Keeping Politics Moral: Legitimizing Israel’s Conscientious Objectors

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Can a conscientious objector eat meat or listen to heavy metal music? Not according to Israel’s Conscience Committee, the military panel charged with granting exemptions for those unwilling to fulfill the mandatory service requirement of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Since Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon, and the creation of conscientious objector advocacy groups like Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit), refusal to serve became a highly-contested political act promoted by a small percentage of the population yet pervading the whole of Israeli society. Today, conscientious objection remains a volatile and complex behavioral phenomenon with numerous groups vocalizing their discontent with the state’s military action in the West Bank and Gaza as well as Israel’s perceptibly militarized culture. 

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How conscientious objection is defined, and by whom, directly impacts whether or not it is deemed legitimate by the government and, subsequently, society. Israel relies on arbitrarily defined notions of conscientious objection in order to delegitimize those moral refusers who ground their objection in ideology that challenges the authority of the state. While Jewish tradition records millennia-old cases of conscientious objection, and 1948 also incited objections to mandated service, to the Committee, objectors who ground their refusal in politics are inauthentic. Israel mandates that citizens subjugate their morality and repress their political views to serve the interests of the state. Paradoxically, to contend that morality and politics may be isolated from one another, the state contradicts its own traditions. Israel must privilege its democratically contrived authority while simultaneously suppressing its Jewish identity to continue its superficial classification of moral refusers. The pretense behind this disingenuous classification system devalues Israel’s Jewish traditions and unnecessarily marginalizes a portion of the population to uphold a false notion of hegemonic support for the IDF and Israel’s military culture.