 7,” Nimrod Flaschenberg, a political analyst and spokesperson for Mesarvot said, referring to the 2023 attack on southern Israel that led to Israel’s war on Gaza. “But we’ve been seeing an exponential increase of 16-, 17-year-olds refusing to serve recently. There are around a hundred circulating an open letter, all refusing service and explaining why.”
Of the wider movement, Flaschenberg said, some refused to serve in a war they had come to regard as political, others because they felt it risked the lives of the captives and a minority out of revulsion for the mass killing in Gaza and the West Bank that they were being asked to participate in.
“There’s still an Israeli public taboo over showing any public sympathy for Palestinians,” Flaschenberg said of the low prominence given to Gaza in the reasons given by most refusers, contrasting that with the widespread outrage that greeted ex-General and leader of Israel’s Democrats party, Yair Golan, because he warned that Israel risked becoming regarded as a “pariah state” that killed Palestinian babies “as a hobby” if it didn’t “return to sanity”.
“That really demonstrates the level of ignorance we’re talking about,” Flaschenberg said. “Of course, Israel is killing babies, but Israelis just can’t accept that.”
However, while growing international condemnation of Israel concentrates on vilifying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Orr, it risks overlooking a harsher reality.
“For many people here, it’s Israelis who are the real victims, the first, the last and only victims in all of this,” she said. “They don’t even see Palestinians as people, just as a threat.”
Green, who immediately rejoined the protest on the Gaza border after his overnight release from house arrest was over, was equally fatalistic.
“I’m not confident we’ll succeed. The government has represented a minority of Israelis for around a year, and the war’s continued,” he said.
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