Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss

      Introduction

      Conscience twinges. It pinches, tugs, stabs and pricks. It must be wrestled with, when one is not plagued by it. It calls and dictates. It is a worm, and a court. Conscience is articulated in these ways as the most solitary, individual, and idiosyncratic of faculties. Yet, as both a personal ethical experience and a potent public discourse, conscience also dramatically reshapes the social terrain. Conscience can make the illegal legal and the offensive admirable, or have the opposite effect. Beliefs regarding the inviolability of conscience in Western ethical traditions persist in close relation to idea that religious beliefs need to be protected and privileged above other social obligations. Despite these claims to precedence, conscience does not displace other social obligations, loyalties, responsibilities, and sacrifices that refuse to be slighted without consequence. The following ethnography of the social life of conscientious objection from military service in Israel exposes the tension between the liberal protections of individual rights the state provides and an idea of citizenship that requires great and specific sacrifices. The links between citizenship and sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. Although conscience is a strong cultural claim, carrying the weight of its long and exalted philosophical genealogy through Socrates, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, military refusal challenges Israeli state sovereignty in a fundamental way. It questions the state’s moral authority and challenges the state’s coercive capabilities. Yet conscience sits precariously and partially outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. The war of position described in what follows, over the ideal relationship between the ethics of the individual, the community, and the state,¹ has many guises, sometimes strategic, sometimes visceral, and often agonizingly played out in the most intimate of spaces.

      Conscientious objection forces a number of difficult questions to the fore. What do religious and ethnic belonging entail? Why is it legitimate for the state to require you to risk your life in war, but illegitimate to ask you to risk your conscience? Refusal of military service in Israel reflects more than ethical qualms over violence: it also reflects the central ontology of the Israeli state and its notions of community, loyalty, obligation, and betrayal always tied to the question of Palestine. The social negotiation of conscientious objection takes place with a constant eye to the Palestinian other, who is the ethical object of refusal. This dissent is with regard not only to the occupation, but also to broader beliefs on ethical responsibility to others and the limits of such responsibility. Many who have investigated zones of conflict are familiar with the ideological and discursive processes that can lead an individual to take part in violence, such as dehumanization and the cultivation of fear. On the contrary, conscientious objection investigates whether an individual is allowed—ethically, socially, legally, or politically—to refuse participation in sanctioned violence.

      Conscientious objection in Israel unearths fundamental tensions regarding social relationships and obligations in modern rights-oriented democracies. Claims of conscience expose a different side of the individual’s responsibility to the group than accounts of modern politics usually consider. Many anthropological accounts focus on the centrality of rights-centered individualism to Western conceptions of personhood. Their point is well taken that supposedly neutral secular liberalism in fact harbors a cultural specificity that privileges the individual and establishes separate realms for the private and the public, thus creating an uninhabitable space for those whose cultural traditions do not lend themselves to such divisions. Yet conscientious objection reveals the ways the individual in a liberal democracy is still deeply bound by communal obligations. The demand for great sacrifice in the nation state is strong and insistent. The flag of conscience offers some uneven and fragmentary protection, but claims are certainly not taken at face value. Soldiers who claim conscience may not be immediately sent to jail, but they often pay a heavy price. Much of their fate lies in their ability to defend their actions as they are called to appear in trials of conscience,