Young Israeli dissidents: ‘Do anything you can to stop the genocide’

“Do anything you can to stop the genocide,” said Einat Gerlitz, a 21-year-old Israeli Jew from Tel Aviv who refused to enlist in the Israeli military in 2022, to a London, Ontario audience on March 18.

Gerlitz was joined by 19-year-old Tal Mitnick, also from Tel Aviv, at the event organized by Independent Jewish Voices. Both shared their experiences of being imprisoned in Israel for refusing to enlist in the army.

“The Western world is complicit in the genocide, and without the Western world, the genocide couldn’t have continued. Continue to struggle from outside, we’re continuing to struggle from inside,” said Gerlitz.

Gerlitz was imprisoned by the Israeli military four times, for a total of 87 days, until Israel’s “Conscientious Committee” finally granted her an exemption.

In flagrant violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Amnesty International reports that the military-run Conscientious Committee does not functionally allow military refusal on the grounds of conscience. It recasts pacifist arguments as political ones and attempts to convince those refusing to fight that their ideologies align with the military. It aggressively interrogated Gerlitz to tears. Some Israelis called her a traitor and hurled death threats.

“There are many people that I drifted away from and they drifted away from me,” said Gerlitz. “I went to prison, they went to the military. I was on the streets protesting the genocide, they were committing it inside of Gaza.”

Mitnick was the first Israeli to be imprisoned for refusing military service after October 7, 2023. He was imprisoned for a total of six months before he was exempted. In December 2023, he boldly stated, “I refuse to take part in a revenge war.”

“Seeing the pictures of the body bags and the small body bags that feel like they’re too small to be in body bags… It was hard being so far away and feeling that we don’t have any power,” said Mitnick of Israel’s recent renewal of the genocide.

Both are part of Mesarvot, a network of Israeli activists refusing to serve in the military. The group offers legal aid, mentorship from past refusers, and media training to new conscientious objectors. It also flocks to local and international events to share experiences of refusal, urging Israeli youth to question “the Israeli war machine.”

A Linktree for Mesarvot includes ways to send letters of support to two Israeli refusers currently anticipating imprisonment, Ella Keidar Greenberg and Netta Lannes Arbel.

Arbel, 24, first imprisoned for eight days in December 2024, stated:

I refuse to close my eyes, to excuse or justify these horrific crimes. I refuse to back them or allow their continuation in my name. I truly believe the only way to promote a reality of peace, co-existence, mutual understanding and the upholding of human rights is to shatter the legitimacy and credibility of the military system. I don’t see a world where peace and security can exist – for both Jews and Palestinians – while they are only maintained behind the barrel of a gun.

Greenberg, an 18-year-old trans woman, was imprisoned on March 19. She stated:

 As I rejected the Gender role assigned to me, so I reject my militarisation in the service of violence and domination. True liberation cannot come through an army that enforces apartheid and commits genocide. In a time of mass destruction, of trampling on rights, of war—refusal is necessary. Do not be complacent. Gather, organize, resist.

Growing up in Tel Aviv

Gerlitz and Mitnick came from households that vaguely acknowledged a need for resolution between Palestinians and Israelis. Detailed awareness of Palestinian history and life beneath occupation was absent.

“I grew up with the idea that there was a cycle of violence in our land between Israelis and Palestinians, and both sides are committing horrible crimes that need to be stopped, and that every side has its own narrative, and that something has to work out,” said Mitnick.

Mitnick’s father was a journalist who interviewed Israeli officials and Palestinian militants, covering “every political event that was happening.” Dialogue about the world thrived in his home. In his teens, Mitnick developed a keen interest in politics and began reading books that nurtured “alternative ways” to view the land where he lived.

“I grew up in a Zionist leftist household,” said Gerlitz. “There was talk about human rights and socialism. I grew up in an environment that criticized the government and talked about the need for equality for minorities and for coming to a political solution with the Palestinian people, but at the same time holding this narrative that it is important to maintain a Jewish state and that Zionism as an idea is important, but has many faults on the way of how it is acted on in reality. It’s not the view I hold on today, obviously. Today, I think we need to strive for human rights for everyone, from the river to the sea, and that we need to break down Jewish supremacy.”

Gerlitz’s grandparents lived in a kibbutz, a communal settlement in Israel, about five kilometres from the Gaza border. When bombs would rain on northern Gaza, their house would shake. Gerlitz had asked her grandmother how much time children in Gaza had to flee to bomb shelters. Her grandmother said that most of them don’t have shelters. She hoped that “one day there wouldn’t be these borders, and that we could visit them and they could visit us.” Her grandmother spoke of the beauty of Gaza Beach.

For Mitnick, “No matter how liberally raised or how progressive your parents are, the systems of militarism and the systems of brainwashing get to every single child.”

Purim, a holiday that Mitnick described as “the Jewish version of Halloween,” was full of Israeli children dressed as armed soldiers. When Mitnick was in first grade and an Israeli assault on Gaza raged, he participated in a “school activity” where he and his six-year-old classmates wrote letters of support to Israeli soldiers. Middle schools offered training courses to funnel young boys into elite army units, propelling conversations in pre-teen social circles. Mitnick’s childhood fantasies were full of gun-holding, crawling in the dirt, and sacrificing himself for his nation. He says these visions have “deep roots in the patriarchy that we have in our society” which equates “manliness” with militarism and violence.

“As a six-year-old, you can’t grasp what that means. You can’t say ‘No, that’s not my conscience.’ You’re a six-year-old,” said Mitnick.

Gerlitz’s grandfather fought in the war of 1967, in which Israel seized control of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Old City of Jerusalem, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s Golan Heights. She said the military populates public space; daily sightings of armed soldiers are normal and heroic. Military service is “not only a duty by law,” but a social standard for “how to give back to the country for protecting you.”

As a child, Gerlitz “wasn’t very patriotic or nationalist.” Guns intimidated her. Yom HaZikaron, a national memorial day for dead Israeli soldiers, confused her.

“In Israel, the memorial day for the soldiers is one day before the Independence Day… I never really understood how can we mourn so deeply the ones who die and then, the next day, we’re told how we should be excited to be soldiers when we’re going to grow older?” said Gerlitz.

Gerlitz and Mitnick chose to become refusers after hearing Palestinian stories of occupation.

Gerlitz, embedded in queer youth movements and climate activism, befriended Palestinian activists who were Israeli citizens. At 17 years old, she first heard the word “Nakba,” which refers to the expulsion of Palestinians from their native lands since 1948. She realized that the stories she had heard about the land didn’t match those of her Palestinian friends. She realized that her Israeli citizenship was loaded with privileges that her friends were denied. She met a Druze trans woman who was forbidden from returning to her village.

“There is a responsibility that comes with being sensitive to social injustices, and once you’re part of an oppressed group, part of a minority, you experience some oppression yourself, and you have these glasses of social injustices of seeing them. You can’t unsee it,” said Gerlitz, who came out as a queer woman when she was fifteen.

“It’s a struggle for the freedom of all of us. Then I decided that I was going to refuse. I’m not going to enlist in a military that oppresses my friend’s families.”

Mitnick read a story about a baby born in Gaza named Fatima. A couple of months after her birth, she was diagnosed with a condition easily reversed with standard medical treatment. But Gaza’s health care system, debilitated by the Israeli system, could not provide this care. Her parents sought a doctor in East Jerusalem, which required Israeli forces to grant them permits. These permits were delayed until Fatima died at the age of seven months.

Not long before, Mitnick’s own father had passed away from cancer following months of the best available care. He began to grieve both his father and Fatima, starkly aware of the difference in the paths that led to their deaths.

“I realized that I’m very privileged. Although I am in deep grief, although my family suffered a terrible loss, I know that we went to the best doctor, we got the best medications, and this was just fate. But Fatima’s parents will forever have to live with the question of what if you were born on the other side of the border, what if we had access to the medication we need? All these what-ifs. What if she could have grown up to be a person in the world?” said Mitnick.

“That’s when I realized that not only can I not be the soldier holding the gun at the checkpoint, not only can I not be the one raiding houses in the middle of the night, I cannot be part of any screw in the system that is bent on the oppression of the Palestinian people, and sacrifices the security both of Palestinians and of Israelis, for the notion of Jewish supremacy, from the river to the sea.”

Youth Against Dictatorship

In the summer of 2023, Mitnick protested judicial reforms in Israel that stripped the court systems of their power and reallocated it to the government. He drafted a letter with peers, in an initiative called “Youth Against Dictatorship”, declaring a refusal to join the military and calling to “move forward to a future where both Palestinians and Israelis have freedom and have justice, from the river to the sea.” They garnered over 280 signatures, occupied their school to “show the world their letter.” They were condemned by members of the Israeli government and the head of the military.“This all happened in August of 2023,” said Mitnick. “About a month and a half before the world that we knew, and the growing movement of refusal would get turned on its head.”

On October 7th, Gerlitz was in Masafer Yatta, a community of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. She had planned to live there for three months, learn Arabic, help Mesarvot organize Mitnick’s planned refusal, and engage in its “beautiful history of Israeli and Palestinian co-resistance” against the occupation.

She woke at 6:30 AM to the sounds of nonstop sirens and bombs. Media coverage, in those first hours, was absent. No one knew what was happening. She called her grandparents in the kibbutz, who had fled for shelter as sounds of shooting surrounded them. Amidst this fear, a ‘new reality’ began to emerge in the West Bank.

“If we thought we got to rock bottom before, it was nothing in comparison to what’s happening now. If before the reality was unbearable and very violent, this is a whole new opera,” said Gerlitz. “From the second or third day, settlers used live ammunitions inside Palestinian villages. Settler didn’t wait anymore for the military to demolish Palestinian homes, they demolished them by themselves. It was all very scary. Inside all of this happening, we felt like we had to do something, we can’t stay silent.”

Gerlitz took to the streets in protest, in an environment of “insane political persecution.” She says that in the first two weeks, more than a hundred university students were arrested or expelled for posting statements like “Stop the war,” concern for Palestinian civilians, or Palestinian flags on their Facebook pages. Most were Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, but some were Jewish Israelis. Fascism in Israeli society skyrocketed beyond its norms of occupation. Mitnick says Palestinians were being attacked just for speaking Arabic or wearing traditional clothing. In this reality, Mitnick’s enlistment approached. He chose to refuse publicly, aware that it would reach “big crowds in Israeli society.” He received death threats, was doxxed, and was directly targeted by the head of the enlistment base, who issued a direct order to bar his objection.

Both Mitnick and Gerlitz say they will continue their activism with Mesarvot. Gerlitz hopes to go to university and pursue a career in human rights work. Mitnick plans to learn Arabic and join an avenue of struggle in Masafer Yatta of “standing physically in solidarity with the Palestinians, between the bulldozers, between the soldiers, between the settlers, that try to attack, day in and day out, the villages.”

“We have each other. We’re together in this, none of us are alone,” says Gerlitz. “Me and Tal have each other, we have IJV behind us, we have Mesarvot, back home we have a whole network of refusers. Community is the key to activism.”

With files from Emmanuel Akanbi

Incé Husain is a neuroscience graduate student and journalist who writes for the NB Media Co-op and the Antler River Media Co-op. She pursues local stories independently at The Unprecedented Times. She is based in London, Ontario.

A version of this article appeared in the Antler River Media Co-op on March 22, 2025.