Front Burner - Why some young Israelis refuse to fight in Gaza

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Since Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s health ministry, over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. Recently, the ministry also began reporting a new kind of toll: deaths by starvation. 180 people, including 93 children, are now reported to have died from hunger. This comes after months of Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has maintained that “there is no starvation in Gaza”. But his statements stand in stark contrast to a large body of evidence from aid agencies, verified images and eyewitnesses.In recent weeks, we’ve seen a growing number of Israelis protesting the crisis in Gaza. Along with these demonstrators, we’ve also seen a number of teenage Israelis who are publicly refusing the draft.They’re choosing prison time rather than fighting a military campaign they oppose in Gaza, and speaking out publicly against what they see as a moral crisis.Soul Behar Tsalik is one of them. He shares what led him to that decision, the cost of dissent, and how Israelis are reacting to the world’s attention on the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Ali Jane, filling in for Jamie Poisson. Since the start of the war in Gaza, the health ministry there has been reporting the number of Palestinians confirmed killed in Israel's military campaign against Hamas. As of last week, their numbers had grown to over 60,000. More than half are women. and children. Recently, after months of Israeli aid restrictions, the ministry has started reporting a separate toll, the growing number of deaths from starvation. As of Monday, they reported that 180 people, including 93 children, have now died of hunger. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has maintained that, quote, there is no starvation in Gaza, although his statements stand in stark

contrast to a large body of evidence from humanitarian groups, aid agencies, verified images, and eyewitnesses. Israel has also long said that it must control the flow of aid to stop Hamas from stealing it, although multiple recent reports, including an internal U.S. government report, haven't found evidence that the group routinely steals aid. Over the weekend, Netanyahu also advocated for a, quote, decisive military victory in Gaza. That came after Hamas released an undated video of an Israeli hostage looking gaunt and emaciated. It sparked more anger over the hostage crisis within Israel and abroad.

But as this campaign grinds on, Israel is also facing increasing outrage from its citizens for another reason. The humanitarian disaster in Gaza itself. A crowd of Israelis march against hunger in Gaza. Carrying pictures of Palestinian children, their government has starved to death. We came here today to call out to end. end this siege, to allow the entry of humanitarian aid, and to end the war on Gaza, which is a catastrophe for both Palestinians as well as Israelis. Along with these demonstrations in the streets, we appear to be seeing a resurgence of a rare

but long-standing protest movement in the country, conscientious objectors, teenage Israelis who were publicly refusing the draft and choosing prison time rather than fighting a military campaign that they oppose in Gaza. My guest today is one of them, Seoul Bayhard Salick. He's a 19-year-old Israeli based in Tel Aviv. When he turned 18, the age where most Israeli citizens are called up to serve in the IDF, Seoul refused to enlist and publicly identified himself as a refusenic. He was in Israeli custody for about two months.

Today, I'm talking to Seoul about why he's taken this stand, what is like to resist Israel's military campaign, and how Israelis are reacting to the world's attention on the humanitarian crisis, in Gaza. Hi, Seoul. Thank you so much for being here. Absolutely. Growing up in Israel,

of course, everyone is required to enlist with the IDF when they turn 18. And can you talk to me a bit about like the significance that that holds for most young Israelis when they're planning out the trajectory of their lives?

Yeah. A useful metaphor I use to explain it is that it's kind of like college, or maybe, you know, it's even a bigger part of the culture because it also carries a lot of bravado. But since your kid, people over your head are talking about it, then when you're an early team, you start like actually picking up names of different units and what each unit does and where your family went and stuff like that. And by the time you're like 15, you're already, even 14, you're already doing good in high school. in order to get to a good unit. You're already working out in order to get into a good combative unit. One of the first things you get asked in any job interview or any time you beat somebody in general is where you serve.

There are families with familial pride in which unit they serve. So it's very important that kids go to that unit or sit in that position. So it's really a cornerstone of the culture here. It does actually sound really similar to the way that kids here would really be thinking about university as sort of this thing that plans like the trajectory of your future that you're saying that's how people think about about military service. And I understand that your decision to not enlist was a gradual one. Right. Can you talk to me about kind of the biggest factors or turning points that led you to

make that choice? Yeah. It's a, it's a choice that happens so slowly that like I didn't realize at what point I had already made the decision retroactively. For me, I think it was a combination of you know, starting to learn about politics and history and what's going on around me and also being a bilingual and knowing English and doing some of that research in English led me down a path of realizing

that there is a really stark difference and contrast between what the history sounds like in Hebrew and in English, which just made it more interesting. Like, it gave me another perspective. I think it's that. I think it's growing up in a school in Jaffa where, you know, I'm constantly surrounded by,

by Arabs and conscious of the fact that I'm in their city or town. Right. Like, just for context, for our listeners, this is like a very old city with a still relatively large Palestinian population. Yeah. And a lot of mosques and all the shops are Palestinian, not all of them, but a lot of. And generally, I think, growing up in Tel Aviv and, and. and having that privilege starting up point of liberalism being all around,

which is something people in the far parts of the country don't really have. So for me, it was somewhat heard of people not serving. Sometimes people get exemptions for different things, and they go on to do what's called National Service, which is instead of doing Army service, you're just serve in, like, I don't know, animal shelter or kindergarten or something. something like that. So this is an option that I heard about, which is a privilege. Like, there are people in this country who for them not serving is completely unheard of. For them

not serving means being completely ostracized from their families. And for me, it didn't mean that. And I mean, was there a point when you decided like, this is it, I'm definitely not doing that. So I'm going to take a stand here? It's hard to say a strict point. I think by the time I was 16, I knew I am not going to be a part of what the IDF is doing. And by the time I was 17, I saw on TV a different refuse and all her campaign and her press and refusal statement and her prison time and stuff like that. And I found out that that's an option. That's the option. That's the path.

And I realized that I could do it. So I made contact and I did. You publicly identified yourself as a conscientious objector, you publicly demonstrated, you talked about it online, and you also released your refusal statement. When you did those things, what kind of reaction did you receive from your fellow Israelis? It really depends who there's different levels of contact that give with them different veils of empathy. With my

close friends who agree with me, then I felt supported, and with my close friends who disagree with me, they're close enough to me to know that I'm doing this. Also, my friends who were, you know, had to go serve, know

that I'm doing this for them. I mean, that I see everybody's as victims of this war and this, and the occupation and this endless a circle of violence so they know me well enough to know that you know I do it with

good intent the second you get a bit farther the second it's on the internet or in the street then there isn't the benefit of the doubt during the demonstration we got we got attacked a bit and roughed up and online

you know I feel complaining about things people say online misunderstands the format of posting things online The standard things you'd expect people to say to people they view as traitors to their country have been said to me thus. I've had some friends who ended the relationship, some family that I'm not allowed to talk to about it, but I consider myself lucky. So, of course, you did go to prison for this. You served around 60 days in custody, including an initial 30-day sentence in a military prison.

And can you tell me about what your time in those facilities was like? Like what kind of conditions are you living in? I specifically sat in the camps division in prison 10, which is the only prison for soldiers right now. The camp division is open when all other divisions for men are overpopulated. So it's kind of improvised. It's a bunch of big tents made out. out of like, I don't know, a thin, cheap metal. We're 20 people to a room.

And generally, the 10th division, the camp division is worse conditions than the other division, also because we're so many people in a room, also because we have, we don't have radio, also because our bathrooms are all shared and there are, there's much less space and time for each person, like, as opposed to having one in yourself. out. So we have we have worse circumstances but because of that we're allowed

a bit more a bit more free time meaning we we socialize more in the tense and stuff and in between that. So for me the whole time it was talking to people and I was open about why I'm in prison which is

a decision each conscientious objector needs to make like personally and that sometimes people like chins in the middle. I was a bit ousted by the army. Sorry, can I stop you for a second? What do you mean that you were ousted by the army? I suspect that the guards know why you're inside general.

So why you're inside general? So I suspect that they leaked that information to the rest of the prisoners, hoping that it would cause a negative reaction. And so talk to me a bit more about, I mean, I'm assuming that you're talking to soldiers who might have been there for very different reasons from you. Why were they there and what kind of conversations did you have with them about why you were there? The soldiers that are there are exclusively different for different reasons than me.

The Army views refusal and conscientious objection as a crime a soldier makes, even though we view it as a crime a person makes in order not to become a soldier, refusing to become a soldier. That's why we're also sent to military prison. The rest of the people there are soldiers. Most of them are like a year in the service, some more, some less. Prison is a punishment. It's not really rehabilitative. So generally also the people who end up in prison are kind of like the unlucky people with no connections or low luck.

With me, it was people who, I don't know, didn't come to base, like missed the, didn't come to base for a week. or people who stopped taking orders, one person who pulled a prank on their commander, somebody who breached, who slightly breached, like, information security. So many, many, many different reasons. Somebody played with a weapon, all kinds of stuff. We put the care in taking care of business, your business to be exact.

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So I had a few rules in order to not get lynched in prison. One of them was to only have political conversations one-on-one. The reason I did this is that it's hard, it's very easy in a group discussion to lose control of the narrative. and in a one one conversation I have more of that control and more so I also I keep more of my empathy and I stray away from being against group things

and you know when you're talking to a person one on one and empathizing with each other and and like they hear my opinions they hear that for a lot of them these are opinions that are unheard of that the Palestinians are just as equal to us and deserve just the same

human rights as us and that they deserve their own nation and country, which is crazy for them, that the war is horrible and criminal and stupid and dangerous, and that this is a repeating thing that violence is, this violence is just a loop. First time they hear about the occupation. For them, you know, the left wing is demonized and mythologized into something they never really meet. I remember having a conversation with someone there. And he asked me, you know, which is the least radical of my beliefs, if I like, if I'd want to vote for Benjamin Netanyahu.

And I told him absolutely not. And then I asked him if he would like. And he said, of course, you can only vote for Benjamin Nathemiao. And then I asked him, why can you only vote for Benjamin Nathiao? So it's trying to get them to understand that there's another way and that there's another option and that people on the other side aren't insane and aren't terrorists and deserve to live in peace and with dignity. Did you hear any of them ever kind of reflect on what they had seen or been a part of, you know, like people who were doing tours in Gaza? In front of me, I heard their experiences.

they, I don't think they can allow themselves to be critical of it. Like, they, when they get out of prison, are going back. The part that they were very critical in front of me is how they're being treated and how they're being sent for tours after tours after tours for no reason, how they're trying to extend their service, the IDF is trying to extend their mandatory service, and that it's futile, that it's repetitive. And, you know, I also use that as a jumping off point.

Just explaining that it's all fuel style and repetitive because violence only brings violence. I'm curious to get your take on how you think your treatment in prison compares to, you know, what Palestinians reportedly face in Israeli detention. So last year we interviewed the executive director of the Israeli-Palestinian human rights organization, Betzalem. And they had just put out a report describing the facilities. where thousands of Palestinians were being detained as a vast network of torture camps. Witnesses in this report described intense physical and psychological abuse, sexual assaults, being deprived of food, water, essential medications.

And I know you can only speak to your own experiences, but how does that compare to the kind of conditions that you experienced and witnessed in prison? Nothing like it. Uh, prison for me wasn't fun, but saying I was tortured is, is, is, is not even close and I can't even imagine what they're going through. I, uh, in the, in the camp division, we're sometimes used as, uh, as labor, uh, for other IDF works. I wasn't allowed to go on this labor. Also, I assume because I'm, because I'm a security breach and also because, uh, I'm not a soldier. Um, but I had, uh, There were prisoners in there with me who went to some of the facilities where those Palestinian prisoners are being kept.

They claim the prisoners there are only terrorists. To me, that doesn't sound true at all, especially with the idea of definition of a terrorist. But only from what they bragged about after coming back to work there for a few days, I've heard horrible things of them throwing rocks at prisoners walking naked and every morning spitting in their food and blowing their nose and their wet wife in their napkins

and it sounds like hell on her and this is only what they brag about. now to today and how you, as someone who has taken the kind of political stance that you have, is looking at the events that are unfolding in Gaza right now. So over the past couple weeks, we've been seeing a flood of images of emaciated skeletal children there, as Israel is only letting in a trickle of aid. According to Gaza's health ministry, 180 people, including 93 children, have died from starvation. The UN also says that close to 14. 100 people have been killed while seeking food since May 27th, a majority of them at aid sites

controlled by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by the U.S. and Israel. The U.N. says that most of the killings were committed by the Israeli military. And as you're watching all of this unfold, what are you thinking about? I'm trying to remain hopeful and see where I can help most. the situation is unimaginable. I'm also looking at those pictures all day and those names. I think it's important to channel all that emotion into fighting back. Here, you know, particularly in this period over the past couple of weeks, here in North America, as these images have been coming out,

we've seen a distinctive rhetorical shift. So politicians and media figures who have never really spoken out about Gaza are suddenly doing so now, whether these political figures are actually taking action on the issue as another matter. But we've also seen leaders in France, Canada, the UK, say that they plan to recognize a Palestinian state, albeit with some conditions. But do you have a sense of how Israeli society is reacting to what feels like, again, sort of at least a rhetorical, shift from Western allies. I feel the turning of something on the ground that really now Israeli culture is facing something that it can't unsee and it can't deny. It's still doing its best, but it's really just too powerful.

And it's horrible that we had to get to the situation for this to start. You know, it could have started on the 8th of October. It could have started 20 years ago. I hope the pressure internationally just becomes tougher. I think that's a price that is very productive for Israel to pay in order to change its ways. So I really urge that international pressure wherever it can come from because it works. It really works. You know, you've said before that you want to see an end to the cycle of violence in the region and for all parties to reach a political solution.

I know this is obviously a big question, but it's one that you've been thinking about for a long time. What do you think that a political solution could look like? Yeah. I think, you know, my dream is for a one-state solution for all its citizens, where Israelis and Palestinians can live equally and intertwined and together. But I think that's not something we can allow to happen without first going through. a two-state solution and letting

the Palestinians determine for themselves what they want and first letting them to live in peace and with dignity and I think realistically that's the only solution we have. Every political change is impossible until it happens and I think it's our work now

to lay the groundwork and get to it and make sure it happens sooner sooner rather than later. So I'm hopeful because I'm hopeful and I'm hopeful because it's productive. And either way, it's better to work towards this solution even if it won't happen in my lifetime. But I'm optimistic. All right.

Sol, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Absolutely. All right, that is all for today. I'm Allie Jains. Thanks so much for listening to Frontburner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow.