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InConscientious Objectors in Israel, Erica Weiss examines the lives of Israelis who have refused to perform military service for reasons of conscience. Based on long-term fieldwork, this ethnography chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish conscientious objectors as they grapple with the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society-often suffering severe social and legal consequences, including imprisonment.While most scholarly work has considered the causes of animosity and violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,Conscientious Objectors in Israelexamines how and under what circumstances one is able to refuse to commit acts of violence in the midst of that conflict. By exploring the social life of conscientious dissent, Weiss exposes the tension within liberal citizenship between the protection of individual rights and obligations of self-sacrifice. While conscience is a strong cultural claim, military refusal directly challenges Israeli state sovereignty. Weiss explores conscience as a political entity that sits precariously outside the jurisdictional bounds of state power. Through the lens of Israeli conscientious objection, Weiss looks at the nature of contemporary citizenship, examining how the expectations of sacrifice shape the politics of both consent and dissent. In doing so, she exposes the sacrificial logic of the modern nation-state and demonstrates how personal crises of conscience can play out on the geopolitical stage.

In recent decades (the __post-heroic' condition) - threats of widespread selective conscientious objection have become a political tool to advance opposing political agendas in Israel. This article examines attitudes amongst the Israeli public concerning the legitimacy of demands that different groups of soldiers be exempted from military operations to which they are ideologically opposed (such as serving in the occupied territories or, conversely, participating in evacuation of settlements). The results point to a multi-cultural model embracing diversity management not as a neo-liberal ideal but rather as a strategy for co-option, containment and inclusion, with a view to preserving the \"people's army\" model.

The abundant writing on conscientious objection (CO) had kept one significant actor rather neglected—the state. Relatively unexplored is the question of how democracies shape their policies toward CO. This article wishes to address this gap, focusing in particular on states that maintain conscription, and examining what accounts for their different responses to CO. Based on the Israeli case study, while drawing on comparative insights from The Federal Republic of Germany and Switzerland during the Cold War, I argue that states’ treatment of CO depends primarily on the military’s status and the type of roles assigned to conscription. States in which these roles are mainly functional, and the military does not enjoy, accordingly, a high symbolic status will be more inclined to formally recognize CO than states in which the military fulfills civilian–social roles and enjoys a high symbolic status. Lack of recognition, however, does not necessarily imply harshness; states of the latter sort might nonetheless accommodate CO through unofficial means. Thus, when discussing the policy towards CO a distinction is ought to be made between accommodation and recognition.

Like all Israeli youth, Atalya is obligated to become a soldier. Unlike most, she questions the practices of her country's military and becomes determined to challenge this rite of passage. Despite her family's political disagreements and personal concerns, she refuses military duty and is imprisoned for her dissent. Her courage moves those around her to reconsider their own moral positions and personal power. Objector follows Atalya to prison and beyond, offering a unique window into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of a young woman who seeks truth and takes a stand for justice.

The Israeli military's Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants' principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence did not challenge the state and moral order, and such cases were granted exemption. Objections based in understanding pacifism as a physical incapacity depoliticizes it by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates a contradiction between liberalism's ideology and its practices, revealing that the limits of liberalism are not only exterior, in nonliberal alterity, but also on liberalism's own interior frontiers. תדעו ןופצמה לש ל״הצ הכירעמ תרסופו םיטסיפיצפ תורשמ יאבצ ,הבוח ךותמ הדמע תשרופ דעב תונלבוס .תורמל ,תאז נא ، יתאצמ תודגנתההש תינורקעה תומילאל לש םידמעומ םיטסיפיצפ םילרביל הרגתיא תא ,הנידמה ,תאזככו םידמעומ רשא ואטיב תא םבורס ןפואב הז וחדינ לע ידי תדעו .ןופצמה ,דגנמ סבור ,יבופצמ ססובמח לע היחד תיחיפ תומילאמ אל רגתיא תא הנידמח ורוסדר תאהי ,םירקמלו ולא ןתינ .רוטפה תודגנתה תססובמת לע תנבח םזיפיצפת לעכ תלוכי-יא תילפ מסהריה תא היצחטילופה לש םזיפיצפה ידי-לע ותכיפה יתלבל והיו האוושהל חישל ירבוה עגונב תוירסומל לש תורש .יאבצ תההייחסתו לא םחיפיצפה לאכ חלחמ המיגדמ סהירת ןיב היגולואידיאה תילרבילה ךרדו ,תפשוחה תולובגש םזילרבילה םניא קר תורחאב אל ,תירביל אלא םג תותיזחב תוימינפה לש .םזילרבילה

This article reevaluates the usefulness of the theoretical continuum between hegemony and resistance in light of recent Israeli experiences. Specifically through the comparison of \"conscientious objection\" and \"draft evasion,\" I find that the breakdown of hegemonic consciousness is not sufficient to understand why some disillusioned Israeli soldiers choose public resistance against the state, while others choose evasive tactics. I argue that the space between ideological discontent and resistance is fraught with social and ethical considerations. The source of political discontent for disillusioned soldiers is problematization of their military service as an ethical dilemma, though the ethical concerns of these soldiers extend well beyond the overtly political sphere. I contend that this presents a challenge to the opposition of hegemony and resistance, but also to many accounts in political anthropology that implicitly privilege the political sphere as a natural site of self-fulfillment. Many accounts of hegemony and resistance isolate political consciousness from the broader ethical life in which people engage, and thus do not recognize that rejecting public action can be based on prioritizing other values, not only mystification. I find that one's readiness to resist the state is dependent on the degree of \"metonymization\" of the individual with the state project, and that cynicism is one way that people articulate the differentiation of their interests from those of the state.

In this article, I explain why some of the most elite and dedicated soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces ultimately became conscientious objectors. I argue that because the sacrificial moral economy, and not the state as supersubject, was hegemonically inculcated in these young people, resistance was possible. This case prompts a reconsideration of anthropological understandings of the relationship between hegemonic inculcation and resistance. Specifically, we cannot only ask to what degree subjects subscribe to hegemony but we must also ask what specifically is inculcated and how this alters agency and its object.

This article investigates the relationship between feminism and conscientious objection in Israel, evaluating the efficacy of feminist resistance in the organised refusal movement. While recent feminist scholarship on peace, anti-occupation and anti-militarism activism in Israel largely highlights women's collective action, it does so at the risk of eliding the relations of power within these groups. Expanding the scope of consideration, I look to the experiences of individual feminist conscientious objectors who make visible significant tensions through their accounts of military refusal and participation in the organised conscientious objection movement. Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article problematises feminist activism in the organised Israeli refusal movement through three primary issues: political voice; privilege; and the realisation of gender agendas. Using Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of power as it has been critiqued and qualified by feminist scholars, I consider the ways in which resistance may be both multiple and a diagnostic of power, allowing activists and academics not only to envision new avenues for social change, but also to recognise their constraints. Critically, feminist theories of intersectionality enrich and complicate this Foucauldian approach to power, providing further modes of critique and strategy in the context of feminist activism in Israel. Ultimately, I argue not only for engagement with the limits of power, but also attention to their function, as in theory and praxis these boundaries critically inform our theorising on gender and resistance.

Jewish philosophers in the State of Israel have been forced by reality to think about questions in political theory that in the past lacked practical relevance. The question of the morality of obedience (or disobedience) to the laws is a topic that is present in the classical sources. It is a frequently discussed topic in Israeli public discourse, especially when it comes to the question of the duty to serve in the army. The article examines the concept of conscience in the wider context of the ethics of Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Although Leibowitz was reluctant to attribute any positive characteristics to the conscience in his theoretical works, he openly supported the activity of the left-wing refusal movements in Israel. The article tries to explain the apparent contradiction between Leibowitzian theory and practice. The article also mentions the works of two Israeli thinkers Daniel Statman and Avi Sagi, who are sensitive to the interplay between Jewish sources and western political concepts. They try to construct a new Jewish definition of conscience and to open the way to the development of other related political and ethical concepts.

The article focuses on groups and individuals who promoted the ideological options of anti-militarism and pacifism in the period immediately preceding the birth of the State of Israel and during its first decade. It presents the struggles of the Ihud group against the spreading of the Masada myth and positioning the IDF at the center of the Israeli collective cognition and of the Organization of War Resisters in Israel against the universal conscription and legal negation of the conscientious objection option. It sheds light on the long-forgotten absolute pacifism of two individuals—Natan Hofshi and Yosef Abilea—who were involved in the above organizations but also preached against what they saw as the dangerous taking over of the militaristic state of mind in the late pre-state days and early statehood.