Mandatory military service in Israel has left some young Israelis facing a stark choice: fight or be branded outsiders.
New York, United States – He feared being called a “mishtamet”. A draft dodger. Someone who shrinks from their responsibility.
But at age 17, Jewish social worker Asaf Calderon made a fateful decision: not to participate in the mandatory military service required of nearly all Israeli citizens.
Instead, he pursued and was granted a medical exemption for mental health reasons. Still, his choice came with a cost.
A soft-spoken man with round glasses and a tender smile, Calderon, 34, noticed that, afterwards, his friends started to seem distant. Members of his family fell out of contact.
He realised his decision had left him a pariah in Israel, even among his loved ones. He eventually moved away to New York City.
“It doesn’t matter why you do it,” Calderon said of becoming a conscientious objector, someone who refuses to participate in military service on ethical or moral grounds. “You are going to get ostracised in a way.”
But the war in Gaza has amplified the pressures he and other conscientious objectors face. Since October 7, Israel has led a military campaign in the Palestinian enclave, with ground forces and aerial bombardment levelling entire neighbourhoods.
The offensive follows an attack on southern Israel that killed an estimated 1,200 people. The subsequent war, however, has left more than 30,000 Palestinians dead, many of them children. United Nations experts have warned of a “risk of genocide”.
There, Calderon met others who avoided Israeli military service through roundabout means — or applied for official status as conscientious objectors. It gave him a sense of community that he struggled to find elsewhere.
Guy Erez, who has attended Shoresh events, described joining the group as an antidote to the isolation. “Oh my God,” he remembers thinking. “Somebody gets it. Thank God I’m not crazy.”
There are no official statistics about the number of conscientious objectors in Israel — in part because there is no single profile of what a conscientious objector is.
Some, like the members of Shoresh, are anti-Zionists, critical of Israel’s founding as a Jewish nation-state. Others, particularly in Orthodox Jewish communities, object to military service for religious reasons.
Still more oppose certain military activities they might be called upon to perform, like assignments that take them into the occupied Palestinian territories.
A tradition of mandatory military service
The history of mandatory military service — and refusing to comply — goes back as far as Israel itself. In May 1948, shortly after Israel declared independence, its government founded a conscription-based military, drawing largely from existing militias and paramilitary forces.
By the following year, though, mandatory service had become cemented in Israeli law. Today, once Israeli men turn 18, most are expected to serve 32 months in the military. Women, meanwhile, serve 24 months.
Without such an exemption, the consequences of rejecting military service can be severe. Israel’s Defence Service Law stipulates that a citizen’s failure to fulfil their military duty can result in up to two years’ prison time.
If they intentionally “injure or maim” themselves in the process, that prison sentence can jump up to five years.
Since the war in Gaza began, an 18-year-old named Tal Mitnick has become the highest-profile instance of military refusal. He surrendered to the Tel Hashomer military base in December for a 30-day sentence.
“I believe that slaughter cannot solve slaughter,” he said in a video recording, before walking inside.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long been a motive for “refusers” — or “seruvnikim” — like Mitnick to reject military service, even before the current war began.
In 2014, for instance, reserve soldiers with Unit 8200, a secretive intelligence group, penned an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to take part in Israeli military actions involving Palestinians.
“There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence,” the reservists said of the military’s actions.
The military’s “intrusive supervision”, they added, “does not allow for people to lead normal lives and fuels more violence, further distancing us from the end of the conflict”. Their public refusal was believed to be the first of its kind for Israel’s intelligence community.
But Netanyahu has long pledged to take a firm stance against so-called “refuseniks”.
Last year, when military reservists threatened to shirk their duties in protest of his government’s far-right reforms, Netanyahu threatened a crackdown: “The government will not accept refusal to serve.”
Like many Israeli children, Roni Zahavi-Brunner — another member of Shoresh — grew up never questioning the requirement to serve, even though her family was relatively progressive. It wasn’t until she went to a boarding school in Italy that her perspective changed.
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