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July
2, 2003
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Kaviner
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July
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July
2, 2003
Prosecuting Ben-Artzi,
the Refusenik
Drama at the
Jaffa Military Court
Edited by REUVEN KAVINER
On June 24, 2003, three young refuseniks delivered
stirring, detailed anti-occupation testimony of a kind never
before heard in an Israeli military court. This followed yesterday's
continuation session of the Ben-Artzi trial. The continuation
of the trial is scheduled, according to present information,
for July 14, 2003.
Yoni Ben-Artzi: June
23
At the court martial of Yoni Ben-Artzi
two key witnesses for the defense didn't show up. Colonel Shlomi
Simchi--head of the army's Conscience Committee, which repeatedly
refused to recognize Ben Artzi as a pacifist--was "too busy"
and would come on a different occasion. The same with Brigadier
Avi Zamir, Deputy Head of Manpower, who ordered Ben-Artzi court-martialed
when he refused an offer to stay in the army with "easy"
terms of service.
The first witness was Ruth Ben-Artzi,
sister of the accused, who came over from Columbia University
in the US where she is completing a Ph.D. in Political Science.
"I am twelve years the elder; I have known Yoni since I
helped change his diapers and have followed his development closely.
Already in high school, he objected to lectures by officers who
came to the school to prepare pupils for military service. He
also refused to take part in school outings to the Mount Herzl
Military Cemetery and the like. I personally saw how deeply he
was moved when the family visited Verdun, France, and saw these
terrible cemeteries with hundreds of thousands of mostly anonymous
tombstones. He came back from France a determined pacifist"
At this point, Yoni Yechezkel, a refusenik
just released by the Conscience Committee this week, took the
stand for the defense. It appears that Yoni Yecheskel never had
to prove that he was a long standing, consistent and principled
pacifist. It seems that it was enough to go AWOL a lot, to play
a kind of cat and mouse game with the military authorities. Yoni
Yechezkel just said this to the army: "I told the army I
don't care what way they get me out, Conscience Committee, Incompatibility
Committee, psychiatrist--whatever they choose. But they will
never make a soldier out of me."
The prosecutor--who had tried everything
to discredit Ben Artzi's pacifist credentials--was now in the
opposite role of bolstering Yechezkel's. But he was totally unconvincing
in trying to show that Yechezkel is more of a pacifist than Ben
Artzi.
June 24, 2003
For a whole hour before the scheduled
time of today's trial, dozens of youths lined the sidewalk in
front of the building, holding up placards and chanting "Occupation
is Terrorism!--The Refusenik is a Hero!" Long before the
judges came in, the small courtroom was filled far beyond capacity,
with many activists left outside. When the five accused filed
in, they were greeted with prolonged applause.
Adv. Dov Henin started by outlining the
main defense line. "This trial is not about technicalities
and obscure points of the law. This trial is about a major constitutional
issue which no Israeli court has dealt with before. The conscience
is the most basic part of human dignity, the part of the personality
which defines the essential values; the part which if broken,
breaks the whole person. It is the contention of the defense
in this trial that freedom of conscience is already enshrined
in Israeli law and has been so for the last ten years, ever since
the Knesset adopted the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty.
And this is so even though the military authorities have hitherto
refused to take proper cognizance of the fact. The defense asks
the court's patience in hearing out the five accused. Each one
is ready to bear full responsibility for showing that his decision
to refuse military service does indeed proceed from deeply held
convictions--the dictates of his conscience."
Haggai Matar: experience
with Palestinians
The first to take the stand was Haggai
Matar. Matar spoke about his considerable personal experience
with the occupation and long quotes from the reports of human
rights organizations as well as stories which he heard from fellow
prison cell-mates who served in the territories.
"In 1999, I joined a special project
of joint summer studies by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian
pupils. Soon afterwards, I started a correspondence with a Palestinian
Administrative Detainee, who was held in an Israeli prison for
six years without trial. When at last he was released, I visited
him in a house riddled by Israeli bullets and with broken furniture.
I joined actions of the Gush Shalom and Ta'ayush movements. We
went to the territories to rebuild houses demolished by the army,
to provide humanitarian help in towns hit by closure or curfew,
to support Palestinian villagers who have been violently assaulted
by settlers. Always, soldiers tried to block us and in many cases
used violence against us. In 2001, I met again with some of the
Palestinian pupils of the summer camp who told me harrowing stories
of being beaten up and arrested by soldiers. One told of witnessing
his friends in Ramallah being shot to death. On August 20, 2002,
three days before I was due to present myself for enlistment,
I and several other activists got an emergency call to go to
Yanoun Village, a tiny place where settlers have so terrorized
the inhabitants that the Palestinians all left. We came there
and the empty houses were terribly depressing and somber sights.
We were very happy that due to our presence, the people started
coming back. With all my experiences, I had no doubt: I absolutely
don't want to be and can't be part of the Israeli army which
I believe has no longer the right to call itself an army of defense."
[The above is excerpted from a two-hour
speech; full text in Hebrew and English available from Anat Matar:
matar@post.tau.ac.il]
Matan Kaminer:
a philosophical analysis.
"In this testimony I would like
to describe the guiding lines of my conscience and explain why
it is incompatible with service in today's Israeli army. For
some people the basic value from which their conscience is derived
is God's word. For others it is loyalty to their country. For
me the basic value is human liberty, human rights. I believe
that all human beings have inalienable rights such as the right
to life, the right to equality, to welfare, to education, to
association, to democracy. All of these rights are violated in
countless ways by the occupation--mainly violated as regards
the Palestinians, but in many ways also regarding Israelis.
"The right of Palestinians to life
is violated by the policy of liquidations (which indirectly causes
also the loss of Israeli life, as we saw last week), and by the
constant military activity in populated areas which causes the
death and wounding of civilians. The right to equality, both
of Palestinians and of Israelis living within the Green line,
is violated by the policy of settlement which takes land, resources
and basic human dignity from Palestinians and which discriminates
against most Israelis in the division of national resources.
The right of Palestinians to welfare and to education are violated
by the ongoing closures and curfews which cause the sky-rocketing
unemployment figures and the severe disruption of the educational
system.
"The most fundamental, though not
necessarily the most directly painful, is the violation of the
right to live in democracy. The very rule over another people
which is denied the right to control it's own life and future
is a flagrant violation of that right, and after 36 years the
pretense that the occupation is temporary wears thin. The contempt
for democracy is gradually crossing into Israel proper, with
racist extreme right parties becoming an acceptable and common
component of government coalitions.
"The deprivation to the right of
democracy of the Palestinians is the root cause of all the crimes
which accompany the occupation--both the crimes of the occupier
of which I described part, and the crimes of the occupied, pushed
to immoral and inhuman ways of struggle. Neither set of crimes
is in any way justified. Both are direct derivatives of the occupation
and can only be abolished by abolishing the occupation itself.
"From all of this, it logically
follows that service in the army, which is the main instrument
for implementing the occupation is totally against my conscience.
My decision to refuse enlistment does not mean that I am against
the State of Israel, against the people of Israel, or against
the Israeli society of which I am part. On the contrary, I feel
impelled to do all I can for Israeli society. I have done so
in the past and intend to go on doing so. The occupation is a
terrible crime; an immoral and malignant crime against another
society which spreads also to our own society, strangling and
poisoning it.
"Obviously, in such a situation
I can't go into the army. I can only ask that my conscience be
recognized and that I be provided an opportunity to do alternative
civilian service for the benefit of the Israeli society.""
Shimri Tzameret, whose
testimony was interrupted when the court adjourned at 5 pm.
"For years, I have known that I
was not going to join the army. I know it with as much certainty
as I know that I will never kick a homeless person lying on the
sidewalk, never rape a woman, and when I will have a child--never
abandon it. We all of us have our own reasoning and my reasons
are a bit different from those who spoke before me. I feel that
there is no need to detail what the occupation is doing to the
Palestinians. What it is doing to ourselves is reason enough.
"First I want to talk about the
suicide bombings. It is a very central part of our life here
in this country and many of us are touched personally in one
way or another. A bit more than a year ago, exactly on the day
when I decided to tell my schoolmates that I am going to refuse
to serve in the army, a suicide bombing happened in which the
mother of one of the girls in the school was killed. And later
on the day it turned out that her sister was killed as well.
It brought home to me what does it mean, that the life of this
girl whom I knew will never be the same again; how terrible it
is when something like this is suddenly breaking in to a life.
Some of my schoolmates were angry with me; they said: how can
you refuse to go to the army when such things happen. I told
them: that is exactly the reason that I am refusing: the army
being in the territories is not a way to stop terrorist attacks;
it causes them. Exactly because I told this girl, Merav, that
I feel committed to do whatever I can to prevent such things
from happening again to others, I feel that one of the most important
things which I as an individual can do, is refusing to serve
in the army. After all, everybody knows how the present situation
will end: always for centuries, the rebellion of an occupied
people eventually ended in its freedom. The only question how
much time it will take, and how many more casualties there will
be. I try to make both a bit less.
"Another point: what the occupation
is doing to our society. I want to tell about Rami, whom I met
in the prison. I sat with him for hours, listening. It is incredible
how many terrible things he had witnessed in just three months
of service in the territories. He told me about the young boy
who threw a stone at the lieutenant-colonel's jeep which did
not hit the jeep. But the colonel still chased the child, caught
him and beat him brutally with the butt of a rifle. And another
child which a Shabak agent tied up, and then urinated on him.
When Rami tried to protest, the man shouted: Go away; I am conducting
an interrogation. And he also told me of soldiers looting a shop,
and then destroying everything which they could not carry. And
he told me about how he could not stand it anymore, and how he
sat in the toilet for several hours in the night, the barrel
in his mouth, the finger on the trigger. In the end he ran away,
and that's how he got into prison. That's what happens to the
sensitive people. The non-sensitive ones, those who get used
to these Wild West norms, afterwards bring these norms into the
Israeli society itself. We are corrupting ourselves. I am not
willing to be part of the main instrument of corruption."
Final Note:
There are many signs that the refusal
issue is becoming more and more central in the media and Israeli
discourse. A number of refuseniks were released over the last
two weeks. The best guess on this development is that the army
wants the number of refuseniks in jail reduced. That is good
news, but it is accompanied by concern that the IDF hopes to
use the current court martial proceedings to teach potential
refuseniks that the price, the next time around, for future refuseniks
might be high.
[This account was edited by Reuven Kaminer,
and is based on the invaluable reporting of Adam Keller and Beate
Zilversmidt for Gush Shalom. Keller and Zilversmidt are the editors
of The Other Israel.]
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