Washington Report, December 2005, pages 18, 21

Special Report

Ellie Armon: Teenage Israeli Refusenik

By Robert Hirschfield

	Ellie Armon in New York (Photo by Asaf Shtull-Trauring).

OVER A café latte in Starbuck’s in Lower Manhattan, Ellie Armon explained the reason she got suspended from Telma Yellin High School, an art school in Tel Aviv.

“They were playing the National Anthem, and I refused to stand up,” she said. “I was protesting the words ‘Jewish soul’ in the anthem. Only a Jew can stand up for this. What about Christians? What about Muslims? That whole way of thinking is responsible for the occupation.”

Her opposition to the occupation compelled Armon to draft her letter of refusal to serve as a soldier in the Israeli army. The letter was a political rite of passage, linking her with a growing number of Israeli high school students.

She was ordered to appear before a committee of four old war veterans whose purpose was to instill shame and trigger repentance.

“They asked me, ‘Why don’t you say something about the killings of Hamas?’” Armon recalled. “I said I didn’t think that was relevant. Then, they asked me, ‘What don’t you like about the occupation?’ I repeated what I wrote in the letter, that Israel was committing war crimes in the territories.”

What would become of society, they asked Armon finally, if everyone was like her?

“If everyone was like me,” she replied, “things would change.”

Armon was classified as a selective refuser—she would either have to serve in the army, or face possible imprisonment. Because the army allows conscientious objector (CO) exemptions for female, but not male, refuseniks, she could have claimed to be a conscientious objector and gotten off the hook.

“I am not a conscientious objector,” she stated emphatically. “When I go back to Israel [she planned to return in the very near future], and the Military Police come to my house and take me to jail, that’s okay. Just as girls who are 18 have to go to the army, I have to go to jail,” she concluded. “This is my job.”

Of the more than 700 Israeli teenagers who have declared their intention not to serve as soldiers, only about 40 actually have gone to jail. Those intent on making a political statement without suffering the consequences find ways around the law. It’s possible to obtain a psychiatrist’s note pronouncing one mentally “unfit to serve,” for example, which is one of the more popular methods of circumvention.

“The authorities basically don’t know how to handle the refusenik issue,” says Israeli journalist Peretz Kidron, a supporter of the refuseniks, “so they blow hot and cold. One day they are strict and authoritarian with one refusenik, the next they fall over themselves meeting another refusenik halfway.”

Kidron estimates there have been 4,000 cases of political refusals over the past 30 years. (High school refusers are a new phenomenon on the Israeli scene.) Of those, 1,000 went to jail, while the others were glossed over, ignored, or benefited from army compromises.

Unlike most resisters, Armon can attribute her rebellion, at least in part, to genetic input. Her mother, the Israeli documentary filmmaker Ariella Azoulay, is an opponent of the occupation and a woman of the left. (Her father, on the other hand, is a man of the hard right, with no sympathy for her heresies.)

When Armon came home from school as a little girl with her shiny stories of Israel’s War of Independence, Azoulay deflated her daughter with the word kibush, or conquest. The War of Independence, she said, was a war of conquest.

“When I said that to my teacher, I was told, ‘Never say that word in this class again,’” Armon said. But by the age of 10, she was exchanging letters with Palestinian detainees. One of the detainees had been in jail a year without trial, and his family had no knowledge of his whereabouts.

“It made me think a lot about questions of civil rights and human rights,” Armon explained.

Amid the rattling of trays, and the Sunday morning jazz, the  young Israeli recalled her high school days of lonely activism.

“At the school, even though it was supposed to be open and liberal because it was an art school, there wasn’t much talk about the occupation,” she said. “There was me, and maybe two other people, and it was hopeless.”

Her decision to defy the army and not serve touched raw nerves all over the place. Her friends supported her because they were her friends, but they did not agree with her. Her other peers, approaching draft age, were more vehement. Heated political discussions broke out, and Armon was accused of being too ideological. But mostly she was accused of betrayal.

“You have to give something back to the country,” they told her.

“I told them, ‘What did the country give me? It gave me one big lie all my life.’”

Which was: “That there is only one history, and you can’t argue about it.”

Armon became involved with the Shministim (high school seniors), students like herself who had been inundating Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with letters of refusal signed by hundreds of high school students.

As one such letter said: “We the undersigned, Israeli girls and boys, believing in the values of democracy, humanism and pluralism, hereby declare that we shall refuse to take part in the occupation and repression policy adopted by the government of Israel.”

In the middle of the night Armon would write resistance slogans on the walls of schools, like the ghost of Rosa Luxemburg. Now, back in Israel, she joins the protests against the wall at Bil’in.

She and the Israeli army are still not done with each other. Armon was detained briefly at Ben-Gurion International Airport when she returned to Israel, and she has been prohibited from traveling abroad.

The army has informed her that she will have to appear before yet another committee at a yet-to-be determined date, and New Profile, the high school refuser support group, has assigned her a lawyer.

“I still haven’t changed my mind,” Armon stated. “I am still willing to go ‘the hard way.’ If that means spending time in jail, I will.”

Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based free-lance journalist who is writing a series of articles on the Israeli refusenik movement.