Ella Keidar Greenberg announced today her refusal to enlist in the Israeli army and serve in the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza and has been sentenced to 30 days in prison. It is still not clear if she will be placed in a male, female, or separate department.
Ella Keidar Greenberg Refusal Statement: The Imperative is Refusal
My name is Ella Keidar Greenberg, I was raised to be a man and a soldier. At the age of 14 I came out as a trans woman and rejected society’s dictation of gender. Now, at the age of 18, I am refusing to enlist, and rejecting society’s militaristic dictation.
Shortly after coming out, I found the communist manifesto in my grandmother’s library. I spent the next two years reading books about political philosophy and Marxist theory. Through reading I developed a deeper understanding of the bloody history and present of the place I live in. With the protest movement against the Judicial coup, a path manifested for me to convert the frustration I felt into hope and political action. I quickly joined the struggle against the occupation as an activist and organizer. First in the anti-occupation bloc and the weekly protests in Kaplan street, and later in the Mesarvot Network, in the Communist Youth Union, in Hadash (DFPE) and in the Communist Party.
Since then activism has turned into the center of my life, I organized a mass protest against transphobic propaganda, protested with Palestinian activists against land theft as soldiers shot stun grenades and rubber bullets at us, blocked roads, got injured by cops and from violent evictions by Magav (border police), organized a mass refusal campaign under Youth Against Dictatorship, did protective presence and joined co-resistance in Masafer Yatta, and now – I am refusing.
The main reason for this act, is that my country is committing a genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in bombings, intentional destruction of infrastructure, starvation, and indiscriminate fire. Millions were torn from their homes, and continue to exist in a state of displacement since. This has been the daily reality in Gaza for the past 18 months. All for a war that was supposedly meant to bring the hostages back home, but in practice, abandons them. The war of annihilation has passed over the West Bank, with escalating settler violence, supported more than ever by the army. Dozens of villages, ethnically cleansed as if they never even existed, and entire neighborhoods destroyed and depopulated as part of the destructive operation in Jenin and Tulkarem. Now that the government has returned to its campaign of destruction in Gaza, this situation is expected to continue and worsen.
Inside Israel we are witnessing police political persecution of left wing activists and Palestinians on scales not seen since the military rule of 1948-1966, arrests over statements on social media, protests and civil organizing. There is an intentional systematic neglect of Arab society to murderous organized crime, 24 living hostages still waiting to return home to their families, a horrific economic crisis that is affecting working people first and foremost, a 65% increase in domestic violence that is tied the 40% rise in civilian firearms. Additionally we have seen a surge in violence against the queer community and a simultaneous cut of its governmental budgets, and that same judicial coup we blocked roads against just moments ago, is now being rapidly legislated under our noses. These are not processes happening separately from the genocide in Gaza, but are direct and immanent parts of the effects of war on society.
For the status quo to keep functioning, people are required to fulfill the roles in the system, like gears in a well-oiled machine. We must work, enlist to the army, we must kill, get married, start a family, and make children who will continue to serve the Occupation, Capitalism and Patriarchy. These systems are not just the soldier standing at the checkpoint, the boss that pays too little, or the people outlawing our gender and medical autonomy, but also the education into these institutions, the sum of all social mechanisms that prime us into obedient subjects of the system.
This logic is what trans people, like refuseniks, undermine. That’s why we’re so scary, because the existing system and its reproduction is insured by us- the people, staying disciplined and obedient.
But obedience brings us nothing but oblivion. The decision makers of the military and government clarify again and again that they have no interest in the stability of the ceasefire agreement, in our rights, or in the return of the hostages. Their interest in us is limited to our function as canon fodder for the extermination and expansion industry. Dark regimes and the horrors they enforce don’t collapse by the citizens obeying the law and doing what we’re told, hoping someone upstairs will come to their senses and understand this has to stop.
Faced with a reality of mass extermination, of systematic neglect, of trampling on rights, of war – The imperative is refusal. Don’t stay complacent, gather, organize, resist.
In 40 years, when our grandchildren ask us what we did during the Gaza genocide, during the collapse of the old order, if we gave up or if we put up a fight, how will you rather answer? I know what I’ll answer, that I chose to resist. This is why I am refusing.
