NOVANEWSPosted by: Sammi Ibrahem,Sr
against conscription
The mere thought is unbearable. A person hooked up to tubes, perhaps dying, desperately needy of treatment unavailable in Gaza, is en route to Egypt or Jordan or Israel. At the checkpoint, he/she or a relative is taken to a side room where a Shabaq agent will place his outrageous demand in return for the permission to exit. We were there at that press conference. The people present were speaking Arabic, English and French and German and Spanish. Not a single Jewish-Israeli journalist. Or so it appeared. How – I wondered – could they not be crowding in here around this issue? After all, even if they think it’s another one of those |
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I believe that the real reason for which they did not show up at the press conference, and wrote what and if they did, is part of the answer to the question: how such criminal policy can be implemented so easily and in such overriding silence in a state not subjected to dictatorship, nor infused with censorship, where no journalists are at any real risk if they report things against current government policy. |
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Initiation rites rampant in the mafia and other groups (who act with institutionalized violence that usually does not adhere to common values, and at times is even illegal) exist, among other things, to ensure that the novice entering their ranks will be branded with the stamp of belonging. |
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“But someone has to do it” say the Jewish-Israeli parents who send their offspring to the army year after year, generation after generation. “The whole world is against us”, and “we’re all better off if it’s my son in there, and not some…”, for “this is my country”, and “I am duty-bound even if I don’t see eye to eye with the present policy”, and “what would happen if the really bad guys were to get here” – say others. Even without questioning the extent of truth in the Jewish-Israeli Zionist version of reality, let us assume that the political and historical situation were exactly as they are now, with the exception that military service were not mandatory. The answer is no. If joining the army were not mandatory, even in similar circumstances, parents would not necessarily want their children to join the army. Perhaps because joining the army as a mandatory service is the most prominent Israeli rite of initiation par excellence. If no longer practiced by one and all, it would cease to be that. When its mythical, symbolic dimensions are shifted towards the concrete, many will justly say – why should I waste the best years of my young life on this of all things.
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By the way, military service in the Wehrmacht, founded in 1935, was mandatory. Youngsters were enlisted in its ranks under state law. They, too, as customary everywhere under mandatory service laws, enlisted regardless of the act of their state, and believed – one assumes – that this is what must be done. For it is mandatory. They and their parents. |
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“Still, in spite of possible imperfections, after all we are no pacifists and regardless of who is right or why people enlist, still we need an army.” These words are uttered by individuals who, in fact, oppose their government’s policy. And they continue to serve it, they and their sons. So why maintain a regular (mandatory) army? For if mandatory conscription were not imposed by law, the stamp of belonging to the act of their state would no longer remain whole. It would begin to crack and fall apart. That is just what happened with the United States’ invasion of Iraq. As there is no mandatory service, not every citizen served his state’s policy, was not fated to serve it – neither they nor their sons and daughters. Thus, at least potentially, the crucial distance is maintained between the individual and the act of state. The state is not he. Not everything it does, he does. Therefore, he can examine it without fearing what will be said of him. This has never happened in Israel which most of its citizens (naturally, only of the sectors that are obliged by law to serve in the army) were never critical as to its wars’ moral justification. Not only the general public, but most journalists as well. No official censorship is needed for Jewish-Israeli journalists to serve their government’s policy and refuse to be critical. They will claim they are patriots and accept the state’s position verbatim, although their professional future is at no risk if they pose questions and suspect the state’s real motive and justification. Compulsory military service is, then, Israel’s most ingenious and terrible invention. Its role is to brand the state’s Jewish residents with an immoral loyalty to the acts of their state, regardless. Its role is to blur the difference between acts of state and of the individual, to make them identical. What the state did was done by the private individual, everyman. As limited as one is in naming his own and his children’s deeds, one is limited in his ability to name the acts of state. That is why no dictatorship is needed in Israel, no military junta nor censorship, and no life-threat to hover over anyone who dare challenge the state – for the majority to obey, participate and keep silent when necessary. In full view of the murdered cancer patients of Gaza, in view of what is called in Israel “Operation Cast Lead” and known around the world as “The Massacre in Gaza”, and in full view of all the other crimes against the Palestinian people, from then to now – all that is needed is mandatory military service. Aya Kaniuk |
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Translated by Tal Haran |
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