Question Hi. I live in Israel. I do not wish to be recruited to the Israeli army for two main reasons. One is the preservation of my liberty (the mandatory service in the IDF is 3 years), the second is the desire to refrain from harming others. While I am not sure how to justify this principles in a general theory of "the universe", I am firmly certain that in Israel, the political situation enables me to use them in order to avoid being recruited to the IDF. However, there is a third variable that keeps nagging me - justice. If I do not serve, other people are protecting me, and there is nothing I can do to avoid it. Can you help? Suggest a line of reasoning and investigation? Sincerely, Shmuel

Accepted:
April 27, 2011

Comments

I am not so sure that you can get out of your military service simply by saying that you wish to preserve your liberty and don't wish to harm other people. You may know the present situation better than I do, but I know of a number of young Israelis who ended up in jail for refusing to serve in the IDF.

I see your justice point: The IDF is protecting the physical security of Israeli citizens (or at least of a large majority of the Israeli population to which you belong), and so it seems unjust for you to enjoy this protection but then also to refuse to contribute to it.

You say that there is nothing you can do to avoid being protected by the IDF. If this were true, then this would weaken your reasons to serve. To illustrate, suppose you have a fan who, unprompted by you, greatly improves your reputation by posting admiring stories about you on Facebook, by very effectively singing your praises to important people in your social environment whose support will greatly help your career, etc. You learn about this person's efforts, and you realize that you benefit from these efforts. But you have no obligation to reciprocate, I would think, precisely because you had no choice in the matter, never asked your fan to act in your behalf or even signaled your approval. Matters are different when you do have a choice and then actively take advantage of benefits made available to you. Suppose, for example, that all the other occupants of your apartment building collaborate to cultivate a beautiful flower garden near your building. This garden cannot be seen from the outside (it is surrounded by hedges), but because you love flowers you often go there and sit on the bench. Here it seems that it would be wrong of you to take advantage of the beautiful garden while refusing to join the effort to maintain it (assuming that your neighbors really want you to contribute etc.).

The preceding paragraph suggest that your justice reason for serving in the IDF is the stronger the more of a choice you have about whether to remain in Israel. If you could easily leave and, say, live in the US instead, then your remaining in Israel is closer to the garden case, where you are taking advantage of the efforts of others. If you have no realistic way of avoiding protection by the IDF (short of suicide, say, which is obviously not a serious option here), then your presence in Israel is closer to the Facebook case where you benefit without choice and thus may permissibly refuse to reciprocate by doing your fair share.

Coming to your first two reasons now. Serving in an army means subjecting oneself to the far-reaching authority of its commanders and political leaders. They may order you to kill people, and they may order you into situations in which you must kill in order to survive. Soldiers harm people; and, more importantly, soldiers often wrongly harm people. Many of the objectives armies are used to achieve are unjust objectives, and many of the people who get killed by soldiers are innocent people and people whose killing is not morally justifiable or excusable. So your fear that, by joining the army, you will become a participant in unjust harm is entirely realistic. Joining the IDF, you may well be ordered to man checkpoints and to police roads that stifle the movement of Palestinians within the West Bank, for example, or to fire tank shells at, or drop bombs upon, civilian homes in the Gaza Strip. To put it bluntly, you may be given orders that, if you comply, will make you harm and even kill innocent people whom it is wrong to harm or kill.

By joining the army, you will make it much harder for yourself to avoid wrongdoing, to avoid harming and even killing innocent people. How much this matters depends on the specific situation. If an army fights (or is disposed only to fight) justly for an important just cause, then one may have strong moral reason, on balance, to join it. If an army is fighting, or disposed to fight, for an unjust cause, then one may have strong moral reason to refuse to join even when one also expects personally to benefit from this army's success. In such a case one would still have reason to avoid the benefits if one can do so witout undue hardship and also reason, of course, to avoid making other contributions to the army's success.

So this is what you might say in defense of your refusal to join the IDF to others who are joining and accusing you of being a free-rider. You can say that one central objective the IDF is used to support is the appropriation of land in the West Bank for new and expanding Israeli settlements, and that this is an unjust objective and policy that wrongly harms the Palestinians who live there. It would be wrong to contribute to the injustice done to the Palestinians and therefore wrong for you to join the IDF. You might add that, while the IDF also serves the legitimate objective of protecting you and other Israeli civilians from violence by Palestinians, much of this protection is needed only because of unjust Israeli policy in the West Bank.

If it is said in response that you are benefiting from the settlement policy, you can respond that you are not actively taking advantage of it (e.g., by living in the West Bank) and only benefiting from it (e.g., through lower real estate prices in Israel) in ways you cannot reasonably avoid.

If it is said that you should then (given what you believe) actively avoid the benefits by working toward emigration, you might respond that you are willing to forego such benefits by donating them to organizations (such as B'Tselem, perhaps) that protect the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. You might add that, as an Israeli citizen, you have a responsibility to work toward achieving greater justice of your country's social institutions and policies, and that the kind of discussions with your fellow citizens that are central to such work would be very much harder to conduct from abroad.

In conclusion, I think that -- if you see the situation in roughly the way I have guessed in the preceding three paragraphs -- you can avoid both: being a participant in injustice and unfairly benefiting from the efforts of others who have joined the IDF. My sense is, though, that your government will not make this path as easy for you as you seem to expect.