effects. The military, however, serves state interests, which are not guided by ethical values, though they can be ethical. State interests are guided by a concern for sovereignty, and often by the logic of Realpolitik. Realpolitik is state-level politics based on power and practical considerations and is explicitly not guided by ethical premises. Thus the ethical intentions of the sacrificers and the effects of their engagement in the sacrificial economy are mismatched, because the priorities and loyalties of the military, the institution that organizes and supervises the sacrifice, are ultimately to the state. Thus, although individuals try to engage in an ethical practice, they are deployed for goals that are often indifferent to ethics.
This produces a number of disturbing distortions of the sacrificial economy. One is that the worth of someone’s offering is evaluated on utilitarian principles of military fitness. This sets out a hierarchy that carries over into nonmilitary social life, in which strong is preferred over weak (Almog 2000), male over female (Sasson-Levy 2003), able-bodied over disabled (Weiss 2005), Jewish over Arab (Kanaaneh 2009), Ashkenazi over Mizrahi (Amor 2010), and those who adhere to certain cultural codes of hegemonic Israeliness over those who deviate (Katriel 1986; Yair 2011). This hierarchy is not based on ethical distinctions but on pragmatic ones. However, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of military’s place in facilitating the central sacrificial economy is the elimination of the fundamental component of substitution. In sacrifice, something of value is offered in place of the sacrificer, it represents the sacrificer. It can be an animal, an object, food, a stone. The sacrificer does not offer himself or herself. One gives in part because one expects to receive. If everything is given, the sacrificial economy cannot continue. In military service, the life of the sacrificer is offered, at least 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
