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"Maybe I Preferred Not to Know": A Draft Notice at Sixteen, and Twenty Years of Not Looking

The clearest description of looking away that this investigation found was not written by an American parent. It was written by a young Israeli woman, in Hebrew, in May 2025, about her own childhood in a country where the draft is universal. Her account was translated into English two days later and read by more than 80,000 people. It is worth reading because it shows, from the inside, how a person raised on a war story refuses to look, what finally makes her look, and what it costs her family. It also shows a mother who did not look away.

The English translation was posted by an account that frames the story in its own hostile terms ("genocidal mind matrix"); those words are the translator's, not hers. The translation has not been checked against the Hebrew here. Her own words follow.

The story she was taught​

"For 20 years of my life, I believed the script that had been echoed to me my whole life."

She describes a childhood of religious lessons, Independence Day pageants performed "for our parents," and constant warnings about the enemy "on the other side of the fence." She writes that during rocket sirens she "only ever heard about what was happening on our side," and adds:

"I never knew what was happening on the other side of the fence, and I never thought to ask." "Why were they doing this to us? I never got a real answer. Maybe I preferred not to know."

"Maybe I preferred not to know." Every parent has said that sentence to themselves about something. It is the black horse speaking in the first person.

The draft notice, and the mother who said no​

"Then I got my first draft notice. Age 16. Even though I knew I could easily get an exemption ... I decided I wanted to enlist, like most of my friends from school. No way I wouldn't."

She wanted to serve in a combat unit. She signed up for a pre-army academy.

"And to my mom's credit, she fiercely opposed it."

Her daughter's reason, as she recalls it, was loyalty: "Like they protected me — I have to carry the burden as well." She was later exempted for medical and personal reasons, and wept at her aunt's grave: "Why can't I contribute to my country? Why can't I be like everyone else?" She writes that in her society, "contributing to your country means dying for it — or killing others for it. That's the lie I lived my whole life."

In a country where the draft is normal, her mother still opposed her daughter's enlistment, "fiercely." The mother looked at what the pre-army academy would lead to and said no. Her daughter, at the time, did not thank her.

Refusing to look​

"When the first tiny cracks started to appear, when I began seeing things that were taboo for me — I refused to listen. I refused to look."

What cracked the story, in her telling, was a person, a friendship with an Arab man from East Jerusalem who "opened my eyes to perspectives I'd never dared to look at," and then a killing she could not explain away: the police killing of Eyad al-Hallaq, whom she describes as "a young guy with autism" shot "just because he was Arab." When she wrote to her best friend about it, the friend replied that "the soldiers there face threats every day, and sometimes they act in self-defense." She writes: "And there — something inside me broke."

The cost​

Her account ends where many parents fear to begin:

"I'm not in touch with my family. I don't speak to my mom, who lives under the same roof as me." "I will never forgive myself for 20 years of willful blindness."

And then she turns the charge on herself for what she still does not do: "Maybe today my eyes are open — but even with them wide open, I do nothing." She asks how, in history, "the majority" could "know and not intervene," and answers: "And here — I am exactly like them. I know. I see. I hear. I understand. It's so close to me. And I do nothing."

What an American parent can take from it​

  • Looking away is learned, and it feels like loyalty. She was not stupid or cruel. She was raised inside a script and rewarded for repeating it. The black horse's reproach in Plato, "desertion," is exactly what she feared anyone would call her.
  • A parent can see what the child cannot. Her mother opposed the enlistment when her daughter was sixteen and eager. That is the parent's role in a draft year.
  • The cost of looking comes later, and it is real. She lost her closeness to her family. The page on the family cost of questioning is about keeping that cost small by starting early and speaking gently.
  • Opening your eyes is not the last step. Her own verdict is that seeing without acting is its own failure. That is why this section ends in ordinary politics, not only in reading.

Israel's own draft debate is still dividing families. An Israeli father wrote in September 2026 about the conscription of ultra-Orthodox young men: "I'm describing, as a parent now living through it, what this policy is doing inside families and the anger and alienation it is creating" (@dovid_s, September 24, 2026). American parents facing automatic registration are at the start of a road Israeli parents know well. The page Israel's Draft Enforcement Model describes the machinery.

Sources​

Research captures: twitter/t71__v841.md, t71__v849.md, t70__v829.md.

Status: The author of the thread is unnamed; per her own account she is alive. Nothing on this page is a claim that anyone committed a crime.

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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