Here's a new American-led campaign to support the shministim, the Israeli kids who are refusing to serve the criminal and neverending Israeli occupation. Jewish Voice for Peace is leading the petition drive. Here's a link to a Palestine site, reporting that Omer Goldman, the daughter of a powerful conservative, whose willingness, along with two other young women, to go to jail earlier this year was so electrifying, has been declared exempt from military service on medical grounds. On the JVP site you can see a group shot of the shministim.
Here's a picture of 
Yuval Oron-Ofir, who's now in jail for refusing. Gets out the end of this week. Oron-Ofir is obviously a lefty; he has been working with refugee kids for a while, living in a commune, "working with Ethiopian youth."
I admit to all readers that I identify with Oron-Ofir in a tribal manner. All antisemites feel free to hate me on that ground. He even looks a little like I did when I was that age. A reminder this morning of all the universalist Jews who in an age of unprecedented Jewish power and Zionist ethnocentrism are going to work with other leaders to help save the world from manifold threats.
Hear is Oron-Ofir's statement about an occupation that has "not been dictated by fate" [please read that, Gershom Gorenberg]:
"A human being among other humans, I, Yuval, feel committed to some basic values without which we cannot exist. ... What I see is that with every additional day when Palestinians are kept by force on their lands, my country manages to crush one more value, one more rule. What I see is a country guided by the inanity of its leaders, a country in thrall to an insatiable hunger for another street, another tree to cram into its shattered borders. I see with what ease our parents close their eyes to the atrocities that are being committed in our name. I see how we are all turning inwards, just so we may not have to hear the screams that are reaching us from the other side. All known human atrocities have been possible only because of blind obedience, silence, and an indifference to the fate of the other."
Pathetic. The shministim movement has nothing to do with people's ideological convictions and everything to do with people not wanting to spend 3 years in the army when they could be studying or traveling.
If you are so committed to certain values, why don't you cross over to Ramallah and preach them there? Right, because they'll tear you apart and throw your body out of a window.
Seems to me the shministim kids are more like the White Rose kids, remember them? Judge for yourself. Here's some of their own testimonials:
Here is an article on the first female high school refusenik:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon08292008.html
Religious objectors get a pass or are allowed to perform alternative civil service in behalf the state. This girl has so offered. She was imprisoned because she declared her objection as a humanist. Apparently simply refusing to participate in what one regards as
immoral state action that is actually self-defeating in terms of
a long-standing pattern of actual results, is what cannot be allowed
by the powers that be.
There is an analogy here with the certification of Vietnam War
conscientious objectors.
In the states now, such people are dealt with by simple contract law since there is no conscription.
Absent the legal theory of adhesion contract of course.
Israelis are convinced they are suffering more casualties and hardship than the Palestinians. Amazing. That mentality will pay off well for them.
What's amazing? Many Jewish Americans think there's always a pogrom right around the corner right here in the USA, despite
the fact of American constitutional government and history and that they are overwhelmingly part of the Establishment and its biggest financial beneficiaries as an ethnic group.
Right, because they'll tear you apart and throw your body out of a window.
The Palestinians of your imagination are a little theatrical, wouldn't you say Mike?
The Palestinians I know, they'd definitely cut him up alright, or throw him out the window, but they definitely wouldn't waste calories doing both.
Phillip:
Yuval Oron-Ofir looks (and you say you looked a bit like him when as young as he) rather the Ashkenazim princeling. I follow your blog because I think it is up to Jews like you to lead us all to the Promised Land, the land of peace and milk and honey—and incidentally to shut down the present culturally impoverished American scene, which ill-thrives on its present mix of aggressive Judaism and decayed, copped-out Christianity. Shamir agrees that either the Jews do it themselves or it won't get done. Not this side of utter disaster, which, anyway, I feel in my bones is coming. WW 4 anyone? Tom White, Odessa, TX
The Palestinians I know would offer him tea and thank him for his support.
As for those Jewish "parents (who with ease) close their eyes to the atrocities that are being committed in our name", Amira Haas recalls she and her mother being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944. "(My mother Hannah) and the other women had been 10 days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'. It's as if I was there and saw it myself."….In her evocative book Drinking the Sea at Gaza, Hass eloquently explains why she, an Israeli journalist, went to live in Yasser Arafat's tiny, garbage-strewn statelet. "In the end," she wrote, "my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation….".
"I admit to all readers that I identify with Oron-Ofir in a tribal manner. All antisemites feel free to hate me on that ground. He even looks a little like I did when I was that age. A reminder this morning of all the universalist Jews who in an age of unprecedented Jewish power and Zionist ethnocentrism are going to work with other leaders to help save the world from manifold threats."
Hard to see anybody could hate you for siding with somebody who refuses to participate in a hateful crime – unless they just hate you, period. You didn't need to say that, I don't think.
"Hard to see anybody could hate you for siding with somebody who refuses to participate in a hateful crime – unless they just hate you, period. You didn't need to say that, I don't think."
But, stevieb, he isn't refusing to participate in a hateful crime. He is refusing to join IDF, which may or may not put him into a situation in which he may or may not be forced to "participate in a hateful crime."
If this guy is opposing a potential "hateful crime" then he could still get enlisted and then refuse to follow any orders which he personally deems immoral. That's usually 2 weeks prison time in IDF, via disciplinary court, no courtmarshal.
So, either he thinks IDF *is* a hateful crime, which makes him a traitor, or he would rather not spend 3 years in the army and all the ideology is just an excuse to be free to party and go abroad.
Mike Seth ^^ is a solider in the IDF who is working in the cyber-war division. He trolls websites like digg, reddit and other blogs.