Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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Despite demonstrations that combat casualties are increasingly from peripheral social groups (Levy 2006), such groups remain peripheral. All military positions are open to all, and acceptance is meritocratic; however, as is the case in U.S. universities, admission often goes to those who were raised with opportunities and is granted with an eye to satisfying institutional ideals.4
Refusers most often described their intentions in joining the army as “wanting to be a hero,” and, in fact, two documentary films that take up Israeli conscientious objection, I Wanted to Be a Hero (a 2004 Israeli film by Shiri Tzur) and Raised to Be Heroes (a 2006 Canadian film by Jack Silberman),5 are named according to this refrain. It is worth considering the subjectivity that informs an understanding of one’s actions as heroic. It is, I believe, best described by what Gayatri Spivak (2004) calls the ability to metonymize the self, to imagine the self in an active relationship with the state, the opposite of subalternity. The ability to engage in sacrifice, then, is not compatible with the subaltern subject position, because it involves an understanding of the self as hero and citizen and of self-sacrifice as a contribution to the (appreciative) community.
Many who would become refusers initially saw their military service as a personal intervention in the arc of Jewish history. When I asked Avi about his parents’ military experiences, he told me,
The truth is, my father had a very traumatic military experience. He was in war and he was traumatized by it, and for me this fact was always kind of embarrassing. Well, not really embarrassing exactly. I knew it wasn’t his fault. I guess I just saw it as his being too close to exile [galut], which made him kind of soft. You know Woody Allen? Not that extreme, but a little in that direction, with the glasses. (I got contacts.) Anyway, I felt like I was much stronger and with self-confidence, and I was jumping at military service as a chance to correct for my father’s service.
This idea of correcting the past, the personal past being deeply entwined with the national past, was very common. Many talked about feeling as if their service was a penance or even an atonement for their relatives who died in the Holocaust.
Dan was a pilot before he refused. Like Avi, he was Ashkenazi and from a middle-class family living in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. He also described his ethical intervention:
They teach you in school that since the Jews left Israel it has been one pogrom after another, only anti-Semitism everywhere. And then in the most shameful moment, the Holocaust [Shoah], only a few Jews in Warsaw even put up a fight, but it is too little too late. To me, I couldn’t understand why no one thought about fighting back a few thousand years ago! Only now do we have the self-respect to defend ourselves?!
Such statements clearly illustrate Spivak’s observations regarding metonymizing the self and the identification with history. They also resonate with Claudio Lomnitz-Adler’s (2003: 142) observation that national sacrifice is often imagined as an attempt to place oneself in the national narrative. The state is likewise invested in this project. Because military service is understood as sacrifice, the state must legitimize it in ethical terms. State discourse encouraging this identification is conveyed through a number of channels. Dan mentions schools and indeed education is one of the prime sites of inculcation. Learning that “since the Jews left Israel it has been one pogrom after another” is an example of the Zionist periodization of Jewish history that romanticized the early Israelites while belittling the two thousand years of Jewish life outside Israel. This narrative characterizes both ancient and modern Israel as authentic, strong, and secure, in contrast to Jewish life outside of Israel, which is stereotyped as adulterated, weak, and vulnerable. As we can see in Dan’s statement, this historicization legitimizes the state and gives ethical purchase to military service. History class, along with Bible studies, motherland studies (moledet), and geography, have since the beginning of the state been culled by educators to convey the Zionist worldview. One of the central concepts of this worldview is the idea of peoplehood or nation, called am in Hebrew. This concept groups people by ethnicity rather than geography or ideology, and attributes a common destiny and collective intentional to the group. It is used most commonly to describe the Jewish people, am yisrael (for an excellent exploration of this concept, see Dominguez 1989). It is central to Zionist education as a conceptual tool through which not only to explain Jews as a naturally cohesive national group, a difficult task considering the far-flung cultural backgrounds of Israelis, but also to naturalize its enemies into opposing groups.6 Am is part of a political discourse of peoplehood that regulates individual and collective experiences to be understood through the ethnic category. Thus, it is common for people in Israel to attribute collective intention, as in “the Arabs rejected the deal,” “the Jews demanded a period of calm,” “they do not value life,” or “Israel wants peace.”
In speaking with other conscientious objectors about the sources of their strong identification with the state and willingness to sacrifice, many referred to their children. Many had difficulty remembering the details of their early childhood educational experiences, but their political conscientiousness as refusers made them attuned to the role of the state in their children’s lives. On three occasions, refusers noted their distress when their children brought home pictures of smiling wholesome soldiers, either a handout or drawn by the child with the encouragement of the teachers. Others mentioned their discomfort that they lost domestic control over the meaning of Jewishness because of the way the state seemed to insert itself into Jewish holidays in school. Uri Ram similarly notes that “Israeli state ceremonies are imbued with Jewish religious symbols and Jewish religious holidays are today imbued with nation-state symbols” (2011: 21; see also Handelman 2004).
Discussing their teenage years, my interlocutors described the confluence of state and private influence that acted in harmony. Military officers were brought into the schools, and teachers brought students to military bases for exposure and training. Classes observed national commemorations celebrating military sacrifice and wrote letters and poem to personalize the experience. Nearly everyone participated in the Israeli Scouts (Ha’Tzofim), a Zionist youth movement that promoted a sense of volunteerism, leadership, a love of the land of Israel, and a strong sense of identification with their Jewish heritage understood in a secular way. For example, Dan recalled climbing to Masada with this group. Masada is a rock plateau near the Dead Sea, and was the site where the Jewish rebels resisted the Roman Empire after the destruction of the second temple. Understanding that they could no longer resist the Romans, the Jews committed mass suicide. Masada has become a site of pilgrimage for modern Israelis, who read in the plight of the rebels their own desires for freedom and political sovereignty (for more on Masada as an Israeli pilgrimage site, see Zerubavel 1997). Dan said,
We climbed all the way up there, and it was so hot, but the physical aspect of it only added to it. In that moment we were heroes, we were pioneers in the completely innocent and sincere (chen) in a way you cannot access as an adult. And when we got to the top they [the scouts leaders] told us to say “Masada will not fall again,” and we yelled it off the edge into the desert. They do it at exactly the right age, when you are so intense and sincere and you are looking for meaning. And even today that I would never bring my kids to Masada, it’s like, not an interpretation I can support, it still makes me emotional to remember it and how I felt.
Dan’s words indicate a strong identification with the hegemonic narrative of history and the need for an aggressive posture of self-defense, as taught through public education and fleshed out at home. In Israel, much of this emotional agency is developed at home, through family stories and losses. There could be no substitute for military service to fulfill what these soldiers believed was their authentic realization as post-Holocaust, native-born Israeli men. Using Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony as intellectual and moral leadership, or determining what is obvious and right, one sees that the historical imagining and subjectivity vis-à-vis sacrifice encouraged by the state is very much what these soldiers identified with and saw as building blocks of their self-worth.
The Interruption of the Sacrifice
These conscientious objectors all completed their basic three-year service and did reserve duty for several years before they ultimately decided to refuse, even though their disillusionment with their military service had begun soon after enlistment. For Avi, it began even before he