Marlborogh Lights or Assault Rifles

"The Army is the supreme symbol of duty, and as long as women are not equal to men in performing this duty, they have not yet obtained true equality. If the daughters of Israel are absent from the army, then the character of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Israel) will be distorted."  

David Ben Gurion

I was initially reluctant to read Valerie Zenatti’s memoir, When I Was a Soldier.  My tangential knowledge of Israeli – Palestinian conflict has mostly stemmed from association with radical anti-occupation, pro-Palestine groups and individuals.  I have been guilty of founding a position without regard to the facts as researched for myself.  I adopted the opinions of those around me without seeking any additional information on my own; merely trusting rhetoric without research is highly unadvisable in most affairs.  If I were to dismiss Valerie Zenatti’s story solely based upon her nationality, I would be no better than the very bigots who perpetuate ignorance and oppression.  After reading the book, I spoke with informed friends and colleagues to ask for locations where I might find more information and research about the Israeli Defense Forces and their role in what I will still refer to as an occupation.  While the book and research have not changed my mind as far as my views on the Israeli occupation, they have highlighted the sense of sorrowful loss that lies at the center of every war. 

The memoir, When I Was a Soldier, is a unique account of a feminine association with war because of Israel’s national conscription requirement.  Israeli men and women are required to serve a term in the Israeli Defense Force at eighteen years old.  The service is supported by the majority of the population as well as celebrated by Jews who emigrate to Israel to enlist.  Compared to American teenagers during the Vietnam War who were burning their draft cards and refusing to serve, the militarization of Israel is seen as an honor, servitude, and national protection.  Zenatti writes of being met with balloons and a banner on her last day of work before enlistment.  The banner read, “Soldier girl, go in peace and bring us back peace” (42).  The phrase seems to insinuate that peace is something to be recovered, or something that could be recovered by a soldier in arms.  Zenatti realizes the contradictions in her nation’s ideology early on, but still feels strong allegiance and necessity in her role.  She struggles with her opposing feelings when she writes, “We’re a nation of lunatics stranded between songs, the sea and war.  A country in which death is conceivable from as early as eighteen, but this eventuality doesn’t make anyone any more intelligent…This is my country, so I know and I understand all this almost physically.  And yet I feel like a stranger to it, a foreigner” (41).  I cannot imagine that I would have been able to articulate my emotions so eloquently at eighteen years old.  I also cannot imagine having lived my childhood knowing that turning eighteen meant much more than the right to buy a pack of cigarettes.  I imagine that the conceivability of death would have made me much more stoic and introspective than the conceivability of a pack of Marlboro Lights. 

Israeli Military Industries (IMI) is a defense systems house, specializing in the development, integration, manufacturing, and life cycle support of modern land, air and naval combat systems.  The company is to Israel what Halliburton is to the United States.  The only difference is that IMI is fully owned by the Israeli government.  According to their website, in 2008 the company’s annual turnover generated $650 million, 60% of which was attributed to export.  Not only is Israel tied to the ideology of military protection, but it is clearly fiscally invested on a national level.  One might suggest that in order to maintain economic balance, Israel must maintain military presence.  The militarization of Israel really is woven into the fabric of identity for many of its citizens.         

There are some Israeli groups who feel as though the fundamental structure of Israel presents a moral dilemma by which they cannot stand.  Since 2002, soldiers and officers from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have been refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories in protest against what is called the Israeli military regime.  In 2006, Omri Evron was sentenced to 14 days imprisonment in solitary confinement for refusing to enlist for his regular mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces.  In a letter documenting his refusal to serve, Evron wrote:

“My refusal to enlist is in protest against the longstanding military occupation of the Palestinian people, an occupation that deepens and entrenches the hatred and terror between peoples… I refuse to serve an ideology that does not recognize the right of all nations to independence and a peaceful coexistence. In no way am I prepared to contribute to the systematic oppression of a civilian population and the deprivation of their rights – as it is being carried out by the apartheid regime and the Israeli military in the occupied territories. I am outraged by the starvation and incarceration of millions of people behind walls and checkpoints… I refuse to serve the arms industries, mega corporations, greedy contractors, preachers of racism and cynical leaders whose business is the advancement of suffering and who rob people of their basic human rights…I refuse to kill! I refuse to oppress! I refuse to occupy!”  I wonder if Valerie Zenetti ever shared some of the same sentiments as Evron during her service.  I wonder how many soldiers have felt compelled to refuse service but have not had the courage or total conviction to follow through.  Early in her service, most of Zenetti’s early irritation with her service had to do with the tedium of repetitive bed-making; not oppression and military occupation.  Later in her tour Zenetti speaks from a more diplomatic and neutral place of objectivity than opposition or total support.

               The Refuse-nick movement is a fairly contemporary one in Israel, but Peace-nicks have been present in activist clusters for decades.  There are countless groups who represent all opinions from extremist pro-Israel, right wing Zionists all the way to the other side of neo-Nazi anti-Jew, terrorist organizations.  All points marked between have some interest group represented from online blogs to peace flotillas with their courses set on Gaza.  The conflict has become quite a quagmire with no solution in sight.  A more mature and resolute Zenetti documents her observations of the conflict when she writes, “in Israel all the extremes of society live side by side, though not always easily.  There are some people who are too rich and others who are shamefully poor; shadows who rock as they pray to God…militants who want peace now, and who know that to achieve that we would have to give the Palestinians the right to live as they want to; and others who swear their loyalty to the Land and to the Bible, who block their ears and cover their eyes to the fact that 3,000,000 Palestinians live…in Gaza” (185).  By the end of the memoir Zenetti becomes a little more hardened by the effects of her military involvement and begins to think more freely about the politics of the conflict itself.  While in Tel Aviv, Zenetti speaks of her desire for revolution when she writes, “Like Gali and like me everyone here thinks there needs to be a revolution, and we sometimes go and demonstrate with the ‘women in black’ calling for Israel’s withdrawal from the Palestinian territories” (217).  Zenetti’s maturation is well documented and a necessary perspective on how war changes a person.  Human lives are fundamentally affected and/or lost in every war.  Oftentimes, the youngest of us are those who are most profoundly changed.  It does not matter what side of the line we stand on and no life is more valuable than another.