Tal Mitnick was the first Israeli to publicly refuse to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after October 7. Enlisting in the military is not just a rite of passage in Israeli society, it is something every eighteen-year-old Israeli is legally obligated to do.
In announcing his refusal to enlist, Mitnick, 18, became a conscientious objector to the country’s mandatory conscription into the military. While there is a long history of this type of refusal in Israeli society — it helped bring an end to Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982 — doing so can be akin to announcing oneself as a social pariah and it is at odds with the beliefs and culture of mainstream Israeli society. Refusal carries a range of social, political, and economic consequences.
Mitnick was sentenced to 185 days in six consecutive stints in prison. On July 10, Israel’s committee on conscientious objectors approved Mitnick for release. “I’m relieved to be exempted after such a long time,” he tells Teen Vogue. “Luckily, I had an opportunity to play a part in the struggle against the war and the occupation.”
In recent years, some refusers cited concerns about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unpopular conservative government and his attempts to consolidate power, and others took issue with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which the top court of the United Nations has deemed “illegal.” Before Hamas’ October 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, it was typical for conscientious objectors to spend around three weeks in Israeli prison. After the war began, as Israel sought to clamp down on dissent and limit challenges to its ongoing military campaign, sentences seem to have ballooned.
While there have long been Israeli youth who refuse to enlist, since the start of the war on Gaza, the stakes are even higher. And while the total number of refusers in the current conflict is quite small, they’re part of a larger community of the Mesarvot Network (or refusers in Hebrew), an autonomous collective of current and former conscientious objectors. Deliberately taking the feminine form of the word mesarvim, Mesarvot is a committed pacifist and feminist organization.
In order to avoid violating Israeli law around mandatory conscription, those involved with Mesarvot are careful to refer to themselves as a “network” focused on supporting those during their time in prison and then their return to Israeli society.
Noah Shabtai-Levin, who is 20 years old and lives in Tel Aviv, is an active member of Maki, Israel’s communist party, and works with Mesarvot to support the next generation of refusers. Shabtai-Levin and I met at the party’s offices, known as the “Left Bank,” in Tel Aviv. Shabtai-Levin decided to refuse after Netanyahu announced a series of controversial judicial reforms in 2023, which sparked mass protests in Israel. Shabtai-Levin spent 130 days in prison for refusing to enlist in the IDF. But, he says, his decision to do so was a long time in the making.
Shabtai-Levin was born, as he puts it, “to a Communist mom and a military officer dad.” His parents divorced when he was young and he spent his childhood traveling back and forth between his parents’ homes, bearing witness to their political differences. Shabtai-Levin recounted a story where one of his classmates told him that “all people in Gaza are terrorists” and he went home to tell his mother. She encouraged him to question the idea and the otherization of Palestinians in Israeli society. He remembers her asking, “If all Palestinians are terrorists, so too are the children and the elderly?”
As Shabtai-Levin went to visit his father only intermittently, his mother chose to enroll him in a “democratic school,” a form of alternative education in Israel where collaboration and collective decision-making are emphasized, similar to Montessori-style education. Shabtai-Levin says he remembers being encouraged to question everything: why students had to study certain topics, why the school day lasted as long as it did, and even the purpose of education.
From an early age, Shabtai-Levin knew that joining the IDF wasn’t right for him. “I knew that I had to cut my hair if I joined the army and I was not okay with that,” he says. But as he grew older and learned about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and, he says, “the war crimes that are being committed against Palestinians,” Shabtai-Levin became increasingly certain of his decision. If it were not for his mother or unique schooling, he likely wouldn’t have made the choice: “Enlisting in the military is part of the social contract of Israel,” he says. Israeli youth are told stories of the nation’s military heroes, those who died in combat to “protect their safety,” Shabtai-Levin recounts.
Even at Shabtai-Levin’s democratic school, which by all accounts sits on the far left of Israeli society, when he told his classmates, he says they were shocked. “I'm surrounded by people who are open-minded, but still, when you're saying that you're going to refuse to enlist in the army it's a big shock because the army is located within the heart of Israeli society,” he says.
At first, Shabtai-Levin thought he would find a way to qualify for an exemption. While all Israelis are required to enlist in the military, some can volunteer instead or are exempted altogether. According to Channel 13, the Israeli TV channel, around 30 to 40% of all Israeli youth are approved for an exemption each year.
After learning about the “cycle of bloodshed and war and death,” Shabtai-Levin decided, “You either fight for peace or you fight for war. And I chose to fight for peace.” This decision seems to be one born of hope, as Shabtai-Levin imagines a future in which his children coexist peacefully with Palestinians rather than “in this colonized game of pretend.”
Yuval Dag, who is 21 and lives in Haifa, says he’s one of the oldest refusers still active in Mesarvot. Dag and I met at a cafe in Haifa, which he likes to call his “adopted city.” He was born in a moshav, a type of cooperative agricultural community.
While his campaign was framed as the first refusal since Netanyahu announced the controversial judicial reforms last year, Dag says, “It's the Fascist government that pushed me.” Unlike others in Mesarvot, Dag had a hard time convincing his parents to accept his decision. He describes them as center-left Israelis who strongly believe in the duty to serve their country. His decision came as a shock to them and the rest of his family. There are still a few relatives, according to Dag, who refuse to speak to him. To them, “Somebody gave three years of [their life], so you should too. So when you don't, it's like a personal, disrespectful thing,” Dag says.
Dag spent 180 days in prison. He is clear that he doesn’t view refusing to enlist as something exceptional. Critics of Israel abroad often dismiss the choice, saying, according to Dag, “You're doing the minimum and you're not heroes or whatever.” He emphasizes, “And it's, for us, always important to emphasize that we also consider it the minimum.”
Dag sees himself as standing in solidarity with Palestinians, and according to him, if you do so, you cannot serve in the Israeli military. And spending time in jail, where he says inmates and soldiers alike endure long days and nights under bright fluorescent lights and receive rough treatment from commanding officers, further darkened his view of the military. “This is how they treat their own soldiers. You can only start to imagine how they treat Palestinians,” he says. Israel’s Channel 12 recently reported on incidents of rape, torture and abuse of Palestinian prisoners by members of the Israeli military. (Teen Vogue reached out to the Israeli Ministry of Justice for comment, but didn’t hear back.)
Sofi Orr, 18, along with Mitnick and Ben Arad, 18, was one of the three Israeli youths who refused to enlist after October 7. While Orr had decided to refuse long before the Hamas attack, she says that Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza reaffirmed her decision. The Gaza Health Ministry says the death toll from the war exceeds 39,000, though a recent study published in the Lancet suggests that the number of Palestinians killed in the conflict could be as high as 186,000.
At the time of our interview, Orr had been out of prison for one month after being declared a conscientious objector by an Israeli military panel on May 29. She had served 85 days in prison. “I managed to convince them that I do fit that definition and Tal didn't [convince them]. But I think that he is not any less of a conscientious objector than me,” Orr says.
Orr, like Shabtai-Levin, attended a democratic school in Pardes Hanna, a leftist enclave just to the south of Haifa. At around 12 or 13, she says she started asking herself whether she would enlist and quickly decided that she would not. This choice was supported by both of her parents, who are also involved in left-wing activism in Israel.
Above all else, Orr is a committed pacifist: “Trying to solve this problem with violence will never work, and it's only hurting more and more people.… There are millions of Israeli Jews here and there are millions of Palestinians here and no one is going anywhere,” she adds. “We have to live together.”
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