Below is Rela Mazali’s introduction to an article in Ha’aretz (15/09/2008) announcing the police investigation of New Profile. Rela, a founder of New Profile, is an author and also an editor of Jewish Peace News.
Ratcheting up their campaign against so-called "shirkers", Israeli
authorities have declared a new front in their "war" - as it is termed by
the news item below - on Israeli youth.
Growing numbers of young men and women currently find themselves unable or
unwilling to accept or trust the worn Israeli dictate: "There's no other
choice". Four generations and over six decades of repeated, unending
"military solutions" have engendered an expanding movement of young people
who experience and express excruciating inner struggles and rifts in face of
the legal duty to serve. Despite the attempt of state courts, both military
and civilian, to compartmentalize such processes as either 'political',
(very rarely) 'conscientious', or 'psychological', these internal conflicts
are both emotional and ideological, combining views, feelings, convictions,
ideas, beliefs, questions, personality, life experience and sense-of-self.
For some young people, they also involve highly dangerous levels of personal
distress and indeed, in recent years, suicide has claimed the lives of more
Israeli soldiers than all other causes-of-death combined.
Rather than listening to the voice raised by these future citizens, rather
than fathoming the social change it reflects and responding with changed,
innovative policies, Israel's state institutions have chosen to wage a "war"
against these youths and the developments they represent. Criminalizing the
movement, state authorities will now attempt to seek out illegalities in
open and legal resistance work, a move characteristic of a militarized state
abusing its power in a bid to keep in place an old, cracking order.
The news item below reports on a criminal investigation now to be conducted
into the activities of the "New Profile" movement. Attorney General Menachem
Mazuz has, the piece reports, ordered a probe into the actions of this
movement, suspected among other things of "convincing [people] to obtain
exemptions from service".
I have been an active member of "New Profile" since it was founded ten years
ago. We are a feminist group of both women and men that has identified and
recognized the existence of the unorganized social movement borne by youth
today in Israel. "New Profile" acknowledges the major importance of this
movement, responding to the need and rights of the young people involved to
open discussion of the pressing questions they face, equipped with full and
accurate information about their prospects - information with which the
authorities are not forthcoming, to put it mildly. This is only one of many
ways in which "New Profile" works to change the militarized thinking holding
all of the people in Israel/Palestine hostage to the policy of use-of-force,
implemented to date by virtually every Israeli government. While "New
Profile" activities may enrage some, whether individuals or institutions,
they are totally legal.
The short item below, however, written by Amos Harel, with contributions by
Yuval Azoulay, is illustrative of the type of militarized justice and
slanted exposure that state institutions and media tend to dispense in
Israel to dissenting groups. Deputy Attorney General Shai Nitzan, whose
letter the item quotes, has apparently upended the legal principle:
'innocent until proven guilty'. Investigation or none, on dispatching his
instructions to conduct a probe he has already determined, "the severity of
[New Profile's] incitement to draft evasion". Parroting rather than
scrutinizing the claims of this state official, journalist Amos Harel also
has no use for the yet-to-be-held investigation. He proceeds to convict "New
Profile" casually, describing it - as if he were simply recounting facts -
as a movement that "encourages draft dodging".
What "New Profile" encourages, in my experience of the movement, is posing,
studying and openly discussing unobvious unorthodox questions, taking
personal and collective responsibility for some of the answers, learning and
creating ways to act on these through the exercise of civil, human and legal
rights. I believe that we speak with and for a future that will not be
silenced.
Rela Mazali