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>> 71 3 Bereavement-Motivated Collective Actors As we showed in chapter 2, after the 1970s, motivation for military service lessened among privileged groups. This was reflected, inter alia, in the framing of a subversive bereavement discourse. The fourth balancing strategy, burden distribution, gradually but imperfectly shifted the tone from a subversive to a submissive discourse. Still, sensitivity to casualties remained a cornerstone in bereavement discourse and imposed limitations on the military deployment. To better understand the limitations that the state faced, this chapter analyzes the link between the social composition of the IDF, as reflected in the social map of the casualties, and bereavement-incited collective action. Changing attitudes toward sacrifice created the bereavement hierarchy, through which various groups interpreted the loss of their children’s lives or the potential risk posed by their children’s military service: in general, the lower the position of the group on the social hierarchy, the greater its tolerance for military death. So, while secular upper-middle-class groups showed a high level of sensitivity to losses and translated that sensitivity into 72 > 73 founded by four residents of the north, mothers of soldiers who were serving in Lebanon at the time of the helicopter accident. Though the group expanded to include men as well, the majority of its members were middleclass women, many of whom came from the centrist-leftist kibbutz movement , with a strong base in the north of Israel (Lieberfeld 2009). Four Mothers led the campaign to pull the IDF out of Lebanon unilaterally and unconditionally, efforts that before the helicopter accident had been steered ineffectively by leftist activists. It enlisted the support of leading politicians and retired generals. Rachel Ben Dor, the movement’s founder, described her impetus to act: On the night of the helicopter disaster I became forcefully aware of the terrible price we were paying in the Lebanese quagmire . . . . We were now facing profound sorrow and despair, and also a great anxiety about their [our sons’] future. . . . Meanwhile the Hakibutz newspaper had published an article . . . [expressing] amazement at the resignation with which Israeli mothers accept the fact that, at a certain age, their sons become soldiers, dedicating their lives to political or military goals, without even questioning themselves about it. (Four Mothers website) From the outset, Four Mothers had to overcome more serious barriers than its predecessors that had appeared following the First Lebanon War. The public supported the Israeli presence in Lebanon and believed in its effectiveness (see Kaye 2002–2003, 566–568); the political elites negated the possibility of a unilateral withdrawal (Beilin 2008, 44–45), and the militarized society did not tolerate the questioning of military logic, especially by women (see Robbins and Ben-Eliezer 2000). Mothers against Silence had had limited impact. Even the level of casualty shyness was not high: the antiwar activity that followed the First Lebanon War was unprecedented, but it focused on the justification for the war, rather than its costs, while tolerance for sacrifice for a just cause remained high. However, the politics of war—such as military success, number of casualties , level of threat, and the rightness of the war—aggravated the previously grounded modest sensitivity to losses after the sudden death of the seventythree soldiers in the midair collision and raised questions about the logic of the military deployment in south Lebanon. Largely because of Four Mothers’ activities, the policy debate regarding Israel’s presence in Lebanon became intense and vocal, contrasting two views: The Kochav Yair group, a bipartisan group of parliamentarians and former intelligence chiefs, supported unilateral withdrawal and provided Four 74 > 75 or unilaterally (Maoz 2006, 215). After winning the elections in May 2000, partly because of this promise, Prime Minister Barak ordered a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanese soil, against the advice of the IDF leadership. Four Mothers’ contribution was mainly in lobbying among the elites, attracting media attention, and organizing rallies that kept Lebanon on the agenda for two years and transformed the presence in the security zone into an electoral issue. While it is impossible to attribute exclusive causal significance to Four Mothers, its major role in prompting the decision was generally acknowledged. Indeed, immediately following the pullout, a majority of Israelis (58 percent) believed that the movement had had a significant or a “very strong” influence on the decision to withdraw; only 19 percent thought that it had had only some limited influence, and 16 percent thought that it had no influence at all (Hermann 2009, 166). Even Prime Minister...

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