Since its founding in 1948, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been a conscription army, drafting its members from within the general Israeli population. And as long as the IDF has been drafting Israeli citizens for service, there has been a tiny minority that refuses to serve.
However, for NBC News, the decades-old phenomenon of some Israelis refusing to serve in the IDF for ideological reasons is newsworthy if it can be somehow attributed to the current Israeli government.
In a recent report from Israel, NBC News contributor Josh Lederman describes how mandatory service in the IDF is a “rite of passage in Israeli society” but notes that “for some young Jewish Israelis, something is changing.”
Claiming that this small number of Israeli youth are “part of an unprecedented movement to refuse to join the army,” Lederman explains why these Israeli youth are refusing to serve in the IDF: “The spark that lit this fire? A proposal by the most right-wing government in Israel’s history to weaken the nation’s courts, giving politicians far more power.”
However, this characterization of Israeli draft dodgers and the reason for their refusal to serve is misleading and deceptive.
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By claiming that this is “part of an unprecedented movement,” Lederman mischaracterizes the history of Israeli draft refusal.
Refusal to serve is as old as the IDF (Joseph Abileah, the first Israeli to refuse to serve in the IDF, did so in 1948).
And far from being “unprecedented,” the movement of some Israeli youth refusing to draft into the IDF has gained traction at various moments in Israel’s history, beginning in 1970. Nevertheless, it is estimated that, on average, only approximately 0.07% of eligible teens refuse to be drafted into the IDF for ideological reasons.
In fact, it should have been clear to both NBC News and Josh Leiderman that Israeli draft refusal is not a new phenomenon linked to the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu since one of the draft dodgers interviewed for this piece, Evyatar Rubin, first refused to join the IDF in September 2022, during the tenure of the previous Israeli government that Yair Lapid headed.
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Further on in this piece, Josh Lederman turns to the protest of Israeli reservists against the current government’s proposed judicial reforms, seemingly equating it with those Israeli youth who refuse to serve in the IDF.
This equivalence, however, is spurious for two reasons: First, while the reservists are protesting against a specific government policy, the youth draft dodgers are doing so out of an ideological opposition to military service; second, while the draft dodgers will never take up arms on behalf of the State of Israel, the reservists have a history of service behind them and have made clear that they are only refusing to carry out their volunteer duties. In the event of a compulsory wartime call-up, they have committed to fulfill their duties.
Thus, without any reliable statistics to prove otherwise, NBC News’ purely anecdotal claim that the phenomenon of draft refusal among some Israeli youth is suddenly a significant one or directly correlated to the current Israeli government’s policies is baseless and unfounded.
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