Staff Writer

Netta Mishly was "born and raised to control people."

A 19-year-old Tel Aviv native, Mishly believes that she and her fellow citizens have been bred by Israel's military culture to dominate Palestinians.

Moral crises such as this led Mishly to reject her mandatory recruitment into the Israeli Defense Forces last year.

While dodging the nation's compulsory draft landed her a 20-day stint in a military prison, it also affirmed Mishly's belief that Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is wholly untenable.

Part of the Shministim -- Israeli teenagers who've refused to join the IDF, protesting what they see as their country's military injustices -- Mishly and fellow refusenik Maya Wind delivered an impassioned plea last week to a group of about 80 students at American University in the District, one of the last stops on their monthlong tour of college campuses across the country.

From an early age, said Wind, also 19, Israelis are told that they're under siege from a suicidal enemy who will not stop short of utter destruction.

"We are raised in fear" of Arab violence, anti-Semitism and a looming second Holocaust, said Wind, a Jerusalamite who spent weeks in a detention center and 40 days in a military prison before being granted IDF exemption in March. "Israelis so deeply fear anyone who is not Jewish," she said, leading to a "basic distrust and fear" of the entire Arab population that negates an earnest push for peace in the region.

Mishly said that her first introduction to Israel's culture of war came when she refused to participate during a ninth-grade trip to a shooting range.

"It put me in a weird situation where I had to explain [to supervisors] why it wasn't right for a kid to shoot a gun," recalled Mishly, 15 at the time.

When report cards were issued later in the year, though, Mishly received a puzzling review: Teachers had written that she "refused to participate in social activities."

"Shooting is not a social event!" Mishly said, faulting what she sees as the army's attempt to indoctrinate young students into the ways of war. Even at 17, she added -- the age when Israeli high-schoolers get their first taste of army life -- "it's too early" to expose kids to warfare.

Wind, too, faulted the country's militaristic mindset. Young soldiers are encouraged to "think as a unit," she said, leading to the "erosion of democracy" in Israel, Wind said.

Since Israel rarely grants exemptions from military service -- primarily fervently Orthodox Jews, the mentally unfit, married women, egregious lawbreakers and staunch pacifists are given passes -- the young women said that they had no choice but to refuse blatantly, and serve the resulting prison time.

After explaining the basic reasons for why they said "No," Wind and Mishly delivered a PowerPoint presentation about the Israeli "occupation."

Listing the "settlements, checkpoints and [separation] wall" as the most flagrant of Israel's many inequities, they offered the crowd a biting critique of the IDF's military strategies.

Dismissing Jewish settlements as a mere "excuse" to place "a military presence in the West Bank," the pair condemned the communities for "strategically cutting the West Bank into many pieces," effectively segregating Palestinians within minuscule patches of land.

Once the floor was opened to questions, several students clamored for the microphone, seeking to take the young women to task for their critical stance.

"As Israelis, don't you guys have any respect for your country?" asked Avi Bublick, an 18-year-old freshman. "You have no respect for the IDF," even though it "protects you!"

Responding, Wind denied that their trip, which was jointly sponsored by Code Pink and Jewish Voices for Peace, was meant "to demonize" their homeland. Rather, she said, they seek "to create a better future."

Bublick and several others, however, rebutted by saying the presentation was full of half-truths and factual errors.

"We are not here to show the truth," retorted Mishly. "We are not objective. We are activists."

In an interview Friday, Alex Mandel, a 19-year-old sophomore, labeled the talk "the most one-sided presentation on just about anything I've ever seen."

Admitting that Israel is not perfect, Mandel, who is a StandWithUs Emerson Fellow and cultural chair of A.U.'s Students for Israel group, said the refuseniks warped the conflict by withholding vital bits of information, such as the abundance of terror bombings in Southern Israel.

Yet Shministim's Wind also told the crowd, "I don't want to see Israel destroyed! This is my country; I have nowhere else to go!"