Human Rights Reporting

Spring 2003 Student Work

Incarcerated Pacifist Shakes Israeli Peace Camp

By Itai M. Maytal

Amit Mashiah, a former commander in the Israeli army, disagrees with Israel's military policies in the West Bank and Gaza. He speaks out against them. He refuses to participate in them. But there are philosophical lines that even he will not cross.

As a spokesperson for Courage to Refuse, an organization consisting of over 500 Israeli officers who have refused to fight in the occupied territories, Mashiah represents a small but defiant group that rejects their government's argument that occupation guarantees security. They view the military presence deep within Palestinian centers of population as nothing more than a continuation of settlements fueled by an extremist messianic ideology.

But if the occupation were to end tomorrow, so would their conscientious objection to military service. That is why Mashiah does not stand by a nephew of finance minister and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who also refuses to serve. Unlike other conscientious objectors, Yonatan Ben-Artzi will not fulfill his military responsibilities because he is a pacifist.

Since August 2002, Ben-Artzi has served 200 days in a military prison for his beliefs. He is one of a handful of pacifists in military custody and has served the longest incarceration. Yet even as the photogenic 20-year-old was declared a "prisoner of conscience" by Amnesty International and as International Conscientious Objectors' Day organizers on May 15 planned to focus on strengthening international support for Ben-Artzi and other refusniks, the support for his case within refusnik ranks remains shaky.

"Sometimes it seems in Israel that the country is here to serve the military and not visa versa," Mashiah said. "But the bottom line is that Israel does need a strong defense. If you allow pacifists not to serve, you create a crack in the army that Israel cannot afford."

In the next two months, Ben-Artzi will face a court martial before a military tribunal that has already sentenced him seven times with 30-day prison terms. As his court date approaches, where he might receive as many as five years imprisonment, the most liberal of Israelis have begun to ask the question: Can we afford a place in our country for pacifists?

Many respond by asking why Israelis think they can equate militarism with activism and passivism. In contrast, left-wing activists assert the presence of pacifists in Israel actively legitimizes its democracy and plurality, not undermining them as right-wing hawks contends.

"It is true that countless pogroms decimated countless unresisting Jews confined in unguarded stets," said Beth Wittgenstein, president of the U.S.-based peace group Gan Ha Lev, "But militants can be just as foolishly passive, feeling protected by defensive fortifications that constitute military targets as inciteful and enticing as offensive weapons." Wittgenstein was referring to Israeli settlements throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Still others respond to the pacifist question: Legally we have no choice. As a member of several international bodies, Israel has signed several international human rights charters that explicitly obligate it to respect pacifists and conscientious objectors. For example, as a signer of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Israel has to guarantee the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.

However, in practice, the government's Conscience Committee usually finds applicants for pacifist status to be `frauds' and therefore incapable of avoiding service. Otherwise, it applies blatant discrimination between different groups, according to Israeli civil rights groups.

"Yeshiva students receive exemption from military service with great ease and women who declare themselves to be conscientious objectors are exempted without any real difficulty," said Carol Epstein, an Israeli activist. Currently, Israeli law exempts Arabs, ultra-orthodox Jews and women who declare themselves pacifists from service.

In contrast, Ben-Artzi and his male peers must go to great lengths to achieve their exemption. In the absence of approval as pacifists, many have taken more passive means of abstaining from the war by receiving "gray refusal" for reasons such as physical or psychological illness, or work and academic obligations. Many simply leave the country and do not return.

"Taking this into consideration, one can only see the treatment of male conscientious objectors as mental harassment designed to break their spirit and force them to abandon their beliefs," Epstein said.

In Ben-Artzi's case, his family's military tradition did not help his effort to present himself as a pacifist. His grandfather Moshe managed to escape Nazi Europe in time to fight Israel's War of Independence where he was wounded and spent six months in the hospital. An uncle, Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu, was killed in action during a famous raid to free Jewish hostages in Entebbe, Uganda while another, Benjamin Netanyahu, reached the rank of captain in Israel's Yom Kippur War before winning political office in the 1990s. Ben-Artzi's parents, brothers and sister all served in the military.

However, Ben-Artzi broke away from his family's tradition by signing the so-called Seniors Letter, a high school declaration of 62 students who refused to join the military. Sent to Ariel Sharon in August 2001, it read, "We the undersigned youths who grew up and were brought up in Israel, are about to be called to serve in the IDF. We protest before you against the aggressive and racist policy pursued by the Israeli government's and its army, and to inform you that we do not intend to take part in the execution if this policy."

His sister Ruth points to this letter and to Ben-Artzi's long-standing rejection of the military as proof of his pacifism. When his class was bused to a military training center for an Israeli Defense Force orientation, as part of his school program, Ben-Artzi refused to go. He also insisted that his parents be refunded the cost of this "course," and that the fees be returned to his sole Arab classmate, who was taken off the bus. This incident combined with a series of pacifistic essays led his high school to prevent Ben-Artzi from graduating and they temporarily succeeded in denying his diploma.

Ruth, a professor political science at Hunter College in New York, believes her brother became a pacifist at age 12 when he visited Verdun, France. It was there where he learned that 700,000 men had fought and killed each other for years during World War I for reasons they could not articulate.

"If you think Arlington is bad with its miles of graves, just visit Verdun," Ruth said, "A whole generation of Europeans was wiped out in that field. Yoni saw this and knew war wasn't for him." Ruth recently sent her incarcerated brother the World War I novel "The Guns of August" to read while he waits for trial.

But even if Yoni is indeed a pacifist, each time he has stood before the military court, the judges viewed him as nothing more than a troublemaker and sent him back to prison. And many people agreed with those decisions. Pacifists are seen as a threat to the Israel state even by many of the most liberal Israelis.

"The suicidal stance of Israel pacifism is no innocent error or mere overflow of youthful idealism," said Eli Bennet, a reservist and graduate student at Columbia University, "It is the product of a fundamentally immoral commitment: the commitment to ignore reality in favor of the wish that laying down our arms will achieve peace somehow."

In late April 2003, Ben-Artzi's father Matania wrote a critical letter to Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak after the judge ruled against moving Ben-Artzi's case into a civilian court. Matania wrote that if the blistering days of August and the freezing nights of January would not break his son's spirit or change his mid then neither would Barak's decision. And as his sister understands it, Ben-Artzi's principles remain intact.

"He's a very individualistic person," Ruth said, "and he's glad that Israelis are talking about his case and thinking about how it affects their lives and their country."

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