Concluding Remarks

Proclamations of dissent are discursive moves that invest individual acts of conscience with a public standing and a political import, accentuating the plurality of the public sphere. While stance-taking acts that affirm consensually held positions tend to go unnoticed, the public letters discussed in this chapter, which involve the expression of counter-stances in the stance-rich environment of dissent, become reportable and memorable in public life. As forms of defiant discourse, such proclamations of dissent run the risk of being branded and dismissed as disloyal, dangerous, and offensive. Therefore, proclaiming dissent is a notable intervention that sets things in motion, triggering new and unpredictable action chains in the form of public debate. The complex design of this public dissent, which is agonistic and condemnatory toward its direct addressees (power-holders and policy-makers), while affirming ties of solidarity with the public-at-large, reflects signatories’ stance as one of limited nonconformity (Ivie, 2015). The selective draft refusal addressed in this chapter is a context-specific -though, I believe, paradigmatic - example of the complex balancing act of stance-taking involved in voicing protest and negotiating one’s communal standing in the performance of dissent. The study of stance-taking, as pointed out by Du Bois (2007), is intrinsic to the production of all utterances and helps to bring out the sociocultural values operative in the deployment of acts of speech. In his words:

Stance always involves, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed systems of sociocultural value, while at the same time contributing to the enactment and reproduction of those systems. Social actors are accountable for how they manage and indeed reshape the systems of social value on which we all depend.

(p. 173)

Seen in this light, proclamations of dissent as stance-taking acts can be said to constitute discursive sites in which social actors renegotiate and reshape the social value systems of their societies. In the case of the reservists’ letters, the signatories’ self-positioning highlights their adherence to Zionist values and their willingness to sacrifice for the nation as soldiers. The draft resisters’ letters of more recent years present a more radicalized, post-Zionist position, proclaiming to refuse to join the army altogether by invoking cosmopolitan values of equality and human rights, and rejecting both nationalist and militarist values. This shift has to do with the rise of post-Zionist and individualistic orientations in some sections of Israeli society, particularly among the educated Ashkenazi middle class to which these youngsters mostly belong (Zemlinskaya, 2008), accompanied by the emergence of human-rights-oriented NGOs supported by liberal organizations and government agencies in Western European countries (Ben-Eliezer, 1999). In both cases, draft resisters explain and justify their dissent mainly by expressing their outrage at Israel’s oppressive regime in the occupied territories. In some instances, as we have seen, this outrage was expressed in general terms by invoking abstract values of justice and equality; in others, the letters’ wording was more specific and concrete, indexing the local political scene. While the first letters only hinted at the possibility of refusal, this possibility was explicitly stated in letters circulated since the late 1970s, at times softening the radical move of draft refusal by limiting it to particular assignments or by proposing to undertake alternative, civil service. While formulated as declarations of intent, these proclamations do not only inform about a future possibility but actually perform an act of partial dis-alignment from mainstream Israeli society. Another form of dis-alignment that has been increasingly prevalent among Israeli left radicals in recent years, and which has attracted both public debate and scholarly attention (Amit, 2018; Wright, 2018), is that of emigration from Israel to Europe and North America. As Wright (2018) points out, this mode of opting out is a highly contested issue. In her words:

For some left-wing activists leaving the country - ceasing to be part of a collective which perpetuates violence on Others, not serving in its army, and not having one’s taxes fund that regime - was not only a more powerful form of resistance but also a morally correct one. For others, this choice was seen as irresponsible, defeatist, and one only available to those already privileged by political and historical circumstances. In either case, activists asked: What kind of disconnection should, or could, one be making? What kind of exile would be an ethical one?

(P- B2)

Amit (2018) discusses the emigration of left-wing queer Israeli activists in political and cultural rather than ethical terms, pointing to the subversive significance their departure carries as a signal of their rejection of the Zionist action-centered heroic ethos. She interprets the decision to emigrate as a form of action in the sense of withdrawing cooperation by refusing to take part in either the heroics of military service or in that of activist struggles against the regime, both of which are part of Israel’s sacrificial economy and both of which feed into the powerful image of the undaunted Israeli Jew. Recognizing their vulnerability, emigrants respond by physically opting out, a move that parallels the avoidance of mandatory military service by draft resisters. Intriguingly, Amit claims that in the particular cultural context of Israeli society, which valorizes personal strength and commitment to collective goals, either by living up to the Zionist cause or by rejecting it through grassroots activism, taking action means participating in violence or actively resisting it. In this context, emigrants’ personal decision to assume a passive stance by leaving the country acquires the weight of an embodied political act. She argues that the very act of leaving proclaims the vulnerability and passivity of their unheroic conduct, weakening the system, and as such it carries political import. She says: “By announcing their weakness and vulnerability, by choosing not to be heroes - not to be there - they are in fact resisting the Zionist project in its essence” (pp. xv-xvi). This reinterpretation of emigration from Israel as an act of resistance rather than as a personal failure or even an act of betrayal (as it was constructed in the early years of the state), or simply as an apolitical personal or career decision, puts it in the same category as draft refusal - a withdrawal of cooperation that signals resistance. As in the case of draft refusal, the radical left queer emigrants’ embodied act of noncooperation is accompanied and amplified by the emergence of new forms of textual production through which Hebrew, in this case, finds a new diasporic life, whose promotion Amit considers a form of political activism. Notably, invoking the words vs deeds dualism, she discusses the precarious activist status of these discourse-centered practices. They consist of “the mere writing in different platforms online, writing that was deemed passive, not an activity, and thus cannot be considered as an actual political doing” (p. 187). She believes that the non-territorialized Israeli identity created and nurtured by non-Zionist emigrants through their discursive interventions in the contemporary digital sphere can provide a point of departure for a more significant refiguring of Israeli culture than any of the resistance efforts engaged in by those who have chosen to stay.

Indeed, anti-occupation resistance efforts, including those by the many draft resisters discussed in this chapter, some of whose groups went on to form more stable affinity groups following the publication of their letters, did not manage to bring about the political change they were after. Some of them did succeed in generating occasional scandals by inserting generally suppressed topics and points of view into the Israeli public sphere, either by mobilizing or by bypassing traditional gate-keepers. Even though the claims made in those public letters were rejected by the political mainstream, and their signatories were criminalized and marginalized, the persistence of these proclamations has been a source of irritation, if not worry, for the Israeli establishment. The letters may have affected governmental policies to some degree before being relegated to the social fringes. This was suggested by a newspaper interview given by Dov Weissglass, former senior advisor to Prime Minister Sharon, to a noted journalist, Ari Shavit. In this interview, which activists like to cite, Weissglass mentioned some of these public letters, claiming that they made Sharon realize the degree of public resistance his policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians had generated and led to his embracement of the disengagement from Gaza plan (Shavit, 2004). At the same time, the formulaic and repetitive nature of these public letters, with their sporadic, phoenix-like yet largely inconsequential reappearances in the public sphere, has made activists question their actual effectiveness. The flurries of public controversy they trigger may attest to their value in sustaining resistance, but they also reinforce the sense of futility that attends the anti-occupation movement’s ongoing yet increasingly disheartened struggle.

Indeed, the very emergence of a textual genre of stylized public proclamations of dissent verges on the paradoxical, as is, in a sense, the very notion of a tradition of defiance in relation to social movement repertoires. It is for this reason that sociologists who write about such repertoires, as briefly discussed in Chapter 1, emphasize their improvisational nature as assemblages of collective performances whose main role is to gain presence in the economy of attention that constructs and politicizes the public sphere. While collective action requires the development of a shared performative code, its ritualized enactments run the risk of semantic voiding (Katriel, 1987), as indicated by some of the responses I heard to these public letters by people who were otherwise sympathetic to their dissenting message (such as, “Oh, not another of those letters”). The ritualization of dissent through textual production thus provides a discursive anchoring for the political expression of counter-stances, while at the same time it highlights their potential vulnerability as they become stable components of activist repertoires. In the next chapter, I continue my exploration of contemporary enactments of the defiant discourse scenario, moving from stance-taking acts to a focus on witnessing as a truth-telling activity that mobilizes language’s representational function and its potential for saying, as it is played out in the context of anti-occupation activism in Israel.