ON November 27, Soul Behar Tsalik, an 18-year-old from Tel Aviv, is expected to show up at an induction center for the Israeli military, but he isn’t going to enlist. Instead — like a dozen other Israeli teens in the last year — he has decided to face military prison rather than comply with conscription.

Behar Tsalik describes military service as an obligation that Israelis like him are raised expecting to fulfill from birth, but it becomes increasingly palpable at age 16, when they start receiving their first draft notices. He likens the process to college admissions for teenagers elsewhere, full of angling for the best positions — albeit in military units and divisions, rather than with universities and scholarships. Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Corps, for example, is well known for being a stepping stone to Israel’s tech industry.

“From around 16, you’re doing well in school and you’re going into programs because you’re trying to get into the best position you can get to in the army,” Behar Tsalik told Truthout. “Some people put in a lot of work, some people don’t. And when you’re 18, you get the official draft letter: ‘Come on this-and-this date for this-and-this job.’ … And that’s when I will probably be going to jail.”

In publicly refusing military service, Behar Tsalik joins hundreds of reservists who have similarly said they would not be complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Together, they hope that they will be able to reprise the role that “refusers,” as they are known in Israel, have played in the past and help bring the current carnage to an end.

THE CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE

The refuser movement in Israel is a patchwork of individuals, networks and more formal groups, some organised around specific military units and conflicts, others centering their broader political perspective, typically on the left. Although military service is often described as a national duty in Israel, conscription is in fact far from universal. As little as 50 per cent of Israeli citizens actually enlist, according to left-leaning Mesarvot (Hebrew for “I Refuse”), a network of Israeli refusers to which Behar Tsalik belongs. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20 per cent of the population, are exempt from military service. Similarly, especially observant religious Jews, who are often described as “ultra-Orthodox” (although some reject the term), make up more than 10 per cent of the population and have historically avoided conscription by requesting deferrals for religious study until they reach the age of exemption, which may extend as far as the late thirties.

Other Israeli Jews avoid conscription through medical exemptions or fail to serve their full two-to-three year deployments due to physical or psychological conditions. Others simply opt for months-long prison sentences rather than years-long deployments in order to get back to their private lives sooner. Among reservists who have completed their initial deployment but remain eligible for redeployment until the age of 40, the numbers who serve are as little as 2 per cent of the population.

Despite such widespread avoidance of conscription, public opposition is relatively rare. In addition to the months-long prison sentences that can be renewed to years by Israeli military authorities, there is the fear of social ostracisation by Israeli society, which is generally very militaristic. That said, many draft resisters — especially those from more left-leaning backgrounds — describe being supported by their immediate family, friends, and other community members, including employers. Nevertheless, fear persists.

“There are many other people who refuse for political reasons,” Nimrod Flaschenberg, a spokesperson for Mesarvot, told Truthout. “But they don’t want to put their faces on it.”

Since Palestinian militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, only a dozen inductees like Behar Tsalik have publicly refused to enlist, along with a few hundred reservists. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Israeli military had 30 per cent more reservists volunteer for redeployment than it had actually called up, according to Yesh Gvul (Hebrew for “There is a Limit”), a more centrist organisation which supports Israeli refusers.

But as the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza commenced, reservists like Yuval Green, a medic and member of Yesh Gvul, questioned whether they were rescuing the 240 Israeli hostages captured by Palestinian militants — or exacting revenge for the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7. (According to the United Nations, more than a dozen Israelis that day were killed by the Israeli military, as reported in The Telegraph and elsewhere.) Due to the escalating violence by Israeli forces in the West Bank, Green was planning on refusing redeployment prior to the attack, but October 7 pushed him to reconsider. His unit was deployed to Gaza, where he witnessed the widespread destruction caused by fellow Israeli soldiers.

Green reached his limit when his commanding officer ordered him to burn down the Palestinian home where his unit had been quartered. When he questioned the necessity of it, he was told it was to conceal their operations and prevent their equipment from falling into militants’ hands. When he offered to sweep the home for any signs of their operational set-up and their equipment, he was once again ordered to burn it down. He refused and shortly thereafter left Gaza.

“All of them knew people who were murdered on the 7th of October,” Green tells Truthout, referring to the other members of his unit. “They were just feeding the circle of violence.”

As of this writing, Israeli forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, including 16,000 children, in the Gaza Strip, as per the Palestinian Ministry of Health as cited by Al Jazeera. The true toll of the genocide, obscured by the ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, may top 330,000 deaths by the end of the year, according to estimates published in The Guardian. Nearly 70 per cent of the dead who have been identified so far were women and children, according to a UN report.

THEY NEED PEOPLE

Although public refusers make up only a fraction of those Israelis who reject military service, their impact can be pronounced. Yesh Gvul, for example, was founded by reservists in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and was cited by then Chief of Staff Moshe Levi as contributing to Israel’s eventual withdrawal. (Israel’s currently ongoing invasion of Lebanon notwithstanding, the Israeli occupation persisted until 2000, when Hezbollah militants forced the Israeli military and its collaborators in the South Lebanese Army from all of Lebanon but Sheeba Farms, which Israel continues to occupy.) Similarly, refusers were cited by Israeli diplomat Dov Weisglass as contributing to the Israeli military’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, following the Second Intifada (Arabic for “Uprising”) in which Palestinians challenged the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

While the number of public refusers currently trails those during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Second Intifada, the movement now is set to be bigger than those of the past, according to Ishai Menuchin, a spokesperson for Yesh Gvul.

“We cannot estimate the numbers,” Menuchin told Truthout. “We know it’s a big wave, but we don’t know how big is this wave.”

According to Menuchin, 3,000 reservists publicly pledged to refuse redeployment during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and 2,500 did during the Second Intifada, but both took years of public organising. While the current number of reservists publicly pledging to refuse deployment to Gaza is in the hundreds, he notes that they have emerged entirely organically, rather than as the result of a years-long public campaign, as was the case in the past. Furthermore, Menuchin points to other evidence of widespread private refusal: testimony received by Yesh Gvul from those newly released from military prison attesting to the facilities being full of deserters, government statistics reporting that the numbers of reservists appearing for duty is falling and the Israeli military’s recent efforts to conscript those traditionally exempt from service, such as the “ultra-Orthodox.”

The motivations of such refusers may run the gamut from moral opposition to self-preservation to religious tradition, but they all contribute to ending the Israeli genocide in Gaza, according to New Profile, another leftist organisation that supports refusers.

“They need people,” Or, an activist with New Profile, tells Truthout, referring to the Israeli military. (As advocating for refusal is a crime in Israel, or declined to share their last name.) “You can’t commit any kind of war crime without having people to do it. More people refusing means that there is less of an ability to commit war crimes — not in Lebanon, not in Iran, not in Gaza and not in the West Bank. It’s the most practical thing Israelis can do, saying no.”

For Behar Tsalik, publicly refusing to join the Israeli military was a decision he had made prior to receiving his first draft notice two years ago, in opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine more broadly. He describes the genocide that Israel unleashed in Gaza after October 7, 2023, as providing only further evidence of what he had already come to believe beforehand.

“Some of my friends are fighters in the war right now,” said Behar Tsalik. “The stuff they’re doing is terrible, and I think it’s also doing terrible stuff to them. … There’s some stuff that you shy away from, and some stuff that you have to put your foot down and say, ‘I won’t.’”