The Murder of Abir Aramin, Nine Years Old

The Murder of Abir Aramin, Nine Years Old
IDF Soldiers Never Go to Jail for Killing Palestinian. Never.
By NURIT PELED-ELHANAN
August 8, 2007

How sad it is to come to the realization that the number of those who evade service in the army of occupation is so low that there is virtually no effect on the motivation of Israel’s children to put on the uniform of brutality.

Professor Stewart Cohen of Bar Ilan University consoles us by declaring that the “blame” lies in the increase in the number of Haredis who do not serve and he informs us that the army of the United States would have been happy with such a low percentage of evaders during the Vietnam war. Maybe we would do well to learn something from the Americans of the 1960s, or even from the Haredi Jews who fear for the safety of their children.

When the extent of evasion became known, I was invited onto the program of Oded Shahar, “Politika”, as a mother who will not permit her son (now 15 years old) to join the army. Apart from me, I was informed over the course of a protracted campaign of persuasion, only men were invited, most of them warmongering generals like Effie Eitam and Yossi Peled.

After I was convinced that my participation in the program would be important, I agreed. The researcher asked me why I would not allow my son to enlist. I explained to her that an army that has been involved for forty years now in systematic and growing abuse of a civilian population, (abuse that even a courageous journalist like Gideon Levy calls by the gentle name of “policing”), an army that teaches its soldiers that killing Palestinian children and those who protect them, like Rachel Corrie and James Miller, is not a crime, an army whose commanders are immune to punishment though they commit daily crimes against humanity, is not a suitable place for my son, who was brought up to love people, who has Palestinian friends, whose brothers and parents have Palestinian friends who are subjected to that same reign of terror and daily torment. After half an hour I was told that despite my contribution there were not enough seats on the stage.

A few days later we were told in an isolated solitary news broadcast that the file on the murder of Abir Aramin, the daughter of Salwa and Bassam Aramin, has been closed. Bassam is one of the founders of the Palestinian-Israeli movement Combatants for Peace, where my sons Elik and Guy are members. Bassam Aramin spent 9 years in an Israeli jail for being a member of the Fatah in the Hebron area and for trying to throw a grenade on an Israeli army Jeep which was patrolling in Occupied Hebron.

On a Tuesday afternoon, the 16th of January, an Israeli soldier shot his nine year old daughter, Abir, in the head as she was leaving school to go home. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry in Abir Aramin's death. The police and the courts have questioned no one except for Abir's sister, who was holding her hand while she was falling. The young sister was asked time and again how many meters were they from the school gate, from the kiosk, from the jeep.

There was hardly any investigation except for a private one by Bassam and his friends who know exactly who the killer is. But as far as the Israeli Defense Forces are concerned, the shooting did not happen. The army's official account of her death is that she might have been hit by a stone that one of her classmates was throwing "at our forces." That in the face of the finding of a senior pathologist, who worked for many years in an institute of forensic medicine.

One of the allegations against the evaders is that they have stopped believing in “values” such as sacrifice. Whose sacrifice, exactly? On what altar? To what god?

The soldiers of Israel are called upon to sacrifice children, parents, volunteers, and sometimes themselves on the altar of the megalomania of the insolent and corrupt leaders of the state of Israel, who have succeeded in converting this whole country into an altar on which they sacrifice other people’s children to the god of death. And no one is guilty of their deaths; no one is ever punished for the murder of a Palestinian child. The state takes care of those who serve it, sometimes. Other times it sacrifices even them, with the same cold-bloodedness and for the same reasons.

And the murderers? What about them? Do they know that they committed crimes? Do they toss and turn in their beds at night? Are they tormented by images of the small bodies that convulse and fall under their rifles, bombs and shells? Probably not. We know of no case in which any soldier turned himself in and expressed remorse for his actions. That is the biggest success of Israeli education: the distinction between blood and blood, between dead child and dead child, and the inculcation of the firm belief that the murder of Palestinians and their friends is not a crime.

Everyone who enlists in the army knows this and is prepared for it. Half the nation! How many millions are there in half the nation? How many millions of young men and women who are simply unmoved by the crying of a child, the agonies of a woman in labor, the pleas of an old man and the deaths of innocent people? How many millions of people who never learned to refuse orders that are manifestly inhumane even if they are legal according to the racist laws of their state, and to say no to corrupt leaders and bloodthirsty generals?

Well done, IDF! Well done, Israeli Jewish education, that has succeeded nearly perfectly in bestowing the values of racism, nearly without opposition.

And if my son Yigal really does want to participate in the military programs that they impose on high school students starting in grade 10, or God forbid, to enlist in the army of occupation and torment, I will see it as a dreadful educational failure. A terrible maternal failure. And if I do not do everything I can to prevent him from becoming a murderer or a corpse at the age of 18 I will know that I betrayed him and my vocation as a mother.

Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall

Nurit Peled-Elhanan can be reached at nuritpeled@gmail.com

Conscientious Objectors Abused by the Israeli Military

CounterPunch

Conscientious Objectors Abused by the Israeli Military

by YIGAL BRONNER
January 17, 2003

Jonathan Ben Artzi's (or Yoni as his friends know him) first experience with the Israeli justice system was a positive one. As a student at an elite Jerusalem prep school, he found that he could no longer bear the militaristic atmosphere or the overt role the military played in his education. When his class was bussed to a military training center for an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) orientation as part of his school program, Yoni refused to go. He also insisted that his parents be refunded for this "course," and that the fees be returned to his sole Arab classmate, who was literally taken off the military bus. Yoni simply felt that a school should prepare its students to be better citizens-- not soldiers. But this position, which for many may seem rather commonsensical, is considered extremely radical in Israel.

The high school, for its part, retaliated by preventing Yoni from graduating and denying him his diploma. It took a year and half of an uphill legal battle for this decision to be overruled by an Israeli court. In a tiny and cramped courtroom, Yoni, by then a college freshman majoring in mathematics, finally had a graduation-ceremony of sorts.

But this small victory is now a fading memory for Yoni, who has spent the last six months in a military prison. Yoni is a pacifist and has been one ever since he was twelve. He simply opposes wars. He cannot picture himself bearing arms. Furthermore, he is incensed by Israel's ongoing occupation of Palestine, by the atrocities and war crimes it commits, and by the endless cycle of violence its leaders market as a necessary component of life in Israel. Long before he was due to be drafted, it was clear to Yoni that he could not and would not participate in this march of folly; he would not join the military.

Yoni was one of the organizers of a seniors' letter addressed to Prime Minister Sharon and signed by some three hundred high school graduates, which announced their refusal to be drafted. The group's entire leadership is now behind bars.

One might have expected the state of Israel to respect the decisions of conscientious objectors like Yoni and his friends. After all, Israel has signed several international treaties which oblige it to wave military service for those who -- due reasons of conscience or religious belief -- feel incapable of taking up arms. These covenants require the state to assign civil rather than military service to such people. But the Israeli government, and more precisely the military prosecutor Menachem Finkelstein, have decided to ignore their obligations towards international law.

Instead the state has incarcerated the conscientious objectors in military prisons, for an indefinite period of time. Opposing the draft is simply too subversive a position in Israel-- too threatening to a militaristic establishment which has lived off the occupation and the ongoing war for so long.

Before throwing Yoni and his friends in jail, however, the Israeli government had to address its obligation to the above-mentioned international treaties, and so in a cynical effort to appear law abiding, it created a committee of "conscience-experts" whose role was to examine the motivations of the seniors. This committee has found that not one of the graduates is a real conscientious objector. They are all pretenders, it claims, and as such their place is in jail.

It would seem that the motivations of someone like Yoni, who risked his school diploma for his pacifist beliefs, should be beyond suspicion. After all, the decision to sue his own school was not without ramifications. Yoni had to pay a high social price for standing up for his unpopular beliefs. Moreover, anyone who reads his school essays will find that ever since eighth grade, he has had a very clear pacifist worldview. These essays were handed over to the military's "conscientious experts" who examined the evidence, and yet they found that Yoni was not really guided by his conscience. Yoni, the experts concluded, was simply a troublemaker, which, according to some twisted logic, also made him a perfectly suitable candidate for military service.

Accordingly, Israel and military prosecutor Finkelstein are not really violating their commitment to exempt conscientious objectors from military service-- there just aren't any objectors in their midst. As for trouble-making seniors, these exist in large quantities and have to be disciplined. There is no international law against this.

What, then, is the suitable punishment for the crime committed by Yoni and his friends, those trouble makers who masqueraded as people of conscience?

The answer to this question is simple: whatever it takes to break them.

Yoni has so far been sentenced to seven consecutive prison-terms, amounting to 196 days, and there does not seem to be an end in sight. He has been told time and again that he would be released at once, if he were to give up his principals. He would then be exempted from army service for mental reasons, they insinuated. The process would be simple: there would not be a team of experts this time. If he would only agree to see a psychiatrist, they would declare him mentally unfit instantly

But Yoni is still strong, and insists that his conscientious position is not some kind of mental illness. Yoni's parents, Ofra and Matania, are also strong, although they are growing increasingly bitter with the state in which they chose to raise their children. People of conscience, in Israel and abroad, must take a stand in Yoni's case. We need to raise our voice in his support. We should demand that this young man be released immediately and be reunited with his parents. It does not take a pacifist or even a political like-minded person to realize that he's done more than enough to earn his second diploma and become a graduate of the prison academy.

Yigal Bronner teaches South Asian literature at the Tel Aviv University and has recently spent four weeks in military prison for refusing to serve as a reservist in the occupied territories. He can be reached at ybronner@post.tau.ac.il

***

Israel's Conscientious Objectors: The Categorical Imperative

Israel's Conscientious Objectors
The Categorical Imperative
By URI AVNERY
December 29, 2003

Some years ago, when the jury for the annual Israel Prize announced its award to Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I decided to invite him to give a lecture to the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, the group that established the first contacts with the PLO.

"I am ready to come," he said, "on one condition: I shall speak only about the duty to refuse to serve in the occupied territories."

For him, that was the alpha and omega of the fight against the occupation.

I told him that he was free to speak about whatever he saw fit, even if I myself did not quite share his view.

(The lecture, by the way, had an unexpected result. In his usual provocative style, Leibowitz compared the Special Units of the Israeli army to the Nazi SS. His words were published, aroused a storm of protest and the prize jury wanted to cancel the award, whereupon Leibowitz himself announced that he refused it.)

Since then I had an ongoing debate with myself about this hard and painful subject.

I am not a pacifist, in the sense of totally refusing to bear arms. My heart is certainly with Yonathan Ben-Artzi, who is standing trial now because of his uncompromising pacifistic stand. He is a wonderful and admirable youngster. But as a member of a generation that experienced the war with the Nazis, I cannot accept the principle that every war is evil. Once the Nazis had taken hold of Germany and started to carry out their aggressive designs, there was no way of stopping them other then by force of arms.

As long as there is no world order and no world government, no world legislature or world police (all of which I hope will be in place by the end of the 21st century), no country can do without with a defense force. And as long as there is no world government that enables every people striving for liberty to attain its goal by peaceful means, freedom-fighters will need to use arms.

But Leibowitz was no pacifist. He did not advocate a general refusal to bear arms, but the refusal to serve the occupation. He believed

• in the moral value of this refusal,
  
• in the duty of every moral person to draw a line between himself and an unjust regime and
  
• to declare that he will not lend his hand to a policy that is inhuman, immoral and illegal by its very nature. He also believed
  
• that the personal example of the objectors was bound to influence the general public.

This approach is beset, of course, with several pitfalls, which made me hesitate.

• First, it undermines the democratic order. The army is supposed to serve the legal government that was elected by the citizens. If you refuse to follow the orders of the legal government, you shake the very foundations of democracy.

• Second, you legitimise the same actions by your opponents. According to the "categorical imperative" of Immanuel Kant, you have to behave

  "as if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal law of nature".

  If A has the right to refuse to serve the occupation, B has the right to refuse to remove settlements.

• Third, you corrupt the army. If all moral people leave the army, it will remain in the hands of the immoral ones. The checkpoints will be manned exclusively by Arab-haters, operations will be executed by sadists. But if the decent people remain in the army, they can influence its spirit, preventing by their very presence injustices and atrocities, or, at least, bringing them to light.

I have always had a lot of respect for conscientious objectors. I know how much courage is needed for a young person (and an old one, too) to withstand the social pressure of family, comrades and neighbors and to bear the consequences. I am impressed much more by such moral fortitude than by physical heroism in battle, when you know that all the people are behind you. (And I speak as one who has served in a so-called "elite unit".)

Therefore I have always supported an individual's right to refuse. But I myself was not ready to call upon young people to follow this line. My position was that persons must decide for themselves where they will best serve the fight against the occupation--inside or outside the army.

But I feel that my position is changing.

1. First of all, many soldiers have convinced me that it is almost impossible to withstand the pressure inside the army. The brainwashing is intense and unrelenting; those in the higher ranks are more and more like robots with blunted senses, the products of the occupation; not to mention the members of the religious academies connected with the army, Arab-haters and settlers with "knitted kippas" (associated with the extreme right-wing national-religious party.)
2. Second, the occupation itself has become a monster that nobody can serve without losing his humanity.
   

• When the members of the "cream of the Israeli army", the Sayeret Matkal (General Staff commandos) say so and refuse to go on, their testimony is persuasive.
  
• When the Airforce combat pilots revolt against their commander, who has said that he "feels nothing but a slight bump" when he releases a bomb that kills women and children, respect is due to them.
  
• When five 19-year old youngsters choose to go to prison rather than enjoy the freedom of the occupiers, Kant himself would have saluted them. The protest against an immoral regime is a categorical imperative.

Does this refusal prepare the ground for the refusal of right-wing soldiers? There is, of course, no symmetry between freedom-lovers, who refuse to take part in an ongoing injustice, and the settlers, who are themselves part of the injustice. But if one recognizes the right to refuse for reasons of conscience, one must apply Kant's principle to them, too. If there ever is an evacuation of the settlements, the right of a soldier to refuse to take part for reasons of conscience must be assured.

• Is this a blow against democracy? Most certainly.But this is a blow for the good. Israeli democracy is being whittled away with every day of occupation.
  

We are witnessing an continuous decline:

• the government has become Sharon's kindergarten,
  
• the Knesset attracts general contempt,
  
• the Supreme Court has largely become an instrument of the occupation,
  
• the media are marching in step.
  

It is the refusers who have introduced a moral dimension into the public discourse.

The accumulation of refusals, with one act inspiring the next and one military unit influencing another, is bound to have a lasting effect on the general public. It is both an expression of change and a stimulus for change.

But above all, the act of refusal shines like a beacon in the darkness. It drives out the despair that has infects every part of the collective body. It restores faith in the State of Israel and its younger generation.

Of course, the objectors are few. They are a small minority of the people and the army. But the course of human history would have been quite different without such minorities--people who had the courage to march on when the chorus of conformists shouted: "Stop!"

And not least: these people allow us to be proud again. A nation that has sons like these can have hope.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.