By admin 
Last week, as Israel called up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers, Eran Tamir, an infantryman who had served four tours of duty in eighteen months, decided that he would not be among them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had announced that the country was planning an “intensive” ground offensive in Gaza, but Tamir argued in an open letter that the administration’s rhetoric was misleading. “They will say that this is an effort to free the hostages, that this is a war of survival or resurrection, and that this time Hamas will truly be defeated—It’s a deception,” he wrote. “It’s legitimate to refuse a war whose stated goals are a complete lie. It’s legitimate to refuse a war that is our moral low point as a country.” In the letter, published on the news site Walla, he addressed other potential objectors: “They will say that you are strengthening Hamas, encouraging the next massacre.” While that may have been true at the beginning of the war, he wrote, today such statements are “deranged.”
Tamir started off with far more enthusiasm for his mission. When a Hamas-led force attacked Israeli communities in October, 2023, he was on an extended trip to the United States. After hearing the news, he got on a plane home and reported to his base in less than twenty-four hours. The cause felt urgent; Israel had just sustained its worst-ever attack, and Hamas was holding more than two hundred and fifty hostages in Gaza. Roughly three hundred thousand other Israelis felt the same call and showed up for reserve service—the largest recruitment since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. When Tamir’s mother begged him not to go, he replied, “If I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.” Now, he wrote, “I tell myself that I will never forgive myself if I continue to serve in this war.”
In unit after unit, the Israeli military is seeing the attendance rates of reservists plummet. Among the resisters is a small but growing group of veterans, like Tamir, who openly express dissent and outrage. In March, a former intelligence officer named Michael Majer wrote on social media that he had “joined the Army to protect my people” but found that the current war was “in total contradiction to the interests of the Israeli people.” Nearly a thousand current and former pilots and airmen signed a petition last month calling for the release of the remaining hostages, “even at the cost of ending the war.” (The signatories stopped short of forthrightly calling for their peers to refuse call-ups, but the Air Force said that petition’s endorsers could no longer serve in the reserves.) Hundreds of current and former intelligence soldiers from the élite Unit 8200 and doctors in the Army reserves have signed similar letters.
While these protesters announce their moral objections, thousands of other reservists are engaging in what has become known as “quiet refusal”—simply not showing up for duty. Israel’s reserve forces make up about seventy per cent of its military. Former soldiers typically serve a maximum of fifty-four days, spread across three years. Attendance has always been overwhelming; military service, which is mandatory for both men and women, is coded into Israelis’ DNA. Now soldiers are arguing that it serves the country better—or at least serves their families better—if they don’t fight.
The Israel Defense Forces would not comment on the percentage of abstentions. In a recent briefing, an Army spokesperson said that the I.D.F. has “sufficient manpower to carry out its missions.” But, according to reporting in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, the I.D.F. chief of staff warned ministers in a closed-door meeting that he had a significant shortage of soldiers and could not deliver on the government’s goals in Gaza. One lieutenant colonel said, “Entire companies have been disbanded.” A recruiter told Israel’s Channel 12 that she was in a “state of desperation.”
A combat commander in the reserves, whom I’ll call Nir, recently recalled that, when the war in Gaza began, “people jumped and came who hadn’t done reserve service in a decade—they wanted to fight.” But as the conflict grinds on and the field of battle spreads, with Israel deploying soldiers to Lebanon, the West Bank, and Syria, reservists are being called up for the fifth and sixth time. I spoke to Nir as he was packing to report for another emergency call-up. He told me that he and his former unit mates have now clocked more than two hundred days of service. Marriages have fallen apart; people have lost their jobs. (According to a recent survey published by Israel’s Employment Service, forty-one per cent of reservists said that they had been fired or forced to leave their jobs after deploying.) During Nir’s last round of fighting, about sixty per cent of his unit showed up. This time, “we’re talking less than fifty per cent,” he said. “It’s really bad. Everyone is spent.”
Nir, who describes himself as right-leaning, had few qualms about the fighting he had witnessed in Gaza, which he said his unit grew accustomed to during Israel’s last major clash with Hamas, in 2021. As the recent war began, he convinced himself that his deployment to Gaza was helping apply pressure on Hamas to release the hostages. Yet fifty-eight hostages remain in captivity; as many as twenty-three are believed to be alive. Nir now believes what many hostage families have been warning all along: military pressure is endangering their loved ones, and only a negotiated deal will secure their release. “I have no reason to serve besides camaraderie now,” Nir said. “I’m ashamed of my government—of what this country has become.”
On Tuesday, Donald Trump began a four-day visit to the Middle East. In Gaza and in Israel, the expectations for the trip are immense. It’s “money time,” as one analyst put it. Yet the war seems to be a marginal concern for the President, who is evidently more interested in making lucrative deals. Before Trump’s visit, the U.S. had secured the release of an American-Israeli captive held by Hamas. Though Israelis were jubilant, their celebrations were tinged with anxiety that Trump would now consider himself done with the issue. Upon arriving in Riyadh, he announced that he had secured an agreement for Saudi Arabia to invest six hundred billion dollars in the U.S., and an arms deal worth a hundred and forty billion. The deal did not call for Saudi to normalize ties with Israel—a huge blow for Netanyahu. In another blow, Trump recently announced that the U.S. will no longer help Israel retaliate against Houthi air strikes from Yemen, which have targeted Israeli cities since shortly after the war began.
A ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March. According to the agreement, Israel would withdraw its forces from Gaza and Hamas would release the remaining hostages. But Israel refused to evacuate from a strategic corridor, and added a demand for Hamas to disarm; Hamas refused to free all the hostages, or to give up its weapons.
Ever since, Israel has blocked any humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, applying what the defense minister describes as one of the “pressure levers” on Hamas. All of the Gaza Strip is at high risk of famine, and nearly half a million people in Gaza face starvation, according to a panel of experts backed by the United Nations. The World Central Kitchen, an N.G.O. that has been a primary source of nutrition for much of the Gazan population, recently announced that it had run out of supplies.
In Israel, the military has described the recent mobilization as a new tactic to force Hamas to accept a ceasefire deal on its terms. But the government has also signalled a desire to remain in Gaza and impose military rule. The Israeli cabinet approved the operation, which began with the widespread call-up of reservists. The second stage will involve displacing all of Gaza’s two million residents to a narrow swath of land in the southern Strip. In the third stage, Israel will seize control of large portions of Gaza. A government spokesman told the Times that the intention was not to permanently occupy territory. But, in a televised conference last week, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, announced, “We are going to conquer the Gaza Strip.” Around the same time, Netanyahu said in a video address, “The Israeli forces will not intervene only to withdraw afterward.”
The government recently circulated a document to military commanders, detailing the objectives of the offensive. As Yaniv Kubovich reported in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, commanders were stunned to discover that the primary goals included seizing “operational control” of Gaza and “concentrating and mobilizing the population.” The release of hostages was sixth, and last, on the list of priorities. The document shows the disconnect between Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and the wider Israeli public—two-thirds of which believes that the hostages are the country’s top priority.
Since the ceasefire collapsed, a series of ferocious Israeli air strikes have killed hundreds of Gazans, many of them children, but the military has so far refrained from sending in its bolstered ground force. Questions circulate over whether the proposed offensive is a negotiating tactic or an actual plan. “If an agreement is not reached by the end of Trump’s visit, the IDF’s expanded operation in the Gaza Strip will begin,” the mainstream newspaper Maariv wrote last week.
One reservist who has quietly ended his military service is Yair, a thirty-eight-year-old former infantryman who lives on a northern kibbutz. When Hamas attacked in 2023, Yair dusted off his Army fatigues and drove to his former base, leaving behind a six-week-old daughter. For the next year, Yair spent half his time with his unit, protecting the northern border. Away from his family, he gradually lost faith in the cause. “I see the war goals becoming blurred, and the gap between what is happening on the ground and the slogans about returning the hostages and defeating Hamas,” he said. Back home, things were falling apart. His wife told him that his family could not withstand another prolonged absence. At work, he couldn’t take on new projects because of the uncertainty of his deployment. A few months ago, he finally sent his commander a text message: “I’m asking to stop. My home can’t take it.” He told me that he still agonized over the choice. “I’ve had so much guilt that I couldn’t sleep at night,” he said. “I felt like I was abandoning my teammates.”
Uri Arad, a seventy-three-year-old former combat navigator, told me that he has heard from many young men like Yair, seeking advice on whether to report for service. “These are people who, all their lives, whenever they were called to serve, they ran,” he said. So he doesn’t tell them what they should do. Instead, he tells them what he hopes he would have done in their position: refuse. During Israel’s Yom Kippur War, Arad was taken captive by Egypt and held for six weeks. “The main thing that kept me going was knowing—not believing, but knowing—that the country would do everything to bring me back,” he said. He views Israel’s decision to renege on the deal with Hamas and expand its military operations as an abandonment of the hostages, which would mean “losing the soul of the country.” Arad, who helped draft the pilots’ letter of objection, said that the number of innocent Palestinians that Israel is killing has become impossible to explain or to ignore. “The war has eroded Israeli morals, its standing in the world, and fractured Israeli society,” he said.
Even Israelis who continue to serve say that the burden on reservists has become unsustainable. But they argue that ending the war now would mean recognizing that Israel has failed to defeat Hamas, whose remaining forces are still effectively in control, less than two miles from the border fence with Israel. For Israelis, the scale and brutality of the October attacks rendered it a war of no choice in the early months. Now only thirty-five per cent believe that continuing the fight is in the country’s interest, but Netanyahu’s ultranationalist coalition partners have threatened to bring down the government if he ends the war. They want a continued presence in Gaza, preferably in the form of Jewish settlements and a military occupation.
Eighteen months into the conflict, Gaza lies in ruins. Israel is ostracized and isolated, reeling from a war that fifty-three per cent of the public says is motivated by Netanyahu’s personal imperatives. By miring the country in endless fighting, critics say, he hopes to distract from increasingly unflattering headlines: his upcoming cross-examination in a criminal trial over charges of corruption (which he denies); allegations that two of his advisers were paid by Qatari officials to carry out an influence campaign; and a wildly unpopular push to pass a law securing the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service.
Even though Netanyahu has vowed that conscripts would be given “no room for refusal,” he also spent years defending a widespread military exemption for the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox. Haredi parties have long been Netanyahu’s key allies in government. Last week, they threatened to boycott all parliamentary votes unless a law passed to exempt yeshiva students from service.
Netanyahu’s government has proven astonishingly durable, despite overseeing the largest security breach in the country’s history, but the demand for equal conscription for all threatens to destabilize it. The Army, short of soldiers, has sent about nineteen thousand draft notices to ultra-Orthodox men since July. Fewer than three hundred of them enlisted. The wife of a former paratrooper from Tel Aviv told me, “I feel like we’re the only ones sacrificing while an entire sector is saying, ‘We would rather die than serve.’ ” She added that she wanted to “cry and beg” her husband not to report for service, but knew that he would refuse to hear it. He deployed this week. “He’s going only because of his friends,” she said. “Not out of any commitment or belief in the war.”
I recently spoke to Izchaki Glick, a major in the reserves of the Israeli commando force. When I asked how many tours of duty he has served, he laughed and said, “Just one”—but that tour has been going on for four hundred and twenty days. Glick, who is forty, is a father of five from the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron. He said that he was proud to serve. “Reservists are the most patriotic people, who know that, if they refuse to show up for duty because of political disagreements, they are destroying the country and the Zionist project,” he said. But even he sensed “a general exhaustion.” The men he serves with are determined to keep showing up, he added, but “it’s, like, ‘You keep calling us. How much longer?’ ” Glick is a founder of a group of active reserve officers called To the Flag, which has political aspirations and is fighting against the Haredi exemption. He said that enlarging the pool of active-duty soldiers is a national-security interest and called the unwillingness of the ultra-Orthodox to serve a “moral and Jewish disgrace.”
In an attempt to stave off reservist abstentions, the Army has resorted to a policy known as “week by week.” It allows some soldiers to alternate between a week of service and a week at home while being paid for both. This costly tactic used to apply only to highly unpopular jobs, as cooks, drivers, or base guards. Now it has become commonplace, according to the news site Ynet.
In another sign of the Army’s distress, recruiters have begun advertising unfilled positions online. One popular Facebook group, called “Wanted: Reservists,” recently posted a notice. “Searching for meaning?” it began. “Join us! Fighters needed for an armored unit in the Gaza Strip.” Under required skills, the posting listed combat experience, knowledge of warfare in urban areas, and being “poisoned” to serve—exhibiting high motivation. The job will begin after an emergency call-up. Its end date, the notice noted, “is unforeseeable.” ♦