When in Israel, it’s difficult not to notice the overwhelming presence of the Israeli Defence Force. They are everywhere: sleeping next to their guns on trains and buses, manning checkpoints, lying on the beach, wandering around tourist attractions. The IDF doesn’t disclose the exact size of its army, but as of 2004 the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London has estimated that there are about 125,000 ground soldiers.

The IDF is considered one of the best equipped and best trained armies in the world right now: these 125,000 form part of a force that has sparked international debate around the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the very existence of the country they protect. But this isn’t what I wanted to talk about with the IDF soldiers I interviewed during my time in Israel.

Rather, I wanted to discuss what everyday life was like for these soldiers. Perhaps the first interesting thing to note is that out of 125,000 soldiers, the IISS estimates that only 40,000 are career soldiers and the remaining 85,000 are conscripts. The further 600,000 reserve soldiers are thought to be largely conscripted. Since being created by Israeli Defence Minister David
Ben-Gurion in an order given on May 1948, the IDF has been a conscript
army. Differing to most military organisations internationally, the IDF
conscripts pretty much everyone.

It is the only army in the world that expects mandatory service from women, and regularly places them in direct combat situations. Unless they are not eligible – very unlikely considering the range of stations and roles – men and women are drafted at the age of 18. Men are conscripted to serve for 2 years, and women for 21 months.When this is completed, each soldier is assigned toa reserve unit should they be needed in the future; reservists who have served in combat are not discharged until they are 45.

These are not just facts and figures: these are real, living, breathing people. Interviewing IDF soldiers, I did not talk to a single one for whom the army was their career path. There were soldiers who wanted to go into finance,
study economics, set up charities, run businesses, but none who showed any ambition to to fight for a living.

Whilst talking to a discharged soldier one night, I walked with him through the city of Old Jaffa, an area of Tel Aviv, which is the second biggest city in Israel after Jerusalem. It is beautiful: historical, but still living and vibrant. Conducting my interview, I noticed something strange. Just across from us, there was a crowd of soldiers. They didn’t appear to be doing anything. As we watched, they peeled off in ones and twos from their group and came back with ice creams and fizzy drinks.

Gradually, they were joined by more and more, until there was a whole little unit standing under the coloured lights of the Yafo, eating sweets and drinking pop. Looking at the soldier beside me, I saw he was laughing. He pointed to the group’s uniform and said, “They’re sailors… without a boat!” I stared at him. So what were they doing here? There is no naval base anywhere near the Yafo. It is the one place in Israel where there are barely any soldiers. 

My interviewee was still giggling. Observing the sailors, I couldn’t help but
feel like they didn’t have any more of an idea of what they were doing in the Yafo than I did. The soldier beside me explained. “They’re on a field trip; the army does field trips.” What? Like the Boy Scouts? “They’re having a tour — want to join?” He was laughing at my incredulous expression. I mean, they’re an army. And they were in uniform, having an evening tour of the Yafo with ice-cream. This shows that most of the IDF’s soldiers are kids. They eat ice cream, they go on field trips. They just so happen to be carrying M4s at the same time.

The soldier I was interviewing that night was actually from New York. He was one of many lone soldiers who do time in the IDF, and then return to their home country. Drafted at 18 and just discharged, he is 20. Asked whether he believed in Zionism, he replied, “Well yes, I have to.” Israeli soldiers had the same attitude. Zionism is more assumed than it is believed.

The soldiers’ stories of combat training include living in the desert for months without running water, being made to drink two litres of it before exercise so they vomit, and going on raids to arrest Palestinians.

The reality is that if you give an 18 year old kid an M4 and teach them how to aim, and if you take them away from their family and out of education for two years, they are going to have to believe in what they are doing it for.
They have no choice — how do they otherwise reconcile the idea they may have to shoot that M4 at a human being? So, what this produces is a generation of people who have fought for the Israeli state, a country itself founded on Zionist belief. It also leads to a heavily militarised country, where soldiers are just a part of everyday life as they constantly go from post to post. As one Israeli infantryman put it, “Everyone here is a soldier.” In a country surrounded by conflict zones, there is a logical argument for conscription. But with the Israel/Palestine conflict’s only hope of resolution being diplomacy, it cannot help to encourage this kind of fundamental belief in the Jewish state.

Israel has become a country where war is normal, where fi ghting is a rite of passage, and I wish I had a solution. A start, though, would be expanding the use of the professional side of the IDF: if you want to find terrorists, send trained soldiers to specifically target them, lessening civilian casualties. Don’t man an airstrike post with 18 year olds who have just left home. Teach Israeli soldiers Arabic so they can talk to the Palestinians they deal with; emphasise the operation as a defence of national security rather than as a furthering of Zionism. It is hard to deny that Israel will be militarised for a long time to come, but, when you see the IDF in the news, remember that most of
them are kids.

They are kids who practice army-crawling on the beach, who eat ice cream on duty, and who believe in the cause of the IDF because they feel that they have to.

YES

James Elliott

The current model of higher education funding has demonstrably failed. Privatisation, fees, cuts and debt over the last four years have all resulted in a 17% drop in the number of undergraduates, the closure of arts and humanities courses, and a collapse in the number of mature and part-time students attending university.

What’s more, this isn’t a financially sustainable system. An estimate of
the portion of student loans that will never be repaid has risen to 45%; this
statistic explains £2.5bn black hole in the universities budget. Clearly, the
system has to change, but on who’s terms? Will it be those of students,
workers, academics and society? Or will it be those of private finance? 

There are two distinct visions of higher education that we must choose between. The first is the vision of the Coalition, and their wealthy backers such as Pearson, a private education company, who are seeking to roll back the public provision of education.

They envision an American-style education system. In the USA a higher proportion of university funds are spent on marketing than on teaching, and working-class, black and disabled students in particular are locked out of higher education. 

The current system is bad enough to resemble that. Tuition fees are ‘a bonanza for the 1%’, as a Professor of Geography here in Oxford, Danny Dorling, referred to them. The fees system allows the wealthy to pay their £27,000 up front, while working-class students pay far more because of interest on their debt. 

The second vision is that of the NUS: Education that is free, well-funded, universally accessible and with high living grants and loans to end student poverty. This is to be paid for by getting the government to clamp down on tax avoidance, rather than taxing the poorest in society, which is in fact what fees themselves are. Money for quality teaching, welfare provision, enough cash to live off and expensive access schemes to help the
poorest.

Everything that students need at university, which they are currently being deprived of, can be paid for by closing in on the £120bn that is avoided in tax each year.

My chief opponents in this debate seem to be the ex-OUCA President,
Jack Matthews, and the Vice-President of OUSU, James Blythe. James
made the objection in OUSU Council last week that, “free education will
never happen”, forgetting that Germany abolished fees just a month
ago, and even cash-strapped Greece provides higher education for free.

Just what are the objections to takingmoney that is avoided in tax andthen ploughing it back into education?

I can’t see any, unless you’re a tax avoider ripping off the public. The essential question remains: What is education for? Or in this case, what are universities for? Education, for me, is a tool of human emancipation. It’s a social good, and a human right. It’s not a commodity to be sold, or a service to be run for profit.If our education system continues down its current path, then profit wins, but students, workers and communities lose.

We need to embrace that holistic view for what education should be like, then mobilise and campaign to win that system. Students, when they fight collectively, have won huge gains in Germany, Chile, Quebec and elsewhere in the last few years.

It’s time this country’s students followed this example. Let’s drop the toxic notion that education and politics are things that happen to us, and let’s retake the agency in this situation, and set out to win the free, public
education system that we know is best for all.

NO

James Blythe

In common rooms all over Oxford this week, students will be voting
on how to mandate their representatives at OUSU Council on the issue of making OUSU education funding policy ‘free education’. Free education seems like a noble and important principle. I wish I could support it — but I can’t.

It’s my job, as your Vice-President (Access & Academic Affairs), alongside
the other officers of OUSU, to represent the students of Oxford to the University, and in particular to lobby for a continuation of the generous
and sector-leading package of bursaries that are targeted at the students
in most need of support.

Those bursaries are having a real and crucial impact. They target support
at the students who really need it, and they are thought about carefully
on an annual basis, looking at the actual evidence of what works.
The bursary package is key in making sure that access to Oxford is not hindered by £9k fees.

Not only do I believe that it is vital that I am taken seriously in negotiations
about something as important as bursaries, but also that if I am not, that will have direct and immediate impact on my ability to fight for improvements
to that package. Tying OUSU to fighting for free higher education,
is a policy that is, in my view, utterly unfeasible in the financial situation in which the UK currently finds itself and for the foreseeable future would leave student representatives unable to fight for real spending and tangible changes that could make an actual difference to students.

I am all for taking important principled stances and I will join James Elliott
on any picket line he can find for us in anger at the chronic underinvestment
in higher education by theUK government. It is appalling andn staggering that we spend below the OECD average on higher education. In fact, I believe that is a picket line at which the Vice-Chancellor, who recently condemned the low spending on higher education by the UK government in his beginning of year
Oration, could join James and me.

I’m not in favour of taking positions just because the Vice-Chancellor
agrees — far from it. When he called for £16k undergraduate fees,
I worked, as the then Brasenose JCR President, with OUSU and other JCR
Presidents and we wrote a letter condemning it as well as bringing
motions in JCRs and OUSU Council. My record is clear — when necessary,
I will stand up to the University and challenge them.

I do, though, believe that we have to pick our battles and pick winnable
ones. It’s also a fact that if we can work with the University and bring
them with us, we will achieve change for students much more easily.

The way forward for the student movement is to embrace realistic goals in order to be taken seriously at the policy-making table both nationally and here in Oxford. I would be proud of a student union and a movement that fought for an increase in public spending, a commitment to no further increase in tuition fees, and real improvements in the visa policy for international students – again something the Vice-Chancellor has called for.

All of these things are achievable – if we focus on free education, a battle
the student movement, if we’re honest, lost 16 years ago, we will, in my
view, look fiscally reckless and unaware of the political reality.

More importantly, we’ll compromise our ability to achieve genuine
change for students. When voting in common rooms this weekend and
when the issue is brought to OUSU Council, take a stand for pragmatism and for principle: vote down the objective of free education.

For the past 12 years I’ve avoided talking about one of the most obvious things about me. Something that is literally —well, almost — written on my face. My name is Evie, and I have acne.

I decided to break the silence after I read multiple articles on how acne frequently leads to depression, and that this is “often independent of severity”. Despite living with acne, I’d never considered that my low mood over a breakout was something natural, I’d just thought it was how I dealt with it. In fact, acne has a significant, negative psychosocial effect, and we don’t talk about it because pointing out our flaws is the very last thing we want to do.

Very few people realise what acne means. In all the media I’ve ever been subjected to, there has never been a protagonist with acne. If there is a character with acne at all, it’s an unsympathetic one, who is either submissive, mean, or both. There are no films about an acne-ridden girl who finds that she doesn’t need to be self-conscious but just has to ‘let herself shine’. All other ‘negative’ images are given support; whether you’re overweight, short, tall, nerdy, or even all-out Ugly Betty, there is a role model for you readily available. Because of this, people without acne often throw around the word “spotty” as a synonym for “young”, in a way no other negative attribute ever is.

There is no reason ever to be “proud to have acne” — but that doesn’t mean that a disease which affects 70-87% of teenagers and frequently
continues into adulthood shouldn’t be talked about, especially amongst a student population that fits neatly into the affected age group. It’s not glamorous — we don’t get to be ‘curvy’, or cute, or intelligent, or strong. Acne is not ‘endearing’.

This isn’t a polemic, however. I’m mostly just trying to let you that it isn’t
trivial – and you’re not weak or weird for letting it get to you. It might sound stupid, but in the same way, as a four year old, I wanted to be blonde and blue-eyed because Cinderella wasn’t Mediterranean, I spent my teenage years believing that anything that’s wrong with you can be overcome – unless you have acne. If a group of girls decided to adopt me into their social group and give me a make-over, it would never be perfect — because I had acne. If I found out I was the heiress to a small country and needed an image revamp, it wouldn’t work- because I had acne. The sudden, unexpected romance with the most popular guy in schoo would never happen — because no matter how
great my body, or my hair, or my style was, I still had acne.

My experience was that I woke up an hour earlier than I needed to, in order to make sure I had time to deal with my face. I wouldn’t go out with friends when they invited me, unless I knew well in advance. I’d convince
my mum I was sick so I didn’t have to go to school on bad days. These are all reflected in experiences others have told me as well. In my case, I even developed the beginnings of an eating disorder simply because, if I couldn’t have the perfect face, I’d be damned if I didn’t have the perfect
body.Thankfully, I managed to escape that downward spiral early on. I’m sure there are many who didn’t.

This happens every day in the lives of people all around us, yet it is never talked about. We sufferers live fairly normal lives, often being told we “don’t have acne” — if it’s light — or that “it doesn’t matter” by significant others,
but the dysmorphia and the insider knowledge persists. This is because the problem is ignored to such an extent that it’s not allowed to be a problem. We are constantly outraged by Photoshopped models, who go from skinny to skin-and-bones, but the fact that Miley Cyrus was bullied for her skin during her ‘flawless’ Hannah Montana years is rarely mentioned.

Chris Pike, OUSU VP for Welfare and Equal Opportunities has said, “It’s important to remember never to feel ashamed about seeking help if acne, or anything else, is making you feel depressed, isolated or uncomfortable. You absolutely have the right to support; whether that’s in terms of counselling
(contact the Counselling Service); advice (from OUSU’s Student Advice Service); medical support (from your college GP); or just someone to
talk to (such as Nightline, your peer supporters, Oxfordshire Mind, or anyone else). There is no ‘wrong reason’ to seek support.”

What I hope to have achieved from this article is to give to others
what I gained from the pieces I read – a feeling that this daily annoyance isn’t just mine. That I’m not overreacting. That I’m not – forgive the trite turn of phrase – alone. It scarily confirmed that people are actually staring at my
face and judging me but it also reminded me that at the end of the day, it’s not “acne-depression”.

Acne is a factor, which, like anything else, can lead to depression. Instead of letting it reach that stage, we should just change the first element.