Good to see that people are still willing to make sacrifice based on their conscience.

Father, forgive me, I will not fight for your Israel - Times Online

"She is one of about 40 pupils who signed a school-leavers’ protest letter this year. Thirty-eight years ago the first such letter – a counterblast against the occupation and the war of attrition, sent by pupils in the final year of my secondary school to Golda Meir, the prime minister – caused an uproar."

Omer told me that the crucial moment of her metamorphosis occurred this year when she went to a Palestinian village where the Israeli army had set up a roadblock. Someone she had considered her enemy all her life stood beside her and someone who was supposed to be defending her opened fire at her.

“We were sitting by the roadside talking and soldiers came along and after a few seconds they received an order and fired gas grenades and rubber bullets at us. Then it struck me, to my astonishment, that the soldiers were following an order without thinking. For the first time in my life, an Israeli soldier raised his weapon and fired at me.”

This shift and willingness to openly reproach Zionism is most welcome. True Jews and all right minded individuals will rejoice to see this violent state collapse.

It's a very brave thing to do.

Am I correct in saying that the most vicious aggressive fundamentalists settlers who stir all the ******************** are actually exempt from miltary duty. Maybe ending that exemption would calm things down

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Sovereignty is Democracy

true, they are exempt from service. Its one of the dichotomies that state faces. The settlers have large families and therefore help maintain the demographic character of the state while at the same time that very increase reduces the availability of manpower to defend the state.

I was listening to an interesting BBC show about bio-technology parks in Israel where the work was built around the religious communities to allow them to work in good jobs while balancing it with there family lives. Interesting to see that their are solutions to all problems if there is imagination.

If only more Western soldiers could adopt the same mentality. The death of 4,500+ allied forces in Iraq could have been avoided.

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Marxists, Feminists and Leftists operate on the basis of "liberating tolerance" - i.e. their ideas should be tolerated, and any opposition should be suppressed.

Is there any other totalitarian state in the mid-East that jails their own people for refusing to join their military?

Is this the democracy that the US so proudly support?

Plenty. But few have people of the courage of this woman. Amid the horror that Israel has become, sparks of its idealistic birth remain.

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True jews as you put it, that is (actual) traditionalist Zionists, only recently agreed to submit to national service. Before that they qwere exempt. Apart from them there has always been a vocal section of Israeli youth who have refused to submit to themselves to national service.