Justice Rooted Resistance Leads Young Women to Conscientious Objection
While both young women have served prison terms and engaged every day of their lives at home, since they made this choice, in justifying their decisions, they still state this “speaking truth to power” in the United States is the hardest thing they have yet done. Speaking at John Jay College in New York City they are verbally chastised by Jewish women old enough to be their mothers. The rebukes redden the rims of their eyes, but also elicit their clearest defense of the right to differ and the importance of the dialogue.
Both Maya and Netta trace their conversion from pro-occupation, Zionist-rooted narratives to an active search for peace through nonviolence to a moment when they realized that their personal actions have unacceptable consequences for others. While in high school each, thinking she was acting entirely alone, sought out service opportunities in the West Bank where they personally saw the consequences of the occupation on their peer Palestinian youth. Maya’s service was a result of having survived a suicide bomb explosion on a bus on which she was riding.
Maya explained that while military service is “mandatory” more than 40% of their age-mates avoid service through exemptions for religious, physical, mental, ethnic or marital reasons (women only in this last case). Each year for three years a graduating class of “12ers” (Shministim the term for 12 grade in school) have signed a joint letter of refusal. This year only ten young people signed the letter and risked prison.
The women repeated periodically that the core principle for their position is that “justice and human rights must be in service to all people equally or it is not justice.”
Maya and Netta responded to a large number of questions from an audience that included American veterans, peace studies students and faculty from area universities, human rights activists, ex-patriot Israelis who had themselves served in the Israeli armed services, and many professionals in mediation and conflict resolution.
There is an active conversation with Palestinian counterparts in the work of nonviolence, said Maya who works for Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, though it is much harder for Palestinians, such as Mohammad Khatib, who risk extended terms of imprisonment without charges for civil nonviolent resistance.
Both women characterize their positions as contemporary expressions of a feminist and liberation perspective. The showed remarkable composure and resilience and were particularly articulate when challenged by confrontational tones in questions. Maya observed that “I have to be patient with others — they do not need to be patient with me and they are not.”
This is the work to confront racism, ignorance, denial and injustice. It is a moral issue. The question is not one of balancing two equal rights, they said. Both fully support the outcome of a two state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live in peace and security with one another. But the current disparity, they argue, is in power and the abuse of that power is immoral and untenable. It does not serve the interests of Israel, Jews, Palestinians, or the United States, they argue.
The meeting was hosted by the Association of Conflict Resolution, a community of practice of mediators, as an example of how to listen to the story of the process by which two young women came to the decisions they did and the consequences of those decisions for them, their families, friends and community. Their tour has been organized and supported by Code Pink among others and includes multiple presentations each day and stops in many cities.
