Monday, October 13, 2008

Father, forgive me, I will not fight for your Israel...

Omer Goldman is a pretty girl, slender as a model. Never still, very restless, she is filled with anxiety by the expected loss of her freedom. For months before she refused to be drafted into the Israel Defence Forces, she went to a psychologist every week to prepare for what was to come: incarceration in a cell in a military prison.

I met her several times last month in an apartment with other girls who are conscientious objectors. Together they would hand out flyers against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza at the gates of a high school like the one she left a year ago.

On her last day of freedom as a civilian, I saw her at the gates of the intake base to which she had received orders to report for induction into a two-year stint with the defence forces, like every Israeli girl. She had come to refuse the draft, to be tried and to be imprisoned immediately.
Several dozen supporters showed up – members of Anarchists Against the Wall, her mother and a few girlfriends – and she stayed close to them as though she were trying to delay the end, the moment when she would clash all alone with the army. More...
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