JERUSALEM — For 28 days in October, Noam Kuzar sat in Military Prison No. 4.
The bespectacled 19-year-old soldier had violated one of the most vaunted principles of the Israeli experience. He refused an army command--orders, in this case, to deploy in the West Bank.
Since the start of Israel's deadly confrontation with Palestinian stone-throwers and gunmen three months ago, a small but growing number of Israeli soldiers is refusing to serve in the mostly Palestinian-ruled West Bank and Gaza Strip. Like Kuzar, several have ended up in jail, having turned against the deeply entrenched, half-century-old duty to serve in their besieged country's army.
"My whole life I've been against the Israeli army and the state being in the occupied territories," Kuzar said. "What right did I have to be there? I couldn't do something I so strongly object to."
Once out of jail, Kuzar was reassigned to a military base where he cleans toilets and performs other menial tasks. He was removed from his unit--the other young men with whom he had performed a year of post-high school community service and with whom he had hoped to graduate from the army in three years' time.
The resistance of a handful of regular soldiers and a larger number of reservists reflects changes in the way Israelis see their once unassailable army, and in the role the army plays today.
In a country where almost everyone is required to perform military service, many Israelis regard the resisters as traitors or cowards. Despite peace accords with Egypt and Jordan, Israel remains a country surrounded by enemies, a fact dramatized in the new outburst of violence. A strong army is essential to the nation's survival, most Israelis believe.
But some are uncomfortable with the kind of duty increasingly thrust upon infantry soldiers confronting riots and demonstrations where Palestinian minors are on the front line.
Ishai Menuchin, a paratrooper in the Israeli army and a veteran of the Lebanon war, spent much of the last month pounding the sidewalks in search of young soldiers. On Friday mornings at Jerusalem's central bus station, where soldiers congregate to go home for the weekend, Menuchin handed out pamphlets urging the recruits to think carefully about whether they really wanted to serve in what he calls an occupation army.
A war to protect Jewish settlements, the pamphlet declares, "is not our war!"
