Conscientious Objectors in Israel. Erica Weiss
potentially. Because of the basic realities of combat and warfare, the state cannot be content with lesser substitutions and tries to cultivate willingness to undertake the ultimate sacrifice. A classic example is the myth of Joseph Trumpeldor, an early Zionist from Russia who died defending the Tel Hai settlement and became a national hero. According to legend, his dying words were “Never mind, it is good to die for our country.” This legend has been used to inspire young people with nationalist sentiment and sacrificial willingness. Yet the Realpolitik ambitions of military actions, and the suspicion that soldiers are more pawns of the state than its heroes, as the state claims, manifests in cynical suspicion of state motives.
I argue that even while people participate in this economy of sacrifice through military service in Israel, there is a great deal of ambivalence and apprehension with regard to the problematic distortions I discuss. Throughout this ethnography, I seek to show that this unease not only is manifest in the crisis of conscience of my interlocutors, but also bubbles to the surface frequently in popular culture in ways that challenge the official narrative and mock the call for self-sacrifice in the military as cynical and manipulative. Thus there are many jokes about Trumpeldor. Many are sexual. One claims that his last words were not nationalist sentiment, and not in Hebrew, but rather yob tvoyu mat (fuck your mother) in Russian. Such jokes and public slights discussed in this ethnography go beyond the slaying of sacred cows. Often they reveal the nature of the unease that people have with the sacrificial economy and its cynical nature. As mentioned, the myth most commonly used both for and against the sacrificial economy has been the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. It is used to both promote and disparage the continued call for sacrifice for the nation-state. Odes to self-sacrifice have been written through this metaphor, but it has also become a locus for the festering anxiety of society with military service. The following poem by the well-known Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai reminds us that the biblical myth of sacrifice was based on substitution. Even in the original myth, God did not allow human sacrifice to take place. Both Abraham and Isaac went home, unlike modern Isaacs. It immediately raises a question: if God did not allow human sacrifice for himself, is the state a greater God for demanding it, or merely a false idol?
THE REAL HERO
Yehuda Amichai
The real hero of the Isaac story was the ram,
who didn’t know about the conspiracy between the others.
As if he had volunteered to die instead of Isaac.
I want to sing a song in his memory—
about his curly wool and his human eyes,
about the horns that were silent on his living head,
and how they made those horns into shofars when he was slaughtered
to sound their battle cries
or to blare out their obscene joy.
I want to remember the last frame
like a photo in an elegant fashion magazine:
the young man tanned and manicured in his jazzy suit
and beside him the angel, dressed for a party
in a long silk gown,
both of them empty-eyed, looking
at two empty places,
and behind them, like a colored backdrop, the ram,
caught in the thicket before the slaughter.
The thicket was his last friend.
The angel went home.
Isaac went home.
Abraham and God had gone long before.
But the real hero of the Isaac story
was the ram.11 (Amichai 1996: 156–157)
Both the politics of the state, as well as those of resistance to the state, are organized by the sacrificial economy in their rationalities of legitimation and justification. Just as a soldier giving his or her life for the state is sanctified in the national politics of martyrdom, so the sacrifices of the resistance are measured in the negative economy. Those who sit in jail or lose their employment receive the most social respect for their commitment to the cause. That political intervention can be made only through sacrifice has strong implications regarding the expectations of modern citizenship. It is commonly thought that voting and civic engagement are key to political influence in modern democracies. Moreover, citizenship in rights-oriented societies is often promoted by such states as protection from the cultural and thick kinship ties that hold those in nonliberal societies (Povinelli 2006). Military service and its refusal reveal the communal obligations that remain hidden at the heart of modern citizenship, however. Such sacrificial obligations assumed to be limited to simpler kinship-based societies are in fact very much part of modern reality. I suggest that modern states can often demand more than face-to-face societies. Although religion, which regulates sacrifice in ritual, often sets clear limits to the personal cost of sacrifice, there is no limit to the self-sacrifice possible through military service. In the imagined community of the nation state, sacrifice has lost all moderation, blurring the expectations and limits of responsibility, as well as the object of responsibility, be it the family, the co-ethnic, the coreligionist, the fellow citizen, the fellow human.
In the first two chapters, I describe my fieldwork with the older generation of conscientious objectors who refused after serving in the military for a number of years. In the first chapter, I consider their path to the ethical and ontological crisis that ended in their refusal, and, in the second chapter, I consider the ways this group of refusers try to give account for their controversial acts to Israeli society, as well as to change the norms that prevent their reintegration. Chapter 1 discusses why the most elite and dedicated soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces were the ones who ultimately became conscientious objectors. The cultural idiom of sacrifice, the binding of Isaac, casts the Israeli soldier as sacrificial victim. However, conscientious objectors’ experiences with their own violence against Palestinians contradicted this conviction and shook their understanding of their actions as soldiers. This contradiction precipitated a crisis of conscience. I argue that because the hegemonic inculcation of these young people was with respect to the sacrificial moral economy, and not to the state as supersubject, resistance was possible. This case prompts a reconsideration of understandings of the relationship between hegemonic inculcation and resistance. Specifically, I claim that the seeds of resistance are often found within hegemonic inculcation, especially when power is used cynically.
Chapter 2 takes up the public spectacle of confession, as performed by the conscientious objector group Combatants for Peace. Having abandoned the mainstream sacrificial economy of military service, my interlocutors struggle for moral influence on their own terms, still governed by the logics of sacrifice. This chapter explores the prospects and pitfalls of persuasion in activism for moral change. During these public events, former soldiers confess to violent encounters with Palestinian civilians. They describe their moments of epiphany in which “military logic” was broken and they saw themselves as the aggressor through the eyes of the Palestinian other. I analyze the structural, linguistic, and rhetorical techniques and characteristics of these confessions, which, like many forms of public confession, are constructed for the purpose of persuasion and moral conversion. In these confessions, the narrators use specific language and examples to upset and restructure assumptions of innocence and guilt to their Israeli audience. As a result, their confessions are in essence an accusation against both audience members who still serve in the military and the state. Through this clandestine substitution of meaning, the ex-soldiers exploit one of the greatest vulnerabilities of the state: its dependence on voluntary sacrifice to maintain its coercive force.
The third and fourth chapters move to consider the younger group of conscientious objectors who decide to refuse service before ever enlisting. The third chapter considers their path to refusal and the social sanctions they experience, the fourth how they attempt to explain and defend their acts as a matter of conscience,