We Refuse

At sixteen, I was with my best friend, a Palestinian when I received my first letter from the army. We had grown up like sisters. She glanced at the envelope. We looked at each other. Her eyes seemed to say: ‘Do you know what you are going to do?’ Then she said: ‘Do you know how difficult life will become, if you don’t go into the army?’ And, at that moment I realised that I couldn’t do military service. I did not want to be a good soldier in their apartheid system.

This book presents the words of men and women in Israel who refuse to do military service in the Israeli Defence Forces, so as not to participate in dirty wars in the West Bank and in Gaza.