Speaking event in Winnipeg. March 20, 2025
“I’d like to stress that this is the Patriarchy acting. And this is the system’s idea of manliness telling us how we’re supposed to fight for the security of our people. And the systems of patriarchy are telling us that it’s only through violence. And later, I realized that what really being a man, what really being a human being is is refusing to those systems that taught us that way.”
– Tal Mitnick, from this week’s recording
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Abandon the Battlefield.
In the face of brutal war, in the realm of illegal crusades and genocides, this site has maintained the definitive call to “Disobey unlawful orders. Abandon the battlefield.”
The situation, particularly in Israel has so far seemed so hopeless. The United States remains the supreme enabler of Israeli aggression through billions and billions of dollars of military aid, even in spite of clear evidence that the aggression by their ally is genocidal. The new administration of Donald Trump is apparently just as dedicated if not more dedicated to supporting the devastating campaign of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than his predecessor Joe Biden. And the campaign against the Palestinians shows no sign of lightening up.
Canadian politicians are for the most part unfazed by all the weekly protests all across the country screaming to our masters to “stop the genocide” and “free Palestine.” And the Western corporate media are generally slanting the news of the Israel-Palestine situation so they are not giving an accurate picture of what’s really happening.
But there are signs of hope. As stated in a previous episode of this program, Palestinians themselves, armed with cell phones, are recording the situation around them and taking their stories and their experiences to the larger world. One Palestine journalist got an Emmy Award for her documentary on life in Gaza during the current war. Another together with an Israeli journalist put together a documentary about the eviction of Palestinians from the West Bank and won an Oscar Award.
And now, in news not well broadcast, there are a small but growing number of people in Israel who are refusing to serve in the Israeli military. Protests against the Vietnam war in the 1960s were small at first. Eventually, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people chose not to serve in the Vietnam war and crossed instead into Canada as “draft dodgers.”[1]
If there is a way people inside and outside of Israel can render support for this movement, people should make every effort to see it become successful. No matter how indifferent to the law the Israeli Prime Minister or the U.S. President may be, their hands reaching out for more Israeli land are tied if the soldier’s expected to do their dirty work for them rise up and say “no.”
On this stellar addition of the Global Research News Hour we feature a special presentation of two of these war resisters or “refuseniks.” Two young people, Einat Gerlitz and Tal Mitnick have refused their required service in the military, something all people in Israel are required to do according to chapter 3 of the Basic Laws of Israel: Defense Service Law. They each spent time in prison. In the month of March 2025, they both toured several cities across Canada telling their story to people about their stands, their challenges, and their hopes. The team presented in Winnipeg on March 20 in the Hope Mennonite Church. Their entire presentation is available in this one hour broadcast.
A video version of the talk is available here.
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a Video Credit: Paul S. Graham
Einat Gerlitz was sentenced to 87 days in prison in 2022 for her refusal to join the Israeli army. A passionate advocate for climate justice and LGBTQ+ rights, Gerlitz brings a unique feminist and queer perspective to her activism.
Tal Mitnick became the first conscientious objector to refuse military service after the devastating events of October 7th. After serving 185 days in military prison, Mitnick became a leader in the movement of young Israelis who are now refusing military service.
(Global Research News Hour episode 467)
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
Partial Transcript of Einat Gerlitz and Tal Mitnick’s presentation in Winnipeg, March 20, 2025
Einat Gerlitz: Growing up in the Israeli society, it’s a very militarized society. The military is part of everything in our lives. It’s very clear that once you finish high school, the next step is military service, and from then on you choose whatever path you want.
The military is everywhere. I have a grandpa that fought in the ‘67 war, in the ‘73 war. It affected our family.
Like many families, we’re not special. Just even walking in the street, there’s soldiers everywhere with their guns and on the beach. It’s everywhere.
It’s part of our lives. Growing up, I grew up in Tel Aviv, but my grandparents live in a kibbutz five kilometers from the Gaza border. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents.
There have been attacks on Gaza all the time. There have been bombs. In the kibbutz of my grandparents, you have 15 seconds to run to a shelter.
It’s a very terrifying experience as a little kid. I remember that sometimes there would be bombs. We would hear an explosion, but there wasn’t a siren because it was on the other side of the wall.
When there’s bombardment in northern Gaza, the house is shaking. You feel it. I remember I asked my grandma, how many seconds do the kids in Gaza have to run to a shelter? She said that most of them don’t have a shelter.
Then she continued and said how beautiful the beach in Gaza is, that she thinks it’s the most beautiful beach in the world, and that she wishes that we can all visit there someday, and that the Palestinians from there can come visit our beaches, and there won’t be these borders and ours and theirs. Growing up, I didn’t really resonate with this nationalistic, before they had those words, but this want to hold a gun and run in the field. I was a very pacifist kid.
Growing up, many kids were talking about how they admire soldiers or dressing up as soldiers in Purim. For me, it was clear that I’m just going to do those two years, get over with it, and continue on with my life. Growing up, I always felt different from the other girls.
At 15, I had term for it. I came out of the closet at 15. Coming out and finding community was very big.
Those years before coming out, the ones of you who went through, you feel very by yourself. Then finding community of people who went through the same experiences is very, very meaningful. Finding this community and this queer youth group that I joined, I also realized that my trans friends go through some experiences that I don’t go through, and that there’s differences inside the queer community.
Learning about the generations that came before us and thanks to their struggles, we have the rights that we have today. I got into going to protests for queer rights. It really got me into activism.
I had this drive and want to also be part of the struggle and to continue it forward. Then I joined climate activism. There, not only I found more community, but I understood that my voice can make a change.
We were a bunch of high schoolers organizing climate protests, meeting with parliament members on climate laws. It was this big shift. I understood that if I organize with other people that have the same motivations and the same values, we can make change together.
Our voice can make a change. In this climate movement, I met, for the first time, Palestinian girls. Growing up, we grew up in very, very separated societies, the schools, the cities, the languages.
We grew up in very, very separated societies. It’s not a regular thing for an Israeli Jewish girl to have Palestinian friends at 17. Even the fact that they identified as Palestinian, they were Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the fact that they even identified as Palestinian, I was told that they’re Israeli Arabs.
Even that was a change of what I was told. I was told that the Palestinians are the ones in the West Bank and in Gaza, and the ones in 48 borders are Israeli Arabs. Hearing the word Nakba for the first time at 17 and getting to know that the stories that my grandparents told me are not the stories that their grandparents told them, realizing that I can say whatever I want in a protest, I can hold whatever I sign I want, I can post my thoughts on social media, and I can voice my opinions at school, and there are things that they can’t afford to voice.
There are opinions that they can’t afford to voice, and hearing the stories of their families in the West Bank, I had suddenly these faces, these people that I care about behind the word occupation, and understanding that it’s the same oppressive systems. I got to know people that at the time had more radical ideas than me, and hearing the term climate justice, and this was really big, starting to connect these dots, and seeing all these cracks in the narrative that I grew up on, and realizing that there’s a whole part of history, and there’s a whole people that I never really heard their story, and there are so many things that no one ever told me in school, and I think this is, it was also around the time of the Sheikh Jarrah protest, and seeing what’s going on there, and joining this protest by myself, I understood that there’s no way that I’m going to serve the military that oppresses my Palestinian friends, and I decided to refuse. I found Misarvot Network.
Misarvot means refusers in the feminine conjugation in Hebrew, through Misarvot Network, I got to know past refusers, and hear their stories, and have the social network that I can’t stress how important it is to have the social network, and I had, and I also, we have legal assistants in Misarvot Network, and I had this assistant throughout appealing to a conscientious committee. A conscientious committee is a committee, it’s a committee that can give out conscientious exemptions. The Israeli conscientious committee violates the international standards of conscientious objection.
According to international standards, it’s supposed to be a committee that’s, it’s supposed to be a civil committee that can recognize conscientious objectors that are pacifist or not pacifist, ones who oppose, their conscientious doesn’t let them serve a specific war, a specific military, or any military. In Israel, the conscientious committee is part of the military, so I went there in that room, four generals and one civilian checking my pacifism, because they only recognize this general kind of pacifism that doesn’t aspire to affect anyone but me, and I, and they decided that I don’t qualify for conscientious exemption, and so my enlistment date came up. Me and three other guys had similar enlistment dates.
The four of us refused together with the support of Misarvot Network on September 4, 2022. We refused, we voiced our objection to the occupation and said that we are not going to serve a military that oppresses one people for the supposed security of the other people, and I sat, when you refuse, you don’t know for how long you’re going to sit in military prison, you don’t know for how long you’re going to be sentenced. It could be two weeks, and it could be two years, like the ones that sat the most in the beginning of the 2000s, and I was sentenced for 87 days in total at a few different imprisonments until I was finally granted another conscientious committee, which gave me an exemption, and through my—oh, I think it’s also important to mention that I sat in military prison, but it’s not the same military prison that Palestinians are held in.
Palestinians face torture, unhuman conditions in the Israeli military prisons. We sat in a military prison that is for soldiers or ones who refuse to be soldiers, so it’s a different military prison, that’s important to say, and I’ll share his story now.
Tal Mitnick: Thank you.
I think, first of all, I’d like to recognize how privileged we are to be here, how privileged not only to come here to speak with everyone, but how privileged we are inside our own societies. We both come from Tel Aviv, which is the big city of middle to high class, and we both have supportive families that, without them, we would not be able to show our face and speak our truth in front of you guys, but also in front of the world with interviews and protests and these kinds of things, and also especially privileged in the fact that we are Israeli Jews in our land, and we live in a land that enacts apartheid and genocide on our Palestinian brothers and sisters, and especially in that way, we can speak the way that our brothers and sisters cannot. I grew up in a fairly liberal household.
Both my parents are immigrants from the United States, and they both raised me in the values of nonviolence, of talking about the cycle of bloodshed and the cycle of violence that exists in our land, and generally, I was raised in a way that military service was seen as something that I could do, but I also could not do. I was raised in a way that it was my choice. Now, I am in no way saying that my parents are as radical or have the same opinions as me, but being raised in this house where I can say what I believe and I can make my own decisions is definitely a step up from what most Israeli society, Israeli society’s households have, but no matter how liberally raised or progressively raised you are, the systems of militarism and the systems of brainwashing get to every and every child.
Already in first grade, in one of the many attacks on Gaza that we’ve seen in the past 70 plus years, there was an activity in my school. We were six years old. The activity was to write letters to the soldiers that were currently fighting, and I mean, I’ve talked about this a lot, and I think that the more I say it, the more crazy it sounds, because I see people that are six, I see kids that are six years old, and I think that in the start, when I was thinking of it, I didn’t realize how insane that actually is to send letters to soldiers that are committing these horrible, horrible acts, and I can’t lie.
The brainwashing and the militarism that exists in our systems, it can get to you, and it got to me personally too, especially as a young boy, I think romanticizing, crawling in the mud, holding a weapon, wearing the uniform, and protecting the nation that I come from, protecting the people that are close to me, is something that I remember feeling from a young age, and I know that a lot of young boys and girls do feel, but I’d like to stress that this is, this is the patriarchy acting, and this is the system’s idea of manliness telling us how we’re supposed to fight for the security of our people, and the systems of patriarchy are telling us that it’s only through violence, and later I realized that what really being a man, what really being a human being is, is refusing to those systems that taught us that way. In my early teens, I took after my father, he was a journalist. I started learning about the world, I started learning about what’s happening around me, and I learned about it in a critical sense.
I remember conversations, disagreements, me floating opinions of the right, of the left, and arguing with my parents a lot, but in the end, I took after the critical stance of what we were taught in school, and what our systems taught us, and around the age of 15, my father, who was probably the greatest influence on my politicization as a person, fell sick with cancer, and after many, after a long battle with a lot of medication, a lot of doctors, a lot of treatment, and really trying everything we can, he passed away, and this hit our family hard. I’m not here to talk about it, but I’m sure that there are a lot of people in the crowd that can resonate with the pain that it is to lose someone so close to you. He left behind me, my mother, and my two siblings.
A couple months after, when I was, when we were still in deep grief, I remember, again, taking after him even more, and reading about what’s happening around me, and finding the story of a baby from Gaza named Fatima. She was born, and a couple months later, she was diagnosed with a disease that, if she was born here or in Israel, she would have had to go to the doctor, maybe get some treatment, and live on a happy life, but because she’s from Gaza, the doctor that she needed to see was in East Jerusalem, and she needed to get a pass from the Israeli, from the Israeli security to go to East Jerusalem. After getting delayed, and delayed, and denied, and requesting again, and delayed, Fatima passed away at seven months, and I’m not sure I knew to say it at that moment, but I knew that it brought a great emotion in me, and the feeling of how privileged I am.
Although having gone through this terrible loss, we have the privilege of knowing that we tried everything, that fate decided that that was, that was what was right, and Fatima’s parents, and families, and close ones do not have the same privilege. They forever, for the rest of their lives, they have to live with the question of what if. What if we were born on the other side of the border? What if we had adequate medical attention? What if we didn’t have this murderous siege on our heads? And that was the moment that I decided that not only could I not be the one holding a weapon in the checkpoints, raiding houses in the middle of the night, I could not be part of any part of this rotten system that is bent on the oppression of Palestinian people.
This was around the time of the rise of this new government, and I can’t stress this enough. Every government in Israeli history has been fascist, has enacted the occupation, and has oppressed Palestinian people, but this new government is a new kind of evil in the fact that the allies of Netanyahu allied himself with this time, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich, and all these evil, evil people, people that until a couple months ago had pictures of mass murderers like Baruch Goldstein up in their kitchen, they started enacting a judicial reform which would take the judiciary into the government’s hands, and all the roadblocks, and all the walls that the judiciary imposed would be non-existent, and that meant taking away women’s rights, that meant taking away LGBTQ plus rights, and the core point of this judicial reform was to annex more, and to settle more, and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of the West Bank and out of Gaza. And there were mass protests against this, not against specifically the occupation part, but against the judicial reform as a taking apart of the democracy that we have in the state of Israel, and I went out to protest.
I went out and I saw a lot, a lot, a lot of people holding Israeli flags, chanting that they want to go back to what was before, what was before Netanyahu, what was before Ben Gvir, and what was before this horrible judicial reform, but I did not feel comfortable protesting with these people. I found this block of people that recognized that we did not have to go back, but we had to go forward, forward into a future where there’s no judicial reform without Netanyahu, without Kahanist allies, but also without an occupation and with justice and freedom for all from the river to the sea. Me and a couple other friends, we drafted a refusal letter stating that we will refuse to enlist into an army that occupies another people.
We got over 280 signatures and in the big, and in a big event of occupying my old school, we showed the letter to the world. We got condemnations from multiple members of Knesset, from the head of the military, that’s a badge that I wear with honor, and we really felt that our movement was growing. We really felt that refusal was becoming more mainstream in Israeli society, but as you could have guessed, this all happened in August of 2023, about a month and a half before our whole world would flip on its heads.
EG: So as Tal was preparing his refusal, I was preparing to go to an Arabic course in South Hebron Hills in the Masafiriyata community. Masafiriyata, for those who aren’t familiar with this community, it was shown in the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. If you haven’t watched it, go watch it.
And this community is a community in South Hebron Hills that faces extreme ethnic cleansing and forced displacement and settler violence, military raids, and there is a very beautiful solidarity between the Palestinian activists and Israeli activists and international activists that have been practicing non-violent co-resistance together in the past almost three decades. And I was planning on living there a few months to study Arabic and do protective presence and different solidarity activities, and Tal was preparing his refusal, and then we woke up on October 7th, 6.30 in the morning. I woke up in my parents’ house in Tel Aviv to the sound of sirens, of bombs.
It was very, very scary. We had no idea what’s going on. In the first hours, the journalists on the media didn’t have any information on what’s going on.
It was very unclear. Obviously, the first phone call was to my grandma, and she and my grandpa were in the shelter, but they were hearing shootings around the kibbutz. It was very stressful.
We had no idea what is happening. As the hours went by, we were starting to understand that there has been a massacre, and many people were missing. Everyone was looking for their loved ones.
My grandparents grieved many of their community members, so it was very devastating and very traumatic. It was like this massacre. We’re still, all of us, still in the trauma from it, and thankfully, my grandparents are okay, and after three days, they were able to evacuate the kibbutz.
From the second or third day after October 7th, we began to see a new reality in the West Bank. If beforehand, there was settler violence, there was ethnic cleansing, the occupation, we thought that we were feeling it at one of its rock bottoms. This was a whole new story.
The settlers weren’t waiting anymore for the military to demolish houses. They began demolishing Palestinian homes by themselves. Settlers were using live ammunition inside of Palestinian villages.
This whole new reality was very violent, still is very violent and very terrifying. Many villages couldn’t bear the violence anymore and were displaced. In all of this environment, there was a rising fascism in our society, and unfortunately, many people, some of them in our society and especially the government, took the path of revenge from the October 7th massacre.
They took the grief and the trauma into revenge, and that is not our path. We felt from the beginning that we must voice an opposition. We must speak up.
We can’t possibly stay silent. From the first few days, it was clear that the massacre is starting to begin in the Gaza Strip, and later on, it became a genocide. We went out to the streets and we began to protest.
Even having a sign, stop the war, was a very radical thing. We were arrested for it. There was insane police violence and over 100 students, 100 university students, were expelled from their studies.
Some of them arrested for posting on Facebook, stop the war, for having a Palestinian flag in their Facebook bio, for saying something about the civilians in Gaza. The whole environment was of insane political persecution, especially for the Palestinian Israeli citizens. This political persecution is still going on today, but in the beginning, it was just insane.
TM: In this environment, I had my enlistment date coming up. I want to add a little more about the fact that the same people we were protesting against, the same people we’re protesting with against Netanyahu, against the judicial reform, were now the same people flying the planes over Gaza, murdering children in their sleep.
The same politicians that said that they would never sit with Netanyahu, not even speak to him, rallied against him behind the war and the genocide. People were scared, especially Palestinians living inside the state of Israel. I mean, activists were scared, and especially Palestinians living inside the state of Israel.
Rising violence in the West Bank, an ongoing genocide, and in this environment, I had my enlistment date coming up. I thought a little bit about it, because it’s a scary time to be the voice of opposition, and there was no voice of opposition to this war. Even some of the supposed left-wing organizations could not bring themselves to say, stop the war, could not bring themselves to say, we need to end this right now.
And that was my decision. Should I come out publicly and talk about it, or should I do it silently and have no one hear about it? In the end, I decided that, again, I am very privileged in the fact that doing this, I could come home to my family. I will not lose my home.
I will still have friends that will call me my friend. And I decided that it’s not only something that I should do, it’s my duty to come out and to refuse. I refused in the end of December of 2023, talking to a lot of media outlets throughout the world, and also some inside Israel.
Like Einat said, we were telling people that the message to Israeli society is that revenge will not bring any of the objectives of the war. It will not bring back the hostages. It will not take down Hamas or anything like that.
And it will not bring safety to anyone living from the river to the sea. This was a very, very watered-down version of what we actually believed because of the environment. But even that, even saying just those basic words, I got death threats, and my phone number and my address were leaked.
People came up to me in the street. It was a scary time to be the voice of opposition. I ended up sitting 185 days for my refusal to enlist, and after me, there have been 12 public refusers that have come out in opposition to this genocide.
The latest one, just yesterday, Ella Kaydar Greenberg, the first trans refuser to come out publicly. She was sentenced to 30 days as her first sentence, and I cannot stress how proud me and Einat are and how to call her our friend, and how brave she is for taking this stance. She did not know if she was going to be sent to solitary confinement or to a men’s prison or to a women’s prison.
She did not know what was going to come. And this is not just the two of us that are coming here to talk to you. There is a movement of people behind us.
Although small, but we try to be strong, and we’ve built real community, and we hold each other up when times are tough, and we always come out in opposition to the genocide, and we will always come out in opposition to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Thank you.
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.
The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.
The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca
Notes:
- Cortright, David (2008). Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 164–165
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