Moving Into Explicitness

The attacks in the media, coupled with legislative attempts to silence public critique of the occupation, have put at least some anti-occupation activists on the defensive, leading to attempts to explicitly explain and justify their decision to speak out. I believe it is against the backdrop of the toxic public environment described in the previous section that soldier-witnesses’ accounts of why they break the silence need to be considered. Such accounts in the form of video segments have been available on the organization’s website for several years, as I have previously discussed (Katriel, 2018). In the fall of 2017, after my analysis of these video-taped accounts went into print, Breaking the Silence issued a special booklet titled Why I Broke the Silence?, which foregrounded the role of accounting in the organization’s discourse-centered activism. The launching of the booklet, which took place at an alternative theater venue in Tel Aviv, was a well-attended event that provided a festive occasion for yet another reiteration of soldier-witnesses’ personal stories and accounts as well as an open exchange with members of a supportive public. Since then, the booklet has been promoted by the organization as part of its assemblage of textual products, while the video segments are still accessible on its website.

Thus, in accounting for their defiant discourse, soldier-witnesses take full responsibility not only for their complicity in the occupation regime during their military rounds but also for their decision to speak out. In so doing, they delineate their reading of the scene of occupation, give voice to the personal motives that propel their dissenting move, and disclose the moral reasoning that led them to the conclusion that they could no longer sustain the silence surrounding the occupation regime and their role in it. The most recent components of these accounts involve rebuttals that attempt to directly deflect the accusations leveled against Breaking the Silence for their ongoing, persistent campaign. As we have seen, both draft refusers’ public letters and soldiers’ testimonies contain references to defiant speakers’ motivations and reasons for their dissent, yet the strand of video-taped segments and the special booklet that explicitly asks Why Break the Silence? provide the most elaborate, and perhaps most poignant, versions of soldiers’ meta-discursive accounts. In providing justifications for speaking out, these meta-discursive accounts express soldier-witnesses’ self-positioning as morally upright social agents and establish their communicative entitlement, that is, their right to have their voices heard in the public sphere.

Indeed, it is probably not incidental that meta-discursive accounts that function as self-justifications appear so prominently in the dissenting discourses of selective conscientious objectors, in the self-reports of members of Combatants for Peace, and in Breaking the Silence testimonies. Among the various anti-occupation groups, these are the ones whose members have been most directly involved in enforcing the occupation regime and whose decision to express their dissent carries the greatest symbolic weight. This decision marks the most radical breaking of ranks, pointing to the option (and the pain) of relinquishing the stance of acquiescence and unquestioning commitment to culturally shared and state-sponsored ideological stances. These are also the groups for whom the insistence on speaking truth to power in conjunction with the occupation regime is most immediately consequential in terms of loss of status and self-identity as citizens and as soldiers who are bound by a sense of duty to protect the sovereignty of their national community and enhance its collective well-being. The use of meta-discursive accounts by Breaking the Silence activists to justify their discursive interventions provides a clear indication of what Keane (2010) describes as a characteristic of actors’ response to a moment of moral breakdown, which he describes as “the move into explicitness” (p. 71). In this case, the move into explicitness finds its expression in the justifications embedded in soldiers’ flesh-witnessing about the scene of occupation, as well as in the more explicit oral accounts offered by the video segments on the Breaking the Silence website, or the ones featured in the booklet devoted to the explicit giving of reasons for participating in the organized act of breaking the silence.

These accounts give voice to a tension between the witnesses’ stance of dis-alignment and their self-imposed constraints on the articulation of dissent. In many respects, Breaking the Silence witnesses, all of whom have served as combat soldiers in the occupied territories, personify the Israeli national consensus and its ideal of republican citizenship grounded in the nation’s sacrificial economy. Having fulfilled the nation’s call to arms, soldiers become metonyms of the nation as a whole, and their voice carries a great deal of cultural weight. Their meta-discursive accounts capture a shift in perspective, from that of a fully immersed combat soldier to that of a self-reflexive witness and critic of the military regime’s practices and arrangements. The personal, internal process involved in this transition is articulated in the aforementioned series of video-taped segments of interviews held with core activists of Breaking the Silence. These video-taped accounts reject the common charge leveled against the soldier-witnesses that their expression of social critique is driven by partisanship, alienation, and animosity. In rejecting this charge, they reframe their opposition to Israel’s oppressive military policies in the occupied territories as a social obligation and as a sign of caring. The forty-seven interview segments ranging from over one to less than five minutes in length, in which soldier-witnesses give their reasons for supporting the organization’s agenda by joining its activities, were all conducted between 2011 and 2015. These accounts seek to legitimize the soldier-witnesses’ decision to speak out, and thus constitute a direct extension of their testimonial voice. While the booklets are heavily edited, and speakers are identified by rank and military unit, the video segments present unscripted, “fresh talk” (Goffman, 1981). This speech is replete with false starts, self-repairs, hesitations, reformulations, repetitions, and variously truncated as well as ungrammatical sentences. Its self-probing tone, its lack of eloquence and verbal polish, as well as the visual fullness of witnesses’ embodied images, all help to bring their voice to life, granting it an aura of authentic expression. The 2017 booklet titled in English Why I Broke the Silence? (and in Hebrew, Why Break the Silence?) contains fifteen testimonial segments by soldiers that are presented in response to the title’s question. An additional booklet circulated by Breaking the Silence, which differs in color and size from the corpus of testimonial booklets that make up the larger part of the organization’s textual production, contains a series of rebuttals to frequently leveled accusations against the organization’s activities. This booklet is instructive as it indicates that Breaking the Silence activists attended to specific criticism raised by their opponents and shows how they heard and responded to it. As discursive practices, accounts and rebuttals share a self-legitimizing agenda, yet they diverge in tone and in voice: accounts constitute an expressive speech activity through which activists give personal voice to their terms of engagement in organized dissent. The rebuttals, on the other hand, constitute a polemical speech activity through which activists enact an organizational voice that provides a direct inter-discursive response to the critique of the organization’s opponents. All these textual variants, written and spoken, can help us explore the self-legitimizing discourses through which Breaking the Silence activists position themselves as nonconformist, yet socially committed, soldier-witnesses who are both independent thinkers and concerned members of their society.