This Israeli went to military prison for saying no to genocide

When he was a child, Itamar Greenberg dreamed of joining the Israeli military. Raised in the ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak he thought the IDF would be his intro to mainstream Israeli society. He doesn’t remember quite what changed; there was no seminal event that altered his consciousness. Just the slow realization that he was being lied to.

“At first, I didn’t see the reality,” he says. “I just knew that something is wrong.” He joined a group that places Israeli’s in Palestinian areas to document and protect Palestinians against settler violence.

He’d been taught that the Palestinians hate Israeli’s because they’re Jewish. Standing alongside other peace-minded Israelis and interacting with Palestinians, as they desperately tried to protect their land from settler encroachment abetted by the IDF showed him the reality. “It’s not anti-semitism, it’s the right to self-determination and equality.”