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A Letter to Aharon Barak,
President of Israel’s Supreme Court
You Are Not Protecting My Son’s Rights
19/04/2003
By Matania Ben-Artzi
Supreme Court President, Aharon Barak,
My son, Jonathan (Yoni) Ben-Artzi, is a pacifist. He
refused to enlist for military service and asked for an
alternative civil service. As a student of Physics and
Mathematics, he believed he could best serve the Israeli
Society by tutoring children in underprivileged schools,
for example.
Yoni's request was rebuffed by the Army. He was called up
for service on August 8, 2002. He came to the Induction
Center, refused to wear uniform and was immediately
incarcerated in Military Prison 4, for a one-month term.
Here is the statement he made to the officer who
sentenced him that day:
"I, Jonathan Ben-Artzi, am refusing to join the army
on grounds of pacifism. My deep belief in non-violence
began when I was still a small child, and developed over
the years into a broad political and philosophical
perception. Because of my beliefs, my own country is
going to throw me in jail, in defiance of all
international laws and basic moral values. I will go to
prison proudly, knowing that this is the least I can do
to improve the face of this country."
Yoni has been consecutively sentenced seven times, for
the same crime, and has spent over 200 (two hundred) days
in Military Prison 4. I am sure that in your capacity as
President of the Supreme Court the tough reputation of
this prison has reached your ear. However, I suspect that
you have never visited the place, neither in the
blistering days of August nor the freezing nights of
January. I shall spare you details of the life in prison,
only to tell you that the Army did not succeed in
breaking Yoni's spirit or making him change his mind.
Quite contrary, he was heartened by knowing that the
prison has since added to its inmate list seventeen
conscientious young men, who, resenting the purposeless
violence of the Israeli military, have asked for
alternative civil service.
Alarmed by the growing number of such courageous boys,
the Army decided to do what it knows how to do best: To
use more force. On February 19, 2003, Yoni was ordered to
stand trial by Court-Martial. The logic underlying the
Army's decision was simple: The military court is only
authorized to deal with soldiers and Yoni is already a
soldier who refuses to sign the papers that will render
him a soldier... After so many months of arbitrary
detention, Yoni was ready to face the challenge. He had
only one condition: He wanted real justice.
He therefore petitioned to you, the President of the
Supreme Court, asking for his case to be transferred to
the consideration of a civil court. The appeal was
drafted by Adv. Avigdor Feldmann, a prominent human
rights lawyer, and Adv. Michael Sfard, a young lawyer
specializing in International Law.
You surely agree that the document submitted in Yoni's
name was a scholarly work worthy of its authors, and even
more so, worthy of the presumed spirit of our society. It
reminded you that no military tribunal is empowered to
decide whether a person is a soldier or a civilian; that
matters of conscience should be debated within the
framework of the civil society, by their very nature;
that all aspects of civil service are under the
jurisdiction of the civil system. It recalled foreign
court rulings (so well familiar to you) indicating that
these principles are universally accepted in all
democratic countries, since many decades.
The hearing of the case was set to April 8, 2003. It was
an early morning session, and the two Justices that
accompanied you seemed quite sleepy and never uttered a
word. You, on the other hand, were very active. Indeed,
so much so, that you saw to it that the attorney
representing the Army had nothing much to do. First, you
concurred with the Army that Yoni was already a soldier.
Then, you argued that the military judges were perfectly
qualified to deal with questions of pacifism, fairly and
knowledgeably. Perhaps you do not know, but two of the
three judges in Yoni's tribunal are officers who have no
college degree and have never attended a course in either
Law or Philosophy. Finally, when Yoni's lawyer pointed
out that conscientious objectors were always tried in
civil courts, you retorted by mentioning that Dreyfus (!)
had been convicted in a military court (and then finally
acquitted in a civilian one...). Yoni stood no chance.
You handed him over to the Army that had already
sentenced him seven times.
Yoni was sitting right in front of you during the
hearing, but you did not seem to have noticed him. Let me
tell you a few things about him. His maternal grandfather
Moshe had managed to escape Nazi Europe and to arrive in
Palestine just in time to fight in Israel's War of
Independence. He was wounded and spent six months in
hospital. While in hospital, his son Zvi was born. Two
years later Ofra, Yoni's mother, was born. Twenty years
later Zvi, a paratrooper, fell in battle. Yoni's older
brother was named after him. He too served in the Army.
When Yoni's turn came, he drew the line beyond which he
would not go. No more futile wars, no more bloodshed.
It may sound ironic that Yoni and you studied in the same
prestigious Hebrew University High School. When you came
to the school to deliver a speech on human rights, he was
deeply impressed. Unfortunately, this experience helped
set him on a path that carried him to your Court last
week.
You seem to like your image as a judge who epitomizes the
most revered values of human rights. It serves you well
here and abroad, among your peers. You never miss a
conference dedicated to this issue. At the latest one,
last week, at the Hebrew University, you preached to our
Parliament (and I translate from the Hebrew text):
"The Knesset should establish, loudly and in clear
voice, the principles of equality, freedom of expression,
rights of defendants and all other human rights-civil,
political and social. I deeply regret the fact that the
Knesset is not doing that".
The annals of our Supreme Court tell a different story.
During your tenure as Justice (and President since 1995)
human rights in this country have been severely eroded.
Your Court has shamefully succumbed to every whim of the
military. Innocent youths were kidnapped in Lebanon to be
used as bargaining chips-and your Court approved it.
Administrative detentions were imposed by the
thousands-but all the appeals to you were dismissed.
Targeted killings that took the lives of hundreds of
innocent bystanders, cruel closures that wreaked havoc
among millions of Palestinians (so that Jewish fanatics
could be unabated in their festivities), inhumane
destruction of the livelihood of tens of thousands of
families--all these have been repeatedly legitimized by
your Court.
You gave the Army Generals a free hand, wrapped in a
deceptive shield of enlightenment. And when a few boys
dared to express their conscientious objection to those
evils-you denied them a fair hearing, their basic right
of legal defense.
Yoni and his friends, in their young age, have
demonstrated their humanity. You did not see it fit to
protect their rights.
With due respect,
Matania Ben-Artzi
PS. During the Week of Human Rights last December (yes,
here we celebrate a full week, not just a single day) you
were scheduled to appear at the Van-Leer Institute,
alongside the Chief Military Prosecutor, General
Finkelstein. On this occasion Ofra and I handed out a
flyer to the participants. I am attaching it herein, for
your convenience.
***********************************************************
Aharon Barak and Menachem Finkelstein,
You are celebrating here today the "International
Week of Human Rights"- a hypocritical and
sanctimonious festival.
This same week: Millions of people are subjected to a
cruel and brutal occupation.
**YOU PUT ON IT A FACADE OF JUSTICE AND ENLIGHTENMENT**
This same week: More than seven thousand people are
locked up in detention camps, deprived of minimal humane
conditions. They have never been brought to court.
** YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT **
This same week: And since many years, the ewe-lamb of the
poor is robbed by an evil, war seeking hand. Across the
fields of Samaria, the dogs lick up the blood of Naboth.
** YOU NEVER STOPPED THEM **
This same week: YOU threw in jail clear-eyed and
pure-hearted boys. Their only sin was that they followed
their conscience.
YOU know that you will not silence their voice. YOU know
they will win.
The Chronicles of Mankind will tell you that.
When the prophet Isaiah said:
"He eagerly looked for justice, but see, bloodshed!
For righteousness, and lo, a cry of distress",
HE WAS REFERRING TO YOU.
YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE THE DAY OF REQUITAL.
"ALL THAT IS REQUIRED FOR EVIL TO TRIUMPH IS FOR
GOOD MEN TO DO NOTHING" (Edmund Burke).
"The world stands on three pillars: The truth, the
justice and the peace. And these three are indeed one.
When justice is served, truth is served, peace is
served" (Rabbi Shimon Ben-Gamliel, Talmudic sage).
http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=7&id=17
My
Draft Resistance
Noa Kaufman
I was asked to write a letter about my draft resistance,
about an event, for a committee, about making the
decision. I sat down in front of the computer and my
fingers started typing the story of the "conscience
committee" one more time, but something didn't seem
right. I deleted it and tried writing about the day I
made the decision to refuse. That didn't feel meaningful
either.
Then I thought of the day when I truly understood that I
not only didn't belong to the army, but that the army
would act against me if necessary, and I remembered the
day when I felt I had beaten the IDF, the day when I
understood that I didn't belong to them - and that they
didn't want me, the day when I felt one million percent
sure that my draft resistance was the sanest thing I had
done in my life.
 On
October 12, along with my friends, I joined a
demonstration of "Taayush" in the neighborhood
of Abu Dis in East Jerusalem. We planned to march
together, Jews and Palestinians, women and men, youth and
older people, towards the wall being built in Abu Dis
that, more than anything, symbolizes the alienation and
segregation that the state is trying to create between us
and our neighbors. It's a commonplace that what you don't
see doesn't hurt, and we people don't usually look very
far beyond our own back yards.
Saturday, very early in the morning, and I can barely
open my eyes to listen to the routine briefing from the
people in charge, who are stressing the express request
that we do not resort to any type of violence, that we
let them handle the situation if something goes wrong.
Later, I walked over to the crate to pick up an onion,
hoping I wouldn't need to use it, and thinking of the
last demonstration involving Palestinians and soldiers,
and wishing everything would go smoothly.
We got on the buses, some 200-300 demonstrators, and when
we reached the no-driving area, we got off and started
marching towards the wall, hoping that from the other
side, we'd soon see our Palestinian counterparts, who
were under an almost continuous curfew.
Gradually I began to wake up, mostly due to the scorching
sun.
The whistles handed out to the neighborhood kids helped
some too.
People from the neighborhood joined us, first a trickle
and then as if all of us were swept by a wave of
enthusiasm: we're marching towards a common goal, no wall
will stop us, our numbers are large, we were almost a
thousand, demonstrating for such an important cause!
We were walking along a dirt path, a lot of steep drops
and exhausting climbs, till we reached an open area. Then
the Jewish demonstrators were asked to move forward, we
were drilled for this and without thinking twice we moved
to the front of the demonstration - Jewish faces look
less threatening to the average Border Policeman -
leaving behind the residents of the neighborhood who were
waving Palestinian flags.
"I hate flags," I whispered to a friend
marching beside me.
"So do I," he said, "but look how happy
they are that they can finally bear those flags without
fear."
Of course, no idyll can be allowed to go for long, and
after about half an hour of walking, a few meters before
the ugly wall came into sight, large forces of Border
Police and regular Police arrived, jeeps loaded with
rifles, grenades, helmets, etc.
At first the organizers tried to calm everything down,
but the area was declared a sealed military zone,
naturally meaning that no one could move in or out except
armed military forces.
 Within minutes the huge group of
demonstrators had turned to run, and soon enough we found
out the reason - the soldiers had lobbed teargas
canisters at us and the gas was spreading through the
air.
If you happen to reach the open air zoo the day the
elephants are having a race, you can imagine how it feels
to have one thousand people galloping towards you.
I turned around and ran too, fleeing the frightened mass
and the gas.
We ran into the back yard of some house that was turned,
through no fault of its own, into part of the stupid,
pointless battle the army was fighting against us, trying
to breathe through the onions provided in advance,
groping our way to the fastest way up. into the fresh
air, while trying to see through all the huge confusion.
I prayed they wouldn't start shooting, and between a tear
and a choke I caught sight of a little Arab neighborhood
kid - they didn't have any onions.
A kid, and I couldn't tell whether he was crying from the
gas or the awful events he'd been hurled into.
I held out held out half my onion and hated myself for
dropping out of my Arabic lessons. Go tell a kid with
stun grenades exploding all around that he's supposed to
breathe through the onion and not rub it in his eyes
although it's a common reflex response.
A few minutes later all was quiet and we started slowly
making our way back to the demonstration area.
I felt defeated, stupid - I'd felt so moved by a thousand
demonstrators. They'd dispersed us in two seconds. Not
only hadn't we reached the wall, we'd also caused
pointless trouble for the people of the neighborhood.
So many kids were running around, but - like kids - they
were back to games and shouting right away, excited about
what they had just been through. I mused that it might
well have happened to them before.
I'm so na?ve, hiding for years in the streets of
Jerusalem, which despite so many bombings and so much
blood, still feels to me like a quiet, pleasant city.
In the same streets where dozens, maybe hundreds of kids
have been killed, among them some of my childhood friends
and faces familiar from the bus or from school. The
pretty, quiet, Jerusalem streets, on many days full of
kids and fun and happiness, and on others full of bowed
heads, hurrying, just to get out of there, out of the
bloodbath, out of that terrible cemetery - in those
streets I feel protected, at home.
I was stunned by the images and actions of the army, my
army, the army protecting me - or at least that's what I
was always taught.
And the children, on the other hand, went on as usual,
collecting empty gas canisters - playing war.
I found my friends and later, the little kid I'd seen
earlier. In broken Arabic I found out that his name was
Mohammad and he was 5, and now, out of the dust cloud, I
could see what a lovely face he had. The only sign of
what he'd been through were his reddened eyes.
 We
stayed where we were for another few  minutes
till they let us out. The overriding feeling was
frustration, failure. On our way we passed a few army
jeeps. I was scared I'd look inside and see one of my
class mates sitting there - he on one side, me on the
other, while just a few months ago we'd studied together
for our high school finals.
I felt something crystallizing in my consciousness - a
hatred for those in uniform.
I've always tried not to hate - to understand, to
remember that friends of mine wear the same uniforms too
and get the same orders, but at that point I felt like
taking some soldier, pushing him into a sealed room and
filling it with tear gas and, just to be
"fair," equipping him with an onion.
I was shocked by the force of my feelings, and I tried to
imagine how those living under perpetual occupation hated
the soldiers - living day by day with tanks wrecking
their streets, destroying what they had been building all
their lives, blowing up homes, shooting loved ones.
That evening, when I read the organizers' reports I cried
again, this time for joy: the neighborhood residents
weren't angry at us at all for causing such a mess, they
simply thanked us. "Thank you," one of them had
said, "thank you for letting us demonstrate without
casualties, no dead or wounded." That reminded me
that while we were waiting for the buses to take us home,
dehydrated and really hungry, one of the neighborhood
people came up and gave us all pitas from his bakery - I
could have hugged him right then, for the glimmer of hope
I'm always so glad to find, shining through the tiny
crack that will someday lead to coexistence.
At that moment I understood that the army would always be
against me, would always try to stop me from reaching
such demonstrations, but that if these activities could
go on helping the realization of even the tiniest right
of those neighborhood residents, the right to
demonstrate, the right to eat, then I would go on
reaching them, whether the IDF liked it or not.
With a lot of joy mixed with some sadness at the final
death of the myth of the army that we're all raised to
believe, I realized that my refusal to serve in the
Israel Defense Force (even now I couldn't stifle a laugh)
- to serve the occupation, to serve the checkpoints, the
tanks, or even some office in an army base sending out
the call-ups - that refusal was not over when I left the
induction base with my exemption certificate. My refusal
had just begun.
New Profile - Movement for the
Civil-ization of Israeli Society
POB 48005, Tel-Aviv 61480, Israel
E-mail: mailto:newprofile@speedy.co.il
Voice box: ++972-(0)3-516-01-19
Website: http://www.newprofile.org/
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