Concluding Remarks

Witnessing is a central discursive practice in the Israeli anti-occupation movement’s rhetoric of dissent. In the foregoing discussion, I have addressed a distinctive type of witnessing, perpetrator witnessing that serves as a parrhesiastic act that casts witnesses in the complex role of victimized-victimizer. A key element in this witnessing relates to the interweaving of eye-witnessing and flesh-witnessing, the two categories of witnessing distinguished (and contrasted) by Harari (2009, 2010) in his discussion of soldiers’ war witnessing. The testimonies discussed in this chapter do double work. On the one hand, they make factual claims about the violent practices of the occupation regime, with soldiers positioning themselves as brokers of alternative knowledge, or surrogate journalists who seek to provide Israeli society with reliable firsthand information about the ills of the occupation. On the other hand, soldier-witnesses seek to expose the Israeli public to the authority of soldiers’ flesh-witnessing by drawing on their experiential knowledge of the occupier role and, particularly, their reflexive responses to what they see and do. Flesh witnesses’ visceral knowledge gives their witnessing a special aura of authenticity while it also indexes the self-transformative effect of becoming a witness and speaking out. Soldier witnessing is a defiant discourse that involves the reclamation of agency by a speaking subject who is able to depart from the position of disoriented bystander and find his or her voice in the face of injustice. The moral shock narratives interspersed through the soldiers’ testimonies revisit and give presence to the moments of moral breakdown that triggered their defiant speech.

The activist archives of Breaking the Silence employ an aesthetics and politics of excess that, according to Brooks (1976), is characteristic of the melodramatic mode as a “language of presence and immediacy” (p. 67). Their assemblages of textualized oral testimonies, photographs, video segments, photo-blogs, and documentaries, as well as ritualized speech occasions such as public talks and events, domestic encounters, or guided tours, all make up a testimonial edifice held together by the power of aggregation, accumulation, and repetition in various modes and venues. These many repetitive enactments of testimonial segments serve as a performative intervention, an insistence on utterance in the face of erasure, and as an affirmation of the power of saying and of standing behind what one says. In their eye-witnessing function, these testimonial enactments seek to establish the facticity of the events that the soldier-witnesses authoritatively recount. In so doing, they mobilize and amplify the representational function of language, proposing factual truths in support of their anti-occupation advocacy. In their flesh-witnessing function, these testimonial acts bring out soldiers’ experiential knowledge of the violence of the occupation regime as seen by its perpetrators who consider themselves as its secondary victims. This visceral knowledge, grounded in the authenticity of “I was there,” is coded within the genre of moral shock narratives that narrate soldiers’ moments of moral breakdown, which give rise to their retrospective act of speaking out.

As Harari pointed out, flesh-witnessing has its pitfalls as a testimonial activity that authenticates the witness’s position at the cost of distancing audiences who do not share his or her experiential knowledge. Attempts to convey such knowledge through discursive means inevitably fall short of their goal, as is often expressed by variations on the saying that those who were not there can never really understand (a theme frequently expressed in other contexts of traumatic experiences as well). Indeed, Breaking the Silence activists seem to be intuitively aware of the paradoxes of their flesh-witnessing, given its multiple audiences and complex addressiv-ity structure (Noy, 2009). Thus, while the one-on-one interviews through which testimonies are collected involve experiences shared by interviewer and interviewee, the testimonial texts’ wider circulation brings them to distant audiences that are uninformed about the details of the situation in the occupied territories and the nature of the military tasks soldiers are required to fulfill. For these distant audiences, Harari’s analysis suggests, the more they are exposed to soldiers’ flesh-witnessing, the less legible the scene of occupation becomes. Thus, this parrhesiatic project creates a self-propelling loop of self-conscious acts of defiance that need to be performed over and over again. This may partly account for the sense of excess and repetitiveness associated with Breaking the Silence project.

Public reading events in which audience members are invited to walk for a moment in the shoes of a silence-breaker by ventriloquizing a testimonial segment taken from the organization’s archive clearly attempt to counter the potential alienation between soldiers’ flesh-witnessing and their audiences. In participating in such ritualized ventriloquizing occasions, mouthing the words of an anonymous silence-breaker on a makeshift stage erected in the heart of Tel Aviv, I felt I was affirming the value of truth-speaking in the context of dissent even if I could not penetrate the depth of his flesh-witnessing. In so doing, I was positioning myself -alongside many others - in the highly contentious political arena demarcated by Breaking the Silence’s witnessing campaign. Through their acts of witnessing and their mimetic diffusion, Breaking the Silence thus provides platforms in and through which speaking and listening become politicized gestures of defiance, which mark a refusal to allow the barrage of verbal attacks directed at the organization to drown its voice and void its impact. Positioned between right-wing detractors who consider them traitors, and radical left critics who consider their ethos to be at once over-militaristic and plaintive, Breaking the Silence activists decided to formulate explicit accounts for their insistence on making their witnessing voices heard. They consider the officially orchestrated efforts to intimidate them into silence as a recognition of the power of their discursive intervention, rejecting claims that these interventions merely perpetuate the Israeli “shooting and crying” syndrome. Positioned between two very different orientations to the power of speech, soldier-witnesses turn to the genre of accounts to explain and justify their employment of defiant discourse, as will be elaborated in the next chapter.