who ultimately became conscientious objectors. The cultural idiom of sacrifice, the binding of Isaac, casts the Israeli soldier as sacrificial victim. However, conscientious objectors’ experiences with their own violence against Palestinians contradicted this conviction and shook their understanding of their actions as soldiers. This contradiction precipitated a crisis of conscience. I argue that because the hegemonic inculcation of these young people was with respect to the sacrificial moral economy, and not to the state as supersubject, resistance was possible. This case prompts a reconsideration of understandings of the relationship between hegemonic inculcation and resistance. Specifically, I claim that the seeds of resistance are often found within hegemonic inculcation, especially when power is used cynically.
Chapter 2 takes up the public spectacle of confession, as performed by the conscientious objector group Combatants for Peace. Having abandoned the mainstream sacrificial economy of military service, my interlocutors struggle for moral influence on their own terms, still governed by the logics of sacrifice. This chapter explores the prospects and pitfalls of persuasion in activism for moral change. During these public events, former soldiers confess to violent encounters with Palestinian civilians. They describe their moments of epiphany in which “military logic” was broken and they saw themselves as the aggressor through the eyes of the Palestinian other. I analyze the structural, linguistic, and rhetorical techniques and characteristics of these confessions, which, like many forms of public confession, are constructed for the purpose of persuasion and moral conversion. In these confessions, the narrators use specific language and examples to upset and restructure assumptions of innocence and guilt to their Israeli audience. As a result, their confessions are in essence an accusation against both audience members who still serve in the military and the state. Through this clandestine substitution of meaning, the ex-soldiers exploit one of the greatest vulnerabilities of the state: its dependence on voluntary sacrifice to maintain its coercive force.
The third and fourth chapters move to consider the younger group of conscientious objectors who decide to refuse service before ever enlisting. The third chapter considers their path to refusal and the social sanctions they experience, the fourth how they attempt to explain and defend their acts as a matter of conscience, this time in the legal setting. Chapter 3 describes how from an early age, this group lived with the expectation of their military service, the expectation of their self-sacrifice. This star-crossed birthright was described by the poet Haim Gouri as being “born with a knife in their hearts.” Although this group questions the legitimacy of such demands, the society in which their daily interactions and primary relationships take place is deeply embedded with these logics. Alienation from close relatives and expulsion from school are a few of the social consequences my interlocutors faced during this period. The older generation of refusers mobilizes both the respect they won as elite soldiers and the social respect for their sacrifice of incarceration for refusal. This younger group, including many women, finds itself paradoxically unable to produce the kinds of narratives that are compelling to Israeli audience, or to mobilize social capital in the same way. This chapter highlights the desperate attempts of my interlocutors to find relevance in the sacrificial economy, and the distress of their exclusion.
Chapter 4 considers the legal adjudication of the question of conscience by the Israeli military. The Israeli military’s Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I find that pacifist refusal based on principled objections to violence challenges the legitimacy of the state and the hegemonic moral order. As such, applicants who articulate their refusal in these terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence does not challenge the state’s existential basis and moral order; cases framed in these terms are granted exemption. Understanding pacifist as a physical incapacity depoliticizes pacifism by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service and preventing the military from having to engage or recognize pacifist moral claims against violence, including state violence. This creates a dilemma for pacifist applicants who wish not only to be exempted from service, but also to engage politically on questions of military service and violence and to endow their pacifism with political meaning and relevance. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates the way in which the discursive production involved in adjudicating rights can negatively shape the social and political meaning of the minority identity, and the rationality of attributing rights.
Chapter 5 addresses the conflicting obligations and responsibilities that conscientious objectors face. Although my interlocutors expect to be able to bracket their dissent from daily life, they find that the matter is much more deeply entwined in the social than they had previously realized. This misrecognition sets off a series of mutual betrayals between family, friends, community, and the state that uncover existing tensions and Oedipal anxieties. The expectations of my interlocutors for the liberal promise are contrasted with those for whom marginality is not a new experience. This comparison leads me to conclude that commonly held ideas of hegemony as a tool deployed by the dominant class to confuse and subjugate the lower class are highly misleading in the case of liberalism. Rather, I suggest, the contradictions and violence of the political system are often pushed to the social margins, the burdens of such contradictions falling on the lower classes. Thus, the dominant class, protected from the violence of its ideology, is far more hegemonically inculcated than those who have long encountered the strong arm of the state.
Finally, I take up the broader implications of conscientious objection and consider how this phenomenon exposes a number of false promises made by state. One is the promise of autonomous conscience. Rather than a resolute act of unambiguous conscience, military refusal is shown to be messy and compromising. Israeli objectors struggle deeply with the tensions of obligation to conscience and citizenship obligations, but do so under a misleading expectation of dissent without social sanction. Many conscientious objectors have become disillusioned with the promise of Zionism as a solution to the “Jewish question”—a false promise of permanent security, absolute belonging, and cultural fulfillment. This is the heroic promise of the nation-state, offered in exchange for sacrifice, an economy of negation. That military service can be an ethical system of sacrifice is yet another false promise. It is a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop. The state is driven by realism combined with a desire for power and territory as opposed to ethical principles, and as such cannot protect or facilitate an ethical tradition. Ultimately, I hope in what follows engage the entailments of national citizenship, the shuffling of yokes and burdens between consent and dissent, and the possible openings these obligations engender.
1
The Interrupted Sacrifice
On the route to the Palestinian West Bank village of Susiya, the mood in the bus was excited and jovial. I was traveling with a group of Israeli conscientious objectors from Combatants for Peace (CFP) to meet with Palestinian ex-fighters, members of the same activist organization. At their meetings, Israelis and Palestinians tell their life stories and how they came to reject a militarized solution to the conflict between their two peoples. As we made our way out of southern Jerusalem and crossed into the Palestinian West Bank, the trip turned into a macabre guided tour of the memory sites of the Israelis’ experiences as soldiers. “You see over there,” Avi said, jumping up from his seat and jabbing his finger vigorously at the window, “behind the wall, you can see through the gap. Now! That one! We demolished the house there like two or three times.” Those who had served in the region between Jerusalem and our destination in the South Hebron hills pointed out the locations of incidents that had contributed to their refusal to continue military service. They told each other war stories in military vernacular, as many Israeli men enjoy doing; however, their disclosure of violent
