“What makes you Israeli”: A qualitative study of young men’s testimonies on military service, nationality and identity in Israel

Abstract

Military service is an important site of contact between the state and citizen. Studying military service can highlight the penetrating power of nationalism, as the state makes a claim of the individual’s sacrifice in the name of the nation. Israel provides an interesting example for such a study, as military service has a prominent position in the nation building project – nationalism and militarism are intertwined and mutually enhancing discourses. Still, globalised discourses that emphasise individualism are also influential. Subsequently, this thesis investigates how young Israeli men relate to nationalistic and militaristic discourses contra individualistic discourses; how these discourses mediate their identification process and the space for choosing to go to military service or not. The study is also concerned with these young men’s identification or counter-identification with their nationality and the role as a soldier in a militarised state. Resistance towards militarism, and its manifestations in hegemonic masculinity, is explored and analysed. This was done through conducting qualitative interviews with eight men who had either done their three full years of service, gotten an early release or evaded the draft. The study found that the respondents were highly affected by nationalistic and militaristic discourses. Their contact with globalised discourses on individualism and personal freedom did not entail diminished sense of pressure to serve the nation through military service. While the two respondents who had evaded service mostly framed their acts as driven by individualistic motivations, individualism also provided a way to justify going to the military. I hold that globalisation and individualism are not necessarily antidotes to militarism and nationalism. I further discovered that military service was a formative experience for several respondents, that made them disillusioned towards the nationalistic and militaristic discourses. Finally, the respondents who counter-identified with the role as a soldier expressed this in terms of a dissonance with hegemonic masculinity, indicating the masculinist nature of militarism.