Two young Israeli draft resisters, Maya Wind and Netta Mishly, recently toured the United States, with one of their first stops being in Seattle. The tour was sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and Code Pink, and also included visits to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tucson, New York City, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, along with various college campuses located in or near those cities.

The two 19-year-olds are part of the Shministim movement that began in 2008 with the publication of an open letter signed by high school seniors announcing their refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories. All Israeli high school seniors, including women, are expected to serve in the military upon graduation; women for two years and men for three years. ("Shministim" is Hebrew for "12th grade").

Both Wind and Mishly have been imprisoned for their refusal to serve. Wind joined the Shministim in December 2008 and served a 40-day sentence, ending in March 2009, in a military prison. About 100 Israeli youth have so far signed the Shministim letter, which explains their reasons for refusing to serve, citing the repressive measures used by the Israeli military in the Occupied Territories, including checkpoints, targeted assassinations, roads for Jews only, and other measures that "serve the land-seizing policy, annex more occupied territories into Israel and trample on Palestinian human rights." Their letter states, "It is impossible to harm and imprison in the name of freedom, and thus it is impossible to be moral and serve the occupation."

At the Seattle event, which was also sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and held at the AFSC's meeting hall in the University District, a fairly large crowd for a Seattle weeknight event turned out to hear the two resisters. The Seattle event was also notable for being held on the same day that the South African jurist Richard Goldstone released a 575-page report for the United Nations Human Rights Council regarding Israel's incursion into and bombing of the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. The Goldstone report found that both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel's invasion, but it singled out the Israeli military for "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population." The report strengthens the position of the Shministim that they could be ordered to commit war crimes if they served in the Israeli military.

The two young women began their presentation with a graphic display of four maps showing the transfiguration of Palestine from 1948 to the present. It included maps showing the two-state solutions proposed by former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, neither of which constituted a viable state. Barak's plan, Wind noted, assigned all the important water aquifers to Israel, cut off the proposed Palestinian state from Jordan so that the West Bank would be completely surrounded by Israel, and provided no capital for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem. The map showing Sharon's plan for a Palestinian state was perhaps the most graphic in making the case that it was never a serious proposal. It displayed a "state" split into three sections, two of which are surrounded on all sides by Israel. Many observers have compared this proposal to apartheid South Africa's Bantustans, which sought to isolate blacks on what were little more than large reservations.

Then Wind and Mishly showed a map of the present-day West Bank, dotted with Israeli settlements and military checkpoints. Mishly noted that since 1967, all Israeli governments, not just the right-wing Likud governments but also the so-called left-wing Labor Party-led coalitions, have supported the settlement projects. Wind explained that the purpose of the ubiquitous military checkpoints is not security but to establish a rigid control over Palestinian life. Many checkpoints are not barriers between Palestinian villages and Israeli settlements or even Israeli proper, but are checkpoints that separate Palestinians from their own communities. Palestinians must obtain permits to go through the checkpoints just to get to their farmland, hospitals, and schools, and they cannot obtain permits if they're known to have taken part in uprisings or if they belong to the "wrong" organization. Similarly, Mishly pointed out, the wall Israel constructed in the West Bank was not intended for security either, since it doesn't follow the so-called Green Line, the borders established after the 1967 war, but instead encroach on Palestinian land in the West Bank, in some cases cutting off a Palestinian village from as much as 50 percent of its adjacent farmland.

Mishly touted the work of Anarchists Against the Wall, an organization comprising Israeli Jews and Palestinian protesters, who hold weekly nonviolent demonstrations against the wall at various places. Despite the nonviolent nature of the protests, she pointed out that more than 20 demonstrators have been killed since 2005 by Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets and high-velocity tear gas canisters. A recent New York Times article by Israeli correspondent Ethan Bronner discussed these protests after former President Jimmy Carter and South African bishop Desmond Tutu, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates, visited a vigil in Bilin in the West Bank. The article quoted an Israeli military official who justified harsh measures because demonstrators sometimes throw stones and injure Israeli soldiers, but in typically unbalanced fashion the article failed to mention these 20 Palestinian deaths, including one as recent as April 2009.

Mishly and Wind argued that there are not just political but also economic motivations behind the occupation. These include the exploitation of Palestinian laborers who are often paid less than the minimum wage in Israel and who cannot receive workers' compensation; the creation of a captive Palestinian market dependent on Israeli exports; and the development of a hugely profitable security and services industry in Israel. This industry includes the manufacture of high-tech surveillance equipment that Israeli companies test on Palestinians and then sell abroad, especially in Europe. United States corporations have also entered these markets, profiting from the Israeli occupation. (See http://www.whoprofits.org.)

As bad as the Israeli occupation is for Palestinians, Mishly and Wind maintained that it is also destroying Israeli society, creating a racist and militaristic culture, brutalizing veterans, undermining Israel's social welfare system, and resulting in a merger of the state and the military. The racism is becoming more pernicious, they argued, pointing to a recent attempt in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to outlaw observances or discussions of the Nakba, the Palestinian term for the events of 1948 when Israeli military forces and paramilitary extremists forcibly expelled or caused more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes, farms, and villages. Mishly also debunked many of Israel's foundational myths, including the claim that Jewish colonists turned a barren, desert land into a green oasis, and that Israel's entire history is one of responding to wars thrust upon it.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, one of the first questions asked was what had caused the two young women to change their attitude to the Israeli military. For Mishly, it was her first trip to the West Bank and the experience of seeing innocent people shot. For Wild, it was participating in an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue group and hearing an account by a Palestinian girl of the treatment meted out to her father by Israeli soldiers. The two women said they are being called traitors, but they emphasized that they are not opposed to Israel, only to the occupation, and that they regard the most urgent task as a negotiated peace settlement.

Most of the audience in Seattle was supportive and gave the two young resisters a standing ovation. A coterie of people associated with StandWithUs, a pro-Zionist organization in the United States, attended. During the question and answer session, one young woman who said she had been an Israeli soldier in 2005 and helped oversee the forcible evacuation of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip described how beautiful Gaza had been when Israeli soldiers were stationed there. Without a trace of irony, she recalled how difficult it was to evict people from their homes.

Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: http://www.icahd.org Anarchists Against the Wall: http://www.awalls.org New Profile: http://www.newprofile.org/english Rabbis for Human Rights: http://www.rhr-na.org