Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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point that they reacted strongly and refused military service. This trajectory is significant in its production of righteous indignation, in that other groups, not similarly sheltered, grow cynical about state ideology and are more invested in evading state surveillance than seeking accountability within the state. This suggests that among the factors that contribute to the emergence of viable counterpublics are ideological piety, hegemony, and privilege.
My interlocutors are also highly invested in the state and in seeking state recognition for their acts. Theirs is not the dissent that avoids and evades state power, quite the opposite. At times almost naively, they directly appeal to the state and to Israeli society for approval. The state does not chase them down, in fact, their appeal is often far more direct than the state would like. Facing potentially explosive claims of ethical wrongdoing and conscientious dissent, the state in most cases would actually prefer to leave matters of refusal unclear and out of the public eye, and is often willing to provide strong incentives to this discrete path by being quite loose with exemptions for other reasons. Getting released from military service is not difficult. Getting released from military service for reasons of conscience is quite difficult, but the path my interlocutors pursue nonetheless.
When conscientious objectors turn to the state with their dissent, they are faced with a highly conflicted social order. Liberal protections for conscience in the military contexts were a major concern for the first legislatures when drafting the first defense laws of the state that would require universal conscription for Jews.9 Before the state was established, Jewish underground defense organizations, such as the Palmach and Etzel, were volunteer, and the change to making military service mandatory for all was not taken lightly. Initially, the ad hoc military service laws explicitly recognized conscience, allowing judges to suspend punishment for acts (or the failure to act) if done (or not done) for reasons of conscience. In 1949, a year after the state was established, talks began in the Israeli parliament regarding the new defense laws. Freedom of conscience, the right to conscientious objection, and the necessity to maintain human dignity were brought up repeatedly in the context of international law and humanist discourse. Legislatures had come to Israel from places such as Poland, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Germany. They brought with them not only European ethical traditions, but also a memory of the pacifist traditions during the world wars and also in pre-state Israel. Brit Shalom, a peace movement that claimed such prominent members as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann, Gershom Scholem, and Henrietta Szold, was mentioned explicitly in defense of inserting a conscience clause in the law.
The religious parties often showed the most concern for the protections of conscience. Binyamin Mintz of the United Religious Front (Hazit Datit Meuhedet) argued against the idea of having “discipline of a dog” as the ethical mode of the Israeli military. “We don’t want our soldiers to be machines without souls and without a heart. We do not want that upon the enlistment a person of Israel to our military, that he will seal off the source of his soul and his conscience, cease to think and be accountable to himself for his actions, and turn into a tool devoid of thought and feeling in the hands of commanders” (Algazi 2004: 16). With these words, Mintz preempts the later narrative of robotic obedience, the “cog in the machine” that would emerge from the prosecution of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel, and would inspire many of my interlocutors to refuse service. Parliament member Moshe Unna, also of the United Religious Front, noted that freedom of conscience needed special protection because it was meaningless if it applied only to what was already legal. “The principle of freedom of conscience is emphasized, and I ask: when is it possible to realize this principle if not when the conscience is opposed to the law” (Algazi 2004: 16). In contrast, the minister of defense preferred leniencies for conscience to be at his discretion, arguing that creating a category of conscience within the law was not necessary. Clearly, there were concerns beyond that of freedom of conscience, such as discipline and the need for a consistent fighting force.
The debate was hashed out over years. In the end, only women were given the full right to exemption from military service for reasons of conscience. This was a compromise between those who were against exemption, and the religious parties, who were both concerned with conscience and opposed to the enlistment of women into the military. Parliament member Rachel Cohen objected to the limited scope of this right: “I cannot not accept reasons of conscience, and not necessarily religious. Men also have reasons of conscience that do not allow them to serve combat duty. This law is not just for Jews” (Algazi 2004: 15). Thus, an absolute right to conscientious objection was never legally enshrined. The minister of defense was given broad discretionary powers of exemption for a variety of reasons, and this latitude has been used both to exempt and to deny exemption for conscientious objectors at various times. Implementation of policy for conscientious objection is largely a question of public perception and strategic appeasement and suppression, what Ariel Dloomy calls the “strategy of not having a strategy” (2005: 708). The military does not want to be seen to be denying freedom of conscience, still a value in wider society, and thus creating martyrs of conscientious objectors. It also does not want to be seen to be cowing to pressure or as implicitly acknowledging conscientious objectors’ political claims against military service.
Liberalism does not find much aid and comfort in this account. I do not believe that the problem at the center of the controversy of conscientious objection is a failure of the state to fully and consistently live up to the liberal promise. In fact, the liberal promise is highly misleading. Although liberalism presumes to offer an escape from the binds of culture and shared responsibilities, such a promise can never be fulfilled within the social sphere. For our case, the promise of moral autonomy is especially deceptive. This ethnography will consistently show that conscience and culture are deeply entwined, and that ideas such as belonging and loyalty depend deeply on shared notions of the ethical good. Even those who defend freedom of conscience tooth and nail cannot escape the collective meanings of conscience. This can be seen in the words of one of the most adamant defendants of the right to conscientious objection in the parliamentary debates, Zerach Warhaftig. He argued a soldier should not be judged guilty “if the deed he did, is an offense done because of justifiable reasons of conscience (ta’amey matzpoon mootzdakim)” (Algazi 2004: 17). Justifiable reasons is a phrase at the same time obvious and revealing of the communal expectations embedded in conscience. Even if society does not agree with the reasons, it must agree to their justifiability, a requirement that embeds them deeply within the collective consciousness and culture. If anything, I argue, liberalism’s denial of the binds of culture creates a dysfunctional situation, setting up false promises, inevitable betrayals, and social turmoil.
Given the centrality of the state and sovereignty to this issue, I try to approach these categories carefully and with intention. The state is a foil for my conscientious objectors both symbolically and in practice. In his article Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State, Philip Abrams observes that the state is a slippery object and difficult to observe and theorize (2006). He suggests an analytical distinction between the state system, which is the system of institutional practices that constitute the state, and the state idea, which is the symbolic identity of the state, often the way people imagine it almost anthropomorphically. Timothy Mitchell warns that “The network of institutional arrangement and political practice that forms the material substance of the state is diffuse and ambiguously defined at its edges, whereas public imagery of the state as an ideological construct is more coherent. The scholarly analysis of the state is liable to reproduce in its own analytical tidiness this imaginary coherence and misrepresent the incoherence of state practice” (2006: 169). For example, as we see in the parliamentary discussions, the state is embodied by different politicians and bureaucrats who carry out its functions and understand its purpose differently. I agree, however, with Mitchell’s conclusions that the problem is not solved by trying to hermetically separate the material forms of the state from the ideological forms. Rather, he suggests, “the state-idea and the state-system are better seen as two aspects of the same process” (2006: 170). I try to take up both and their intersections. The Jewish state carries immense symbolic importance for my interlocutors, who both react against it and participate in the state system as soldiers. The acts of the state can be seen to have consistent and predictable appetites, for power, for sovereignty, for territory, but those who carry out these goals—including soldiers, military personnel, state bureaucrats, and the prime minister—each have their own understanding