Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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the very first days, they were handing out equipment, and they handed everyone a nightstick. It really surprised me, with the gun I had all these images of using it like in movies I had seen, but I couldn’t imagine using this nightstick. It seemed so barbaric! I thought about what it would be like to hit someone with it, and I pictured bones cracking under its force. I hated the thing and I decided I would never use it. Of course, later I did use it because often it is the appropriate weapon for a situation.
Refusers narrated the various ways in which their service did not fit their preconceptions about who the aggressor would be in the situations they encountered as well as about who would pay the price of their service. Uri’s experience did not match his expectations. Uri had Israeli parents but grew up partly in California, where he befriended many other children of Israeli parents, a small group of whom went to Israel to join the military instead of going to college. We spoke in English.
When I joined I expected missions to make sense, that we would go to find a specific terrorist, and deal with him professionally, effectively and surgically. But at some point, I began to realize that so many of the missions were arbitrary, and so messy. I remember going to this house looking for someone with a name given to us by intelligence. We got there and of course there were only women, kids, and old people there, because that’s what happened every time. We had to order the men and women apart, the kids were screaming, people crying, always the same. The next week we were given another name, but were dropped off at the same fucking house! There we are again with the same women, ordering them around all over again, in the same absurd ritual, like some choreographed dance. And I knew they recognized us. It was embarrassing! To be both incompetent and cruel … maybe one or the other [laughs]…. I really began to understand what was going on when my commander told me that it wasn’t a good thing if things were “too quiet.” I began to see in everything we did that the army was instigating conflict, not just responding defensively.
The distinction between instigation and response is a matter of moral significance for the Israeli military, which self-identifies and self-legitimates as an exclusively defensive force. Other refusers described being disturbed to discover that they had developed a slowly grown addiction to power.
For a long time, the refusers generally did not talk about such things with their fellow soldiers and would push their doubts out of their minds. Avi told himself, “You shouldn’t change your beliefs about everything all at once” and “It’s not always the time for soul-searching.” Even with his doubts, Avi believed for a time that he was helping by being in the Occupied Territories, that he was keeping some of the excesses of other soldiers in check. This sense faded, however.
One day we were told to evacuate a house that was going to be demolished. We got there and told the family that they had one hour to leave. There was, of course, rushing around and crying and begging us to change our minds (as if I made that decision). After everyone was out, and they were going to knock it down, one of the women came running to me and begged me to go back inside because her daughter had forgotten her school backpack, which had all of her school supplies inside. My commander would not allow it—for him it was just a school bag. So, I had to tell her no.… But what does it mean “I had to”? From her point of view, and from any perspective that matters, I told her no. There I was trying to be the “good soldier,” and there I told her no, and that’s how the little girl will remember me, and if I am really honest, she’s right about me, or she was. And I thought to myself—this is me sacrificing for my country? It can’t be. I was the schmuck standing there on this ridiculous premise, when even a child can see that is not the truth.
Avi had conceptualized himself as Isaac until he found himself with the knife in his hand, until he saw himself as Abraham. His commentary indicated that, being part of a chain of command, his dissatisfaction with the situation at hand did not matter; he had not allowed the girl to retrieve her backpack, not because he did not want to or because he hated her, but because he was only a single, notorious, and maligned cog in the machine. He stopped seeing his service as a sacrifice, however. Before this encounter, he had felt great doubt and ambivalence about his service, and furthermore attributed moral value to his ambivalence, to being a good soldier, but in the moment of crisis realized the irrelevance of his sense of ethics to his actions and their consequences. He realized that he had unintentionally sacrificed ethics. It was a moment in which the alignment of moral good and what was good for the state split, and Avi found himself, in Gramscian terms, no longer consenting but coerced with regard to his ethics. He was prevented from taking action by fear and an inability to conceptualize what dissent would look like within that physical space; that is, he could not imagine the possible actions that he could have taken.
Avi found himself in a situation in which, through military logic of self-preservation, he was not the victim of sacrifice, as he had imagined, but, rather, that the most of the loss in his daily experience was Palestinian loss. This does not mean he was not frequently in mortal danger; he was. Despite being prepared for self-sacrifice, he felt that he was demanding more from Palestinians than was ethical under the everyday moral code with which he had been raised regarding respect and dignity in human relationships. Whereas the discourse concerning just causes for military sacrifice in Israel concerned strong and clear beliefs regarding war, national boundaries, and the enemy, the policing missions of occupation violated them.
Others echoed similar sentiments. I heard such thoughts voiced, for instance, toward the end of an olive-picking solidarity event in the West Bank organized by Combatants for Peace. My hands had grown sore from plucking clumsily at the small bitter green olives that grow in that region. I stepped aside to stare pointlessly at them and found myself next to Dan, who had come away from the trees to get some water. As we stood there, an army jeep drove by carrying young soldiers who were monitoring our activities. They waved and chuckled at us, I supposed because they were amused by what are often described as the naive efforts of leftists. Ironically returning their wave, Dan told me,
You get into the mode of military logic, the way you are trained to protect yourself and your soldiers, and there is no choice but to follow it; if not, their lives are on your hands. But then you catch yourself doing things which are just not OK, and certainly not up to the standards I had when I enlisted. That is what happens with the whole human shield thing, which I saw some guys do. When you see it in the newspaper it looks awful, but when you are there and you get deep into the military logic, it makes perfect sense to you. When I realized that there was no way to be there and not follow that logic, I knew I couldn’t be there anymore.
Dan was expressing, especially with the example of the human shield (the use of civilians as cover, forbidden by military policy), how, through the structure of military training, the sacrificing soldiers were replaced as victims by unwilling Palestinians. To say that the soldiers expected to be victims sounds extreme, but it does not mean they expected death. Rather, it refers to the mediated self-sacrifice I have described, to exactly what is meant by the English phrase often used to describe soldiering: as individuals “putting themselves in harm’s way” for the greater good. For Dan, the realization that the heaviest price was not being extracted from him interrupted his understanding of his military service as sacrifice. These soldiers were certainly exposed to grave danger and could have been killed many times, but, for them, this danger did not characterize their service. The logic of military service stresses the avoidance of loss, whereas the logic of the sacrificial economy demands negation and loss. After a long pause, Dan added, “When I understood there was no good coming out of it, that we weren’t helping anything, in fact the opposite, I wasn’t willing to risk my life for that anymore. After that, I was basically paranoid about getting injured or something, because if I lost a leg, I wouldn’t be able to see myself as a war hero, I’d just be a cripple.” In his consideration of voluntary death among the Siberian Chukchi, Rane Willerslev (2009: 701) differentiates voluntary death from suicide, with voluntary death (in proper context) conforming to the sacrificial requirement of furthering life through the taking of life. After Dan no longer saw his service as sacrifice, he feared any loss would be suicide-like, pure loss with no redeeming value. He was, in Lomnitz-Adler’s words, haunted by the “specter of meaningless death” (2003: 18), of a meaningless killing.7
Avi’s and Dan’s accounts had many elements in common with other stories of refusal I collected. Doubt