Author
V-Man
Peretz Kidron is an Israeli writer, journalist and translator who lives in Jerusalem. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1933, his family fled to Britain in 1938 to escape the Nazis. He migrated to Israel in 1951 and was a kibbutz member for 20 years. In Israel, military service is required of all its citizens, including those whose conscionce says its wrong to kill. Peretz Kidron is a former reservist, among the first to refuse service in the Occupied Territories as far back as the 1970s. In 1979, he translated Yitzhak Rabin's memoirs and leaked a passage to the New York Times. Kidron knew just how explosive those few paragraphs would be. The lines were not in Rabin's book because they had been excised by Israeli censors. The passage told how Rabin, then a 26-year-old brigade commander, was ordered by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to expel 50,000 Arabs from the villages of Ramle and Lod during the War of Independence.
Peretz Kidron is a board member of B'Tselem, and has long been active with Yesh Gvul, Hebrew for "There is a limit" -- a group that supports soldiers who refuse to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. His recent book, "Refusenik!," is an anthology covering 30 years of Israel's refusal movement, and tells the stories of the Israeli soldiers who believe in their country but not in its actions beyond its borders. The book features numerous declarations and personal testimonies by these 'Refuseniks' from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon up to the current Palestinian situation. Peretz Kidron was recently in Santa Cruz and I had an opportunity to speak with him at length. He begins here by discussing the founding of the group Yesh-Gvul.