of the teachers. Others mentioned their discomfort that they lost domestic control over the meaning of Jewishness because of the way the state seemed to insert itself into Jewish holidays in school. Uri Ram similarly notes that “Israeli state ceremonies are imbued with Jewish religious symbols and Jewish religious holidays are today imbued with nation-state symbols” (2011: 21; see also Handelman 2004).
Discussing their teenage years, my interlocutors described the confluence of state and private influence that acted in harmony. Military officers were brought into the schools, and teachers brought students to military bases for exposure and training. Classes observed national commemorations celebrating military sacrifice and wrote letters and poem to personalize the experience. Nearly everyone participated in the Israeli Scouts (Ha’Tzofim), a Zionist youth movement that promoted a sense of volunteerism, leadership, a love of the land of Israel, and a strong sense of identification with their Jewish heritage understood in a secular way. For example, Dan recalled climbing to Masada with this group. Masada is a rock plateau near the Dead Sea, and was the site where the Jewish rebels resisted the Roman Empire after the destruction of the second temple. Understanding that they could no longer resist the Romans, the Jews committed mass suicide. Masada has become a site of pilgrimage for modern Israelis, who read in the plight of the rebels their own desires for freedom and political sovereignty (for more on Masada as an Israeli pilgrimage site, see Zerubavel 1997). Dan said,
We climbed all the way up there, and it was so hot, but the physical aspect of it only added to it. In that moment we were heroes, we were pioneers in the completely innocent and sincere (chen) in a way you cannot access as an adult. And when we got to the top they [the scouts leaders] told us to say “Masada will not fall again,” and we yelled it off the edge into the desert. They do it at exactly the right age, when you are so intense and sincere and you are looking for meaning. And even today that I would never bring my kids to Masada, it’s like, not an interpretation I can support, it still makes me emotional to remember it and how I felt.
Dan’s words indicate a strong identification with the hegemonic narrative of history and the need for an aggressive posture of self-defense, as taught through public education and fleshed out at home. In Israel, much of this emotional agency is developed at home, through family stories and losses. There could be no substitute for military service to fulfill what these soldiers believed was their authentic realization as post-Holocaust, native-born Israeli men. Using Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony as intellectual and moral leadership, or determining what is obvious and right, one sees that the historical imagining and subjectivity vis-à-vis sacrifice encouraged by the state is very much what these soldiers identified with and saw as building blocks of their self-worth.
The Interruption of the Sacrifice
These conscientious objectors all completed their basic three-year service and did reserve duty for several years before they ultimately decided to refuse, even though their disillusionment with their military service had begun soon after enlistment. For Avi, it began even before he was deployed.
I remember one of the very first days, they were handing out equipment, and they handed everyone a nightstick. It really surprised me, with the gun I had all these images of using it like in movies I had seen, but I couldn’t imagine using this nightstick. It seemed so barbaric! I thought about what it would be like to hit someone with it, and I pictured bones cracking under its force. I hated the thing and I decided I would never use it. Of course, later I did use it because often it is the appropriate weapon for a situation.
Refusers narrated the various ways in which their service did not fit their preconceptions about who the aggressor would be in the situations they encountered as well as about who would pay the price of their service. Uri’s experience did not match his expectations. Uri had Israeli parents but grew up partly in California, where he befriended many other children of Israeli parents, a small group of whom went to Israel to join the military instead of going to college. We spoke in English.
When I joined I expected missions to make sense, that we would go to find a specific terrorist, and deal with him professionally, effectively and surgically. But at some point, I began to realize that so many of the missions were arbitrary, and so messy. I remember going to this house looking for someone with a name given to us by intelligence. We got there and of course there were only women, kids, and old people there, because that’s what happened every time. We had to order the men and women apart, the kids were screaming, people crying, always the same. The next week we were given another name, but were dropped off at the same fucking house! There we are again with the same women, ordering them around all over again, in the same absurd ritual, like some choreographed dance. And I knew they recognized us. It was embarrassing! To be both incompetent and cruel … maybe one or the other [laughs]…. I really began to understand what was going on when my commander told me that it wasn’t a good thing if things were “too quiet.” I began to see in everything we did that the army was instigating conflict, not just responding defensively.
The distinction between instigation and response is a matter of moral significance for the Israeli military, which self-identifies and self-legitimates as an exclusively defensive force. Other refusers described being disturbed to discover that they had developed a slowly grown addiction to power.
For a long time, the refusers generally did not talk about such things with their fellow soldiers and would push their doubts out of their minds. Avi told himself, “You shouldn’t change your beliefs about everything all at once” and “It’s not always the time for soul-searching.” Even with his doubts, Avi believed for a time that he was helping by being in the Occupied Territories, that he was keeping some of the excesses of other soldiers in check. This sense faded, however.
One day we were told to evacuate a house that was going to be demolished. We got there and told the family that they had one hour to leave. There was, of course, rushing around and crying and begging us to change our minds (as if I made that decision). After everyone was out, and they were going to knock it down, one of the women came running to me and begged me to go back inside because her daughter had forgotten her school backpack, which had all of her school supplies inside. My commander would not allow it—for him it was just a school bag. So, I had to tell her no.… But what does it mean “I had to”? From her point of view, and from any perspective that matters, I told her no. There I was trying to be the “good soldier,” and there I told her no, and that’s how the little girl will remember me, and if I am really honest, she’s right about me, or she was. And I thought to myself—this is me sacrificing for my country? It can’t be. I was the schmuck standing there on this ridiculous premise, when even a child can see that is not the truth.
Avi had conceptualized himself as Isaac until he found himself with the knife in his hand, until he saw himself as Abraham. His commentary indicated that, being part of a chain of command, his dissatisfaction with the situation at hand did not matter; he had not allowed the girl to retrieve her backpack, not because he did not want to or because he hated her, but because he was only a single, notorious, and maligned cog in the machine. He stopped seeing his service as a sacrifice, however. Before this encounter, he had felt great doubt and ambivalence about his service, and furthermore attributed moral value to his ambivalence, to being a good soldier, but in the moment of crisis realized the irrelevance of his sense of ethics to his actions and their consequences. He realized that he had unintentionally sacrificed ethics. It was a moment in which the alignment of moral good and what was good for the state split, and Avi found himself, in Gramscian terms, no longer consenting but coerced with regard to his ethics. He was prevented from taking action by fear and an inability to conceptualize what dissent would look like within that physical space; that is, he could not imagine the possible actions that he could have taken.
Avi found himself in a situation in which, through military logic of self-preservation, he was not the victim of sacrifice, as he had imagined, but, rather, that the most of the loss in his daily experience was Palestinian loss. This does not mean he was not frequently in mortal danger; he was. Despite being prepared for self-sacrifice,
