{"id":397297,"date":"2019-02-26T13:03:03","date_gmt":"2019-02-26T12:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-teenager-was-locked-up-for-refusing-to-serve-in-israels-military\/"},"modified":"2019-02-26T13:03:03","modified_gmt":"2019-02-26T12:03:03","slug":"this-teenager-was-locked-up-for-refusing-to-serve-in-israels-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-teenager-was-locked-up-for-refusing-to-serve-in-israels-military\/","title":{"rendered":"This Teenager Was Locked Up for Refusing to Serve in Israel’s Military"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hilel Garmi\u2019s phone is going straight to voicemail and all I\u2019m hoping is that he\u2019s not back in prison. I\u2019ll soon learn that he is.<\/p>\n

Prison 6 is a military prison. It\u2019s situated in the Israeli coastal town of Atlit, a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea and less than an hour\u2019s drive from Hilel\u2019s home. It was constructed in 1957 following the Sinai War between Israel and Egypt to house disciplinary cases from the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF.<\/p>\n

Hilel has already been locked up six times. \u201cI can smell the sea from my cell, especially at night when everything is quiet,\u201d he tells me in one of our phone conversations. I\u2019m 6,000 miles away in Chicago, but Hilel and I have regularly been discussing his ordeal as an Israeli war resister, so it makes me nervous that, this time around, I can\u2019t reach him at all.<\/p>\n

A recent high-school graduate with dark hair and a big smile, he\u2019s only 19 and still lives with his parents in Yodfat, an Israeli town of less than 900 people in the northern part of the country. It\u2019s 155 miles to Damascus (if such a trip were possible, which, of course, it isn\u2019t), a two-hour drive down the coast to Tel Aviv, and a four-hour drive to besieged Gaza.<\/p>\n

Yodfat itself could be a set for a Biblical movie, with its dry rolling hills, ancient ruins, and pastoral landscape. The town exports flower bulbs, as well as organic goat cheese, and notably supports the Misgav Waldorf School that Hilel\u2019s mother helped found. Hilel is proud of his mom. After all, people commute from all over Israel to attend the school.<\/p>\n

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He is a rarity in his own land, one of only a handful of refuseniks living in Israel. Each year roughly 30,000 18 year olds are drafted into the IDF, although 35%<\/a> of such draftees manage to avoid military service for religious reasons. A far tinier percentage publicly refuses to fight for moral and political reasons to protest their country\u2019s occupation of Palestinian…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hilel Garmi\u2019s phone is going straight to voicemail and all I\u2019m hoping is that he\u2019s not back in prison. I\u2019ll soon learn that he is. Prison 6 is a military prison. It\u2019s situated in the Israeli coastal town of Atlit, a short walk from the Mediterranean Sea and less than an hour\u2019s drive from Hilel\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-397297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}