Kfar Shmariyahu, Israel — Among over 60,000 demonstrating for peace the night of May 11 in Tel Aviv was a 44-year-old Israeli who has served two jail terms for refusing to do military service in the occupied territories. It was Yuval Lotam’s first time in many years at a rally. “I always mean to go, but somehow I never get moving in time,” he admitted sheepishly.
Lotam melted into the crowd Saturday night. As a young soldier he served three years as an officer in the paratroopers. Then he experienced an about face of conscience, and for the last 20 years has refused reserve duty in the land occupied by his country.
Sometimes his refusal resulted in transfer from unit to unit. The army “just didn’t know what to do with an officer like me.” But in 1993 and again in ’97 he was sentenced to 30 days in a military prison.
Although loosely associated with a movement called Yesh Gvul (there’s a limit), modest soft-spoken Lotam is essentially a loner. “I am probably the most selfish refusenik ever,” he claims. “The only reason I do it is for myself, so I can bear to look in the mirror.”
Lotam is much more loquacious on the subject of friendships with Palestinians that evolved from his act. In 1997 Lotam’s imprisonment stemmed from his refusal to perform guard duty at a prison housing administrative detainees. In a carry over from British colonial rule, Israel holds security suspects in detention for renewable intervals of up to six months without bringing specific charges against them.
Immad Sabi, a Palestinian administrative detainee at the prison Lotam refused to guard, saw a small newspaper notice reporting Lotam’s imprisonment, and wrote him an open letter. Sabi’s letter, eventually published in the New York Times, touched off a friendship between the two men. Now a graduate student living in Holland, Sabi has several times hosted Lotam at his home.
After his release in ’97 Lotam helped initiate a program of personal correspondence between Israelis and administrative detainees. He is still in contact with several. “These days my friends in Ramallah and Jenin urge me to do something. When I ask ‘What can I do?’ they say, ‘At least go to the rallies!’” So this time Lotam made the effort.
Standing near the stark granite slab that marks the spot of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination at a peace rally in 1995, Lotam listened to the speakers on the podium.
Ala Shainskaya, a scientist who immigrated from the former Soviet Union 12 years ago, hesitated when invited to speak — until people asked her if she wasn’t afraid participation might jeopardize her job at a prestigious scientific institute.
“That decided me,” she said in heavily accented Hebrew. “I came here from a totalitarian regime. I refuse to let this happen to our democratic country.” To Shainskaya the emphasis on ‘togetherness’ at any price may engender suppression of dissent. “What does ‘togetherness’ mean?” she asked. “That we all must think alike and march alike like robots?”
Similar thoughts 20 years ago motivated Lotam to begin his “selective” refusal. This year 450 Israeli army officers have engaged in a similar action by signing a public petition, bringing to over a thousand the number refusing to serve in the territories. Eighty-five have been imprisoned in 2002.
But this extreme action raises difficult philosophical and practical choices for many young people, even for those who oppose Israel’s current policies.
Yoav Ingber is a law student who has missed weeks of school this semester after being called up to his reserve unit where he serves as a tank commander. In an article in a student newsletter analyzing in legal and moral terms his opposition to the refusal petition, Ingber terms it unjustified defiance to exploit the cloak of the military to express one’s ideology.
David Damelin was another student called up for reserves this spring. The 28-year-old philosophy student was a regular at peace demonstrations, but when his activist mother urged him to sign the officers’ petition, he declined.
Damelin reported for duty — and was killed in a Palestinian attack on an army checkpoint. Exactly 60 days after his death, Damelin’s mother somberly addressed the rally: “The suffering of Palestinian mothers and Israeli mothers is the same. Put yourselves in the other’s place.” On her son’s fresh gravestone are carved the words of poet Kahlil Gibran: “All the earth is his birthplace and all mankind his brothers.”
Yuval Lotam listened, nodding. He left the rally as anonymously as he had come. “I’m no kind of hero,” he insisted.
Helen Schary Motro is an American lawyer and writer living in Israel, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and the 2001 recipient of the Common Ground award for journalism in the Middle East.
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