Sofia Orr
On my enlistment date, this February 25, I went to the enlistment center and told them I was refusing enlistment. They were really confused because it’s very rare, and they don’t have any protocol for dealing with refusal. So, they just send you from one officer to another until you get to someone who is high-ranking enough to send you to a holding cell. You wait there for a couple of hours, sometimes even a day, and then you get a trial, and you get sentenced to any number of days in military prison.
At my first trial, I was sentenced to twenty days. When I was released from prison, I received a draft notification telling me, “Okay, you served your punishment — twenty-four hours from now, you need to go enlist.” I refused again and the cycle continued.
They can do this forever, it’s part of their intimidation. They don’t want us to know how long we will stay in prison, because it’s scarier that way, and they want to scare people away from refusing. They want us to be quiet. That’s also apparent in prison. When we talk about politics, we get yelled at and threatened with punishment. There is a rule in the army that you’re not allowed to talk about politics, but it’s only enforced against refusers who talk about their “left-wing” politics. That goes on until either you break or they grant you an exemption, which for me was after eighty-five days. I was the second conscientious objector since the war started. The first, Tal Mitnick, spent 185 days in prison.
Each time I publish content in Hebrew, I get a lot of comments calling me a traitor, a self-hating Jew, saying that I should be killed or raped, or sent to Gaza and bombed.
Still, most of the cost is social. Most people don’t object because they are afraid to lose their friends and family. That’s why we from the Mesarvot network try to be something like a…
Auteur: Sofia Orr
