In her home on the eighth floor of a tower block in northern Israel, Sofia Orr is filling an army-issued rucksack with a crossword book, black underclothes and a compact CD player.
But unlike the thousands of teenage Israelis who have packed up to join the army since October 7, the bag she is packing in the town of Pardes Hanna-Karkur is for prison.
On Sunday it is likely that Orr will become the first woman since the start of the Gaza war to be jailed for refusing military service because of her political beliefs.
After speaking publicly about her intentions, Orr, 18, has received death and rape threats. She has been called a “self-hating Jew” and a traitor on social media, and naive and ungrateful by friends.
Her mother, Sigul, has spent the past three years trying in vain to persuade her to change her mind but Orr remains undeterred.
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“I have never thought I was going to enlist, even when I was really young,” she said. “There’s that feeling that you want to serve your country and protect your country, but I thought there were other ways to help people around me. I think it is wrong to take children and make them into soldiers and not leave them any choice in it.”
She is part of a tiny minority.
Compulsory military service has long been a cornerstone of Israeli society, as most of Orr’s friends accept. Many of their contemporaries have felt an extra compulsion to fight after the devastating attack by Hamas on October 7 that left 1,200 Israelis dead and 240 people largely from the Gaza border kibbutz communities kidnapped; 130 hostages remain unaccounted for.
More than half of Israelis believe that continuing the military offensive in Gaza is the best way to recover the hostages, according to polling by the Israel Democracy Institute published in January. Within the first two weeks following October 7, an unprecedented 2,000 ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are excused military service on religions grounds, volunteered to enlist.
The network which supports Orr, Mesarvot, or “we refuse” in English, has only 400 members. Many of them are active on the Israeli left, which has very little political representation in the Knesset.
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A former classmate, who grew up a few miles away from Orr and asked to remain anonymous, started her military service shortly after October 7.
“In Israel, everyone goes to the army — it’s the thing you do,” said the classmate, whose work in an intelligence unit helps to prevent cyberattacks. In addition to her compulsory two years of service, she has signed up for an additional four years in the army, but she is torn between her feelings about the conflict and her career. Israelis who serve are often awarded higher salaries than those who do not, she said.
“I know people who have just finished service who are getting a boosted pay grade because they have been in the army,” she said.
But she too has reservations about Israel’s military operation, in which more than more than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to health officials in Gaza’s Hamas-run administration. The United Nations said that the majority were women and children. Israel claims that more than one third of the dead were Hamas fighters.
“Horrible things happened to people in my country but horrible things happen also in Gaza and I feel sorry for everyone,” she added. “It was easier for me to go into the army doing this job. I don’t know if I want to believe it or if it’s true, but I think the work I’m doing doesn’t do any harm — it protects our soldiers.”
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Israelis first begin mental and physical tests to assess youngsters’ fitness for military service aged 16. The call-up comes at 18. Both men and women are required to complete military service — two years and eight months for men, two for women — though the army has asked soldiers to serve an extended period because of the war. It is illegal to refuse on the grounds of political objection.
The vast majority of 18-year-olds who avoid enlistment do so by securing an exemption or deferral, usually on medical or religious grounds, particularly within the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Enlistees are called to Tel Hashomer enlistment base in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv. If you refuse, you are put before a disciplinary hearing and often sent to jail. Once you are released, you are ordered to attend again; if you refuse again, you are sentenced again. This cycle continues until the army’s enlistment unit, Meitav, eventually declares the citizen unfit to serve, at which point they are given an exemption.
The number of conscientious objectors who are imprisoned in Israel each year is unknown. The average sentence for refuseniks during wartime is between 90 and 120 days, according to Mesarvot.
In the two months since the start of the Gaza war, 60 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women who received the draft were enlisted, according to the Israeli news website Walla News. By comparison, of the 144,000 18-year-olds eligible for service in 2020, 47 per cent joined up. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) do not routinely publish full demographic data on enlistment or exemptions.
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Noa Levy, the founder of Mesarvot, refused service in 2002 during the second intifada and now supports members in her capacity as a lawyer. She said that declining a call-up was a difficult decision for young Israelis to make, not least because of the social isolation they face.
“There is no information accessible at all about conscientious objection,” said Levy, who is also vice-president of the left-wing Hadash party. “There is a conscience committee, but nothing public about how to get to it, or about other ways of being released from the army. These are big question marks for 18-year-old kids; they’re very young, called in front of a system that is huge and very strong.”
Among the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, only five do not recognise the right to conscientious objection. In Britain there were almost 60,000 conscientious objectors during the Second World War, many of whom objected to fighting on religious grounds, including a large number of Quakers.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hundreds of Russian men have faced criminal charges for becoming war refuseniks, while Ukrainian men of fighting age have been using smugglers to flee their country rather than serve.
Orr made the decision to refuse, as opposed to seeking an exemption, before the war, and does not believe joining the army will solve the conflict. “My decision became political when I was 14 when I started to ask myself, ‘If I go and serve almost two years in the army, who and what do I actually serve?’ I would go and serve an endless cycle of bloodshed and that is not something I wanted to do.
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“My immediate family is very supportive and I’m extremely lucky because not everyone has that. That’s why not everyone who wants to refuse is able to, because they may lose their family and friends.”
She added: “From some of my friends and family, I mostly get called naive or ungrateful. Naive that we could ever make peace with the Palestinians, and ungrateful that all of my friends are going to the army and protecting me and here I am not protecting my people and the country.”
It is unclear what Orr’s punishment will be. Tal Mitnick, who in December became the first Israeli teenager to be jailed for refusing service since October 7, was sentenced an initial 30 days in prison. Mitnick will attend the enlistment centre for the third time on Sunday after serving 60 days in prison over two sentences.
As he sat smoking and catching up with friends on the balcony in the afternoon sun at Mesarvot’s headquarters in Tel Aviv last week, he was pushing the bounds of his freedom to its limit. If Mitnick had failed to show up within 21 days, he would have been branded a deserter, and subject to a longer sentence.
Back in Pardes Hanna-Karkur, Orr does not believe in the “horrible consequences” that the army suggests a prison sentence will have on her life and career.
“One thing that pushes me to do this, even when I’m scared, is knowing that I will love myself more if I stand by my values and my strong belief in peace.”
