"I, Yonatan Ben Artzi, refuse to be drafted into the army on grounds of pacifism. My deep belief in nonviolence began when I was a little boy and developed over the years into a comprehensive political and philosophical conception. Because of my belief, my country is about to send me to prison, contrary to all international law and a basic law of morality. I will go to prison with head held high, as I know that this is the little I can do to improve the country."

This was the statement read by Ben Artzi at his brief military trial in the National Induction Center at Tel Hashomer before he was sentenced to 28 days in a military prison for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.

Last Thursday, Yonatan's parents, Prof. Matanya Ben Artzi (the older brother of Sara Netanyahu, wife of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu) and his wife, Ofra, accompanied their son from their home in Jerusalem's Beit Hakerem neighborhood to Beit Hahayal (Soldier's House), where the soldiers who are entering the army bid farewell to friends and family and board the bus for the Induction Center. It's a place where parents and children, brothers and sisters and friends embrace and cry together, touch one another and make the traditional promises. Yonatan said goodbye to his parents and his older brother Ahikam, and boarded the bus without any joy or expectation of embarking on a new path. Not exactly with head held high, and without succeeding, in the meantime, in making any discernible improvement in the country. He knew for certain that later that day he would be sent to Military Prison 4.

The Ben Artzis are not an unknown family. In addition to Sara, another brother, Haggai, who lives on the settlement of Beit El in the West Bank and is a newly religious Jew with right-wing views, has also been in the news occasionally. The family of Matanya, a professor of mathematics at Hebrew University who identifies openly with the left, has until recently maintained a moderate to low media profile. He made the news largely because Yoni decided not to serve in the army.

Ben Artzi has maintained his position for the past two years, declining to heed the advise of friends who explained to him how simple it is to get an appointment with the "Kaban" - the mental health officer - and get a discharge on grounds of unfitness. "For Yoni it is a matter of principle," his father says. "He refused even to think about the Kaban option. He said that all the `poisoned' guys [as gung-ho army types are dubbed] who enter the Sayeret are the ones who need the mental health officer to find out what motivates them to go knowingly and clearly to kill other people."

In the army, too, Ben Artzi's refusal to serve is a matter of principle, and the IDF is determined to recruit him at any price.

Sara and Matanya have another brother, Amatzia, a former fighter pilot and high-tech man who divides his time between his home in the ultra-upscale Savyon community north of Tel Aviv and Palo Alto, California. So as not to feel left out in the family of right-left extremists, he declares himself to be politically a member of the extreme center, and will say no more on the subject.

Matanya Ben Artzi, 54, was born on Kibbutz Mahanayim, in Upper Galilee. His mother, Hava, seventh generation in the country, was a descendant of the disciples of the Vilna Gaon who settled in Palestine in 1770. His father, Shmuel Hawn (a distant relative of the actress Goldie Hawn), was born in Poland and came to Palestine as a youngster, changing his name to Ben Artzi ("son of my land") and becoming an educator. From Mahanayim the family moved to Kfar Hittim and then to Tivon, near Haifa. "My parents were traditional Ben-Gurionists," Matanya Ben Artzi says. "They were Mapai [the longtime ruling party that was Labor's precursor] activists in the deep sense of the word, which included the shaping of Hebrew culture via the Bible. You could say we grew up in a biblical-secular home."

A brilliant student who was bored in school, Matanya skipped various grades with the result that he finished high school at the age of 15, including the matriculation examinations. He entered Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of 16 to study mathematics and physics.

He completed his studies in 1967, just after the war, and entered the army. "I started out in a pilots' course but I toppled myself, finally, because I had already completed a first degree and I was thinking about an academic career," he recalls. "A whole group of us went from the pilots' course to the reconnaissance unit of the Golani Brigade. Then, when the country started to become an empire, I was transferred to Raphael [Armament Development Authority], which also grew and developed tremendously."

Ben Artzi remained in Raphael, as a member of the career army, for 12 years, and dealt with applied mathematics and physics. He completed a second degree at the Haifa Technion during his service and a doctoral degree at Hebrew University. He did postdoctoral work at Northwestern University in Chicago, specializing in the mathematics of physics. His wife, Ofra, did her master's degree in the study of religions at Northwestern.

"Every so often, someone comes along and tries to refute Einstein's theory," Ben Artzi says, referring to the furor generated by a new theory propounded by an Australian scientist concerning the speed of light. "Physics is not a religion, and no scientist will say that what Einstein discovered is the last word. In the meantime, though, it is still there, hard and fast, written in stone. Maybe in another 400 years there will be another breakthrough of theories in physics, which will overturn Einstein. Today, to a certain degree, there is not much glory in being a physicist."

Ben Artzi has three children, two of whom followed the normative route and served in the IDF: Ruthie, 31, who was in the Air Force, is completing a doctorate in political science at Columbia University; and Ahikam, 30, who was in the Navy, is in the final stages of his doctoral studies in mathematics at New York University. Yoni, who is 19 and a half, completed his second year in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at Hebrew University.

"Yoni was born on Hanukkah in 1982," his father notes, "and that is the source of his name" - referring to one of the "glorious brothers" who led the revolt against the Greeks. "After we chose the name, we discovered that there are endless Yonis and that in many cases the name is related to the myth of Yoni Netanyahu [Benjamin's brother, the commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal reconaissance unit, who was killed at Entebbe in 1976]. But even then we were very far from that myth."

In Ben Artzi's terms, "far from the myth" was a clear understanding, long before others, about where the euphoria of the occupation was leading. Ben Artzi recalls that two weeks after the Six-Day War, a huge public assembly was held outside the Beit Ha'am (now the Gerard Behar Center) in downtown Jerusalem: "They set up a huge stage across the whole street, and sitting on it were [the writers] Haim Hazaz, Moshe Shamir, Natan Alterman - all the ones I liked to read - and many others, such as Yitzhak Tabenkin from the Ahdut Ha'avoda movement; and they founded the Greater Israel Movement. I saw the enthusiasm on the platform and I said to myself that my view was exactly the opposite, and I haven't changed my opinion by one millimeter since. Afterward, while I was working at Raphael and doing my doctorate in Jerusalem, I would come to meetings with the `Blue Red' group, where some of the members were [left-wing activists] Meir Pa'il, Lova Eliav and Ran Cohen."

Early refusenik

In 1980, Matanya Ben Artzi was tried for refusing to serve in the territories. Unlike his son, though, he did not go to prison. Refusal was then very unusual, he says, and the army, based on its own interests, preferred to come to terms with the "rebels" quietly and not give publicity to ideological deviations of this kind. "I remember that I was doing reserve duty at the end of the 1970s and there were demonstrations in the Casbah of Nablus. I was in the reserve brigade of the Paratroops; we were at Training Base 3, on the main road between Nablus and Ramallah. After a few reserve stints, when I saw the humiliations and the oppression and the curfew, I said that I refused to serve in the territories. The army did not get stubborn with me. They understood very quickly who they were messing with and let me serve in the Kirya" - the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv.

It was around the same time that Ben Artzi stopped visiting his brother Haggai in Beit El. "I went there once by bus, this was in the period of the Jewish underground group [in the early 1980s], and on the way from Jerusalem they threw stones and one of the windows of the bus shattered. There was a little hysteria on the bus but nothing serious happened. I came to Haggai and asked him why they didn't travel in armored buses. He replied, `Out of principle, we travel the same way people do in Tel Aviv, but we react differently.' And before my eyes a group of them organized and they went in the open to the neighboring villages to take revenge. The next day I read in the paper that settlers smashed solar heaters, shot up cars belonging to Palestinians and in general perpetrated a pogrom, and the police were investigating. I told Haggai that I wouldn't come to the settlement again because I didn't want to be an accomplice to all that. I haven't gone there since."

In the 1980s, the whole family went to Berkeley, California, where Ben Artzi taught at the university and did research. In the summer of 1989, after a brief attempt to settle in Haifa, they moved to Jerusalem permanently. Ofra taught at Hebrew University's Buber Center for adult education - Hebrew for Palestinians, Arabic for Israelis - and Yonatan was exposed to the politics of the home and of Jerusalem during the period of the first intifada.

"The 1980s were the worst period in Israeli history, because of the national unity governments," Ben Artzi says. "We read about it at Berkeley, and it drove me crazy that in 1984, after the collapse of the stock market and the Lebanon War, the Likud wasn't toppled. And [Shimon] Peres and [Yitzhak] Rabin, instead of telling [the prime minister, Yitzhak] Shamir that [the Likud] had cooked up the Lebanon War and brought about the fall of the bank shares, so they could now go and solve the problems by themselves - instead of that, they entered the government in order to save it, just as Peres is now doing with [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon.

"When Yoni was in third grade, he learned about Jerusalem the capital of Israel and brought home a pamphlet from his school in Beit Hakerem - an open, liberal school - that absolutely appalled me. The pamphlet told about the 200 neighborhoods in Jerusalem outside the walled city, about Sheikh Jerrah and about Silwan, which was called `Kfar Hashiloah,' with not a word about the fact that Silwan was inhabited by Palestinians. The pamphlet said that the residents of Silwan were the first Jewish immigrants from Yemen, who came to the country in the second half of the 19th century. There wasn't a word about East Jerusalem or its residents."

Ben Artzi immediately explained to Yoni that the pamphlet was full of mistakes and did not hide his opinion about the Education Ministry from his son. More concretely, his mother occasionally took him to joint activity of Israelis and Palestinians at the Buber Center. Yoni attended the Hebrew University High School, where he developed an independent political consciousness. "I had endless fights with his teachers," his father recalls. "He grew up between his mother's students and his father's views, but beyond all that he was responsible for his decisions. Everything was open at home. On the one hand, there was an uncle who was an extremist settler; on the other hand, the husband of his aunt was a right-wing prime minister, and all of them would sit here in those years - Haggai, Bibi [Benjamim Netanyahu] and Sara - and we would argue. That is part of the Israeli story, the argument that divides families."

A question of morality

In 1996, following the wave of terrorist attacks on buses, Yoni's high school was scheduled to go on a trip to Galilee. "He told his teacher that he would not enter the territories and asked for the route to be changed so as not to pass through the West Bank on the way from Jerusalem to Galilee. The teacher replied, `Don't worry, it's not dangerous to go through the West Bank now, they are all under curfew.'

"Yoni said he did not want to be in a bus filled with children screaming with glee while other children watched through closed windows, and that it was a question of morality, not danger. But the teacher didn't understand what he wanted. Everyone went on the trip and Yoni stayed home."

Yoni was a good student in high school, one of those who won't allow teachers to lecture without explaining and grounding what they say, who ask tough questions and give teachers a hard time. Socially, despite his unconventional views, he was popular and had plenty of friends. In 1999, a large demonstration took place in which Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) groups squared off against secular people outside the Supreme Court building. "That was the first time in history that they closed Hebrew University and the high school and sent everyone to demonstrate in favor of secularism," Ben Artzi says. "Yoni went up to his teacher and the principal and asked them which of the two demonstrations he was supposed to join, the one by the Haredim or the one by the secular groups. The teacher was furious at him and told him to get out, she didn't want to see him. He said, `Maybe I have something good to say about the Haredim?'"

Yonatan Ben Artzi received his first preliminary call-up order three years ago. He went to the local Recruitment Center and said he was unwilling to serve in the army on grounds of conscience. "That was not a surprise," his father says. "He told them he was willing to do alternative service but not within the army framework."

How did you and Ofra react?

"We have long since stopped playing the game in which those who don't go to the army are less patriotic than the others. I just wanted to be sure that I hadn't influenced him and hadn't sent him that message indirectly. On the other hand, doesn't a religious child become that way because his parents are religious? No one asks him if he chose to be religious. Naturally, the home had an influence. If you ask why Benny Begin is right-wing or why Uzi Landau came out the way he did, then it's legitimate to ask Yoni why he is like that. His older brother and sister told him not to fight the army but to work out a compromise. We also told him that he was getting into a hard fight against the strongest organization in the country. In fact, it's the only organization - an army that has a state."

In May 2000, Yoni was invited to appear before the army's "Conscience Commission" (see box), which tries to decide whether people who say they are conscientious objectors are true pacifists or impostors. One of the questions he was asked was whether, if he was lying injured on the road and an army ambulance came by, he would get into it. He replied that he would and was sent home to think for a year. In the meantime he entered university, and in June 2001 was again summoned to the commission, which listened to what he had to say patiently and rejected his pacifist arguments.

Ben Artzi petitioned the High Court of Justice, claiming he had not been allowed to bring witnesses who would testify to his pacifism. He persuaded the High Court, which tossed the hot potato back to the army, ruling in a precedent-setting judgment that henceforth those appearing before the Conscience Commission could bring a lawyer and witnesses as well as writing materials, and that the commission must keep minutes of the sessions. A third commission in the Ben Artzi case convened in November 2001.

"It was all a big game," Matanya Ben Artzi says. "We testified, they talked to his lawyer - he was from the law office of Uri Kedar in Jerusalem - they received written material, testimonies from people who knew Yoni, and his opinions. He had a letter from Prof. Chaim Gans, from the Center for Human Rights in the Faculty of Law of Tel Aviv University, and from [the historian] Prof. Michael Har-Segor, who both explained the meaning of conscientious objection. But the officers on the commission tried to argue with and prove that it is impossible to be a pacifist in Israel. In the end they wrote minutes, as the High Court demanded, and grounded their rejection of Yoni's request by claiming he was not enough of a pacifist."

Perfect pacifist

Ofra Ben Artzi: "In the first two commissions the army was not convinced that he was a perfect pacifist, so for the third commission he brought witnesses, letters, stories, friends and parents who told about his history and his behavior in high school. But the reaction of the commission was that this was not pacifism, it was violent and anarchistic behavior. They said he was a kid who couldn't get along with any establishment or be part of a framework, that he wasn't a pacifist because he was too strong and too vocal for a pacifist, because in their conception of the model of the pacifist, he is supposed to sit quietly and roll his eyes upward and accept whatever is decided; and if he is a troublemaker or an anarchist who is not capable of accepting a framework, he has to sit in jail in order to be educated."

At the end of May this year, Ben Artzi again petitioned the High Court, maintaining that the commission's decision was extremely unreasonable. The suit included copies of all the human rights conventions to which Israel is a signatory and in which freedom of conscience is above all other values. The justices of the High Court read the petition and decided not to intervene in the army's decision.

"That hurt us the most," Matanya Ben Artzi says. "The conventions to which Israel is a signatory stipulate that states have to provide conscientious objectors with an alternative way to serve. In practice, the court said they would do nothing and effectively sentenced him to prison."

Yoni Ben Artzi has been in jail for a week. He speaks to his parents by phone. "Today he told us that he cleaned the toilets," his mother said. "Then they promoted him and sent him to help the quartermaster. He asked us to bring him Coca-Cola on our next visit. The only time you are allowed to drink Coca-Cola in the prison is during visits."

Do you regret the upbringing you gave him?

Ofra Ben Artzi: "We support him very much and we think he did the right thing at the right time. It is not an act of anarchism. Yoni is now embodying the only thing that can be done, and the right thing: civil revolt."

And what if everyone follows his example?

Matanya Ben Artzi: "On the day that we have a thousand people like Yoni, salvation will come, because the leaders of the army will come to the government and say that they are unable to carry out these missions and they will ask to be exempt from dealing with refuseniks and settlers. Maybe they'll give them weapons the way [Slobodan] Milosevic did with the Serbs in Kosovo - gave them weapons and told them, `Solve your problems by yourselves, we can't fight for you' - and even that didn't help him. In another 10 years, when people make judgments about what happened here, and decide who the heroes were and who will be remembered, Yoni will be one of them.

"I don't want to inflate his ego, but that is what they will say about his civic courage. We sanctify civil revolt when it occurs somewhere else: Andrei Sakharov, or the leader of the opposition in Burma, or Natan Sharansky in a Russian prison, but when it happens here and it's not right-wing, it is seen as indecent. On the right, it's not important if they smash the roofs of Palestinian houses or block roads or seize buildings - it is accepted complacently. They call it legitimate civil revolt. I am also against the left-wing use of the untenable argument that they have to do reserve duty in order to safeguard things: because it's less bad when we [of the left] are at the checkpoints, says [Meretz MK] Mussi Raz. I say that it leads to collaboration with evil that knows no boundaries. And if it should really turn out that all the 18-year-olds refuse to be drafted, then let the 58-year-olds sit and ask themselves what happened that the young generation that we raised doesn't want to defend the state. Or maybe there is nothing to defend?"

Was the fact that the ultra-Orthodox sector is not drafted forcibly a consideration in the decision to refuse to serve?

"That is not the main point. The point is that here, conscience is turned into religion and no one has the right to choose, whereas in all the Western countries it is the opposite. There, the citizens have freedom of conscience and that is the source of the different religions. Here, the only form of conscience that is recognized is religious and military conscience, and that is what infuriates Yoni - that there is no universal humanistic culture of values here in the broad and Western sense of the idea."

On the day Yoni began to serve his prison term, more than a hundred French human rights advocates, members of the French Academy and intellectuals, sent e-mail messages to the defense minister asking him to intervene and bring about Yoni's release and demanding that Israel honor the international human rights conventions it has signed.

Ben Artzi has no doubts about the views of his brother Haggai and his brother-in-law, Benjamin Netanyahu, about Yoni's refusal to serve. "My brother of course doesn't understand it," he says. "He attended the Netiv Meir high-school yeshiva, where he became attached to the whole national-religious elite, which is the most dangerous combination of Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] with the alter ego of [National Religious Party leader and cabinet minister] Effi Eitam, a kibbutznik who became religious and has reached the highest levels of madness in the connection between army and religion. My brother of course served in the army, he was a major in the Artillery Corps. Bibi is a different story. He sees it from a secular point of view.

"A few months ago we had a big celebration on the occasion of my mother's 80th birthday - Sara [Netanyahu] organized a meal at the King David Hotel. The whole family was there and we talked about the subject. Bibi, who has an American orientation, said that he is familiar with the phenomenon from the period of the Vietnam War in America. Civil revolt is all right, he said, and it is also all right that the army puts the refuseniks in jail. I think that despite everything, though he might not say so, he admires Yoni. In the past we argued more about politics, these days we argue more about economic ideas.

"Politics will soon be finished anyway. In another five or six years there will be an American protectorate here and all the territories will be given back to the Palestinians. Who remembers Sinai today? From the family viewpoint, because of my sister, I am glad that this intifada is not being managed by Bibi but by Sharon. I would feel very bad personally if my brother-in-law were in charge of the army and allowing it to perpetrate serious war crimes."

Ben Artzi has no qualms about the moral question of whether taking specific cases of Israeli army actions to the International Criminal Court at The Hague is a case of "informing" on the IDF. He signed a petition that was sent to the International Court and he regularly updates Amnesty International and other human rights groups about the judicial procedures involving his son and about Yoni's imprisonment.

Conscience and the IDF

In 2000, the IDF, prodded by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, transmitted to the international organization of conscientious objectors data on the scale of the phenomenon in Israel. According to these figures, 115 requests for exemption from service on pacifist grounds were submitted to the IDF between 1998 and 2000; 53 of the requests were made by pre-draft youngsters. Only 11 of the requests, or 9.5 percent, were granted: three pre-induction young men, two soldiers in compulsory service and six reservists.

The body that deals with requests for exemption from army service was established in 1995 and is called the Commission for Exemption from Defense Service on Grounds of Conscience - the Conscience Commission, for short. Its modes of operation and the criteria by which it operates are generally secret, and the grounds for its decisions are not made known to the public. The public occasionally learns about its discussions in specific cases that reach the High Court of Justice, as in the case of Yonatan Ben Artzi. A survey conducted by the international organization of conscientious objectors in 24 countries that signed international conventions on human rights, including Israel, found that only two countries, Israel and Ecuador, deal with requests by conscientious objectors by means of military bodies. The other countries refer such questions to civilian committees. Unlike the other countries, there is no right of appeal against the decisions of the IDF's Conscience Committee.