Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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Chapter 3 describes how from an early age, this group lived with the expectation of their military service, the expectation of their self-sacrifice. This star-crossed birthright was described by the poet Haim Gouri as being “born with a knife in their hearts.” Although this group questions the legitimacy of such demands, the society in which their daily interactions and primary relationships take place is deeply embedded with these logics. Alienation from close relatives and expulsion from school are a few of the social consequences my interlocutors faced during this period. The older generation of refusers mobilizes both the respect they won as elite soldiers and the social respect for their sacrifice of incarceration for refusal. This younger group, including many women, finds itself paradoxically unable to produce the kinds of narratives that are compelling to Israeli audience, or to mobilize social capital in the same way. This chapter highlights the desperate attempts of my interlocutors to find relevance in the sacrificial economy, and the distress of their exclusion.
Chapter 4 considers the legal adjudication of the question of conscience by the Israeli military. The Israeli military’s Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I find that pacifist refusal based on principled objections to violence challenges the legitimacy of the state and the hegemonic moral order. As such, applicants who articulate their refusal in these terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence does not challenge the state’s existential basis and moral order; cases framed in these terms are granted exemption. Understanding pacifist as a physical incapacity depoliticizes pacifism by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service and preventing the military from having to engage or recognize pacifist moral claims against violence, including state violence. This creates a dilemma for pacifist applicants who wish not only to be exempted from service, but also to engage politically on questions of military service and violence and to endow their pacifism with political meaning and relevance. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates the way in which the discursive production involved in adjudicating rights can negatively shape the social and political meaning of the minority identity, and the rationality of attributing rights.
Chapter 5 addresses the conflicting obligations and responsibilities that conscientious objectors face. Although my interlocutors expect to be able to bracket their dissent from daily life, they find that the matter is much more deeply entwined in the social than they had previously realized. This misrecognition sets off a series of mutual betrayals between family, friends, community, and the state that uncover existing tensions and Oedipal anxieties. The expectations of my interlocutors for the liberal promise are contrasted with those for whom marginality is not a new experience. This comparison leads me to conclude that commonly held ideas of hegemony as a tool deployed by the dominant class to confuse and subjugate the lower class are highly misleading in the case of liberalism. Rather, I suggest, the contradictions and violence of the political system are often pushed to the social margins, the burdens of such contradictions falling on the lower classes. Thus, the dominant class, protected from the violence of its ideology, is far more hegemonically inculcated than those who have long encountered the strong arm of the state.
Finally, I take up the broader implications of conscientious objection and consider how this phenomenon exposes a number of false promises made by state. One is the promise of autonomous conscience. Rather than a resolute act of unambiguous conscience, military refusal is shown to be messy and compromising. Israeli objectors struggle deeply with the tensions of obligation to conscience and citizenship obligations, but do so under a misleading expectation of dissent without social sanction. Many conscientious objectors have become disillusioned with the promise of Zionism as a solution to the “Jewish question”—a false promise of permanent security, absolute belonging, and cultural fulfillment. This is the heroic promise of the nation-state, offered in exchange for sacrifice, an economy of negation. That military service can be an ethical system of sacrifice is yet another false promise. It is a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop. The state is driven by realism combined with a desire for power and territory as opposed to ethical principles, and as such cannot protect or facilitate an ethical tradition. Ultimately, I hope in what follows engage the entailments of national citizenship, the shuffling of yokes and burdens between consent and dissent, and the possible openings these obligations engender.
1
The Interrupted Sacrifice
On the route to the Palestinian West Bank village of Susiya, the mood in the bus was excited and jovial. I was traveling with a group of Israeli conscientious objectors from Combatants for Peace (CFP) to meet with Palestinian ex-fighters, members of the same activist organization. At their meetings, Israelis and Palestinians tell their life stories and how they came to reject a militarized solution to the conflict between their two peoples. As we made our way out of southern Jerusalem and crossed into the Palestinian West Bank, the trip turned into a macabre guided tour of the memory sites of the Israelis’ experiences as soldiers. “You see over there,” Avi said, jumping up from his seat and jabbing his finger vigorously at the window, “behind the wall, you can see through the gap. Now! That one! We demolished the house there like two or three times.” Those who had served in the region between Jerusalem and our destination in the South Hebron hills pointed out the locations of incidents that had contributed to their refusal to continue military service. They told each other war stories in military vernacular, as many Israeli men enjoy doing; however, their disclosure of violent encounters in blunt terms gave their stories an uncanny twist.1 As many of their peers were waking up for a leisurely Saturday morning, these former elite combat soldiers, for whom the military had been a central part of their lives, were now en route to a solidarity event in a small Palestinian village.
I met Avi early in my fieldwork. He was an active member of Combatants for Peace and was often present at the events. When I would meet with him alone, outside CFP activities, he would express ambivalence about whether he would be attending the next event, saying he wanted to spend time with his young daughter. In the end, however, almost every time, he would be there, giving me a guilty grin and joking that he couldn’t stay away. These events were very important to the people I worked with, all of whom invested considerable amounts of their time in these activities. On that weekend and others, I had arrived early in the morning at the Tel Aviv central train station with a thermos of coffee and a few candy bars for the trip through Jerusalem and into “the territories” (ha’shetachim). I would go with them on their trips to the West Bank for meetings with their Palestinian counterparts in the organization or on solidarity events. Nearly all the Jewish members of the group had refused their service in years previous, especially during the wave of refusals in 2002 and 2003. Refusal by qualified individuals to perform military service is illegal, and all of my interlocutors among the former soldiers on the bus had spent time in military prison for their decision, their terms ranging from a few weeks to a year. They also had been dismissed from the military. Many felt, however, that their biggest punishment was social, harsh rejections by loved ones and strangers alike who could not accept what they had done. Despite this, they persisted in their activist activities, and in doing so calling often negative attention to themselves.
Heavy sacrifices are demanded of those who live in the region of Israel and Palestine, a site of struggle over land as well as over notions of community, belonging, and citizenship. In Israel, the main sacrificial economy is conducted through military service, in which the risk and time of service is exchanged for more complete citizenship (Peled and Shafir 1996, 1998) and moral capital (Klein 1999). Military service plays a central and much-discussed role in Israeli society, and the performance of this duty is foundational to the Israeli understanding of national community and belonging. However, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) noted, all hegemonic ideals are fragile, and thus the demand for sacrifice is renewed, resubstantialized, defended, and modified with each new generation.
There has been a