A wave of grassroots conscientious objection among young Israelis has sparked a disciplinary clash after an 11th-grade student at Ramat Gan’s Ohel Shem High School, a campus just outside Tel Aviv, was summoned for official punishment over distributing leaflets that urge peers to reject mandatory military service over Israel’s documented atrocities in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. Leading Israeli daily Haaretz first reported the incident, which has pulled back the curtain on deep political tensions around military conscription and free speech within Israeli educational institutions.
The student was not immediately suspended, but school officials informed her that disciplinary action, including a suspension starting in the upcoming academic year, remains on the table. The teen was one of three young organizers who circulated the leaflets, titled “We Hereby Refuse,” just outside the Ohel Shem High School campus, per the Haaretz report.
The document directly calls on teens approaching conscription age to sign a pledge committing to refuse enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces, citing widespread war crimes committed by the military in occupied Palestinian territories that have continued since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023. “We, teenagers slated for conscription in the Israeli Army, hereby refuse to take part in its crimes and to serve the dictatorial government’s interests,” the leaflet reads in part.
To date, organizers confirm that roughly 130 students have added their signatures to the refusal pledge. The campaign is backed by Mesarvot, an Israeli grassroots organization that provides support to young people who choose to refuse mandatory military service on conscientious and political grounds. The group has long criticized Israel’s education system for normalizing militarism, arguing that schools intentionally embed a pro-military worldview into daily student life from an early age.
The refusal letter expands on this critique, noting: “The schools prepare us for the army by embedding militaristic discourse. The truth is that the army is not a preordained fate – no one is born a soldier.” It adds that even with a temporary ceasefire in place in Gaza, “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes continue,” highlighting that Israeli military forces and civilian settlers in the occupied West Bank are actively advancing a state-backed policy of ethnic cleansing. “We refuse to take part in moral wrongdoings,” the statement continues, adding that signatories refuse to “collaborate with a fascist government” and “continue the cycle of bloodshed.”
During the disciplinary meeting, Ohel Shem principal Israel Vilozny told the student that distributing activism materials focused on education or climate change would have been treated as a far less severe offense, according to the student’s account. The teen’s parents have hit back against the school’s action, accusing administrators of selective enforcement of campus rules and targeting their daughter for political persecution.
Vilozny has defended his handling of the case, arguing that the student broke campus policies by distributing unauthorized political materials on school grounds. The Ramat Gan municipality, which has oversight over the public high school, has issued a full statement backing the principal’s decision, framing mandatory military service as “a sacred value” at the core of Israeli civic life. While the municipality acknowledged that it supports open political dialogue on campus, it maintains that all political materials require advance approval from school leadership before they can be distributed.
In a controversial comparison, the municipality drew a parallel between the anti-conscription leaflets and the spread of racist ideology by followers of the extremist Kahanist movement, a far-right Jewish nationalist faction classified as a terrorist organization by multiple governments. “Tomorrow another student could show up with two Kahanists to spread racist poison,” the municipality’s statement warned. Officials also pushed back against messaging aligned with the International Court of Justice’s recent rulings on Israeli actions in Gaza, warning that the campus would not tolerate “propaganda in support of” those ICJ findings.
Mandatory military service remains one of the most central and widely accepted institutions in mainstream Israeli society, especially in urban centers like Ramat Gan, despite growing reporting of rising influence for extremist settler and ultranationalist factions within the Israeli military. Official Israeli military data published in February 2024 underscores this broad acceptance: 84 percent of eligible men from Ramat Gan enlist in the armed forces, with 38 percent serving in frontline combat roles. At Ohel Shem High School specifically, enlistment rates are even higher, with 93 percent of eligible male students joining the military and nearly half serving in combat units, the data shows.
The disciplinary incident comes as Gaza continues to grapple with widespread destruction from Israel’s military campaign, and Israeli media has documented a sharp, alarming rise in anti-Palestinian sentiment among young Israelis across the country’s educational system. An earlier Haaretz report published in the same month found that more than one-third of students in Israeli secular schools believe Palestinian citizens of Israel do not deserve equal rights or membership in Israeli society.