demand for military service a coincidence of their fantasies, their cultural values, and a chance to advance their moral worth.
Such sacrifice is a kind of mediated self-sacrifice. The “mere” and “voluntary” acceptance of this risk is a sacrifice in and of itself, a precondition for the amplified possibility of injury or death. This sacrifice is not selfless as much as it is overdetermined by what I call a coincidence of the good in society around military service as communal sacrifice. For the individual, the sacrificial economy involves benefits to material and moral worth from participation. Hubert and Mauss note that abnegation in sacrifice and its rhetoric are not without their rewards: “The sacrificer gives up something of himself, the victim, but does not give himself. Prudently he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive” (1981: 100). As Foucault’s (1991) descriptions of the self-disciplining associated with good citizenship practices make clear, however, there are likewise benefits to the state’s ability to govern. In the Israeli case, the performance of military service is encouraged by state educational initiatives and widespread social pressure to do the most to serve society, an ethic of volunteerism, the moral virtue of difficult service, and benefits to masculinity as well as personal career ambition and the social respectability that accompanies service in Israeli society.
Avi would often refer to combat soldiering as though it were coterminous with Israeli citizenship, referring to his service in an elite unit as the universal Israeli experience, as most Israelis do whether they have had this experience. In fact, combat roles are taken by only some 10 percent of Israelis, and even fewer serve in elite units. The ideal combat soldier and, thus the Israeli ideal as described by Meira Weiss (2005), is Ashkenazi, male, physically able, and attractive. Tamar Katriel describes the demographic group of soldiers like my interlocutors as “elite pioneers from Eastern and Central Europe for whom the official tale of Zionist settlement has served as a powerful self-defining and self-legitimizing social discourse” (1997: 150). Reciprocally, Danny Kaplan (2008: 418) demonstrates the national emotional investment in the welfare of this hegemonic group of Ashkenazi men, especially when engaged in the sacrificial economy of military service.3 Many Israelis, and many combat soldiers, do not fit this description, but nearly all of my interlocutors conformed to this mythic ideal, though they avoided discussion of their demographic homogeneity. Their uncomplicated relationship to the national ideal of sacrifice allows them to relate to this ideal without self-doubt. This means that their inculcation was very deep and enmeshed with their sense of identity. The official narrative of the state, with its European past and New Jew present, is also their personal narrative. For those who are not part of the hegemonic group, the experience of personal divergence from the ideal—be it a family history in the Middle East, a disability, not being Jewish, or being an immigrant—is noticeable from an early age and will always be an inherent obstacle to complete identification with the national ideal. 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,
