WHEN Sofia Orr was a 14-year-old Israeli schoolgirl, she decided that one of the things she wanted to be when she grew up was a conscientious objector.
 
When Ahmed Helou was 15, he joined Hamas to fight for the freedom of the Palestinian people.
 
Five years later both of them found themselves in an Israeli prison.
 
When Orr turned 18 this year and became eligible for mandatory military service with the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), she declined. “I refused to take part in occupation and apartheid regimes that Israel is enacting upon Palestinians for decades, and now also because of the war and massacre in Gaza,” she said.
 
But she decided, “It wasn’t enough to just say ‘no.’ I needed to do it publicly.”
 
Now 19, Orr was released in June after serving 85 days in prison for her “political and conscientious objection.” She spoke last week as part of a press conference featuring former Israeli soldiers, Palestinian combatants and US military personnel who have refused to be complicit in the Gaza genocide.
 
Helou, whose family had fled to Jericho during the Nakba of 1948, is 52 now and lives in the West Bank. When he joined Hamas as a teenager he “threw rocks and made Palestinian flags,” he recalled. That got him sent to an Israeli prison for seven months. When he emerged, he too was determined to find another path forward that didn’t involve violence.
 
Helou has held onto that commitment despite losing 80 members of his family during the current Israeli assault on Gaza, “mostly children, women, boys,” he said. His one remaining sister is still alive somewhere in Gaza, along with her five children. “Every day we awake in fear of what news will come,” he said.
 
Orr’s prison time exposed her to the full extent of dehumanisation, not just among the prisoners but within the IDF itself. “I learned how the military dehumanises all the people it comes in contact with, even the soldiers serving in it,” she said. What she also learned was “the power of saying ‘no’.”
 
Elik Elhanan, a special forces soldier in the IDF from 1995-98, and a founder in 2005 of the Israeli-Palestinian group, Combatants for Peace, echoed that view as he spoke online to reporters, a Palestinian keffiyeh hanging on the wall behind him.
 
It was all about “the courage to refuse,” said Elhanan, who lost his sister to a Hamas suicide bomber more than 20 years ago. Currently, the group is focused on direct action, in particular against “the criminal and murderous land grab in the West Bank,” Elhanan said.
 
Helou believes that together, Palestinians and Israelis can create a peaceful future with shared values. “We love this land, both of us love this land,” he said, fighting back emotion, “But in this war, we have lost a lot. We are both victims. Both of us.” Elhanan agrees. “We are united in our pain,” he said.
 
Larry Hebert, a senior airman in the US Air Force soon found “there was no way I could support what was happening in Gaza.” He was inspired to seek conscientious objector status after Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old US airman distressed over US complicity in the Gaza genocide, self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC last February.
 
But Hebert was shocked at the lack of response to Bushnell’s action. In the military, Hebert said, no-one spoke Bushnell’s name or “had the moral courage to speak up” about the atrocities happening in Gaza.
 
When Hebert would point out to peers, superiors and even members of Congress that the US was breaking international humanitarian rights and US law by supporting Israel’s genocide, he was met with a chilling response. “Who’s going to stop us?” he was told. He realised, he said, that “the strongest military in the world” was “a place of immorality.”
 
The speakers had come together to launch a new “appeal for redress” which affords members of the US military the legal right to contact their members of Congress with any concerns they have about what the US government is doing, in this case specifically the US military support of Israel’s attack on Gaza. It does not require them to leave the service to do so, but that is also a choice.
 
But there are risks. Even though it is a legal and constitutional right, those who speak out can still be subject to retaliation and even prosecution if certain lines are crossed.
 
In Israel, you simply go to jail, as Orr did. But, as she concluded after her experience, “the support that the US is offering Israel again and again will never lead to anything good and will only damage the future of everyone living from the river to the sea.”
 
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.