The Waging Peace Podcast

Israeli Soldier Refuses to Wage War: Why Sofia Orr Chose Prison

• Diana K. Oestreich • Season 2 • Episode 17

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Sofia Orr, a 19-year-old Israeli conscientious objector, shares her journey of refusing mandatory military service and spending 85 days in prison for her stance. Listen to hear how:

  • Sofia began questioning military service at age 13, viewing it as a political choice rather than obligation
  • She describes Israel as "more an army with a country than a country with an army" with military indoctrination beginning in childhood
  • Sofia's prison experience revealed how military systems dehumanize everyone involved, including guards
  • She rejects the notion that violence can solve the conflict: "There is no military solution to this"


You can find Sofia on Instagram @sofiorr7716 

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Diana Oestreich:

I am so excited to welcome one of my heroes, Sophia Orr, to the Waging Peace podcast and as we speak, Sophia, you are in Israel right now.

Sofia Orr:

Yes, I am.

Diana Oestreich:

And you just ate dinner and you said you had a lovely pasta. And, because you're eight hours ahead, I just ate lunch and I had mediocre soup that I've been eating for three days. Sophia and I met because we were on a conscientious objector call together and we also were honoring October 7th, the one year anniversary of that, together with other people who have chosen to refuse to accept violence. So she is one of my huge heroes and I'm so excited for everybody to get to meet you, sophia, welcome, welcome.

Sofia Orr:

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. So I am 19 years old, 19 and a half. I was born in June and I had a very, I think, special and unique upbringings in terms of Israelis. My family is non-Zionist and very left-wing and I was really brought up on values of empathy and equality and being humane and solving problems with dialogue, and I think that I went with those values everywhere in my life and I never really thought I would enlist, because my feelings were always that I didn't have that feeling of nationalistic duty that I think most Israelis have.

Diana Oestreich:

Could you let people know who aren't Israeli, what that whole expectation is and the enlistment process for those who grow up in Israel?

Sofia Orr:

Enlistment is mandatory in Israel for the vast majority of people, everyone except the Palestinian, citizens of Israel, citizens of Israel and it is very ingrained in the society that it's not just mandatory in the law, but it's also the socially accepted thing to do. You are brought up on this from a very, very, very young age, basically from when you're born. It's a very militaristic society and we like to say that Israel is more an army with a country than a country with an army.

Diana Oestreich:

Wow, an army with a country instead of a country with an army with a country than a country with an army. Wow, an army with a country instead of a country with an army.

Sofia Orr:

Yes, because the army is at such a central point in the society, in the culture and in the way that the government operates and how it operates around it and what kind of power the army has in society. It's a very militar, military society where you have soldiers coming to schools to teach you about their role and what are you going to do in the army, and they take you from school for enlist things in the enlistment process and you go for five days of military camp where you learn how to shoot a gun, um, and when you're like 15, 16 years old.

Sofia Orr:

But I didn't grow up with that kind of nationalistic duty and like less so in that militaristic mindset, I think because of my family and maybe because of who I am. But I think that we are all very influenced by our families and the way that we are brought up and the same way that so many people are so influenced by other parts in Israeli society.

Diana Oestreich:

So if you didn't have go along with it, what would it?

Sofia Orr:

be so. It's also different depending on your role, but for most people it's three years for men, two years for women, from until when you're 18, until you're 20 or 21. Most people do it without even thinking. Most people do it because they see it as the right thing to do and they are serving their country.

Sofia Orr:

It's ingrained in you from a very young age that being a soldier is heroic. Soldiers are heroes and their sacrifices are heroic and you should be a soldier and you should want to be a soldier. And they're protecting you and they're sacrificing their lives for you and you need to continue that tradition. It's like that in the Memorial Days, in the Holocaust Memorial Days, in the Memorial Days for soldiers, in Independence Day everything has so much militaristic propaganda in it. But when I was about 13 or 14, when I didn't have that feeling of nationalistic duty, I didn't really think I would serve, because I didn't see it as the best way to help the people around me. I didn't see it as obvious. It always seemed to me like a choice, which is something very unusual in Israeli society. It isn't treated as a choice.

Diana Oestreich:

Seeing it as a choice is very unusual. I think that's really profound, because I grew up in a military family and I served, and that same idea that it isn't a choice, it's just what you should do idea that it isn't a choice, it's just what you should do I have two kids that I'm raising and I keep thinking that it's not a choice if people don't know they have options. When I look at people making choices that I disagree with, I also think did they know they had other options? Because then it's not really a choice.

Sofia Orr:

Yeah, If you look for it then you can see that it's a choice. But most people are not encouraged to look for it and don't want to look for it. Because when you start to treat it as a choice, then you start to look at the options and then you have to consider things in a more broad way. You can't ignore anymore the political implications.

Diana Oestreich:

You can't ignore the accountability. When you recognize that you have a choice, then you now have responsibility for your choice. Yes, definitely.

Sofia Orr:

I see enlisting as a political choice than refusing. When I was about 13, 14, I started to develop more of a political conscience and starting to question if I go in the military which is what is expected of me and I go and if I go in the military which is what is expected of me and I go and serve two years in the military, what does that time mean? Who am I serving? What am I serving? What cause am I serving? Starting to treat it as a choice and to treat it as a political choice, who are the people in power? Why do they want me to enlist? What do they want to achieve? And starting to ask those questions, I think, is the most important part. It also is what leads to getting answers, and the answers that I got were that if I go and enlist in the Israeli military, I am taking part in a military that is committing a global crime against human rights, that is doing an occupation and an apartheid regime, and that if I go and serve in the military, I throw my body into a cycle of bloodshed that we have to break. And then it became not just I don't want to enlist, I can't enlist, I cannot go to the army with a clear conscience because of the political and ideological behalf.

Sofia Orr:

I think that was the second part of it. Refusing is the whole process where I started from not wanting, then I can't, and then to the third part of saying, okay, it's not just that I can't go to the army, I have to stand against it. I have to take an active stand against it and to try and raise a voice against what the army is doing, what the Israeli government is doing, and use that expectation of me of enlisting and trying to gain a voice through it by refusing. And that is why I came to the decision to refuse and to refuse publicly. I refused when I was 18 and I spent 85 days in military prison and tried to use that to make as big a change as I can as just one 18-year-old girl.

Diana Oestreich:

Can we just say that again, you were 18 when you refused, but even younger when you found your power. You found that you had a choice and then asked questions and then you found that you couldn't do it. You used going to prison as a way to make change and make power. I think that's incredible and from the first time I met you, I was like wow, because I was 23. I signed up when I was 17, 18. And I didn't really see what was happening and I didn't really see that I had a choice and I definitely didn't take responsibility for so. I was 23 when I was halfway to where you were getting that reality.

Diana Oestreich:

I think that's so critical for people to see, because so many people, if they even allow themselves to have a conscience about what their country is doing to other countries being in America that we have sent these bombs to Gaza, we have armed this genocide, we have fueled the Israeli army. I think a lot of people want to hide from that accountability and they definitely don't want to sacrifice to change it. So what was it? How did you get past that point of just knowing that it wasn't right, knowing you would refuse, knowing you would pay the price, but finding that way to say, I want to make the biggest change I can by using my voice through the process.

Sofia Orr:

When I think about it back, I don't think I had any other option for myself, for who I am. I don't think I had any other option for myself for who I am and for the person that I want to be. Refusing is a continuation of how I would like to live my life in every aspect of it, and coming to the decision to refuse was also saying, ok, this is what I can do. This is my small part in this thing. It was before October 7th. The occupation was and is still enough of a reason to refuse. It was my way of doing whatever small part I can to try and bring a Palestinian voice into Israeli society where it isn't being heard. To try and bring a voice for peace into the Israeli society where it isn't being said and it is actively being shut down. Now more than ever, it's difficult for me to imagine doing anything else.

Sofia Orr:

I think that deciding to do it publicly was a very big part of doing it at all. Because of the way that I asked myself questions, I know that not many people in the Israeli society ask themselves. I wanted to gain a voice to encourage other people to ask themselves those same questions, because I was surrounded by friends who I begged to ask themselves those questions why are you going to the army? Tell me why. And they couldn't tell me why. Trying to raise that voice of critical thinking and of empathy and of resisting dehumanization of palestinians and to try and treat enlisting as a political choice, to bring it to the political conversation and I think is extreme was very important for me. To try and get other people to ask themselves those questions, to treat it as a political choice For me, doing it publicly and trying also to reach internationally. If I'm in for a penny, in for a pound, if I am doing it, then I should do it all the way. If I am resisting, then I should resist as hard as I can.

Diana Oestreich:

Well you are, because not many people are raising their voice right now or willing to go to prison for that. It's changing things. When you and I sat on that call, you were there raising your voice for resistance in Israel and there's a Palestinian ex-soldiers and I'm an American ex-soldier truth that I think a lot of our countries and a lot of our religions are trying to shut down that conversation because it centers the best of us, our humanity that wants good for the other person.

Sofia Orr:

Yes, definitely. I have a privilege where I'm able to do it, mostly in a safe way, where I have a supportive family and where I have the privilege to see peace as an option, because on the other side of the fence I have Palestinian friends that it's difficult for them to see peace as an option sometimes. For me, it's also part of my responsibility to be that voice for peace and for ending the occupation, ending the war, the genocide, because I have the privilege to be able to see it and to be able to visualize that kind of peace, because I come from a place of privilege. If I can imagine it, then I should try and share it as much as I can.

Sofia Orr:

People, especially in Israeli society, they would call me naive for thinking that this is the kind of future that we can have, that we can have any kind of conversation with Palestinians. But I don't think it's naive at all. I think that when we look at the hard facts, at the political situations, at the history, the political history of this place, this is not just moral option. This is our only productive option. This is the only thing that will work. There is no military solution to this. There is no violent solution to this.

Diana Oestreich:

There is no violent solution to this, because if that was a solution, it would have already happened. My country and I can see your country refuses to accept the failure of their politics. What they've been doing for the last 75 years has not worked. The militarization of America has not created more safety or security in the world.

Sofia Orr:

And it never will.

Diana Oestreich:

My country has been doing it like 250 years. When are they going to stop lying that it's a failure and pivoting to a different?

Sofia Orr:

idea. I think it's naive to think that if we try again and again and use more force and more power and just better weapons and try to intimidate them more and use more violence, and if we just try one more time, thinking this time it will work, then we will be able to destroy Hamas. It will never work that way. This extreme violence only makes extreme violent mindset more prevalent in the societies.

Diana Oestreich:

Can you tell me about where there's interactions between Palestinians and Israelis? Many Israelis say they really don't grow up having much experience about the realities, about how Palestinians are living as second-class citizens in their own country.

Sofia Orr:

Israeli society is an extremely racist society and an extremely segregated society where Palestinians and Jewish Israelis very purposefully don't meet each other very often there are mixed cities where people do meet each other.

Sofia Orr:

I've met Palestinians growing up, but very, very few, and it's on purpose because that human interaction breaks that barrier of dehumanization that the government tries so hard to enforce. Because when you only think of that person, of Palestinians, as the enemy, when you dehumanize them and turn them into an enemy, into monsters in your mind, it's so much easier to commit horrible crimes against them, to kill them and to occupy them. When that barrier breaks and you see each other Israelis, see Palestinians as human beings equal to them, then it's much more difficult to do things such as enlist in the army and go and do war crimes in Gaza. It's a very, very racist society in the law, but also in society itself, where people are just very racist. That was one of the hardest things for me in prison is being surrounded by people who said extremely racist things on a daily basis and it's seen as totally normal.

Diana Oestreich:

Would you tell me about your time in prison?

Sofia Orr:

I spent 85 days in prison, from February until May 2024. Sometimes when I think about my life, I think that is the only thing I am sure that I will never regret Refusing and making that decision. I think I could have done it better, but I would never regret that I've done it and I think my time in prison was difficult. It's a military prison and the conditions are not great, but they're fine. It's much better than anything Palestinian prisoners suffer in the Israeli prisons. It's a military prison, so everything works in a militaristic way, but I think that it also really showed me from up close the way that the military operates.

Sofia Orr:

That's also the thing that I've tried the messages I've tried to deliver to other inmates sitting with me in prison is that the way that the army is treating us and is treating its soldiers that are mostly outcasts, draft dodgers who for mostly economical reasons or medical reasons or mental health reasons, couldn't enlist or had to run away, or girls were sexually abused at their bases and had to run away. That the way the army treats them as not people with problems but as problems. That the way that the army tries to solve every problem with force, to dehumanize the people that it has power over the way that this system works. It's meant to work that way. It's not an accident, it's not.

Sofia Orr:

Oh no, the army just screwed me over. No, this is the way that the military is supposed to work. This is the way that the military has been tried and true on Palestinians for decades in the West Bank and in Gaza. The kind of system that dehumanizes some of the people that it comes in contact with will eventually dehumanize all of them, and that was very noticeable in military prison, and it really showed me how the military operates. Having those kinds of conversations and trying to make change in whatever way I can, while also being told that I cannot talk about politics and being threatened with punishment if I will talk about politics, was also, for me, part of my refusal. Trying to make change, or so you know, whatever way I can inside prison.

Diana Oestreich:

You had mentioned that when you were in prison, one of the big moments for you was noticing how prison and the military dehumanized not just the prisoners which you were, but also the guards. The whole thing was taking away people's humanity by forcing them to be and do things the guards- some of them were younger than me.

Sofia Orr:

They are 18, 19 year old girls and it's like a game. The way that it works in the military is which is very different than how it works when the army operates on the ground in the West Bank is that it is like a game. None of us are going to get shot? Yeah, it does take away their humanity as well, where they have to treat us a certain way, where if we met outside on the street, they would never treat me the way that they treated me in prison.

Diana Oestreich:

The same things are true, I think, for any military. People look at it from the outside, but from the inside it's a pecking order and the person on top. If you give them the mindset that they can absolutely shoot to kill everybody else's beneath them, they are terrorizing the people in their own ranks. And in the US we know that 60% of female veterans have been sexually assaulted by their superiors. So their leaders, the people in charge and actually the most amount of people who've been sexually assaulted are all males. So it's this harmful culture that is created to kill their soul, kill their bodies. This is such an awful thing that we look up to and think is going to solve our problems, when we're just creating the worst of us, celebrating it and then paying them and then saying it's a career.

Sofia Orr:

Saying it's an honor to go and kill someone in the name of your country.

Diana Oestreich:

I had been to basic training and I had en enlisted and I'd been in a war for 397 days and then I'd been in for eight years and it's these experiences that you can't tell anybody about, really how horrible they are to each other. What I saw soldiers do to each other Until I watched a TV show and it was about prison. It was called Orange is the New Black show and it was about prison. It was called Orange is the New Black and it's about a woman in prison and all of a sudden I'm like, oh, why does this look so familiar? Just the way that you live, the way that you have a number, like when I walk in, I don't have a name, I am 4241. And you carry your toilet paper with you to the bathroom. I never knew why your toilet paper with you to the bathroom. I never knew why. Seeing people live in prison was absolutely the most familiar and the only way I could ever describe what it was like to live in the military was a prison. So a military prison is that plus?

Sofia Orr:

I'd assume a lot more. Yeah, because it's both a prison and a military. Orange is the New Black. My driver told me you should watch this movie before you go to prison.

Diana Oestreich:

Did you or did you pass? I did not. Yeah, maybe you don't want to.

Sofia Orr:

I mean now I have the real experience for myself.

Diana Oestreich:

Now it might look like Disneyland compared to what you lived through, but thank you for sharing your experience about how these accepted things the military prison and also the war that this is the only way there will be peace is by accepting and harming people. If we can just bomb them, kill them, it'll be peace. Thank you for sharing that. That's the culture you grew up in and also how you chose not to.

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Diana K Oestreich

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