Not in My Name

Ariel Shatil is one of some five hundred Israeli reserve soldiers who have declared their refusal to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories by signing the “Courage to Refuse” petition which was published in January 2002.

My name is Ariel Shatil. I’m thirty-three years old, an Israeli citizen and a Jew. I’m also a sergeant in the Israeli army and a cannon commander in the artillery corps. So far this brief description of myself also fits several thousand other Israelis, so what is it that brings me to write this article? The reason is that a year ago I decided to refuse to serve any longer as a reservist beyond the 1967 borders of Israel. On 25 January 2002, I joined fifty-two other such “refuseniks” in signing a petition that was published in a national newspaper. The petition declared: “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people” (see box for full text of petition).

My Personal Story

I’d like to begin with my personal reasons for refusing an order to serve in the Gaza Strip back in September 2001. My call-up for reserve duty had come by mail a couple of months earlier. A few phone calls to the army made it clear to me that my platoon would be stationed at an outpost in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, just outside the Erez crossing point and industrial zone. The al-Aqsa intifada had been going on for nearly a year at the time, and despite being enraged at the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah a few months earlier and at the suicide bombings that had become commonplace, I still could see that what inflamed the Palestinian uprising was the realisation among the Palestinians that even after eight years of the Oslo agreement, we the Israelis were no more inclined to return to the 1967 borders than when we signed it. In a desperate bid to quash the intifada, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were resorting more and more to what was referred to in the media as “targeted killings”, another name for executing people without having to prove their guilt or allowing them to plead their innocence. Israel was also imposing stifling curfews, demolishing houses and cutting down crops on which Palestinian families depended for their livelihood, all explained by “security considerations” or just in plain revenge for one attack or another.

 

I tried to reason with my battalion to release me from the reserve duty but to no avail. And despite everything that I knew was going on I still elected to go and try to serve it out if I could. I must explain that I have served in the occupied territories numerous times, from when I was drafted in 1988 until I was discharged in 1991. I have also carried out tours of duty there as a reservist several times over the past ten years. I never liked it; I knew that I was there mainly to protect the Jewish settlers and the Jewish settlements that in my opinion had no business being there in the first place. I elected to go because I was afraid of being singled out and facing the full wrath of the army and of the people who serve with me in the reserves. I thought that, as on previous tours, I would be able to content myself with the thought that my battalion would keep its outstanding record of not killing, wounding or harassing anybody during reserve duty. I was wrong.

 

I decided to refuse on the day I arrived with all of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers at the outpost in Gaza to be briefed on our mission there. The outpost is situated with its back to the “Erez” industrial zone overlooking the town of Beit Hanoun and a crossing called “Jackson’s crossing” on the main north–south road running through the Strip. Its job is to protect the industrial zone and the Jewish settlements there. Almost every night, Palestinians hiding in the field between the outpost and Beit Hanoun would fire a few mortars towards the outpost. We were told that as soon as that happened we were to open fire, in some cases with Browning 0.5 heavy machine guns, in the general direction from which the mortar shells came. Anybody who has ever fired such a weapon will know that it has no sights. You point the barrel towards where you want to hit and guide your fire to the target by seeing where the bullets go—all in the pitch dark of night. It was painfully obvious that some of the bullets would end up going through Beit Hanoun, but I seemed to be the only one bothered by that.

 

I remember us being briefed by the commanding officer of the platoon at the outpost whom we were to relieve. He said that the reservists they themselves had relieved had used the pretext of mortar fire on the last night of their stay there to empty their magazines in all directions, joking about it when they went to shower afterwards. He didn’t elaborate on whether he had reported or complained about the incident; he just shrugged as if to say he was not happy with it but these things happen.

 

During daylight hours, we were supposed to supervise the movement of Palestinian workers in and out of the industrial zone. With most of the Gaza population unemployed, even the meagre salaries offered by Israeli employers in the Israeli-controlled industrial zone were worth fighting for. Our job was to watch over the workers walking on the road between the zone and Jackson’s crossing. Private cars were not allowed to drive on those two hundred metres of road for fear of attack, which meant that the workers walked the distance under our gaze and gun barrels poking out of reinforced concrete firing positions. That walk was for many of them a walk of defiance. They were not allowed to tread on the side of the road next to the outpost, but a few of them walked several paces there while looking at us with a mixture of hatred, fear and defiance. Taxis were also not allowed beyond Jackson’s crossing, but since the people returning from the industrial zone had money, at the end of the day there was a clamour of taxis waiting for them, each trying to steal a few metres on its rivals in hope of gaining some fares. Our orders were to deter those which got too near, even to the point of firing at their wheels if the need arose.

 

At the end of the briefing, having heard what our assignment would be for the next few weeks, I went around the perimeter of the outpost, checking each and every firing post, its armaments and field of vision. I saw the Palestinian workers returning from the industrial zone and walking towards Jackson’s crossing. I had the complete picture. That was when I decided to refuse.

 

I knew there was no way I was going to serve there. Later, when people asked me why not, I would point at the crossing and at the electric border fence and tell them that this was the biggest prison in the Middle East, and I was not brought up to be the jailer there.

 

During the pre-tour training I asked for an interview with my battalion commander. I told him that I was unable to carry out the orders given and asked to be transferred to a different platoon in the battalion whose assignment was patrolling the Egyptian border. He turned down my request and started arguing with me over my reasons for wanting to refuse service. He told me that as a non-commissioned officer I didn’t have to man the firing positions myself, merely co-ordinate between them. I remember telling him that if I believe an order is wrong, not only would I refuse to carry it out but I would also forbid anybody else in my vicinity to do so.

 

After four days of limbo in which I had no idea what was planned for me and during which a lot of mental pressure was applied, including turning members of my platoon against me, my battalion commander tried me himself in a disciplinary hearing. After listening to pleas on my behalf, he decided not to send me to jail but rather to confine me to base, outside the Gaza Strip, for the twenty-five days of the tour, with a thirty-five-day sentence suspended for two years. I carried out guard duty, eight hours a day, every day, in the entrance to the battalion compound. I suppose that was my walk of defiance, standing there every day as people passed by, telling them precisely why I had decided to refuse.

 

I remember being asked later why other people in my platoon had not refused. After all, they saw the same things I did and were given the same orders. People claimed that I was trying to assume moral superiority over them. The truth is I’m convinced that people in my platoon did their best to carry out orders while being careful not to harm civilians in the process. Most of them (like me) would have preferred not to be there in the first place, but the army had put them in a situation where in order to protect themselves they had to kill or be killed.

 

Most of them could not pay the price of refusing: being singled out from their unit, being sent to military prison for up to a month. Reservists do not get paid for time served in prison, nor does it count as a tour of duty, so they can be called up again for reserve duty in the same year. For people with jobs and families this can prove crippling. I could afford the price of refusal, being a bachelor with a well-paid job and few family ties.

 

I was helped through all that time by a civilian organisation called Yesh Gvul (There Is a Limit), which supports people who set themselves moral boundaries and act according to them. Yesh Gvul was very helpful with tips on my rights vis-à-vis the army. It also provides a small fund for people who are jailed and do not get the social security payments for doing reserve duty. This fund pays little more than the minimum wage in Israel—much less than what they would receive for doing reserve duty—but for some refuseniks every little bit helps. Thankfully, I did not need help in that department.

 

When the whole ordeal was finally over, I went home and vowed to myself that I would never go through the same thing again. My options were simple: I could dodge reserve duty by faking a health problem or mental stress; I could spend my time going in and out of military prisons until the army decided to discharge me permanently from reserve duty; or I could emigrate. The first option was the easiest to reject—as a matter of personal pride, I would not allow the army to turn me into a liar. The second option was extremely depressing and seemed like a complete waste of time since my being behind bars would help nobody, least of all me, and would probably not even be reported anywhere. The third option meant running away, something I’m not fond of doing, especially when I feel that Israel is my home.

The Petition

Three months later, as I was sitting on my balcony in Tel Aviv mulling over immigration forms, Yaniv Itscovitch and David Zonshine, two reserve officers in an elite paratroop unit who had just returned from a tour of duty in the Gaza Strip, called me up and offered me a fourth option: to publish a petition of reserve soldiers like us stating that from now on we will not serve beyond the 1967 borders; that we have come to realise that the things we were ordered to do in the occupied territories are things no decent human being should do to another human being; and that these immoral orders also weaken our country by destroying its moral backbone and plunging it closer to the abyss of fascism and apartheid. I threw the immigration papers into the garbage can and agreed to sign the petition.

 

Our initial group numbered about twelve people. It took us an additional month to gather more signatories and raise the money for an ad in a local newspaper. During that time a journalist who found our story interesting decided to write an article about us and film our group. We also decided at the last minute to set up a website at www.seruv.org.il/ (“seruv” means “refusal” in Hebrew) where the petition would be displayed online with the names, ranks and units of its signatories. The decision to include the rank and unit was to show that these were actual reserve soldiers from combat units.

 

Our petition was published on 25 January 2025 in the Haaretz daily newspaper. On the same day, the article about us was published in a different newspaper with headline billing and the story was broadcast on the most popular weekly television news show.

 

The reaction was huge. Within a week we had a hundred signatures and within two weeks we had doubled our number again to two hundred. For a month, not a day went by without our group being mentioned in the media. The reaction from the establishment was, of course, extremely negative. It tried to proclaim us “traitors” but that didn’t really work. Everybody in our group had served three years or more (officers are obliged to serve an additional year at least) in combat units of the IDF and most had actively risked their lives in defence of Israel. Nobody apart from the extreme right wing in Israel took the treason accusation seriously. The authorities tried to claim we were exploiting the army and our military rank as a political tool. That seemed a little more plausible at first until people realised that our protest was a civilian protest; everything we said was as civilians, and when called up for reserve duty we did not exploit our ranks but just refused quietly and accepted the consequences. It also helped when people understood that Israel’s political landscape is littered with ex-army generals who got into politics in the first place by really exploiting their rank.

 

There was quiet agreement in the corridors of power that we presented a strategic problem for the government; it could not rely on soldiers obeying every heinous order that was given. In addition, our first-hand testimonies of what was going on in the occupied territories helped break the common front displayed to the Israeli public by an overly patriotic media that openly admitted to being fed straight from the army’s spokesperson. It seems the authorities decided that if they were unable to break us or discredit us, they could do the next best thing and silence us.

 

That was not very difficult to accomplish. Ever since we came to public attention, no existing political party has dared support us openly. Some even viewed us as a threat. In time of war, people tend to rally round the flag, hoping that huddling together will bring them the security they crave, opting to forget why the war erupted in the first place. In addition, as mentioned above, most of the media was happily being fed the news that the army wanted it to publish, and the army stressed publicly its opinion that we should be ignored. An example: the US broadcaster CBS did a report on our movement by Bob Simon for 60 Minutes. It was the first 60 Minutes programme involving Israel that was not shown here.

 

However, no matter how quickly our numbers were growing, the situation was deteriorating at a much faster rate. The gruesome sights in the aftermath of suicide bombings, coupled with the terrible visions from the re-occupation of the West Bank cities and refugee camps, have plunged both Israelis and Palestinians ever deeper into a closed cycle of violence and retaliation. People who have expressed horror at reading our testimonies have grown accustomed to hearing and seeing even more horrible acts being committed on a daily basis. Things that would once have shocked this country, such as dropping a one-ton bomb in the middle of a densely populated area in order to kill a single terrorist (as occurred in the Gaza Strip in July 2002), are now met with silent approval by most Israelis, even when they are aware that that specific bomb cost the lives of at least fifteen innocent civilians, nine of them children.

The Future

Our numbers are still growing, but much more slowly than before—not more than two or three people join us every week. Our main enemy is a feeling of doom and despair that is spreading throughout the Israeli public. On the one hand, the despair is leading to a call for the ethnic cleansing of all Arabs by deporting them to the adjoining Arab states (this is called “transfer” in Israel); on the other, the feeling of doom causes people to believe that there is no way out of this situation and pushes them into that fascist paradise, the perpetual conflict.

 

The main development at the time of writing is that our movement of refuseniks is appealing against the occupation to Israel’s High Court of Justice. We are putting forward two points. The first is the right to refuse military service on conscientious grounds. The second is that Israel is committing illegal acts on a daily basis in the occupied territories, not only according to international law but also according to Israeli law, and that we have the right and obligation not to participate in those acts.

 

This action of appealing to the High Court epitomises quite well the ideas that made us write our petition in the first place: our belief in a basic fabric of democracy and democratic values that should still exist in Israel, despite being eroded by thirty-five years of occupation. Almost every aspect of the occupation has previously been brought before the High Court and has been decreed legal when viewed outside the general context of the occupation. The difference now is that for the first time the complete picture of the occupation is being presented to the court for it to decide on by people who once were called upon to enforce that occupation.

 

My personal feeling is that losing this appeal would remove the last barrier protecting Israel from a downward spiral towards an even more horrible bloodbath and moral decay. It seems to be the last part of the immune system that is still functioning, the last chance the patient has to heal himself before outside assistance is mandatory.

Selective Refusal: A Brief History

There is an unwritten pact between the Israeli public and its government that the latter can rely on the public’s backing and service in the army provided the government proves that a particular war or conflict is, or was, unavoidable. The Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor refused to serve in the army back in 1972 because the then prime minister, Golda Meir, would not even listen to peace offers sent through the United Nations by Egypt. That, of course, resulted in the 1973 Yom Kippur War that cost a staggering 2,700 Israeli casualties, only for the inevitable to happen just a few years later with Egypt and Israel signing a peace treaty, and Israel withdrawing from all the Egyptian land that was conquered during the 1967 War.

 

Many called Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon a “war of choice”. Even today, twenty years later, the goals of the war are still not completely known. That war shook many Israelis’ belief in the honesty of the government, that it would tell them the truth. The doubts began with the battle for the Beaufort outpost, which the government first claimed was won without a single casualty, later being forced to admit that casualties had been suffered. Trust in the government was further eroded with the claim that the incursion into Lebanon was only forty kilometres deep, even though everybody in the army knew otherwise. The disillusionment culminated with the massacre of over a thousand Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut by the Israeli-supported Christian militia. The Israeli army controlled the entire area of the camps and turned a blind eye to what was going on in them, but lent a hand to the same militia in the cover-up operation after the massacre.

 

The most famous case of refusal in the Lebanon war was that of Colonel Eli Geva, who questioned the order to advance into Beirut and was removed from the command of his tank regiment. However, the most significant was that of a group of reserve soldiers who openly declared that they would not fight in this “war of choice”. They called their group “Yesh Gvul”, and they circulated a petition stating that all those who signed it would refuse to serve in Lebanon. By 1985, 3,500 reservists had signed the petition. The 1985 withdrawal to the “security zone” in southern Lebanon can be attributed to the government’s fears of the threat of mass refusal.

 

Yesh Gvul continued operating over the years, with the focus shifting to the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, especially during the first intifada, which erupted in December 1987. Over the years, it has helped hundreds of people who refused to take part in the continued occupation of Palestinian land.

 

After the Oslo years, when many believed that peace was on the horizon, the outbreak of the current intifada in September 2000 saw a new surge of people who were not willing to participate in the continued oppression of the Palestinians. This culminated in the publication of our petition and the media coverage it received. The government and army were caught by surprise. They were used to countering refuseniks by branding them “pacifists”, “cowards”, “extreme leftists”, and so on, just in order not to have to deal with their arguments. The authorities had a problem using the same tactic against us since we had all served in combat units, many of us in elite ones. We also stated that we were willing to continue serving in defence of Israel wherever required within the 1967 borders.

 

It was, and still is, important for us to keep this identity and that is why we did not want to act within an existing group. We do, however, despite some ideological differences, have close working relations with Yesh Gvul and we recognise that without its fight over the years our task would have been even harder.

Israeli Military Service

All Israeli Jews are drafted into the army at the age of eighteen, with the exception of ultra-orthodox Jews, who are exempt from military duty. This mandatory draft also includes the Druze community, who live in the northern part of Israel. Men serve a minimum of three years while women serve only two. After the end of mandatory service, men are required to serve a month or more each year in the reserves until approximately the age of forty-five. Women are usually not required to do reserve duty, but if they are it is only until the age of twenty-five.

 

When drafted, around 20 per cent of recruits end up in combat units and receive combat training. The rest are assigned to non-combat units.

 

This is what happens in theory, but in practice things are slightly different.

 

Around half the people drafted do not finish their mandatory army duty. Some dodge the draft altogether, some feign depression and mental and physical problems in order to escape service. The reasons for doing so are varied. Some of the avoidance is what is called “grey refusal”: people who are unwilling to go to the occupied territories but are afraid to pay the price of explicit refusal. Some of it stems from a reluctance to “waste” three years of one’s life. Some of it is an inability to come to terms with military discipline.

 

For those who do finish the full term, the problems begin again with reserve duty. Being torn away from one’s life for a month every year can have a devastating effect on academic studies, on one’s career, on the owners of small businesses and on every aspect of life. In addition, “grey refusal” and the risk of getting killed are big factors here. Many people elect not to respond when called up, hoping that the army will give up on them eventually. Many also use health problems to get discharged from their units.

 

Given that soldiers who underwent non-combat training are less needed for reserve duty than those from combat units, the staggering outcome is that Israel has at its disposal to summon only around 5 per cent of those registered as reservists. This is the official percentage, which I heard Defence Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer cite in a speech he gave in Herzeliya.

Final Words

All of the people who signed our petition are in the aforementioned 5 per cent. Some have been there for ten years like myself, some for twenty years. We are the few who have shouldered Israel’s security for years while others just provided excuses. We are not refusing because we are tired of shouldering that load; we have proved our willingness to do so time and time again by continuing to show up for reserve duty while many others have stopped over the years. We are refusing because we do not want to participate in the oppression and humiliation of another people, and because we now know that the occupation and its by-products are the most profound threats to the existence of the state of Israel.

 

 

Courage to Refuse—Combatants’ Letter

● We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel, who have always served in the front lines, and who were the first to carry out any mission, light or heavy, in order to protect the State of Israel and strengthen it.

 

● We, combat officers and soldiers who have served the State of Israel for long weeks every year, in spite of the dear cost to our personal lives, have been on reserve duty all over the Occupied Territories, and were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over the Palestinian people. We, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this Occupation exacts from both sides.

 

● We, who sensed how the commands issued to us in the Territories, destroy all the values we had absorbed while growing up in this country.

 

● We, who understand now that the price of Occupation is the loss of IDF’s human character and the corruption of the entire Israeli society.

 

● We, who know that the Territories are not Israel, and that all settlements are bound to be evacuated in the end.

 

● We hereby declare that we shall not continue to fight this War of the Settlements.

● We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.

 

● We hereby declare that we shall continue serving in the Israel Defense Forces in any mission that serves Israel’s defense.

 

● The missions of occupation and oppression do not serve this purpose—and we shall take no part in them.

The text of the petition signed by Israel’s refuseniks. For a list of its signatories, see www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp