Israel’s Death Hierarchy: Casualty Aversion in a Militarized Democracy

8 Conclusions

>> 205 8 Conclusions Inspired by the overwhelming casualty sensitivity that appeared in Israeli society in the first decade of the 2000s, this book has tackled the fundamental issue of how the state manages its citizens’ lives and deaths by prompting individuals to be willing to sacrifice their lives for their country . Adequate answers were not found in the existing literature on casualty aversion. In summing up the literature, what we found lacking was an integrative approach that links casualty sensitivity to its social origins, its reflection in bereavement discourse and bereavement-motivated collective antiwar protests , the manner by which the state adopts its course of action to this articulated sensitivity, and its impact on civil-military relations. Each of these components has been dealt with separately by sociological and IR/PS studies, but they have not been adequately integrated. As shown in the introductory chapter, this lack of integration created deficiencies in our understanding of the issues. It was with this challenge that this book dealt by relying on the Israeli experience. 206 > 207 enjoyed by the middle class. In practice, as occurred in the 1950s, privileged Ashkenazi soldiers risked their lives to protect mainly the lower-class Mizrahi border residents by means of reprisal raids but were rewarded accordingly . Rights were balanced, and hence the death hierarchy conformed to the original Hobbesian hierarchy. With the almost-total cultural dictate that made military sacrifice unquestionable, privileged groups were denied substantive freedom of choice. And, to the degree they had had such freedom, the state rebalanced the rights in a way that valued the right to protect as borne by the Ashkenazi groups and hence tied them back to the security project. Rights became imbalanced after the 1970s and more so following the First Lebanon War, with the decline of the external threat, the ascendancy of a market society that devalued military sacrifice, and the decoupling of soldiering from citizenship together with an increase in security costs. A drop in motivation among the secular middle class, who had benefited most from the right to protect, was the result. It elicited individual and collective forms of resistance to sacrifice, resulting in imposition of limitations on the way the IDF could utilize its manpower resources, and thereby affected the community ’s right to protection, at least as seen through the lens of the traditional military paradigm. When the rights are out of balance, the state enacts multiple balancing strategies. In this case, the state initially opted for the first balancing strategy , the most favorable one: increasing the demand for protection. This may increase support for the military burden and revalue military sacrifice as a means of both reducing pressures to provide any rights other than security and rewarding the bearers of the security burden. However, during the First Lebanon War and on the Palestinian scene, the state failed in its attempt to increase the demand for protection; on the contrary, the increasing burden caused by warfare worsened the previous imbalance. No more promising was the second strategy, increasing compensation for sacrifice. The state has limited options to offer a dominant serving group; likewise, monetary rewards directly allocated to servicepersons are limited under the draft regime. Since the fourth strategy (burden redistribution) entails a long-term structural change in the armed forces, failure in deploying the first balancing strategy made the third balancing strategy, burden reduction by means of reduced military protection, a readily available solution. The withdrawal from Lebanon in 1985 under the pressure of protest activity and the military restraint in the first Intifada that paved the road to Oslo represented this form. To reduce military protection, the government opted for moderate moves over more bellicose ones and made compromises it had been 208 > 209 risk no longer were only peripheral citizens, and it had to risk privileged soldiers again and could not rely solely on peripheral soldiers, it turned to the use of excessive force. By so doing, it reduced the risk to which soldiers are exposed at the expense of enemy civilians, the group on the lowest rung of the death hierarchy. Exhaustion of the fourth strategy was at work, as exemplified by Operation Cast Lead. Apparently, this once again rebalanced the rights. Military policies are thus demarcated by the interplay between the two sets of rights. Difficulties in promoting the right to protect affect the level of the right to protection. Within this space, the mode of balance between rights determines the profile of the legitimacy to sacrifice and...