Why did I decide not to serve in the army:

As soon as I started to have political awareness, it was clear to me that I would not join the army. I don’t remember exactly when and how it happened, but at some point, this understanding — that the country is conducting a violent and brutal occupation, which causes violence, death, and injustice, not to mention a militaristic culture — seeped in, in a way I had not known before.

I began to look at the world in a different way, with alienation. There is always alienation in the beginning when you don’t know how to contain the pain you see.

Along with the alienation came the very urgent need to act. I remember how I saw with a good friend the film about Atalia Ben-Ami, who was a political dissident who had just been released from the military prison at the time. In a large part of the film, she meets with Palestinians who live in the West Bank and hears from them about their lives. These were horrors I had never known before. I remember at the end of the movie I looked at my friend and said to her: I want to be like her, I will be like her.

Since then it became clear to me that I would not enlist, that I would not be able to cooperate. I didn’t know how I was going to do it then. At first, I thought I would really choose the path of declared political refusal, and imprisonment. I saw it as a tool of activism.

In the end, I didn’t choose it and managed, in a different way, to obtain an exemption and be released.

Now I am active in the socialist struggle movement, which fights against the occupation alongside other struggles. When I think about it now I feel a huge relief that I can use this phase of my life in this way, instead of in a system that is used to oppress the innocent.

By Avigail