Principle or Pathology? Adjudicating the Right to Conscience in the Israeli Military

Abstract

The Israeli military's Conscience Committee evaluates and exempts pacifists from obligatory military service, based explicitly on concern for liberal tolerance. However, I found that liberal pacifist applicants’ principled objections to violence challenged the state, and as such, applicants who articulated their refusal in such terms are rejected by the military review board. By contrast, pacifist conscientious objection based in embodied visceral revulsion to violence did not challenge the state and moral order, and such cases were granted exemption. Objections based in understanding pacifism as a physical incapacity depoliticizes it by making it incommensurable with public moral debate concerning military service. The pathologization of pacifism demonstrates a contradiction between liberalism's ideology and its practices, revealing that the limits of liberalism are not only exterior, in nonliberal alterity, but also on liberalism's own interior frontiers. [conscience, military, liberalism, ethics]

The Intimate Life of Dissent Ánthropological Perspectives

“…What counted as a persuasive conscience certainly reproduced narrowly masculine, bourgeois and Protestant ways of being in the world. What I am also interested in here, however, is not just the outer limit of liberal dissent, but its anxious and uncertain core (Walzer 1970;Weiss 2012). Hesitations about claims of conscience are not only produced at the edges of liberal cultures, but at their very heart.…”

Citizenship, Cowardice, and Freedom of Conscience: British Pacifists in the Second World War

“…The forms of evidence that were treated as persuasive when making claims of conscience are also part of the particular history of British liberal democracy. In perhaps the most extended ethnography of COs to date, Erica Weiss has argued that Israeli COs, for example, are required to show the embodied grounds to their objection to military service and violence, often demonstrated through vegetarianism (2012; 2011). Principled arguments would not get an Israeli CO very far before a tribunal (ibid.…”

“…Critical scholarship has often looked to the margins in order to find the sites where the contingent and arbitrary nature of liberalism are revealed (Das and Poole 2004). As Erica Weiss has argued, though, conscience reveals the inner limits of liberalism (2012; see also 2011). Difficulties in having claims of conscience recognized have often as much to do with similarity as alterity (compare Kelly and Thiranagama 2011).…”

On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology

“…Beyond work on revolutionary protest and radical politics are studies that, equally importantly, document the complex sedimentation of power and inequality through an array of governmental practices and actors (including state, media, and biomedical regimes). One set of articles raises the question of how dissent comes to be thwarted (Cho ; Harms ), individualized (Junge ), or pathologized (Weiss ). A second set explores the violence and exclusion that accompany the “ambivalent inclusion” (Rogozen‐Soltar :633) of immigrants in diverse parts of the globe (Ameeriar ; Gonzales and Chavez ; Rogozen‐Soltar , ; Rozakou ), whereas one article explores how Australian Aboriginals struggle over how to inhabit white settler colonial public space (Fisher ).…”