Courage to refuse

When the news cycle turns genocide into background noise, it is difficult to shake off the feeling that you are complicit in the violence. Atrocities become bullet points in fact-finding reports. Stories of people get lost in the rubble of dead bodies piling up as lifeless statistics. But, once in a while, someone reminds you that a steadfast moral compass can be a light amidst the horror.In March 2025, Ella Keidar Greenberg refused to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. At the age of 18, facing mandatory conscription, she became the first openly transgender conscientious objector in Israel since October 7, 2023 when the Palestinian group Hamas led an attack in Israel on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. For this audacity, she was put in prison.Standing tall as ‘refuseniks’Almost every Jewish citizen of Israel who turns 18 is conscripted, with extremely rare instances of religious and medical exemptions. Refusal is a choice that comes with harsh consequences including imprisonment, social ostracism, and a strained relationship with one’s family and friends.Ella’s choice to walk this path as a teenager, fully aware of the backlash, fills me with admiration. She listened to the insistent voice of her conscience instead of going with the herd.In 2016, another transgender woman named Aiden Katri in Israel made the same refusal to enlist. She said, “Arabs and Jews live in this country as two different classes; Israelis and Palestinians live under two different legal systems…if I turn a blind eye to the oppression of another people, this would be hypocrisy.” She too was imprisoned.Ella and Aiden belong to an honourable tradition within Israel, carried on by people who call themselves “refuseniks”. Borrowed from Soviet Jews, who were once denied permission to leave the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), this term is now reclaimed by Israelis who not only stand up against compulsory military service but also against occupation and apartheid.There is a continuity between their refusal to be bogged down by society’s diktats. They accepted neither the gender assigned to them at birth nor the expectation to oppress Palestinians. Both forms of violence flow from the same patriarchal imperative to control, dehumanize and exploit. They refused to allow family, religion and the state to determine the course of their lives.Gloria Steinem: Revisiting the feminist iconTheir defiant spirit and their public critique of militarization throws a challenge to Israel’s campaign to promote itself as a haven for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people.The term “pinkwashing” is widely used by Palestinian and Israeli LGBTQ people who are keen to talk about how a climate of openness with respect to gender and sexuality is used to deflect attention from Israel’s crimes against humanity and shut down calls for accountability.Resisting participationAs someone who has been taught by Jewish professors, and participated in religious holidays with Jewish friends, both in India and the United States, I see in Ella and Aiden’s refusal a principled commitment to “tikkun olam”, the obligation to repair the world.It is a beautiful concept in Jewish ethical thought, and is particularly relevant in our times. These trans women do not buy into the idea that loyalty to fellow Jews requires loyalty to the occupation. They also puncture the lazy and dangerous assumption, common outside Israel, that all Jews are Zionists.What stays with me is a line from Ella’s public statement before she was put in prison. She imagined a conversation in the distant future, with her grandchildren asking what she did during the genocide — whether she gave up or put up a fight. She said that, in such a scenario, she would proudly say, “I chose to resist”.This homely image of a dinner table conversation between a grandmother and a grandchild, sitting together with the enormous weight of a moral question, shows us that textbook histories often erase the contributions of women like Ella and Aiden.It would be foolish to dismiss these young women’s choices as footnotes against the scale of destruction in Palestine. They may not have been able to save people from being killed and raped, or prevent schools and hospitals from being bombed.But their refusal to participate matters. It is a silent tribute to their Jewish ancestors who suffered immensely during the Holocaust, and said: Never again! Ella and Aiden’s “No” should serve as a wake-up call to everyone who is still hesitant to speak up.Chintan Girish Modi is a journalist and educator with a background in peacebuilding.

Source: Deccan Herald