Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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courts, in the media, and often in the home.
Yossi recalls the moment he decided to refuse to serve in the military as one of epiphany and profound humiliation. As a combat soldier serving in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, he had a visceral experience that crystallized previous qualms and apprehensions about his activities in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Following security protocols led him to aim a gun at a young boy who had frozen in fear. Struck in the moment by the scene he was involved in provoked a sense of disgrace, fundamentally at odds with how he had pictured himself until that point, as an elite and self-sacrificing soldier. His understanding of the world, the Jewish experience, and his role in it, began to crumble beneath him and he experienced a period of existential unease that culminated with his decision to refuse to continue military service. Yossi describes coming to this decision like arrival on dry land, as a resolution to a period of confusion.
Aya’s final clash with her high school principal resulted in her expulsion from the school. Located in Tel Aviv, and specializing in fine arts education, her school had gained some notoriety for the high number of students who did not serve in the military. The media had deemed this evidence of systematic shirking of military duty and had cast the school and the city of Tel Aviv itself as self-indulgent and unwilling to sacrifice. Her principal, relatively new to the school, was determined to change this impression, and to make sure that his students would not dodge their military service. He introduced a special curricular emphasis on the connections between Jewish peoplehood, nationalism, and military service. Because Aya was determined to avoid military service for reasons of conscience, she had frequent run-ins with the principal over her objections to these activities. For example, with other students she protested the visitation of military representatives to the school and student trips to military bases, both intended to inform and excite students about their upcoming service. It was a trip to Jerusalem focused on “our Jewish heritage” that ultimately led to her expulsion. Feeling that the trip supported ethnic nationalism, she stayed home. When she refused to do a make-up assignment about what her Jewish heritage meant to her, she was expelled.
Amos insisted that the worst moment of his life was when he sat in his family’s living room and told his father that, after many years serving in the military, he planned to sign the letter of refusal to serve. “Sitting there, I would have preferred to tell him a thousand times that I am gay, rather than have to tell him even once that I was signing that letter.” In becoming a combat soldier, Amos had followed in the footsteps of his father, who had served in the Six-Day War. He struggled to find a way to explain to his father that he believed things were different than when his father had served, that the occupation had turned soldiers from defenders into aggressors. He knew that his father would never be able to accept that Amos truly believed this was the right thing to do. His father’s generation, for whom Jewish self-defense was a radical revelation and a new lease on life after the Holocaust, would never be able to see his refusal as anything but a dangerous step backward. After that encounter, it was more than a year before he spoke with his father again. Amos’s wife and her family were supportive, but the rift was very difficult for Amos, who had enjoyed his tight-knit family and their emotional and material support.
Growing up in the United States, I was like many of my compatriots, ignorant of and quite indifferent to my own mixed-up family history. As such, I was struck by the public and private significance of familial, cultural, and ethnic genealogy in Israel. I was also struck by the central role of the military in Israeli life, which is what drew me to this topic (for a vivid account of how military force acquired so much legitimacy and centrality in Israeli society, see Ben-Eliezer 1998). My hometown, a village of six thousand in the northeast United States, still has multiple stores specializing in 1960s-style tie-dye T-shirts, and the local political culture of nonviolence and antiestablishment sentiment made military service seem quite remote from my life. My religious education made it even more so. When I met my Israeli boyfriend (now husband) and visited Israel for the first time, I became fascinated by this cultural difference, not only the prominent problems of militarism, but also the ethos of volunteerism, cooperation, and communal sacrifice. I also met those who refused to serve in the military, and discovered the life complications they faced as a result.
After spending several summers in Israel, I conducted extended field-work there from 2007 to 2009 with the two main groups currently associated with conscientious objection. One organization is Combatants for Peace (CFP), whose members are former elite officers in the Israeli Defense Forces. Based on their experiences as soldiers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, these ex-soldiers have come to the conclusion that the occupation is morally wrong, and have decided to refuse to perform their reserve military service until this unjust situation is rectified. This group is made up of mostly men in their thirties. The other group is composed of young women and men in their early twenties who have never served in the military. It includes many pacifists and is loosely associated with the organization New Profile, a feminist organization that favors demilitarizing Israeli society. These two groups are associated with far left-wing politics in Israel, and are uniformly against the occupation or de facto control of Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip on Israel’s west, and the West Bank on Israel’s east.
During my fieldwork, I lived in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is the economic center of the country; it is the second largest city in Israel and considered the more secular and liberal counterpart to Jerusalem, the capital. Many conscientious objectors from both groups were from Tel Aviv or its suburbs.2 I traveled to Jerusalem to meet with refusers there, and occasionally to more peripheral areas. Over time, I got to know members of Combatants for Peace and younger conscientious objectors. I conducted interviews and also met people informally and socially. I spent time with them at home and met their families and friends. I participated in the meetings of both groups. These included meetings for members conducted in Israel and in the West Bank, as well as organized presentations that invited Israeli audiences. I also attended solidarity events in support of Palestinian communities that my interlocutors participated in. Requesting contact information from friends and acquaintances in this group, I was also able to meet other conscientious objectors not formally involved with any activist organization, as well as people who considered refusal but ultimately decided against it. I worked with a New Profile youth group in Tel Aviv for young people considering refusal. When the leaders of the group were looking for a new meeting spot, I offered to host the group at my apartment. I followed a number of these young people as they appealed for exemption from service on the basis of pacifism. That process entailed going before what is popularly known as the military Conscience Committee, which evaluates the appellant’s pacifist conscience for authenticity and sincerity. I also conducted interviews with members of the Conscience Committee, the Israeli military prosecutor, lawyers representing conscientious objectors, and legal scholars writing on the issue.
Conscientious objection in Israel (sarvanoot le’sibot matzpooniot) relies on the premise that conscience is a privileged status requiring protection, even above physical well-being. The military can require all manner of physical sacrifice from soldiers, including missions with a high probability of death, but it does not have the right to require moral compromise. Indeed, many cultural norms govern the physical risk to which the state can expose a soldier. The limits of such risk are often in dispute and concern serious cultural matters such as how to define necessary risk, the appropriate ratio between risk and monetary expense, and the value of an individual life. For example, recent public debates in Israel have centered on whether all soldiers need bulletproof vests, and whether the defensive materials used on transportation vehicles need to be of the best quality available. How high a price to pay for the return of a captured soldier is another controversial deliberation. Yet conscience and moral good are not negotiated in the same way. Conscience is thought of in absolute terms. The state cannot directly ask a citizen, even a soldier, to do something they have already concluded is wrong. Likewise, although giving one’s life for the state is considered the ultimate sacrifice, going against one’s conscience for the state is not similarly esteemed.
How did conscience come to acquire such protections against the normative expectations requiring sacrifice? Some anthropologists have recently suggested ethics as a productive anthropological category. They note that, worldwide, people have varied ethical traditions concerning how to do the “right thing,” that is, on the rules and norms that govern social interactions. Conscience