From Yeshiva to Court-Martial to Columbia Cease-Fire Cause

When I was 18, in 2020, I followed the footsteps of many other Modern Orthodox students in my high school: I attended a gap year program in Israel meant to foster Jewish connection and intellectual growth. 

One of the unique experiences of the program was hearing from a Palestinian who came to talk to us about his experiences living in the West Bank. He told us, for instance, about the expulsion of his grandmother from her home when settlers moved in. He told us that Palestinians living in Area C in the West Bank—one of the most restricted areas under Israeli control—were unable to travel for work outside the West Bank without a special permit. These stories forced me to sharply re-examine everything my Jewish day schools instilled in me. 

In my gap year program, also known as seminary, I also learned of a boy who had attended the Yeshiva down the block for two years before being drafted into the army. His name was Aharon Dardik, and he became a kind of mythical figure, because we had all heard that he’d been in military prison, but few of us actually knew why. We also knew that he’d been dating someone from my seminary. When I returned to New York in the fall of 2021, equipped with a new understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I learned that Dardik had moved there as well, and I wanted to talk to him and learn about his ideology and his experiences.

Aharon Dardik during his stint in the IDF in 2020. (Courtesy of Aharon Dardik).

“They believed I was a soldier, and I believed that I was not.” 

Not every pro-Palestine campus activist has actually been court-martialed by the Israeli Defense Forces. But Aharon Dardik—who today serves as the president of Columbia University’s Jews for Ceasefire chapter—is such an activist. Dardik is 24 years old, stands over six feet tall, wears a Kippah he describes as the smallest in the world, and is majoring in philosophy and political science. “When people ask, I say I was involved in a protracted dispute with the IDF,” he says of his court-martial and subsequent imprisonment. “They believed I was a soldier, and I believed that I was not.”

In 2014, when Dardik was 14, his family moved from Oakland, California, to Neve Daniel, a West Bank settlement where everybody is “some flavor of Orthodox.” His family moved there for the same reason many other American Jews emigrate to Israel: because they feel a calling to their home, the land to which they consider themselves native. He describes the relationship between the settlers and Palestinians as “very limited” because most Palestinians take on menial-labor jobs and require a permit to exit and enter the community. Dardik remembers having conversations with some of the other settlers—right-wing Zionists—where he says he “pitched peace to them as something that was also important for Israelis and not just Palestinians, which I sincerely believe, and I think is an elementary step.” In his view, each time the Israeli military goes into Gaza, it kills “a bunch of people, destroys a lot of buildings, and Hamas is weakened—but you’re radicalizing the next generation. The next generation will come up, then they’ll try and fight, they’ll all die. And then you’ll do it again every couple years.”

At age 20, after the two-year Yeshiva program, Dardik was drafted into an Israeli air force unit. Before being deployed, he says he “tried deliberately tanking my final exams to not pass.” When actually deployed to base, he informed his commanders that he wasn’t prepared to work on a combat mission. This claim was, for the most part, ignored, until his services were needed. 

Dardik was responsible for “refueling, repairing and arming the F-16s before they went out on a mission.” While his role did not entail going to the front lines, he was nevertheless a part of the combat system. 

In 2021, Hamas fired rockets at a campaign event for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, several weeks before what would be called Operation Guardian of the Walls, or the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. Israel was planning its counterattack when Dardik’s unit was called into command. “I was told by my commanding officer that I needed to arm the fighter jet plane with the explosives, the bombs. And that’s what I refused to do.”

The back-and-forth with his commander led to his being court-martialed. In fact, he was court-martialed a total of six times during his deployment and spent a total of about four months in military prison. 

While in prison, Dardik woke up at 6 a.m., ate breakfast and went out with a group to do hard labor. He mostly picked thistles from abandoned buildings in the desert during 100-degree heat, sometimes for 12 hours. At 7 p.m. they’d return to the prison and have nine minutes on their phones, after which they’d turn in their phones and return to their cells. 

After each stint in prison, Dardik would return to his army base. Sometimes on the weekends, he had the chance to see his partner from my seminary. But with each return to the base, he’d reject every command given to him, stating, “I consider participation in the IDF to be immoral.” And the cycle would continue. 

With each return to base, he would ask his commanding officers to fill out the paperwork necessary to secure what’s called a conscientious committee hearing. The purpose of such a hearing was to determine a conscientious objector’s reasons for refusing orders. 

After months of asking, Dardik was granted a hearing with the conscientious committee. “They asked philosophically probing questions to ensure that I met their standards of what a conscientious objector should be,” he recalls. These questions included why he didn’t want to serve, what had changed for him ideologically since being drafted and other, mostly hypothetical, questions such as: “What would you do if there was a terrorist pointing a gun at a grandmother and you were the only sniper who could take him out?” 

Five days after his hearing, on July 23, 2021, Dardik was released in a unanimous decision. 

Aside from putting himself in a dangerous position, his family’s standing in their community was threatened. “Everyone in my family is a Zionist, and my community was a settlement in the West Bank.” Although his family continued to accept him, they didn’t tell anyone from their broader community his story. “If they had, my family would have had to move and start a new life, because doing what I did was unacceptable in that community.” He feels comfortable sharing now because he’s moved away and believes that his actions would be understood as his own. 

Dardik never wanted to put his family at risk. All he wanted was to live by his values: finding a peaceful solution by not engaging in what he considered a harmful system. 

Aharon Dardik attends a joint Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and If Not Now protest in 2024. (Courtesy of Aharon Dardik).

Dardik says that his experience in prison didn’t change those values, but it changed the urgency with which he approached his beliefs. “When everyone says that what you’re doing is wrong, you’re forced to re-examine and think about why they say that.” Ultimately, Dardik understood that what he did was necessary. 

But actualizing his beliefs came with a hefty price. Aside from serving time in military prison, Dardik saw that the trajectory of his life would change if he were to stay in Israel. He was concerned about what employment opportunities would look like if he stayed. Although, legally, conscientious objectors are not allowed to be discriminated against in Israel, “in practice, people know that it does happen, and that was definitely a reason to consider moving to a different country.”

However, the idea of moving back to America came to him gradually, accompanied by disillusionment with the Israeli government. He also deeply missed the United States and wanted to return to college there. Further, he realized that he wanted to be engaged with American and Israeli politics, not as someone at a desk job but as an activist who protests and participates in community efforts. 

Dardik also understood that the Israeli political scene was fundamentally different from America’s; in 2021, he felt the left-wing movement in Israel had “basically collapsed” and that coming to the United States would enable him to work toward “envisioning a whole new society in Israel that was based on values of freedom and equality and peace and justice and safety for everyone, regardless of birthplace, ethnicity and religious status.” As he saw it, Israeli society had an underdeveloped consciousness of  systemic oppression, and he wanted to go to a place where the frameworks of understanding systemic oppression were better understood.

A New Start at Columbia University

When Dardik was in his first year at Columbia in the fall of 2022, he got involved with J Street. He says he never heard back from Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) after signing up for their mailing list, and was “particularly drawn to J Street’s pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, pro-peace narrative” and what he perceived as a “decent tolerance of people who care deeply about both Israelis and Palestinians.” J Street worked to meet with elected officials who were progressive and who could make change. He joined the J Street board at Columbia University that year and left that role this summer. 

Aharon Dardik speaks at Israelis for Peace rally in New York City in 2024. (Courtesy of Aharon Dardik).

After October 7, Dardik says the entire campus community shifted and became involved with pro-Palestinian demonstrations. He spoke with students in JVP and SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine). But in November, when the two groups were suspended from campus organizing for violating campus rules, Dardik and several of his Jewish leftist friends formed Columbia’s Jews for Ceasefire chapter. 

Dardik was inspired by Brown University’s Jews for Ceasefire chapter, which shared on social media their action taking over a classroom. “This is awesome and needed at Columbia,” Dardik recalls a friend saying. “So we formed the Jews for Ceasefire chapter. We supported CUAD (Columbia University Apartheid Divest) when they started the encampments and when they escalated in taking over Hamilton Hall.”

“A minimum of 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza have died since October 7. I think 2,000-3,000 Israelis as well,” he says. “But it’s not happening ‘over there.’ It’s happening on our planet, to our people.” By starting Jews for Ceasefire, Dardik and his community of like-minded leftist Jews wanted to create a space for other Jews to think about what was happening in the Middle East, protesting for a safer atmosphere for all living there. 

“You look at how people are actually living, and you see such a disparity, so much so that people can’t access basic human rights: to food, to shelter, to transportation, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”

He also understands that a ceasefire likely will not be accomplished before the start of the fall semester and imagines that “protests and disruptive actions will continue. You don’t want this sort of thing to end until the project is done. One of the things the school year gives us is that a quarter of the movement will have now graduated, and another quarter is coming in as freshmen. This is a good time to pause, reconsider and see how we can make a pro Palestine movement as pro Jewish and as good for Jews as it can possibly be.”

The group is meant to rally different kinds of Jews together, including “Jews who are on the fence” about joining pro-Palestinian movements. “This is not a movement that hates Jews or hates Israelis. Peace does not require displacement. It does require justice, and it does require equality, but this is not an anti-Jewish movement.” 

If anything, Dardik believes that this is a time for Jews to go up-in-arms for the cause, being “good allies. Because really, we live in a world where there can be pro Jewish anti Zionists, and so we want to make sure that we’re, as Jews, not opposing their activism, but rather helping make sure that their activism is as strong and as good for Jews as they could possibly be. Because the futures of Israelis and Jews, and of Arabs and Palestinians, are all intertwined.”

“You look at how people are actually living, and you see such a disparity, so much so that people can’t access basic human rights: to food, to shelter, to transportation, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. Dardik understands that some Jewish people are skeptical of Palestinians and their cause due to their upbringing, to which he says: “If you hear Jews For Ceasefire’s rallying cry for real peace and equality and disagree with it, I want you to pause and think about why: what’s stopping you from joining in? Your voice is needed too.”

Top image: Golani Brigade cadets are sworn in to the Israeli Defense Forces (Credit: Israeli Defense Forces/CC BY-SA 2.0)