Introduction

Preliminaries: Vignettes from the Field

Let me begin my discussion with several vignettes and illustrative texts. These are taken from my participation in activities organized by some loosely networked organizations and groups that struggle to end Israel’s military control of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza. These territories came under occupation during the 1967 War between Israel and its neighboring Arab states. The anti-occupation activities discussed in this book represent some of the more radical on-the-ground engagements routinely undertaken by participants in the Israeli peace movement. They express defiance of the growing ethno-nationalist sentiments within the Israeli public during the turbulent years of the Second Intifada [Palestinian uprising] in the early 2000s, when violence escalated with the demise of the Oslo peace process, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a Jewish right-wing assassin in 1995. The vignettes presented in the chapter exemplify activists’ engagement in what I call in this book “defiant discourse,” which I view as a composite speech¹ activity that poses a challenge to mainstream society by giving voice to oppositional positions and attitudes through the efforts of organized groups. Some of these groups may be ad hoc and short-lived, while others may be more enduring and evolve into oppositional organizations. Defiant speech is one mode of resistance in grassroots activism, representing an attempt to intervene in the public sphere by challenging hegemonic constructions of reality and the power arrangements that sustain them. As indicated in the vignettes that follow, such challenges often intertwine a variety of forms of symbolic action designed to communicate to the authorities and to the public a withdrawal of consent from official policies and dominant positions. Signaling such withdrawal is significant since the power to govern in democratic societies is relational - it depends on citizens’ consent to be so governed. Protecting expressions of lack of consent is the test and hallmark of democratic societies, ensuring the plurality of the public sphere. When such consent is withdrawn, as it often is in the context of contentious politics, dissenters may face condemnation or even state-sponsored punitive action, such as arrest. The vignettes provide a glimpse of the scene of anti-occupation activism that serves as the empirical site for my exploration. They point to the centrality of speech and action as two mutually implicated cultural categories in terms of which activist practices are organized and evaluated more generally. The vignettes are presented with some background information (to be expanded in the next chapter) by way of inviting the reader into the broader social field of grassroots activism in and through which some Israelis express their dismay at the ongoing occupation regime. As I will argue, defiant discourse as a form of discourse-centered activism finds its quintessential place in soldierly dissent, as this dissent most directly challenges the legitimacy of the state as a power broker. Yet, the deployment of these dissenting soldierly voices in Israel needs to be understood in relation to the broader field of anti-occupation activism, which blends grounded and discursive symbolic actions within an array of defiant activist practices, some of which are illustrated in the examples that follow.

“Speaking is action, too”

In the fall of 2015,1 took part in a small-scale house meeting between representatives of the veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence² with some fifteen other people, which was held in a private apartment. This was one of numerous such meetings that have been organized by members of this organization in both private and public venues around the country since its establishment in 2004, several of which I participated in over the years. The goal of these face-to-face encounters is to familiarize members of the Israeli public with the day-to-day reality of Israel’s military control of the Palestinian territories as depicted by soldiers who have firsthand experience with the occupation regime. These soldierly accounts challenge the usually blurred picture of the occupation that Israelis encounter through official outlets and in the mainstream media. The gathering opened with a presentation by a Breaking the Silence representative, who shared his personal story of military service in the occupied territories. Dwelling on troubling incidents concerning the mistreatment of Palestinian civilians in which the narrator was implicated, he proceeded with some readings of testimonial segments from the organization’s archive that helped establish the broader relevance of the narrator’s story. After the speaker’s presentation and the Q & A session that followed it, we went on chatting over snacks, and I asked the Breaking the Silence activist: “What do you actually expect people to do with the information you are sharing with them?” His prompt answer reasserted a cultural assumption about the relationship between speech and action: “Speaking is action, too” [gam ledaber ze pe’ula]. In the context of this self-consciously defiant discourse, the speaker’s statement reaffirmed the primacy of action, yet collapsed “saying” and “doing” into one another - not speech vs action or speech alongside action, but speech-as-action, as an effective force that has the power to bring about change.