He was an IDF officer but now he says he’d rather go to jail than participate in the Gaza war
This time last year, Michael Ofer-Ziv was halfway through his military work on the war in Gaza. The reservist was called up a week after the devastating Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The 29-year-old says he was torn about whether to serve with the Israel Defence Forces or not. A self-proclaimed leftist, he says he was abroad when the call came, and was hesitant to accept. But emotions among friends and family were running high. His family knew some of the victims killed at the site of the Nova music festival, one of the areas the militants had targeted.
So Ofer-Ziv reported for duty on Oct. 13, 2023, serving as a control officer for the next two months out of Sde Teiman, a military base in the Negev desert in southern Israel, near the border with Gaza.
“As a lefty, I do not believe that military action will solve anything in the long term,” he said during an interview with CBC News.
“But it was very clear that in the short term, there was a need to re-establish the border to protect civilians on our side.”
However, even during his term, his apprehension toward the military’s stated goals for the war remained in the back of his mind. In June, after a break, he officially refused to return — a decision that could mean jail time.
Ofer-Ziv is now among over 100 Israeli servicemen and women who have signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to return to service without an immediate ceasefire deal in Gaza and return of the Israeli hostages who remain there. The letter, which is still collecting signatures, had reached 165 at time of publication.
Conscientious objectors — also called refusers or refuseniks in Israel — reject the mandatory call to service over moral or political grounds, and can face jail time for their actions. Though they remain a minority of the population, the country has seen recent high-profile cases of young refusers.
Netanyahu’s office declined to comment to CBC on the letter and on refusers protesting the war in Gaza.
The IDF said in a statement that any narrative suggesting an uptick in refuseniks is “false,” and that the cases described are “marginal.”
“Since the outbreak of the war, hundreds of thousands of reservists have been called up, some of whom continue to be actively deployed even now.”
The tipping point
Ofer-Ziv was part of the brigade command unit, which controls the movement of troops in the battlefield. He was stationed in a “war room” at Sde Teiman, where he would monitor a portion of the ground operations in Gaza live through screens. He described it as the “cool-headed” team driving the fight on the ground.
(Sde Teiman would later gain infamy, as it was partially converted into a detention camp during the war and faced allegations of IDF soldiers abusing Palestinian detainees. Ofer-Ziv was not involved with the detention camp operations.)
He said he couldn’t share too many details of his time there, but said it was an environment where officers were constantly debating where, who and what to strike next. And between those debates and the high-stress environment he was in, compounded by a lack of sleep and separation from his family, Ofer-Ziv says making decisions was difficult.
He also felt that, while troops were never told to target civilians in Gaza, many didn’t see the accidental killings of civilians as a big deal.
“The general sentiment is this disregard [for] Palestinian lives: It’s not as important of a thing that we should talk about or care about that much,” he said.
The thinking was “we should avoid it when we can, but it’s not something that we should work really hard to avoid.”
Part of what kept Ofer-Ziv in that war room was a belief that a ceasefire deal was imminent. And he believed the presence of someone who was more critical of the war could make an impact on the decisions made.
“I really believe that when I was there, I made a bit of a difference,” Ofer-Ziv said. “In many cases, the decision not to fire, I had a part [in] making that decision.”
But the tipping point was in December 2023, when the IDF mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages in northern Gaza.
“At the time, we already had this concept that the military pressure is killing hostages, rather than making a reality for a deal,” he said.
He was given a routine break that month, and by the next month, he had already decided not to return.
Regarding any wrongdoing on the battlefield, the Israeli army told CBC it had referred nearly 2,000 such cases to the General Staff Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, an independent body, for review.
No soldiers, no war
Mattan Helman refused to enlist with the IDF in 2007, and spent over 100 days in jail. Now, as executive director of Refuser.org, he works to support fellow refusers and their efforts to resist Israeli military action in the broader Middle East.
An international organization, Refuser.org funds refusers’ legal fees, and also supports their press and social media campaigns about war resistance.
“This kind of initiative of soldiers is resistance,” he told CBC News. “The work cannot go on without soldiers to continue the war.”
Though they are a minority, refuser movements have gained some traction in the past. Yesh Gvul — which roughly translates to “There is a limit” — is one of them, created at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War by Israeli veterans who refused to serve in the military. Nearly 3,000 reservists signed the petition against invading Lebanon, according to its website.
Shimri Zameret, the chair of Refuser.org’s board who has also spent time in jail for refusing to serve, says it’s difficult to reject military service in Israeli society.
Though there are exemptions, most Israeli citizens are required to serve in the military once they turn 18 — men for at least 32 months and women at least 24. After that, they’re typically required to be part of the reserve force, where they’re not always on active duty but can be called up for emergencies.
It’s not just the legal requirement that makes refusing difficult, however. Many refuseniks keep it to themselves, Zameret says, because they fear reprisal from their family and friends, as serving in the military is an important part of Israeli society.
“Most of them don’t understand that they’re doing atrocities because they are told by their societies, they are socialized to believe that what they’re doing is protecting their society,” he said.
“So this is the cognitive dissonance, where soldiers are going and they’re doing this thing that they believe is for protection.”
A top Israeli cabinet minister has signalled the country is preparing to annex 150 settlements in the occupied West Bank, sparked in part by Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House. But such a move could also hinder any prospective peace process.
Possible jail time
Ofer-Ziv officially refused military duty when he was called up again in June.
He was then notified that he was suspended from military service shortly after signing two refusal petitions. There was an attempt to sway him to remove his signature from them.
He says he believes the government is hoping to keep the activities of refuseniks like him quiet. But he is adamant about his decision, he says.
“I participated in occupation for, let’s say, four years, when I was in mandatory service. I participated in the occupation every day,” he said.
“I live in Israel. I pay taxes [that] go to the West Bank, they go to occupation. So, the way I see it, it’s me paying my dues….
“[And] this is what I can do to pay back for what I did.”
He could face jail time, though he says he may not find out until after the war ends. But Ofer-Ziv says he’s at peace with any punishment that he may have to face as a result of his outspoken objection to the war in Gaza.
“I’d rather sit in jail than participate in this war.”
Published at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000
Russia’s Putin signs updated doctrine that lowers threshold for using nuclear weapons
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a revised nuclear doctrine declaring that a conventional attack on Russia by any nation that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country.
Putin’s endorsement of the new nuclear deterrent policy comes on the 1,000th day after he sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Putin first announced changes in the nuclear doctrine in September, when he chaired a meeting discussing the proposed revisions, but the signing follows an apparent decision by the U.S. to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with American-supplied longer-range missiles, which was first learned in published reports on the weekend.
Russia’s Defence Ministry, as reported by Russian news agencies on Tuesday, said that Ukraine launched an attack on the Bryansk region overnight with six U.S.-made ATACMS long-range missiles. Debris from one missile fell on a military facility causing a fire, but the other five were intercepted, the report said.
The attack resulted in no casualties or damage, the ministry said.
The signing of the doctrine, which says that any massive aerial attack on Russia could trigger a nuclear response, reflects Putin’s readiness to threaten use of the country’s nuclear arsenal to force the West to back down as Moscow presses a slow-moving offensive in Ukraine.
Asked about whether the updated doctrine was deliberately issued on the heels of the U.S. decision to ease restrictions on Ukraine using its longer-range missiles to strike Russia, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the document was published “in a timely manner” and that Putin instructed the government to update it earlier this year so that it is “in line with the current situation.”
Russia’s president has previously warned the U.S. and other NATO allies that allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied longer-range weapons to hit Russian territory would mean that Russia and NATO are at war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a virtual address to European lawmakers in Brussels to mark the 1,000th day, urging them to continue to aid Ukraine’s defence, and warning that Russia could draw upon thousands of more North Korean soldiers.
“The more time he has, the worse conditions become,” he said.
Includes countries who support attack from a nuclear power
The updated doctrine states that an attack against his country by a non-nuclear power with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” will be seen as their “joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
It doesn’t specify whether such an attack would necessarily trigger a nuclear response. It mentions the “uncertainty of scale, time and place of possible use of nuclear deterrent” among the key principles of the nuclear deterrence.
Defence Minister Bill Blair says Canada supports the Biden administration’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied long-range missiles into Russian territory.
At the same time, it spells out conditions for using nuclear weapons in greater detail compared to the previous version of the doctrine, noting they could be used in case of a massive air attack involving ballistic and cruise missiles, aircraft, drones and other flying vehicles.
The wide formulation appears to significantly broaden the triggers for possible nuclear weapons use compared with the previous version of the document, which stated that Russia could tap its atomic arsenal if “reliable information is received about the launch of ballistic missiles targeting the territory of Russia or its allies.”
The revised doctrine envisages that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to aggression against its ally Belarus.
Belarus’s authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled the country with an iron hand for more than 30 years, has relied on Russian subsidies and support. He has let Russia use his country’s territory to send troops into Ukraine and allowed the Kremlin to deploy some of its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Russia says it has captured another Ukraine town
Advancing village by village, Russia since August has recorded its fastest gains in Ukraine since the first year of the war.
Russian forces claimed the capture of the Ukrainian settlement of Novoselydivka in Eastern Ukraine, Russian state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday, citing the defence ministry.
After nearly three years of bombardments, many Ukrainians welcome having the ability to strike back deeper into Russian territory as the U.S. is warned not to further escalate the war.
Meanwhile, 12 people, including a child, were killed in a Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday.
The drone attack overnight on a residential building in the small town of Hlukhiv bordering Russia also wounded 13 people, including three children, Ukraine’s national police force said.
Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 51 drones and lost track of 30 more after Russia launched 87 drones overnight. Drones that disappear from radar have often been brought down by Ukrainian electronic defences.
Russian forces have pummelled the northeastern region of Sumy in recent months, damaging its critical and civilian infrastructure.
A missile strike there on Sunday killed 11 people, injured 89 and cut power for thousands.
Published at Tue, 19 Nov 2024 11:21:06 +0000