boundaries, and the enemy, the policing missions of occupation violated them.
Others echoed similar sentiments. I heard such thoughts voiced, for instance, toward the end of an olive-picking solidarity event in the West Bank organized by Combatants for Peace. My hands had grown sore from plucking clumsily at the small bitter green olives that grow in that region. I stepped aside to stare pointlessly at them and found myself next to Dan, who had come away from the trees to get some water. As we stood there, an army jeep drove by carrying young soldiers who were monitoring our activities. They waved and chuckled at us, I supposed because they were amused by what are often described as the naive efforts of leftists. Ironically returning their wave, Dan told me,
You get into the mode of military logic, the way you are trained to protect yourself and your soldiers, and there is no choice but to follow it; if not, their lives are on your hands. But then you catch yourself doing things which are just not OK, and certainly not up to the standards I had when I enlisted. That is what happens with the whole human shield thing, which I saw some guys do. When you see it in the newspaper it looks awful, but when you are there and you get deep into the military logic, it makes perfect sense to you. When I realized that there was no way to be there and not follow that logic, I knew I couldn’t be there anymore.
Dan was expressing, especially with the example of the human shield (the use of civilians as cover, forbidden by military policy), how, through the structure of military training, the sacrificing soldiers were replaced as victims by unwilling Palestinians. To say that the soldiers expected to be victims sounds extreme, but it does not mean they expected death. Rather, it refers to the mediated self-sacrifice I have described, to exactly what is meant by the English phrase often used to describe soldiering: as individuals “putting themselves in harm’s way” for the greater good. For Dan, the realization that the heaviest price was not being extracted from him interrupted his understanding of his military service as sacrifice. These soldiers were certainly exposed to grave danger and could have been killed many times, but, for them, this danger did not characterize their service. The logic of military service stresses the avoidance of loss, whereas the logic of the sacrificial economy demands negation and loss. After a long pause, Dan added, “When I understood there was no good coming out of it, that we weren’t helping anything, in fact the opposite, I wasn’t willing to risk my life for that anymore. After that, I was basically paranoid about getting injured or something, because if I lost a leg, I wouldn’t be able to see myself as a war hero, I’d just be a cripple.” In his consideration of voluntary death among the Siberian Chukchi, Rane Willerslev (2009: 701) differentiates voluntary death from suicide, with voluntary death (in proper context) conforming to the sacrificial requirement of furthering life through the taking of life. After Dan no longer saw his service as sacrifice, he feared any loss would be suicide-like, pure loss with no redeeming value. He was, in Lomnitz-Adler’s words, haunted by the “specter of meaningless death” (2003: 18), of a meaningless killing.7
Avi’s and Dan’s accounts had many elements in common with other stories of refusal I collected. Doubt was followed by the persistent belief that one could make a positive contribution, be the “good soldier” and prevent aggression. This period of ambivalence was very often followed by a crisis triggered by an encounter, often with a child or a woman read by the soldier as undoubtedly innocent (as opposed to young men, who are always suspect).8 Seeing themselves otherwise and fantasizing about the Palestinian gaze was universally a gut-wrenching experience for Israeli military refusers. The intersubjective experience is not a comfortable space to inhabit, and as Michael Jackson notes, is rarely achieved willingly but instead involves a painful epiphany of seeing one’s own stance invalidated in the face of another (2009: 239). This invalidation was especially devastating for these soldiers, who invested so much of their moral worth in their willingness to sacrifice in the culturally sanctioned method of military service. The moral crisis caused a realization of a hiatus in their understanding of themselves as self-sacrificing and of the reality of soldiering, which, afterward, they interpreted politically to mean that service was unethical and that they must refuse it. Retrospectively, they described their years of service and efforts to maintain faith in the sacrificial meaning of this service as spent in denial.
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