On November 27, Soul Behar Tsalik, an 18-year-old from Tel Aviv, is expected to show up at an induction center for the Israeli military, but he isn’t going to enlist. Instead — like a dozen other Israeli teens in the last year — he has decided to face military prison rather than comply with conscription.

Behar Tsalik describes military service as an obligation that Israelis like him are raised expecting to fulfill from birth, but it becomes increasingly palpable at age 16, when they start receiving their first draft notices. He likens the process to college admissions for teenagers elsewhere, full of angling for the best positions — albeit in military units and divisions, rather than with universities and scholarships. Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Corps, for example, is well known for being a stepping stone to Israel’s tech industry.

“From around 16, you’re doing well in school and you’re going into programs because you’re trying to get into the best position you can get to in the army,” Behar Tsalik told Truthout. “Some people put in a lot of work, some people don’t. And when you’re 18, you get the official draft letter: ‘Come on this-and-this date for this-and-this job.’ … And that’s when I will probably be going to jail.”

In publicly refusing military service, Behar Tsalik joins hundreds of reservists who have similarly said they would not be complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Together, they hope that they will be able to reprise the role that “refusers,” as they are known in Israel, have played in the past and help bring the current carnage to an end.

The refuser movement in Israel is a patchwork of individuals, networks and more formal groups, some organized around specific military units and conflicts, others centering their broader political perspective, typically on the left. Although military service is often described as a national duty in Israel, conscription is in fact far from universal. As little as 50 percent of Israeli citizens actually enlist, according to left-leaning Mesarvot (Hebrew for “I Refuse”), a network of Israeli refusers to which Behar Tsalik belongs. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20 percent of the population, are exempt from military service. Similarly, especially observant religious Jews, who are often described as “ultra-Orthodox” (although some reject the term), make up more than 10 percent of the population and have historically avoided conscription by requesting deferrals for religious study until they reach the age of exemption, which may extend as far as the late thirties.

Other Israeli Jews avoid conscription through medical exemptions or fail to serve their full two-to-three year deployments due to physical or psychological conditions. Others simply opt for months-long prison sentences rather than years-long deployments in order to get back to their private lives sooner. Among reservists who have completed their initial deployment but remain eligible for redeployment until the age of 40, the numbers who serve are as little as 2 percent of the population.

Despite such widespread avoidance of conscription, public opposition is relatively rare. In addition to the months-long prison sentences that can be renewed to years by Israeli military authorities, there is the........

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