Amitai Ben-Abba
I found the psychiatrist via my health insurance company. The clinic was underground. Dystopian, really. A white, fluorescent light made me feel even crazier than what I had hoped for. I think he was called Dr. Hofstatter. A thin layer of silver hair encircled his bald head like a half-broken ashtray. He had circular glasses with a see-through frame. His eyes were quite close to each other, an impenetrable grayish blue. He spoke very little, but when he did, his Hebrew had a faint Russian accent.
He went through the checklist for clinical depression the same way one would go through a shopping list: fatigue or loss of energy; feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, or guilt; impaired concentration and memory; indecisiveness; restlessness or feeling slowed down; recurring thoughts of death or suicide; unexplained aches or pains; irritability; feeling of hopelessness or pessimism; persistent sad, anxious or “empty” mood, and so on. A pretty broad umbrella—more like a summary of the human condition than criteria for illness. Indeed, compiling this list (my memory aided by a list of symptoms from the American Psychiatric Association) makes me note with some discomfort that it may accurately describe conditions that recur periodically in my life, perhaps even right now, as I’m writing this essay.
I answered curtly. He asked whether I wanted medication. I said yes. His old printer slowly chewed out a prescription. Two framed diplomas on the wall tickled my curiosity, but I turned my gaze back to the fingers interlaced on my lap, thinking it better to stick strictly to my depression. We waited in silence.
There are many ways to evade the three-year compulsory service in the Israeli military. My path of choice was mental illness, or, as we say in Hebrew, “Kaban,” which is an abbreviation of “Mental Health Officer.” I habitually refer to my experience as a humorous anecdote: “I tried to fake clinical depression,” I say. “But I failed. Instead, I was diagnosed with a ‘pre-psychotic state with potential for schizophrenia.’” Unfortunately, when I joke about this, it is almost always to someone who suffers from or whose loved ones suffer from depression or worse. I do not mean to offend anyone, or to belittle what is definitely a grave condition. My improper gag only serves to clarify a point about myself: perhaps I was more mentally unstable than what I care to admit.
Although extremely common as a method of draft evasion, the Kaban experience receives very little representation in Israeli culture. It is a kind of taboo. I can recall only one poem that speaks to it. The poet Shlomi Hatuka is one of the radical Mizrahi poets who have recently emerged from the margins of Israeli society to the central stage of its poetry scene. I am translating from the Hebrew:
Go to the Kaban
Tell him
About your dreams:
He will think of you as a madman;
Go to the doctor
Ask him
Why are they making sure that you are healthy
Only before
Sending you to die
Hatuka’s poem is entitled “Letter to a Boy from the Periphery,” and calls on him: “Do not enlist / That is the rebellion,” because “Anyway / All of the promises / Are kept for the whites.” The experience of evading army service by way of Kaban remains the form of draft dodging of the invisible, the peripheral, those of color, those who must use their time to provide for impoverished families, who cannot claim that they are ultra-Orthodox (men) or simply religious (women), and who are unaware of or have no access to the network that supports Conscientious Objectors. I was of the latter category.
I am very reluctant to write this story, really. What if Israel retaliates and tracks me down for deception? Perhaps I will offend a bunch of people, as with my silly wisecrack, but on a massive scale? Will I shut doors for myself by revealing what may be a questionable act? But it has to be written at some point. For one, it is the big breakpoint in my life that turned me into who I am today, the most radical shift from my prescribed path as a Jewish Israeli. It is so central to the formation of my identity, that as a writer, I cannot ignore it forever. There is a certain political urgency to this story as well. I can’t remember reading anything like it. Surely, many people write about their experience as Conscientious Objectors, including my younger sister, who sat in prison for one hundred and ten days for publicly refusing to serve in the army. An even more celebrated position is that of the Disillusioned Soldiers, who have the authority to speak about the obsolescence of the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and the Siege of Gaza simply because they had the misfortune of perpetrating them (Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, and other examples abound). The Draft Dodgers, on the other hand, are voiceless. They are seen as leeches by the Right, which flaunts bumper stickers with the phrase “A True Israeli Does Not Dodge the Draft.” The Left gives them no stage, as they do not have the legitimacy awarded by the woes of army or prison. Although the great majority of secular Jews who get an exemption from the military receive it on the grounds of mental illness, their experience remains unaccounted for.
This is not to say that my story is at the top of a hierarchy of misery. It is not. Nor am I trying to denigrate the very crucial contribution of Disillusioned Soldiers and Conscientious Objectors to help shatter Israeli consensus. You may see this as a “coming out” story; of mine, but also of this option. Unfortunately, it cannot have the clearly delineated structure that is the requisite of an effective call to arms. I wish someone else would write that. Maybe an accomplice will read this story one day and be inspired to do it justice.
Perhaps Hatuka has already done so with his poem. Written with an incredible lightness, his narrative floats effortlessly from “a girl’s declarations of love” to a dreamy conversation with the Kaban. And perhaps, compared to my younger sister’s incarceration as a Conscientious Objector or to the breakdowns and abuse people go through during their army service, it really was a pretty simple and easy process for me as well. And yet I remember that time, the two months during which I tried to receive an exemption, as such a dark period of life. I was oscillating between a deep fear of an unknown future to a sadness at the loss of numerous friendships. Most of my high school friends joined the military. My older sisters and cousins joined the military. It seemed like everyone was going to, presently in, or had finished military service. There was an impression that I would be condemning myself to a life of isolation. I felt alone with my fear of ostracism, and with the contradicting fear of military life, of breaking like an eggshell against the wall of authoritarianism. Opposing fears do not cancel each other out. They amplify one another in an upward spiral of dread.
After affirming that I suffered from at least five of the aforementioned ailments, Dr. Hofstatter prescribed me with antidepressants. A folded list in the box detailed the side effects. Some of them were precisely the symptoms the medicine was supposed to halt: suicidal thoughts, sad or anxious mood, and very etcetera.
I went back to Dr. Hofstatter the following week and said I was suffering from some of the side effects I had gleaned from the list, with an emphasis on anxiety. I told him that when I would receive phone calls from unknown numbers, my heart would start beating wildly, thinking it’s someone from the military calling about my upcoming draft date. I wasn’t lying. I remember specifically: receiving a call from a “blocked number,” knowing that it had to be the army inquiring about my whereabouts—why didn’t I come to this or that test, am I ready for draft date—and feeling a sense of impending doom. The ring undulated in my parents’ apartment. I didn’t pick up, just paced around until the call exhausted itself. I remember feeling an urge to get out now, and going on a walk in an attempt to quiet my racing heart.
“What would you do if you were given a gun?” Dr. Hofstatter asked.
That was the ultimate question. If a psychiatrist was under the impression that a person would hurt themselves or others if given a weapon, they would have the professional responsibility to prevent such an occurrence; fake or not, lives were on the line. The catch was that everyone with a deadly weapon was at risk of hurting themselves or others, especially anxious eighteen-year-olds. This is why anyone can evade military service by way of mental illness. The definitions are broad enough, all-encompassing. We don’t even need to perform.
“I … I don’t know what I would … to myself,” I said.
A long moment of silence. My hands and my eyes rested on my jeans. I would wear a loose dark blue shirt to these meetings. I wouldn’t comb my hair or pluck my bushy eyebrows. I was unwell, sad, disengaged, afraid. I would walk back home still in character, chin down, concave chest. I would ignore the Breslevs, the dancing Hasidic Jews in the Jerusalem city center, who would try to induce the passersby to please the Lord with hopping happiness. At home, the talking heads on the news were discussing how elite IDF soldiers were assaulted by terrorists on top of a boat. They had to defend themselves and neutralize the terrorists. “Ten terrorists were eliminated.” They kept showing blurry footage where you could see a figure—a soldier, we were told—being thrown off the deck. I was irritated and annoyed by the mirages. The talking heads were complaining about anti-Semitism. The world is turning against us. In times like these we must stick together as a people, as we all know so well. I would mutter, audibly, so my parents could hear, “Why are you watching this shit.” Then, I would sit on the computer, click “home” on Facebook, and toggle down for hours. Paranoid that the army would look at my profile and find out that I have a social life—even if mostly online—I changed my name to Tai Stefkov and put a pitch black screenshot as my profile picture.
Dr. Hofstatter prescribed me with anti-psychotic medication to counter the anxiety that may have been caused by the antidepressants. Symptoms of anxiety may be intermittent, frequent, or ongoing, and include but are not limited to fear of impending doom; repetitive thinking, or getting caught in the same thought patterns; feeling of losing control, of being overwhelmed, of “going crazy”; difficulty thinking, forming thoughts, concentrating, and/or remembering; feeling “foggy-headed” or muddled, or as if you have a million thoughts going on at the same time, all demanding your attention; experiencing difficulty putting your thoughts together or expressing them; feeling spaced out; wanting to cry for no apparent reason; feeling persistently unsafe; being consistently worried, and so on and so forth. Put simply, the psychiatric understanding of anxiety pathologizes human distress as a whole.
As I write this essay, I find myself talking to people about anxiety. Turns out everyone I know has had some of these symptoms throughout their lives. My acquaintances ascribe their experience of anxiety to the capitalist work ethic, to Jewish culture, and/or to their genetic disposition. Some were diagnosed and prescribed meds, some go to therapy, others describe themselves as simply innately and irreparably oriented towards anxiety.
I didn’t take the cocktail I was prescribed. I bought the medicine just in case Hofstatter would check to see whether the prescription was used or not. Surely they could do that, the doctors.
The number one cause of death among serving soldiers in the Israeli military is suicide. More Israeli soldiers kill themselves than die in rounds of war on Gaza, in operational activity in the West Bank, than die by traffic accidents, disease, falling coconuts, crashing airplanes, terrorist attacks, white male mass murders, natural disasters, lightning strike. How many of these suicide victims have asked for help? The military does not make this data available. For True Israelis, the one thing worse than draft dodging is soldier suicide. Soldier suicide is an affront to Zionist principles.
In its anxiety over “the demographic balance” (doublespeak for “preservation of Jewish majority”), Israel creates a marketing strategy for hope, heavily persecutes dissent, and idolizes the Future. A burgeoning political party is called There Is A Future (Yesh Atid), and rallies most of its voters on an anti-draft-dodging platform. The suicides show that There Is No Future. The suicides recognize what the Zionist dream has become and act accordingly. As such, perhaps the suicides got it right, and us survivors are in the wrong. No matter. Better fake your pre-psychotic schizophrenia than risk becoming a missing statistic.
The more I concentrate, the more the clinic unfolds in my memory. It was underground such that two windows were blocked by a fat layer of concrete, which was a wall underneath the sidewalk outside, but daylight would squeeze its way through a crack at the top, and mingle with the fluorescent white oblivion they say you see before you die.
“Do you use drugs?” Dr. Hofstatter asked.
I shifted uneasily, saying nothing at first. The silence was interrupted by the sound of buses on the street. “Sometimes.”
The building was common for Jerusalem. The outside walls were adorned by Jerusalemite stone, or by its convincing imitation, with an ancient off-yellow, the color of infinite age. When I walked out of the clinic, there was something unsettling about the sun, shining so exuberantly on my face, like the bright, blinding light of an interrogation room in a Hollywood film. What did it want me to confess?
During that period, I was faxing letters to the military on an almost daily basis. The process of finding a fax machine in the twenty-first century could already drive you nuts. Why was the fifth largest nuclear superpower in the world using fax? I am now able to speculate on the sinister gracefulness of this choice, but at the time, I couldn’t understand, and had more burning concerns. I needed to see a Kaban. My mental health was deteriorating. I had to meet a military mental health officer before my draft date. Why wouldn’t they help me? I faxed my prescriptions as proof. Look, I’m verifiably crazy. I would call to verify that my faxes were received and my request processed. No, we haven’t received a fax. Oh, you sent it to the other office. Send it to this number. Send it to that number. Send a photocopy of your draft call. You already did? Send it again. You will be notified. That’s all I can say. Sorry. I said sorry. Can’t help you.
The famous catch-22 specifies that sane people will try to avoid danger and harm to their own wellbeing. Therefore, the request to avoid such situations serves as proof of one’s sanity. As I requested to be exempted from service, I was showcasing a sound mind, and was thereby required to engage in dangerous and harmful situations that I would need to be crazy to want to engage with in the first place. Likewise, someone in a state of mental breakdown would not be able to navigate through the bureaucracy of proving their madness to the Israeli military. Successful navigation was itself proof of a rational and organized intellect. The faxing method was horrifying and sublimely elegant all at once. I started fearing there was no way out.
Accordingly, I kept receiving letters summoning me to all kinds of tests. My request to see a Kaban disqualified me from the Intelligence Force, but they still wanted me to have a meaningful service. They postponed the draft date by a month or two so I could get tested for other things. They designated me to a half-combat electronic warfare unit. It sounded cool if you were a fifteen-year-old gamer, but I was already set in my mind to refuse to serve an army that had just rained chemical weaponry and executed five hundred children in Gaza. Collateral damage, the talking heads would call it at first. Then they would deny the sources as unreliable. I preferred to have a conscience and be ostracized than to participate in the slaughter and be at the receiving end of protests like the Gaza Flotilla. Before the soldiers slid down like Rambos from the sky, all electronic equipment was disabled on the boats. First the activists heard the sound of the helicopters. Then the equipment blacked out: cell phones, cameras, laptops. The electronic warfare unit was doing its job.
Why is individual distress being pathologized and medicated? It is not surprising that a teenage boy facing a life or death decision would be anxious. It is not pathological to try and get out of harm’s way by any means available, nor is it unlikely that one would feel empathy towards other humans who were clearly being oppressed. The only actually pathological symptom that I could discern was that an entire culture—my people, my family and friends—could rationalize and justify their ongoing maltreatment of millions of others. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been joking about how I got my exemption. It’s been a way for me to deny a labeling of myself as crazy while my society deepened its entrenchment in racism.
When people ask me how I evaded military service, I normally respond along one of two lines: the Silhouette or the Joke. The Joke was presented at the beginning of this essay, and I now attempt—somewhat unsuccessfully—to save it for people for whom it can be a humorous and harmless transgression. I more frequently offer the Silhouette, which is really a way to avoid talking in detail. With Israelis, it’s very simple. One word suffices: Kaban. The experience of getting an exemption from the Mental Health Officer is so ubiquitous that nothing else is required. “How did you get out?” they ask. “Kaban,” we say. (Alternatively, we could say “I went out on twenty-one,” which is the lowest health profile score given to an IDF candidate.) No one would assume that we have the schizophrenia, psychoses, bipolarity, OCD, major depression, or anxiety disorder that our diagnoses may imply. We went to the Kaban. He gave us an exemption. That is all.
The other version of the Silhouette was developed while my sister was imprisoned and I had to speak to foreign press on her behalf. After hearing the general statements agreed upon with my sister—she’s refusing because she believes there is no military solution to a fundamentally ethical problem; this is her way to say that the Occupation can’t go on; she’s willing to pay the price for her beliefs, and so on—the journalists would veer the conversation towards the idiosyncrasy demanded by their profession. They would ask me about my own experience with the military. I can empathize with the desire to know. After all, who cares about rehearsed responses and carefully polished cases? But that story was about my sister and her astonishingly brave choice, not about me. “I found my way out of the military in other ways,” I would silhouette. That was all they needed to hear in order to know that I wasn’t interested in answering any other questions about it.
There was one day I almost changed my mind again. I was walking on the street, noticing the printed signs on the restaurants: “Workers Needed! After Military, No Prior Experience Required.” It would’ve been so much easier to conform, I thought. Reservist soldiers in plainclothes were walking by, their M16’s shifting languidly to and fro as they chatted in brotherly conversation. I could just forget about all this and show up and become a soldier like everyone else and do my time quietly and drink with my friends every other weekend and after the release I could go on a long trip to India or Peru and come back to work part time as a waiter without previous experience and enroll at the Hebrew University and live a pleasant, worry-less life in my community. Why did I need all of the hassle of draft dodging? I could be a happy face in the crowd. The weight of existence was almost too much to handle. I wanted to break out of my skin. I was afraid of my grandma’s disapproving glare, my uncle ignoring me, my friends talking in military jargon about experiences I didn’t want to understand. But I was already too alienated by the gently dancing guns, more afraid of being a killer or killed.
One Friday I bumped into a friend from high school who had already been almost a year into the army as a Service Conditions Noncom. She was on leave for the weekend and wore her civilian clothes à la mode, in careful coordination of the burgundy with the soft purple and black. I distinctly remember her wristwatch. It fit flawlessly with her retro style—golden colored case, hands and numbers on a white dial, and a brown strap, snug around her wrist. But get this: all three hands were locked in place, frozen quite close to each other at what could’ve been 8:35 and thirty-seven seconds.
“It’s been a while!” She threw her arms around me in an embrace. “How have you been?”
“Oh, you know, ups and downs,” I said, avoiding eye contact. “You?”
“I love life, and I love the IDF.” She smiled, anticipating a raised eyebrow on my behalf, knowing that she was saying something I might find strange, but owning it. She had nothing to be ashamed of.
I stared blankly. She saw her service as altruism, taking care of the needs of downtrodden soldiers. She’d gotten word of my intention to dodge, and thought this encounter was a perfect opportunity to have a conversation, heart to heart. She sat me down for tea, and talked at me for an hour, relating stories of bettering the serving conditions of soldiers from impoverished households.
“I’m against the occupation and all, but you can change from the inside,” she said. “You can really make a difference in people’s lives.”
I kept looking back at her watch, as if trying to will the frozen hands into motion. Was I dreaming? Her transformation since high school was impressive. She used to be one of the cool kids, an artsy smoker. But now she was so political, and at the nationalist side of the spectrum.
“You know, I learned so much over the past year,” she said. “About Judaism and about our history. I’m angry at my parents that they didn’t teach me any of this. There’s such a rich culture and heritage that we were deprived of.”
Like me, she grew up in a liberal Zionist household, one that conformed to the Israeli claim of a mystical connection to the land, but that saw it as somewhat distasteful, out of line with its pre-State traditional secularism. After a brief dip in the melting pot of the army, my high school friend was already cast in the mold that is now dominating Israeli politics: religious, ethno-nationalist Zionism. Of course, that’s not what I was thinking at the time of our conversation. I couldn’t concentrate much; too hypnotized was I by her watch.
My last meeting with Dr. Hofstatter. He asked me whether I’d noticed any improvement with the new pills. I said no.
“Okay.” He sighed and turned to face his computer, then continued talking with a hasty, business-like tone, conveying a slightly confusing impatience. He was ready for us to be all over and done with. “I will write you a letter for the Kaban recommending that you be exempted from service.” He proceeded to type with two fingers for what seemed like an eternity.
As subjects of industrial civilization, we each have our own unique psychological glitches. With the diversity of our dysfunctions, we are like a mosaic of the collective trauma we have been going through as a species: nibbled cuticles here, a shaking foot there, and that twenty-first-century novelty: the blank, empty gaze into the screen on our palms. In Dr. Hofstatter’s case, his glitch showed with each painfully slow tap on the keyboard. Offbeat like cardiac arrhythmia, a single tap could never follow the preceding two in distinguishable sequence. The pacing was divinely uncoordinated. Each keyboard strike could not be trusted, had to be accentuated with a decisive hesitance, and yet was treated by Hofstatter with a worrying indifference, given that my life was arguably on the line here.
He struck a final punctuation on the keyboard—I was almost startled by its decibels, cutting my train of thought—and printed out the letter. My liberation.
A weight lifted off my chest. I made it. The military would no longer ignore my requests. And in fact, my appointment with the Kaban was scheduled for the following week. I would emerge after the interview like Persephone from the underworld, euphoric, elated, echoing Joan Didion. Hofstatter gave me a prescription of the same meds for three months and told me to schedule another appointment when I ran out. He said I might benefit from psychoanalysis. I can’t remember whether I thanked him or not. But with the letter of diagnosis safely in my hands, I could finally afford to display my curiosity about those two diplomas on the wall, a mystery that had bothered me since that first meeting. One diploma affirmed that he had a Doctorate in Medicine, and the other that he had a PhD in Philosophy. Had this gray, utterly disinterested man gone through the ordeal of two doctoral degrees?
“Are you also a philosopher?” I pointed at the diplomas.
He looked at me, confused. “No, when you become a doctor you get one doctorate as a practitioner and another one as a research component.”
“So why does it say ‘PhD in Philosophy’?”
“That’s what it’s called.”
Those are the last words I remember from Dr. Hofstatter. I haven’t seen him since.
Sometimes I wonder whether Dr. Hofstatter had known what I’d come for all along. Surely, as a psychiatrist covered by public insurance, he had seen others like me. Anxious eighteen-year-olds hoping for an exemption, laboriously avoiding eye contact. Maybe he was aware of the atrociousness of the military and empathized with my cause. But most likely, the constraints of his profession forced him to give the diagnoses accordingly. What kind of doctor would assume that a patient seeking help is just faking it?
Military doctors, apparently. One of my sister’s duties in military prison was to watch over prisoners who were at risk of hurting themselves. She would sit with the isolated prisoner for four-hour shifts, and was instructed to whistle if anything happened. There, she met a young soldier called N. Sick and tired of a meaningless military service, N decided not to come back to her base after a weekend leave. A couple of months passed, and she was tracked by military police and taken to prison. Seeking support for a mental breakdown, N requested to see the prison’s mental health officer. The Kaban accused her of faking it in order to receive an exemption. She attempted suicide, and was placed under twenty-four-hour supervision. N was a disturbing prisoner to guard. My sister recalls her harrowing screams—howls, really, that echoed at night throughout the camp.
Imagine N was told that her suicide attempt was a fake. At what point does her crisis become real? Postmortem?
After I got my exemption, my uncle, a high-ranking military officer, asked to have Dr. Hofstatter’s name in order to report him to state authorities. His rationale was that Hofstatter was putting people who actually needed help at risk by diagnosing and prescribing medication to healthy people like me. By cheating the system, was I not making it more difficult for people with actual problems to receive treatment?
It makes me wonder: say Dr. Hofstatter thought I was faking it, and refused to give me that golden diagnosis. At draft date, I would go to the conscription department and declare myself unfit for service. They would try to convince me to go through the soldierization process (there’s a special word for it in Hebrew: khiyul) nonetheless, and keep me for a couple of days under arrest. First they would try to shame me by having me stand in front of the flag, call me a mishtamet, a parasite, would tell me that I’m a selfish piece of shit, ready to have other people suffer and die for my own safety. Regulations would guarantee a Kaban meeting within forty-eight hours. The Kaban would dismiss me as a liar.
“Give him a couple of weeks in prison and he’ll understand that getting drafted is his best option,” he might say.
They would transfer me to military prison, either Prison 6 in Atlit or Prison 4 in Tzrifin. During that first, lonely night, I would be too anxious to fall asleep. It would be too hot in the summer, I would itch all over and sweat, shifting from side to side in the narrow bunk bed. I might cry and consider changing my mind. The next morning I’d be yelled at and drilled with the other inmates, forced to call the guards “commander,” “sir,” and “ma’am.” I’d be kept in a cell all day or “treated” to washing dishes or cleaning toilets. I would be allowed to buy a phone card— a Telecart, it’s called, an artifact from the nineties used only in prisons—in order to call home once a day. My mother’s voice would bring me to tears and choke my throat.
How did I end up here? I want to go home. I want this all to end. Why won’t they release me?
Time would pass with a decelerated grimace. Every little sound, bit of conversation, snoring cell mate, stifled cry, would keep me awake at night, and the violently early six AM wake up rounds would drive me to exhaustion. The wheels of bureaucracy would keep on churning my sanity as I would wait for another meeting with the Kaban. I’d be tempted to stop doing chores, to refuse to participate in the drills, to be put in solitary confinement, to drive myself to an ever more convincing mental breakdown, so that next time the Kaban would not shake his head dismissively and wave me back to prison. In the jaundiced daylight or fluorescent night, death would become increasingly appealing. I’d imagine myself shifting towards the light, white oblivion. Why not end it all? Life is too exhausting. What’s the point of hammering on. And so on. My eyes would lock on plastic bags, strands of string, and on the disposable single-bladed shaving razors. The suicide note would start writing itself in my head. Things which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me. Am I crazy? Was I lying? Does it matter? I refused to give Dr. Hofstatter’s name to my uncle, of course.
Amitai Ben-Abba is an Israeli-American writer born and raised in Jerusalem. His work has appeared in The Independent, CounterPunch, Haaretz, and other publications. He is a writer of the documentary Objector (2019) about his sister’s imprisonment as an Israeli conscientious objector. Amitai is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Mills College where he was awarded the Fellowship in Writing and Community Engagement.
