Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
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origin), especially among those who had already been in the army. Being from the more dominant and privileged of the Jewish groups tied my interlocutors to the symbolic capital of the state’s Ashkenazi pioneers, who take credit for the creation and implementation of the Zionist project. Mizrahis (Jews from the Middle East) and other minority Jewish groups arrived later on and are not credited with this foundational history, are often in more peripheral areas (as a result of government policy), and bear—as people from Arab countries—the added pressure not to appear as Arab sympathizers. Many Mizrahis reject military service for a variety of ethical and principled reasons, though they often do not invoke the language of conscience, and thus are usually punished for disobedience in a routine way and receive no media attention (see Amor 2010). These other “refusers” do come into my account.7 They go to the same jails as self-declared conscientious objectors, with whom they have interesting points of resonance and discord. Questions of the army, national defense, Jewish-Arab relations, and relationships between men and women are among the many topics they discuss in their shared time of incarceration.
Baruch Kimmerling notes that the dominance of the secular Ashkenazi upper middle class has been under threat for years, targeted by demands for social justice and equality from oppressed groups, and suggests that their hegemony broke following the 1967 war (2001).8 Yet this group maintains a great deal of economic privilege, bureaucratic competence, and symbolic capital derived from associations with an idealized Europe, as well as the sacrifices of the Holocaust and Israel’s War of Independence. The ethnography here shows that this privilege contributes greatly to their ability to publicly refuse military service. They conceptualize and discuss themselves in the vocabulary of conscience. They approach and attract the media with articulate and compelling statements that are repeated and reproduced. They organize their representation in groups. Unlike ethnographies of marginality that have appeared in recent years, I attempt to do anthropology in the center, close to the bone of state power (for compelling examples of the ethnography of marginality, see Tsing 1993; Das and Poole 2004). In doing so, I follow Ann Stoler’s lead in researching “along the archival grain” (2010). This approach suggests that there is no need to read the state against itself. Rather, Stoler explains, in reading that is in line with the state’s intentions, contradictions and anxieties emerge on their own. My interlocutors’ experiences are to a large extent manifestations of such contradictions and anxieties, their dissent not being a foreign influence, but the result of contradictory political and ethical messages they have received from official and hegemonic sources. At the same time, the following chapters make plain that this group’s status and abilities are in many senses a double-edged sword. The social understanding of conscience in Israel and elsewhere considers an authentic conscience instinctual, unstudied, and visceral. The rhetorical and analytical abilities of conscientious objectors are frequently judged to be scripted and pretentious, however, and fail to convince their audience of their sincerity. Israeli conscientious objectors try to persuasively perform what they believe, but they often create skepticism by appearing too smooth, too educated, and too self-conscious of their interests. This lack of control has implications for questions of hegemony, specifically, the limits of typically hegemonic identities and characteristics.
The dynamics of liberalism play a significant role in this account. An extended discussion of liberalism might surprise anyone familiar with the Israeli state, and it should. As many, notably Uri Ben-Eliezer, have pointed out, Israel is not liberal (1993). It has many characteristics of European Republicanism in being centered on civic participation as the basis for citizenship, mostly through military service. Oren Yiftachel has correctly noted that Israel is in fact an ethnocracy, which distributes both rights and privileges based on ethnic membership and policies of Judaization of the public space (2002). Moreover, commentators have noted that recent moves to legally incorporate the Occupied Territories, combined with increasing restrictions on freedom of expression, make the Israeli regime look less liberal and less democratic. We should nonetheless give careful consideration to the implications of conscientious objection on liberalism for a number of reasons.
One is that conscience, the reason for military refusal and the basis of the public claims for protection made by conscientious objectors, is deeply bound in the history of liberalism. Specifically, conscience and liberalism emerged hand in hand as part of European political philosophy that proffered the self-defining morally autonomous individual. Such an individual is ultimately responsible for his or her acts and behaviors, and conscience is a key concept to ensure that accountability falls on the individual and nowhere else. Wendy Brown shows that tolerance for a dissenting conscience follows from the “moral autonomy of the individual at the heart of liberal tolerance discourse” (2006: 7). Whereas Ottoman tolerance divided societies into communities based on religion, Western tolerance put an “emphasis on individual conscience” (9). This political tradition has clearly been influential in forming the subjectivities of conscientious objectors who invoke these discourses in their demands for political recognition. It is also represented in the political and institutional culture of the Israeli state.
Liberalism and tolerance reflect a significant part of the intellectual genealogy of the state’s European founders, and as such made their way into Israeli law and policy. Israel’s declaration of independence promises “complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” showing that, among other concerns, liberal values played a part in the early efforts to define the state. This stream of thought conflicted with the desire for an ethnically homogeneous society, and the tension of a self-defined Jewish and democratic state has never been resolved. In a moment, I discuss how these liberal values held by early legislators were manifested in partial protections for conscientious objection. The second reason we should consider liberalism is that the state represents itself as a Western-style liberal democracy. At various times, right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that “Israel is unique in the Middle East for having a vibrant, liberal democracy, where women are equal, minorities are free and where all are subjects to the rule of law” (Benari 2012); and that “Israel is a Western liberal democracy and as such its public space is open and safe for all, men and women” (Ravid 2011). My account is less concerned with whether we should accept these claims and more with the meanings they try to convey, what they serve to legitimate, and what political possibilities they open and foreclose.
The final and probably most important reason that we should pay close attention to dynamics of liberalism is that the experience of a liberal social order is the dominant experience of my interlocutors and greatly shapes their subjectivities. Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir have shown in their book This Regime Which Is Not One that the occupation regime that governs the Palestinian territories, clearly neither liberal nor democratic, should be thought of as part and parcel of the Israeli regime, which claims to be liberal and democratic. While keeping this entwinement in our minds, we at the same time must address the ways in which different groups are exposed to different faces of the regime. As we see in the ethnography, my interlocutors were encultured into liberal bureaucratic systems dependent on principles of self-regulation and upright self-conduct (Foucault 1991b: 87–104; Rose 1998). Until their refusal, their conformity with expectations was based on the internalization of hegemonic values and ambitious pursuit of their fulfillment. Others—like Palestinians, but also to some extent, Mizrahis and other Jewish others—face a more directly disciplining state. The state found little point in exposing its ideal citizens, beneficiaries of its ethnic hierarchy—Jewish, economically productive, European, and ideologically convicted—to the strong arm of the state.
As such, my interlocutors’ main exposures at home, in school, and in their social circles were to liberal values. Thus, with state encouragement, my interlocutors have largely liberal subjectivities. By this, I mean that the liberal understandings of the individual, autonomy, and responsibility are fundamental to their worldviews and to their conscientious refusals to serve. Elizabeth Povinelli uses the term autological subject to refer to the discourses and practices that invoke such an autonomous and self-determining subject (2006). Of course, such a subject cannot actually exist, but the expectations and ideal of being such a subject frequently weighed on my interlocutors, especially in their conscious reflections on their ethical responsibility. It was only in later stages of adulthood that they began to discover, and more deeply understand, the ethnocratic aspects of the state and the very different experiences