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Noam Gur and Alon Gurman will arrive, on next Monday (April 16), to the enlistment office in Tel Hashomer military base, where they will declare their refusal to serve in the Israeli Army as it is an occupying power, and will be imprisoned for this refusal.
In his refusal declaration Gurman wrote: "My refusal to serve in the Israeli military, in addition to being a refusal to take part in occupation and apartheid, is an act of solidarity with our Palestinian friends living under Israeli regime, and struggle for liberty, justice and equality." In her refusal declaration Gur wrote: "I refuse to join an army that has, since it was established, been engaged in dominating another nation, in plundering and terrorizing a civilian population that is under its control."
Alon Gurman, 18, from Tel Aviv was certain that he would enlist until he first went to the West Bank. During his last year in school, he started reading about the Palestinian popular struggle lecture.
"I started going to demonstrations thinking that while certain policies might be wrong, they can be changed, and changed from the inside, and so I went on with the pre-draft procedures as expected of me," says Gurman. "Only after the first time I went to the occupied territories did I realize that I could never be a part of the army. I saw house demolitions; I saw unbelievable levels of violence used against civilian protest, and all in the name of colonialism. I was especially traumatized when I was arrested in a demonstration in Al-Walaja, just as we were starting to disperse. The soldiers were my age, my peers, and I saw the effect of the service on them. You can’t be moral in an immoral situation." In recent months, Gurman has been attending the Friday demonstrations in the West Bank on a regular basis, and during the last escalation in Gaza, he organized a protest in Tel Aviv, before and during which he received personal threats. The exposure to all of this violence strengthened his decision to refuse, but it was only after hearing of Noam Gur that he was persuaded to do it openly, risk prison, and not avoid the draft quietly.
Friends and supporters will join Alon Gurman and Noam Gur to the military base, and remind the young Israelis about to join the army, that the occupation of the Palestinian territories still continues, "and there are those who oppose it, and that we must all act like Noam and Alon and refuse to take part in the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people."
For more information: neta.frie@gmail.com or phone 0546691221
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