Plan of the Book

The book sets out to explore defiant discourse as speech employed in organized performances of dissent that acknowledges the plurality of the political sphere and challenges dominant positions within it. Taking discourse-centered activism within the Israeli anti-occupation movement as my empirical site, I will address cultural assumptions concerning the action potential of speech in grassroots political struggles. Defiant discourse, in the analysis I propose, is designed to bring about tangible change as well as to actualize the realm of the political as a distinctively human “space of appearance” (in Arendt’s terms); it therefore cannot be fully comprehended as a tool of protest and persuasion. In the chapters that follow, I address three analytically distinct, language-centered moves that I consider central to the soldierly discourses I use as an empirical resource for my analysis -proclaiming, witnessing, and accounting, each of which is elaborated in a separate chapter. These moves construct soldiers’ defiant discourse as a political intervention performed through the insertion of voices that pluralize the public sphere; present reality-claims by authentic witnesses, attesting to what they know in specific and concrete terms that serve to counter hegemonic obfuscations and vagueness; and construct self-reflexive accounts in which their personal and ideological reasons for engaging in dissent are elaborated. Taken together, their exploration is hoped to add a sociolin-guistic note to the growing scholarly literature on anti-occupation activist groups in Israel/Palestine by exploring the construction of defiant discourse in soldierly dissent in terms of ideologically inflected performances of resistance embedded in the local Israeli context.

Thus, Chapter 2 locates the book’s analysis of anti-occupation soldierly dissent in relation to the broader context of Israeli speech culture. In so doing, I consider witnesses’ defiant discourse in terms of Foucault’s (2001, 2011) study of the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia (rendered into English as frankness or as fearless speech). I propose that the cultural scenario embedded in the notion of fearless speech has played the role of a key symbol in modern Israeli culture, and trace its reverberations in texts that were central in Israeli secular education in the state’s formative years and in current journalistic texts that implicitly invoke this scenario. I then provide a sketch of the ideological and political debate surrounding Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and the Gaza strip, with attention to some of the discursive choices and strategies associated with this debate (Friedman & Gavriely-Nuri, 2018). Chapter 3 addresses proclaiming as a central component of dissent, highlighting dissenters’ self-positioning in this process. I focus on proclamations of dissent as discursive moments in which draft resisters’ individual and personal act of conscience is transformed into a public-political act, by discussing the textual genre of public letters composed by groups of soldiers (mainly reservists) and prospective recruits (mainly high-school students) that have circulated in Israel for five decades and have become a culturally recognized genre for publicizing opposition to the state’s military policies. Using the concept of stance-taking, as employed by sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists, I explore the ways in which activists articulate their complex positioning of “limited nonconformity” (Ivie, 2015) vis-à-vis their imagined audiences, balancing their opposition with expressions of communal affiliation and belonging so as to assert their insider position alongside their critical stance. Chapter 4 addresses the act of witnessing as a form of defiant discourse that involves an insistence on speaking truth to power by reiterating witnesses’ firsthand testimonies of the scene of occupation. These testimonies concretize the abstracted and politically contested notion of the occupation by detailing the grinding and oppressive practices this regime involves and the moral predicaments they generate for the soldiers implicated in them. Chapter 5 considers the ways in which activists legitimate their dissent through the use of accounts that publicly justify their decision to speak out. The emergence of these accounts is claimed to be a response to persistent attempts to silence, marginalize, or even criminalize anti-occupation soldierly dissent. These accounts provide an additional and specifically designated platform through which soldier-witnesses expound on their reasons for their dissent, disclose who they are and what they are about in the public sphere, reaffirming basic cultural values and moral positions. In so doing, they strive to reconstitute the public sphere as an arena of open-ended political discursive action.

The concluding chapter (Chapter 6) locates the analysis of the soldierly defiant discourse explored in this book within the broader historical context of anti-war activism as an early globalized social movement and in relation to the speech-action nexus that is thematized in the language ideologies that underwrite the deployment of activist practices both offline and online. Drawing an analogy with the notion of a “crisis of representation,” which is centered on the speech-world nexus, I tentatively propose the notion of “crisis or problematic of performativity,” whose exploration will address the tensions built into the speech-action nexus that is central to political life and to the role of language in it.