On the eve of Israel’s 61st Independence Day last week, the country’s police arrested six Israeli Jewish feminist political activists – members of New Profile, the movement for the civil-isation of Israeli society, including a 70-year-old woman – for assisting young Israelis to evade conscription.
The police entered the activists’ home, confiscated their computers and the computers of their partners and detained them for questioning because of their support for young people who declare themselves conscientious objectors, a status not recognised by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
New Profile is one of the most effective yet entirely law-abiding groups within the Israeli resistance movement, whose members not only resist the occupation of Palestinian lands, but also work for the demilitarisation of Israel, a country in which all high school graduates are conscripted – men for three years and women for two.
The movement has actively incited young women and men to resist military service and has guided some of them in obtaining exemptions through a variety of means.
For some time the police have been tracking the activities reported on the group’s website (newprofile.org) which encourages Israeli youths to dodge the mandatory draft. New Profile stated that it was entirely legal and open and that the interrogation violated their freedom of speech.
I have been following New Profile’s activities for several years and know it as a public and fully legal establishment, whose activities – pastoral, educational and political – are carried out openly and transparently. Contrary to many opposition groups whose focus is resisting the 1967 occupation, or commemorating the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe), New Profile operates exclusively within Israeli Jewish society in the full glare of the media.
I am writing about this police raid precisely because it illustrates the workings of the Israeli racial state, which targets not only the Palestinians in the territory Israel occupied in 1967 through a draconian regime of Jewish settlements and checkpoints, and the infamous separation wall which prevents Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem from leading a normal life. Nor does it only target the residents of Gaza who, months after the murderous invasion, are still waiting for the lifting of the near total siege. (Did you know, for instance, that for spurious security reasons, Israel is even preventing the importation of – wait for it – pasta?) Nor does it only address its technologies of surveillance and control only at Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who in many ways live as second-class citizens. The Israeli state is now also targeting its own Israeli Jewish citizens who dare oppose the primacy of the military.
As New Profile stated: “The militarisation of Israeli society harms the sacred principles of democracy, freedom of speech, and political freedom. For people who thought that only Israeli-Arabs were being framed for criminal political activity, this raid was proof that none of us can be sure of the permission to express ourselves freely regarding the failings of Israel’s society and regime.”
To those who say that this police raid is the result of the new Netanyahu/Lieberman right-wing government, I would say that this is what life in a racial state is about – it begins by targeting the state’s occupied subjects and second-class citizens, and goes on to control its own citizens for legally opposing its sacred security cows.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
