Refusing to serve.

What would you do if you were rafted into an army occupying another people's land? Noam Bahat, age twenty-one, and Shimri Tzameret, age twenty, citizens of Israel, thought about it constantly as teenagers. Three years of full time military service is mandatory for Israeli youth.

Bahat and Tzameret, along with three other young men, were recently released from prison after twenty-one months for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. The five refuseniks spent more time in jail than any other conscientious objectors in Israeli history.

Bahat initially believed "in the white knight concept of the army," he says. "Then I started asking myself questions: What am I, an eighteen-year-old kid with no ability to influence the system, supposed to do when the state of Israel, my homeland, destroys the lives and rights of three million Palestinians? As a man of conscience, I could not take part in the army of oppression."

Tzameret came to the same conclusion.

"I have met many soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories," he says. "They told about beating 'insolent Arabs.' They told about shooting people for fun. My generation goes to the Occupied Territories and comes back with new moral norms."

Tzameret says their public refusal was intended "to shake Israeli society up, to make people see how we look from the outside, to make people see what we are doing to ourselves and to the Palestinians."