their stories an uncanny twist.1 As many of their peers were waking up for a leisurely Saturday morning, these former elite combat soldiers, for whom the military had been a central part of their lives, were now en route to a solidarity event in a small Palestinian village.
I met Avi early in my fieldwork. He was an active member of Combatants for Peace and was often present at the events. When I would meet with him alone, outside CFP activities, he would express ambivalence about whether he would be attending the next event, saying he wanted to spend time with his young daughter. In the end, however, almost every time, he would be there, giving me a guilty grin and joking that he couldn’t stay away. These events were very important to the people I worked with, all of whom invested considerable amounts of their time in these activities. On that weekend and others, I had arrived early in the morning at the Tel Aviv central train station with a thermos of coffee and a few candy bars for the trip through Jerusalem and into “the territories” (ha’shetachim). I would go with them on their trips to the West Bank for meetings with their Palestinian counterparts in the organization or on solidarity events. Nearly all the Jewish members of the group had refused their service in years previous, especially during the wave of refusals in 2002 and 2003. Refusal by qualified individuals to perform military service is illegal, and all of my interlocutors among the former soldiers on the bus had spent time in military prison for their decision, their terms ranging from a few weeks to a year. They also had been dismissed from the military. Many felt, however, that their biggest punishment was social, harsh rejections by loved ones and strangers alike who could not accept what they had done. Despite this, they persisted in their activist activities, and in doing so calling often negative attention to themselves.
Heavy sacrifices are demanded of those who live in the region of Israel and Palestine, a site of struggle over land as well as over notions of community, belonging, and citizenship. In Israel, the main sacrificial economy is conducted through military service, in which the risk and time of service is exchanged for more complete citizenship (Peled and Shafir 1996, 1998) and moral capital (Klein 1999). Military service plays a central and much-discussed role in Israeli society, and the performance of this duty is foundational to the Israeli understanding of national community and belonging. However, as Antonio Gramsci (1971) noted, all hegemonic ideals are fragile, and thus the demand for sacrifice is renewed, resubstantialized, defended, and modified with each new generation.
There has been a long engagement in anthropology, as well as among some extradisciplinary predecessors and contributors, with research that implicitly and explicitly questions the legitimacy of state power. This questioning comes to a large extent in revealing, in full view, the strategies and techniques of state self-legitimization, methods of legitimizing power and violence, and, most damaging of all, the sleight of hand in making state power seem natural and pointing out the metaphorical man behind the curtain. Gramsci’s conceptualization of hegemony and its mechanisms has had long-lasting impact in the field. Other scholars have revealed state techniques of inclusion and exclusion on grounds of ethnicity, gender, and language as well as the suffering and paradoxes of agency that result from marginalization (see Appadurai 2003; Brown 1995; Das and Poole 2004; Guha and Spivak 1988). Meanwhile, several anthropologists have been explicit in their attempts to break the “spell” that the state seems to assert (see Appadurai 1993; Mbembé 1992; Taussig 1992). For example, James Scott has questioned the legitimacy of state power by considering the everyday methods by which people evade its governance and control over their lives (see Scott 1987, 1990, 2009). This work has dovetailed with and inspired much anthropological work on resistance by indigenous and marginalized communities. By and large, within this ongoing dialogue, scholars share a perspective that hegemonic inculcation is a more or less effective tool of state power and that resistance to state power comes either from those who are beyond the hegemonic reach of the state, from alternative or oppositional traditions, or who break the spell of state hegemony, whether in terms of older ideas of class consciousness or more modern conceptions that do not posit an a priori political form of consciousness.
In this chapter, I try to explain the context and process by which elite, dedicated soldiers came to resist the state through military refusal. Contrary to the social expectation that these soldiers would be the last to publicly refuse, I show why they were, in fact, the most likely to do so by virtue of their state-encouraged investment in the national narrative and the state-sponsored sacrificial economy of military service. This case prompts a reconsideration of anthropological understandings of the relationship between hegemonic inculcation and resistance. Resistance to the state and its authority is generally considered to come either from those outside its hegemonic or disciplining sphere or from those who fall short of state expectations of the ideal subjectivity for good citizenship. However, this case demonstrates that accepting and identifying with the state-supported hegemonic ideal does not preclude resisting the state. As scholars, we cannot ask only to what degree subjects subscribe to hegemonic values or about the extent of nationalist inculcation; we must also ask about the ideals to which, specifically, this identification and loyalty are directed. I find that inculcation does not imply loyalty to the state as super-subject but, rather, loyalty to the sacrificial moral economy, which, though emphasized through national initiatives as a cornerstone of good citizenship, engenders a turn of events that the state neither anticipated nor desired. Rather, the sacrificial economy acts as a golem, taking on a life of its own against the state that nurtured it in so many ways.
The 2002 and 2003 waves of refusals to perform military service surprised and beleaguered the Israeli Defense Forces. The refusals were distinguished by their occurrence in the higher ranks of the military, for example, by Brigadier General Yiftah Spector and many other officers. These conscientious objectors, including my interlocutors, were mostly elite combat soldiers, reservists in their twenties and thirties sent to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Elite, here, refers to soldiers selected for volunteer special forces combat units, which hold a great deal of prestige for the difficulty and responsibility of the jobs. Their conscientious refusal to serve was, for most of society, unexpected because all indications had been that these soldiers were the most enthusiastic and the most dedicated among their peers to the sacrificial act of military service. They had been elevated to ideal types of soldiering, praised, iconized, and entrusted with the highest levels of responsibility. They were, as a military prosecutor told me, the face of the Israeli Defense Forces. Although the military and most politicians tried to limit the political fallout of their unexpected refusals, they were caught off guard. The refusals dealt a blow to mainstream confidence in the moral soundness of the nation’s elite soldiers, in the sense of collective conscience regarding military service and the military’s claims of purity of arms (tohar ha’neshek), as asserted in the Israeli Defense Forces doctrine of ethics.
The Sacrificial Idiom in Israeli Society
The idiom of sacrifice in Israeli society posits the soldier as sacrificial victim. The biblical story of akedat Yitzhak, or the binding of Isaac, is the dominant metaphor for discussing military service in Israel, with the soldier imagined as Isaac. This metaphor is found extensively in public discourse as well as the arts. Some scholars go so far as to claim that it is primarily through this myth that Israeli society speaks to itself (Sagi 1998; Weiss 1991). In the story, told in Genesis 22, God calls on Abraham to bring his beloved son Isaac to Mount Moriah, bind him, and sacrifice him. Abraham obeys, but at the last moment, he is interrupted by an angel of God, who tells him not to kill Isaac. Abraham, instead, finds a ram, which he sacrifices in substitution. God informs Abraham that, because he has demonstrated his faith and obedience, “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me” (Genesis 22:17–18). Abraham then founds a community in Beer Sheva.2 The significance of this story for the metaphor of Jewish redemption in Israel through sacrifice is readily apparent. The theme of sacrifice leading to redemption and the foundation of a blessed and invulnerable nation clearly resonated with the Zionist ideology of redeeming the land of Israel and with Zionist leaders calling for difficult sacrifices from the new citizens of the fledgling nation engaged in near-constant
