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Conscientious Objectors in Israel
Tobias Kelly, Series Editor
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A central organizing idea of this book is my interlocutors’ varied participation in the economy of sacrifice in Israel. When I talk about the economy of sacrifice I am referring to the ways that sacrifice can be exchanged for honor and authority in society. Sacrifice is a public demonstration of investment in society and its welfare. The basic principle of sacrifice is substitution, giving something valuable that represents the person making the sacrifice, the sacrificer.10 In an economy of sacrifice there is an expectation of return. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss explain the principle of substitution: “The sacrificer gives up something of himself, the victim, but does not give himself. Prudently he sets himself aside. This is because if he gives, it is partly in order to receive” (1981: 100). What is returned is the transformation of moral and social status. As in a gift economy, sacrifice is not purely an economic exchange. Sacrifices, like gifts, are considered unique, and decorum prevents direct quantification of worth. Thus the economy of sacrifice always maintains some ambiguity as to the worth of the sacrifice and the appropriateness of the social rewards. In my understanding of sacrificial economy, I build on a number of insights of other theorists of sacrifice, and three are especially prominent. The first is Michael Lambek’s assertion that sacrifice is ethical. He argues that sacrifice is made for a life-giving purpose, and sacrifice must be understood by its practitioners as good and productive. At the same time, however, a tradition of sacrifice carries specific ethical values, which we cannot refuse or reinterpret as individual participants. To participate in the economy of sacrifice, one must accept the ethical framework of the sacrifice and the effects produced by it. Sacrifices “are performative acts that sanctify the conventional and moral states they initiate” (2007: 30). In Israel, the dominant economy of sacrifice is the military, by which people gain social status and moral authority through service as soldiers for the state. The ethics of service in the IDF are problematic to some, among them my interlocutors. In Chapter 1, we see that though many try for a time to both serve and reinterpret the moral meaning of their service, they are unable to control the ethical effects of service as individuals in a larger system. When engaging with the sacrificial economy, people face a tradition whose meaning, though not unchangeable or unchanging, is not open to broad individual interpretation. This is an important point when addressing issue of conscience and the expectations of moral autonomy that accompany it.
The second theoretical commitment I want to make follows Abdellah Hammoudi, who shows that sacrifice is fundamentally social. Some recent treatments of issues of sacrifice have examined sacrifice from a textual perspective. Such accounts mine theoretical accounts to extract an inherent symbolic architecture of a sacrificial tradition. Actual social phenomena are then presented as the inevitable manifestation of logics originating in philosophical structures. Following Hammoudi’s approach in The Victim and Its Masks (1993), I reverse the order, looking first and foremost at the social practice of sacrifice, and in doing so also make a claim about anthropological priorities. Texts are far from irrelevant, but they do not determine the social. The personal and social ambitions of individuals and groups who engage with sacrificial traditions drive the interpretations, understandings, and deployments of sacrificial tradition. This is abundantly clear in this case, wherein the myth of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, the guiding metaphor of military service in Israel, does not manifest any clear social organization based on the inherent structure of relationships. Rather, the myth is publicly manipulated, pushed and pulled and torn asunder in a struggle to determine the legitimacy of the sacrificial economy of military service, a thoroughly contextual tug of war.
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