Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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photograph is not an unproblematized celebration of sacrifice. Using the Christian metaphor, it suggests inauthenticity for Jewish culture and plays with the dichotomy of voluntary self-sacrifice and communal betrayal of the individual. Criticism of sacrifice through military service began in earnest in the 1970s. Iconic authors such as Amos Oz, Yehuda Amihai, Yitzhak Laor, and A. B. Yehoshua have all used the idiom of akedat Yitzhak to criticize the nation’s demand for sacrifice from its youth, pathologizing the intergenerational relations it implies as well as pointing out the impossibility of normalization (a high Zionist goal) under conditions of continual self-sacrifice. Literary scholars understand this criticism as representative of larger shifts in the ethos of Israeli society away from a veneration of sacrifice. Despite forty years of intermittent critique, sacrifice through military service continues. Likewise, despite the increased critical awareness that class, ethnic, and gender boundaries are created through the hierarchy of sacrifice in the military, these are far from being overturned. There are, then, many relationships to, and investments in, the Israeli state’s framing of good citizenship through the national sacrificial economy.
Living the Nation
Avi grew up in a middle-class family in a suburb of Tel Aviv, where he still lives with his wife and daughter. He is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, Jews from central Europe. He had been a commando and refused in 2002, together with many of his fellow commandos. Avi was very active in the Combatants for Peace organization. In 1990, at age seventeen, his heroic ambitions were informed by a romantic attitude toward the idea of communal sacrifice. This was partly because he had been exposed almost exclusively to the sincere veneration of military sacrifice as presented in public and educational events and activities of commemoration, had not yet encountered critical literature, and was relatively unaffected by the ongoing disenchantment with sacrifice in the arts. But he also recognized that joining the military was his rite of passage into full participation in Israeli society, and he pursued it with vigor. Avi recognized that he would accumulate both tangible and intangible benefits through military service. He spoke to me at length about the ways in which he saw his masculinity and citizenship as dependent on service. He knew that his service would endow him with moral worth and respect and transform his moral status in society, as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (1981) insist sacrifice is meant to do. Iris Jean-Klein (2000, 2001) demonstrated how the domestically based nationalist initiatives of ordinary persons, everyday and self-motivated forms of inculcation with nationalistic ideals in Palestine, are often more significant than organized initiatives. Considering the eternal question of why people would agree to kill or die for the nation-state, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985: 386) suggest that such willingness is partly due to strategies of substantialization by which the obligatory is converted into the desirable. Though Avi’s service was legally required, he pursued it with vigor because of the many benefits of participation.
In joining an elite unit, Avi was also signaling high ambitions vis-à-vis a hierarchy of substitutions in military sacrifice. Not all service is the same, and therefore not all endows the same degree of transformation in moral status. Military service entails hierarchies of sacrificial value, as is common to organized sacrificial practice (Lambek 2007; Willerslev 2009). In making great sacrifice in the Israeli military, one does not seek out death or injury; however, the sacrifice is greater with greater loss in an economy of negation. Taking on what is socially recognized as additional risk, physical and mental agony, discomfort, and time contributes to the sacrificial hierarchy of military positions. Avi could have taken an office job close to home, which would have involved little danger and hardly any responsibility and would have allowed him to go home at the end of each day, but he told me he never considered such a position. Intelligence work carried somewhat more cachet, but the real elite choice was combat duty. Likewise, not all combat duty is equal; jobs such as pilot and commando carry far more prestige and a greater sense of exclusivity than rank-and-file positions do because they are more physically and intellectually challenging, a hierarchy well recognized throughout society (Kimmerling 2009).
Avi went through an excruciating selection process and subsequent training to become a commando. He would often in conversation bring up his mindset when he joined the army as a teenager, sometimes sarcastically referencing his naïveté, though sometimes with chastened esteem for his intentions (for further discussion of the role of the military in society, see Helman 2000; Ben-Eliezer 1998). On one of the latter occasions, during a conversation over a cup of instant coffee, he told me,
I wanted to give the most.… I felt like I needed to do the most that I was capable of. I believed that I should give the most, because that was like … an investment, that would carry through the rest of my life. So I only saw the possibility of giving 100 or 110 percent. But also, in my family there was a very big emphasis on volunteerism, trying to do the most you can without counting points, which you know, is big in the Israeli ethos as well. I would volunteer with my mother a lot, helping poor families or new immigrants [olim chadashim]. I really got from my parents, and also my teachers, that, because this is a new country, that everyone needs to give up a lot, put in a lot of effort for the experiment to work. I thought if I did something really hard, then my generation could set the country straight, make it stable and like … permanent or something. And I could be a hero in the process, so I saw no downside at all.
His words resonate with Jean-Klein’s (2001) claims that nationalization often allows people to realize their fantasies as well as fulfill their political-moral commitment, which are often intertwined. Avi and other refusers found in the hegemonic demand for military service a coincidence of their fantasies, their cultural values, and a chance to advance their moral worth.
Such sacrifice is a kind of mediated self-sacrifice. The “mere” and “voluntary” acceptance of this risk is a sacrifice in and of itself, a precondition for the amplified possibility of injury or death. This sacrifice is not selfless as much as it is overdetermined by what I call a coincidence of the good in society around military service as communal sacrifice. For the individual, the sacrificial economy involves benefits to material and moral worth from participation. Hubert and Mauss note that abnegation in sacrifice and its rhetoric are not without their rewards: “The sacrificer gives up something of himself, the victim, but does not give himself. Prudently he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive” (1981: 100). As Foucault’s (1991) descriptions of the self-disciplining associated with good citizenship practices make clear, however, there are likewise benefits to the state’s ability to govern. In the Israeli case, the performance of military service is encouraged by state educational initiatives and widespread social pressure to do the most to serve society, an ethic of volunteerism, the moral virtue of difficult service, and benefits to masculinity as well as personal career ambition and the social respectability that accompanies service in Israeli society.
Avi would often refer to combat soldiering as though it were coterminous with Israeli citizenship, referring to his service in an elite unit as the universal Israeli experience, as most Israelis do whether they have had this experience. In fact, combat roles are taken by only some 10 percent of Israelis, and even fewer serve in elite units. The ideal combat soldier and, thus the Israeli ideal as described by Meira Weiss (2005), is Ashkenazi, male, physically able, and attractive. Tamar Katriel describes the demographic group of soldiers like my interlocutors as “elite pioneers from Eastern and Central Europe for whom the official tale of Zionist settlement has served as a powerful self-defining and self-legitimizing social discourse” (1997: 150). Reciprocally, Danny Kaplan (2008: 418) demonstrates the national emotional investment in the welfare of this hegemonic group of Ashkenazi men, especially when engaged in the sacrificial economy of military service.3 Many Israelis, and many combat soldiers, do not fit this description, but nearly all of my interlocutors conformed to this mythic ideal, though they avoided discussion of their demographic homogeneity. Their uncomplicated relationship to the national ideal of sacrifice allows them to relate to this ideal without self-doubt. This means that their inculcation was very deep and enmeshed with their sense of identity. The official narrative of the state, with its European past and New Jew present, is also their personal narrative. For those who are not part of the hegemonic group, the experience of personal divergence from the ideal—be it a family history in the Middle East, a disability, not being Jewish, or being an immigrant—is noticeable from an early age and will always be an inherent