By Tim Shenk

Anyone who has visited the West Bank in the last 40 years has gone past a good number of Israel Defense Force (IDF) soldiers. Toting automatic rifles and dressed in combat fatigues, they are a constant presence at hundreds of checkpoints, controlling the flow of people throughout much of the occupied territory.

For Americans, after the guilty realization that your passport allows you to bypass a long line of Palestinians, what comes as a surprise is how young the Israeli soldier at the checkpoint is. If you think that he or she just graduated from high school, you’re probably right — conscription (three years for men, two years for women) is mandatory for most Jewish Israelis after 12th grade.

This fact didn’t stop Maya Wind, who spoke at SIPA on Tuesday, from refusing to enlist in the IDF when she graduated from high school last year. Continuing a small but stubborn tradition of Israeli conscientious objection, Wind and nine other shministim — a Hebrew word meaning “12th-graders” — sent a letter to their prime minister and defense minister explaining their refusal to enlist as a protest against the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. They wrote, in part:

We oppose the actions taken in the name of the “defense” of the Israeli society (Checkpoints, targeted killing, apartheid roads — available for Jews only, curfews etc.) that serve the occupation and exploitation policy, annex more conquered territories to the State of Israel and tramples the rights of the Palestinian population in an aggressive manner.

The shministim were detained and jailed for several months and ultimately exempted from military service on “mental health” grounds.

Of course, conscientious objection can seem like a dangerous act in a state facing an external threat. In the US, for example, Socialist leader Charles Schenck was imprisoned for distributing pamphlets in favor of conscientious objection during World War I. The Supreme Court decision on his case gave us the world’s most overused metaphor on the dangers of free speech: that the law does not permit you to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Wind may be shouting “Fire!” but, as the saying goes, there may actually be a fire.

“There’s a real erosion right now in what I consider culture of democracy in Israel,” Wind said, describing militarism, Islamophobia and racism as growing societal ills.

Israeli political movements to criminalize the Palestinian commemoration of the Nakba — an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” that refers to Israel’s founding — and to make Israeli citizenship dependent on “loyalty” to the state have met little protest, according to Wind. Security concerns dominate Israeli politics to the point that there is inadequate discussion of domestic issues, and there is almost no awareness of Palestinian perspectives on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, she said.

Wind is an eloquent “anti-occupation activist,” as she calls herself, and she has an impressive command of the details of Israel’s occupation and assimilation of Palestinian land beyond the “green line” of its internationally recognized pre-1967 borders. She is also remarkable because she is so young — at 19, she is roughly one-third the age of many of the gray-haired peace activists who showed up to support her.

But much of her SIPA audience was challenging. A former IDF officer asked whether she believed Israel could exist without the military occupation. Another person asked whether she was comfortable with the prospect of 4.5 million Palestinians exercising their “right of return” to Israel. Wind answered that she believes the occupation aggravates the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and prevents peace, and that she is not committed to the idea that Israel is a “Jewish” state — as a peace activist, she has made Palestinian friends, and she is not afraid to have Palestinian neighbors. Given the divided politics of the audience, there was a fair share of testy muttering, abortive outbreaks of applause and other tense group dynamics.

“Most of the time it’s not as civil as this,” Wind quipped.

Wind’s most compelling explanation of her beliefs came from her story of how, at 15, she decided to participate in a Palestinian-Israeli dialogue group and spoke with a woman whose father had been killed by the IDF.

“It was very clear to me that that was not self-defense,” Wind recalled. “I really started crying when I heard this story. … That was the first time that I made the connection between my personal actions and the greater context. … Slowly I became active in the West Bank as a peace activist, and then seeing what I saw there only strengthened this understanding. … The occupation was wrong and I could not serve, I could not.”