Young Israelis are clueless about the occupation. This activist wants to change that
The young people at Avishai Cohen’s session in Nahf
Judy Malz reports in Haaretz on 2 January 2023:
A group of young, army-bound Israelis huddle in a cold room in a remote village in the northern Galilee. They are about to partake in an activity that might be considered subversive by the powers that be in Israel these days: a frank discussion about the occupation.
Their guest is a prominent anti-occupation activist who hopes within the next two hours to challenge the widely held belief in this room that Israel can do little wrong. Over the course of this discussion, he will discover how little these 18-year-olds know.
Nir Avishai Cohen, 41, has already spoken to thousands of young Israelis on pre-army, gap-year programs like this one. His talks focus on the injustices of the occupation and on what he believes new recruits need to know before heading out to serve in the West Bank, where many of them are likely to be stationed.
Providing these young Israelis with a reality check at this crucial juncture in their lives has become his life’s mission. This is the first mechina – as such programs are known – that Avishai Cohen has visited since November’s election, which brought to power the most extremist and religious government in Israel’s history. Indeed, never has an end to the Israeli occupation and a peace settlement with the Palestinians seemed further away.
Most of the young Israelis he meets, says Avishai Cohen, have never heard the word “occupation” mentioned in school, let alone been taught what it means to live under such a system: “As far as most of them are concerned, this is just a term that crazy leftists use.”
Celebrity status
A former spokesman for Breaking the Silence, an organization of former combat soldiers dedicated to ending the occupation, Avishai Cohen attained celebrity status three years ago when he participated in the wildly popular Israeli version of reality TV show “Big Brother.” He fully understands that most of the gap-year program participants who extend him speaking invitations are far more interested in his “Big Brother” experiences than his left-wing activism. But as he likes to say, “I’ll go speak wherever the door is open for me – and if this is the way to get in, so be it.”
This particular gap-year program does not have a permanent base. Rather, participants move location every few weeks. They are spending the last week of December and first few weeks of January in Nahf, an Arab village near the northern city of Karmiel. Their next stop will be the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank, making it an opportune time for this crash course in Israeli history post-1967.
Avishai Cohen begins his talk, as he typically does, with a bit about himself. The point is to reassure these 18-year-olds, spread out on ratty couches and mats on the floor, that despite what they might have read on social media, he is not a crazy anarchist or traitor. Rather, he is a proud Israeli patriot who loves his country no less than they do.
Nir Avishai Cohen
Born on a small moshav near the Sea of Galilee to a family of farmers, Avishai Cohen spent his boyhood years helping his father pick mangoes and lychees. He attended a school run by the nearby kibbutzim, where, as he notes, “it was clear that everybody enlists in the army and volunteers for combat duty.”
On a portable whiteboard stationed at the front of the room, he draws a rough map of Israel and the territories it conquered in 1967’s Six-Day War. Pointing to Gaza, he asks the two dozen young Israelis gathered before him whether they know how many Palestinians live on this narrow strip of land sandwiched between Israel and Egypt.
“15,000?” one long-haired girl ventures. “Not even close,” responds Avishai Cohen. “More like 2 million.”
When he asks if anyone knows what rights, if any, Palestinians living in East Jerusalem enjoy, only one hand goes up. This young man happens to get the answer right. He knows that almost none of the 300,000 Palestinians living in “unified Jerusalem” – as Israeli politicians often refer to the capital – enjoy citizenship and, as a result, cannot vote in national elections.
“But why should we give them citizenship?” asks a young woman in a yoga outfit, who has been gazing at Avishai Cohen suspiciously since he turned the talk to politics. “This is a Jewish country. If we allow them all to vote, they’ll have a lot more power.”
Some of these mechinistim, as the gap-year program participants are known, seem to be under the mistaken impression that Jews living in West Bank settlements are not Israeli citizens. Others labor under the belief that the West Bank is part of the sovereign State of Israel.
“I hate to break the news to you, but to this day, the government of Israel has not annexed even one speck of dirt in the West Bank,” Avishai Cohen informs them.
He notes that in the West Bank city of Hebron, where some 800 Jews live among 250,000 Palestinians, two legal systems are in place. “Say there are two 10-year-old boys throwing rocks at cars in Hebron – one Jewish and the other Palestinian. Do you know that the Jewish boy won’t be arrested but the Palestinian boy will? That’s because the Jewish boy is subject to Israeli civilian law while the Palestinian boy is subject to military law, and under Israeli military law even a 10-year-old boy can be arrested.”
These young Israelis were not aware of that. “Are you aware of another country in the world where one part of the population was subject to one set of laws and another to a different set of laws?” he asks. He’s hoping someone will understand the reference to apartheid-era South Africa. No one does.
Airing the dirty laundry
For Avishai Cohen, it is important that these young Israelis understand what turned him into a renegade of sorts. Two specific incidents during his military service served as triggers. In the first, during a drill carried out in a West Bank village, his unit was ordered to wake up an entire family in the middle of the night, drag them out of their home and surround them at gun point.
“These were people who hadn’t done anything wrong,” he recounts, “and there we were scaring the living daylights out of them for no reason at all.”
In the second incident, his unit entered a Palestinian village one night in order to arrest a suspected terrorist. Fearing that he might be waiting for them and had booby-trapped his home, they woke up an elderly woman – a neighbor of the suspected terrorist – and had her knock on his door instead. (The Israeli Supreme Court eventually prohibited this use of innocent people as human shields.)
“I began feeling there was a huge gap between what I was doing during my daily service in the occupied territories and what my family thought I was doing there,” says Avishai Cohen, explaining why he eventually decided to speak out.
The girl who has been shooting him hostile glances throughout raises her hand again. “But why do you feel the need to air the dirty laundry when we already have so many enemies wanting to destroy us?” she asks. “Honestly,” she adds, “I think it’s terrible that you go and besmirch our soldiers in foreign countries.”
Avishai Cohen listens patiently before delivering his prepared response because he knew this would come up. “My criticism isn’t of the army, but of those who send the soldiers out to do these things,” he says. “I’m not anti-Israel. I’m anti-occupation. And there’s a huge difference.”
Several months ago, Avishai Cohen published a book (in Hebrew) called “How I Became Like This: An Israeli Story.” It was inspired by his many discussions with young Israelis like these about to join the army. In the introduction, he explains that when they ask him, as they often do, how he became “like this,” they often mean an “Israel hater” or “anti-Zionist.”
“I can’t blame them for thinking that way, because these are kids who were raised on a very simple message – and that is that all Arabs are bad and all Jews are good,” he says.
At the end of his talk, several participants ask him privately where they can buy a copy of his book. “Come with me to my car,” he says. “I have a few copies in the trunk. It’ll be my gift to you.” (Just before the book’s planned release date, his publisher pulled out of the contract citing fears that it would “upset customers.” Avishai Cohen eventually self-published it with the help of a successful crowdfunding campaign.)
Reflecting on his conversation with these young Israelis over coffee later, the author says he can’t criticize them for being ignorant about the occupation. “Unless they happen to live there, very few of them ever set foot in the occupied territories before joining the army,” he says. “And it’s not like they’re ever going to learn anything in school about what goes on there – because as far as the Israeli educational system is concerned, the less they know the better. After all, if they know too much, they might start asking questions.”
An optimist by nature, Avishai Cohen believes the rise of the far right might ultimately prove to be a blessing in disguise for the anti-occupation movement in Israel. “Once people start experiencing a loss of rights within Israel proper, which very well may happen with this new government, they might finally start to understand what it’s been like for Palestinians living under occupation all these years.”
At the same time, he fears that by the time that realization sinks in, he may no longer be allowed to take his act on the road. “Things are changing so quickly now in this country that I don’t rule out the possibility that in the not-so-far-off future, my book will be banned and I’ll stop getting invitations to speak with young Israelis,” he says.
This article is reproduced in its entirety