Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. I'm as always, delighted to present our speakers each time we meet.
But this time again, it's a it's a genuine personal present to present also a friend and just a visiting speaker, Professor Ernest Levy,
who served just until recently as the head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel,
and also an associate professor at the Program of Gender Studies at the University of Maine.
Research focuses on the field of gender and militarism.
Her most recent English publication is Women Soldiers and Citizenship in the Observer in Israel Gendered Encounter with the State,
co-authored with an obscure father and just recently a Hebrew book published,
MacDowell bases co-edited volume dealing with roughly the same topics but a completely different book.
And the title of her talk today is Gender Citizenship The Case of Women Breaking the Silence.
I want to thank you for coming back.
Thank you for inviting me, Yaacov, and thank you for joining me this afternoon in Oxford.
It's really exciting and it's a little honoured to speak at Oxford. My purpose today is a real articulation of the ideas proposed in this book,
co-authored by Professor Edna Lansky Further than Myself, which explores the meanings of women's military service in Israel.
In this book, we argue that mandatory military service for women becomes a major arena for processes of initiation into gendered citizenship.
The military is one of the main arenas for civic participation,
since it is the institution most closely associated with a state both on its allergies and its practices.
Thus, we understand the military is a contact zone while the citizen and the state meet.
The encounters with a state are always shaped by gender, ideologies and gendered interests,
which are especially pronounced in the military, which is a hyper masculine organisation.
Therefore, we analyse military service.
Is it citizenship, conferring institution and focus and how it shapes the way women perceive the state and experience those citizenship.
Although the initiation processes into citizenship welcoming to all Jewish women in Israel.
Their perceptions and experiences of citizenship are not uniform and should be studied according to
ethnic and class intersections and also according to the role that they fulfil in the military.
In my lecture today, I want to explore one specific group of women those who have served in the occupied
territories and testified to an anti-occupation movement called Breaking the Silence.
My question will be why have these women come out and talk about violent experiences in the military
when the common norm in Israel is to deny violence and to silence experiences of violence?
I will open by introducing fully analytical concepts that we developed in the book that
I believe can help us understand women's military experience beyond the Israeli case.
And specifically, they can help us understand the minority of women who choose to speak up and talk.
First, however, I want to present the larger context. Israel is a sewer.
Most of you know it's still the only country in the world with mandatory conscription for women.
60% of all Jewish women enlist, and they present a food of the regular military significantly, significantly more than any other Western military.
Most Western militaries, women up to 15%, the most, usually around 10%.
Interestingly, though, this has been so since the establishment of the state in 1948, women's military service did not become taken for granted.
It is highly controversial during various groups into heated arguments again and again, and particularly with regard to women in combat.
Indeed, since the mid-nineties, the military's gender regime has undergone significant changes, such as opening up combat roles for women,
dismantling the women's codes and gender, integrating of most military courses from basic training to officers courses.
Today, the military gender regime is no longer dichotomous in coherence to actual as it used to be.
The men are the warriors and the women of the secretaries. Rather,
it's a very dynamic field operating under the influence of conflicting pressures religious forces
and conservative process and masculine forces press for maintaining a clearly segregated gender.
Although within the military they will be aquatic forces, mainly the media.
Human Powell and feminist and liberal forces are working to integrate women.
These changes are not unique to the Israeli military. I want to remind you that in December 2015, former Defence Secretary in the US,
Ashton Carter, declared that all combat was will be open to women in the US forces.
And as you know, maybe few weeks ago on October 25, the British government made a very similar announcement about the British armed forces.
In light of these dynamic forces, we seek to discard binary notions.
When I say we mean my colleague who is not who,
we seek to discard binary notions of gender power relations and examined the organisation as one comprised of multiple gender arrangements.
Gendered analysis of women's military service used to assume a fairly binary perspective,
arguing that military service is either a mechanism for social mobilisation and equal citizenship.
And that's the liberal feminism.
Of course, all of that ification of mass citizenship and a form of cooperation with a patriarchal, inviolate institution.
This is the attitude of radical feminism will reject these two schemas as too simplistic,
and we aim to problematise these assumptions and argue that the military's inequality regime both create valid opportunities and
set various obstacles for different intersectional groups of women and thereby generating diverse encounters with the state.
Against this backdrop, I will be search.
Ask how women cope with an encounter with a state for their participation in the institution most closely associated with citizenship.
We interviewed over 120 women and we got testimonies of 20 women who gave
testimonies to Breaking the silence about a decade after the military service.
Based on the analysis of the interviews.
We contend that gendered encounters with the state can be understood through three interrelated concepts multilevel contracts,
contrasting gendered experiences, and this acknowledging violence.
And I will start with the first one. The experience of military service is shaped by differential social contract between the state and the citizen,
which reflects both formal citizen duties and rights and informal expectations and obligations.
The contract, which is a product of cost negotiations and power relations between the two sides uneven two sides,
the military and the soldier derives its unique character from the cultural schema that shaped the women's expectations of service.
The meaning of the women's service is shaped by the nature of the contract and by whether it was fulfilled or violated during the service.
And I'll give you one example only. We have more in the book.
We discovered that women who serve the secretaries present two very different narratives about the service.
Lower class women who serve the secretaries describe the service is enriching and empowering experience.
This very positive interpretation emerges from the informal contract which sees military service as a venue to achieve a sense of respectability.
Respectability is the term of Beverly Scaggs, and according to Scaggs,
respectability connects personal identity with national identity and national belonging.
In contrast, middle class women enlist into in the military with a sense of entitlement to self-fulfilment and also to gender equality.
They expect to serve in a prestigious role that will advance their social status and showcase their personal abilities.
Service as a secretary, which pushes them back into the role that symbolises traditional femininity,
is experienced as a gross violation of the contract, and they talk about the service in terms of dispel disappointment.
To our mind, one of them even said holocaust about military service.
That is so lower class women. Military service is perceived as a path to acquiring respectability.
Inclusion in the political collective in the military fulfils its part of the contract for military force for middle class women.
Military service is supposed to ensure their preferred status within the bodies of the collective service as a secretary is considered
abrogation of the contract and they are deeply disappointed and it's also reflected in the way they talk about the citizenship in these lines.
The second concept contrasting gendered experiences.
Despite the military organisation being hypermasculine, it actually offers women.
I'll do a range of gendered experiences. Then the civilian labour market.
Military service pushes some women into traditional feminine walls, just like the secretaries that I just mentioned.
But also many other women get a chance to experience bluelink of gender experiences.
For example, if they serve in the intelligence wars and the intelligence is the biggest unit in the Israeli military,
and the growing number of women get a chance to cross gender boundaries by solving injuries, combat instructors, all combat soldiers.
These various wars could very different gendered experiences from the point of view of body, of sexuality, of emotional management.
Through their embodied experiences, they learn the positions in the army.
They learn the boundaries of the body, the boundaries of the military power,
etc. These women's military experience provide concrete meaning to their participatory citizenship.
It teaches them the position in the hyper masculine organisation, in the position vis a vis the state.
I must also say that although the military offers a very wide range of experiences.
His experience is always shaped and interpreted in light of the image of the combat soldier who embodies the nation state,
embodies the ultimate citizen. This image demarcated the women's marginality and limits them.
That is, the military open up into opportunities for a variety of gendered experiences,
but at the same time clearly lays down the patriarchal boundaries in the less concept this acknowledging violence.
How do women soldiers experience, discuss or deny militarised violence?
The military, by definition, is the organisation authorised to use violence and behalf of the state.
That's the sociological definition. It is saturated with violence,
whether directed outside to those who are defined as enemies or directed inside
towards women is sexual harassment and towards men very often in the form of hazing.
These soldiers of both agents and victims of military militarised violence.
Surprisingly, however, when we interview soldiers, mostly women, they do not discuss the violence of war and occupation.
We heard a thunderous silence, so much so that you would think to talk about a different place in the woman in the labour market,
just a regular civilian workplace, and that about service in a force that has been controlling a hostile civilian population for over 50 years.
The very few women willing to break the silence were the ones who testified to the organisation Breaking the Silence.
So it's their political voice and agency that I want to explore today.
So this was the introduction and one more shot introduction about breaking the silence.
Breaking the silence is an anti occupation protest movement, which started out in 2004,
was an organisation of men who completed the service in the Occupied Territories.
They documented and published testimonies of abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 2010.
They publish testimonies of their ongoing situation, publishes testimonies by women soldiers.
So for the first time, women veterans publicly presented eyewitness testimonies to an anti-war movement for the first time in Israel.
It doesn't happen in many other countries. Also today, the group is same.
The target of a campaign of persecution and defamation lies by the government, together with extreme right wing NGOs.
I want to give you just an example of what they do. Of a testimony by a woman.
Can you claim escape? Okay.
So this is one example. It has English subtitles of a woman giving a testimony which shows you that they're not staying anonymous anymore.
They're giving testimonies with their face open. So naturally, Shelly will go on.
Chilling images shot in the Gulf in Tennessee all of late last year will be hosting the skies above,
ensuring Rudy and his counties are not able to leave the function of Qaddafi at the moment.
Yeah, I know. It's, you know, kind of an event that is about yourself.
She had a piece of me. The Lord condemned you and I.
Adorable the whole thing. Honey, I am a child, he said. I know a lot of families should not be able to.
That's a shame.
Sure, I can call the team and talk about first things that can occur and look ahead to Shackleton and see that actually seeing to of itself.
Havana, Cuba was the epicentre of the war. We can call on her emotional charm when it came out that I loved Man, that Moussa said.
It wasn't so much who killed my will than my Yemeni.
More Mohammad Mahamat came on my show as emotional instead of as anybody forget.
He actually she meant the aftermath of the Somali girl.
I think they now.
No no majority party which I am majority minority try to show by design matching is
that your membership of the humanity of your class not forgetting what is the key?
They tell me shyama I have to tell you until MADDOW said kingdom as it in Somalia.
And I thought, God, that was so funny because any man and all that seem to be to help so much more.
And so I morpheme but mostly all I had a month before the and then with the old.
Okay. Okay.
So this was just an example, not a very lovely one.
Based on the first 20 testimonies, we argued that the metanarrative that organises the women's testimonies is an
ongoing tension between acknowledging and this acknowledging military violence.
In the testimonies, the women declared that they had valuable knowledge on what occurred and they describe different behaviours.
At the same time, however, they claimed that they did not know what really happened and frequently argued that they would rather not have known.
So the question of knowing or unknowing and gender is what interests me today.
Let's hear the false testimony. Neufeld served as a company clerk located in the occupied city of Cleveland.
Well, hundred and 63,000 Palestinians bullied and intimidated by about a thousand Jewish settlers.
Now, first interview will himself an ex-con but soldier and an activist ask so.
Mm hmm. It's a grown man. Okay. It's not automatic.
Okay. Oh, okay. It's okay. There was video, right?
Wow. Okay, good. So he says, but you know, that they detain people.
And she says, but I never saw the detainees know, did I know exactly.
I didn't engage in operational activities. I think I pretty much didn't want to know, like it wasn't part of my job.
But with all your political awareness. No, there wasn't any.
No, I wasn't aware. Maybe I close my eyes to it.
Maybe I didn't want to know that I was there. But you will really in the middle of action.
That's right. But, you know, I sort of didn't see I don't know, I sort of closed my eyes.
But that's because it was too hard for me. If I had really been engaged in it, then maybe.
And he says, So what will you engage in? And she says, The soldiers and they.
Social activity, social events, personal conversations.
Yep. And he says, but the reality was two metres away.
He's pushing her. And she says, and I didn't relate to it.
I don't know regarding the Palestinians. I don't know. I didn't ask.
They didn't tell me. As you can hear him, repeat it time and time again, the voices.
I don't know if I could easily choose not to know because the job did not do.
I had to leave the base and she did not directly encounter day to day reality of the occupation.
Nonetheless, one event pierced a wall of not knowing the day she encountered the headscarf, handcuffed Palestinian detainee inside the base.
This was her politicising moment. Well, she chose to know.
Consequently, she wanted to hold discussions and ethics among the soldiers.
But [INAUDIBLE], Commander would not allow it.
The interviewer, from breaking the silence wide, wondered why no file did not insist on talking to soldiers.
And she said, I think it was because of two reasons.
One, because it was heavily involved in my social soldier's social life.
And that was just to make things fun for them and take them out of the trenches.
And also, I didn't want to be the leftist who raises these issues because I wanted to be the company cleared for everybody.
A second soldier, Gilad, served as a lookout. She could not say to know what was going on.
She was proud of her professional knowledge, which protected her from facing moral and emotional questions.
How politicising a moment was when she reported and what appeared to be four Palestinian children preparing to throw a molotov cocktail.
The military responded with live fire and later it emerged that one of the children was killed in the wake of this incident.
I realised that despite the sophisticated knowledge and very clear rules of engagement, everyone was operating under a very high level of uncertainty.
Furthermore, she learned that her professional knowledge was enlisted to construct a little active narrative used to justify the shooting.
In testimony, she described her debriefing with an investigator from the Shabak, the Israeli and MI5.
He asked me to give a written account of the incident as it occurred.
That's it. Then you will have to sign it. And you'll done.
And what did you write? What if seen? But then I wasn't certain of what I've seen.
I wasn't certain. But it did happen. And he says, Why weren't you certain?
Why wasn't I certain? Because it wasn't that bad with the boys.
They didn't affect anything. And also because you start to ask yourself, so supposing they just put their hands up.
I told the investigator what I recall happening and then I asked him What happens if it didn't in fact happen.
He said that even if it didn't happen, they would confess. So the interviewer says, What does it mean they would confess?
And she says, I didn't ask. I decided I do not know.
So the stories of the Friday night demonstrate the movement between knowing and not knowing the violence of occupation.
Of course, we can argue that they do not discuss the violence of occupation since they did not encounter directly.
Yet it is clear that the silence is part of the denial and silencing mechanisms of the occupation that are very prevalent in Israeli society.
In an attempt to preserve the image of the just society and morally, militarily,
Israeli society activates various mechanisms to deny military violence,
including emphasising the Jewish victimhood, especially the Holocaust,
stressing the traumatic discourse and ignoring completely Palestinian suffering.
In this context, any discussion of the world violence itself, which I experience when I talk about it when I give this lectures in Hebrew,
is perceived as treason, making it very difficult not only to object to military violence, but even to acknowledge it and cope with it morally.
Against this backdrop, the women who did manage to break the silence.
And made the voice heard. Exceptional. A small minority.
So I will now analyse the decision to break the silence, employing the analytical concepts that I mentioned before.
The first one was multilevel contract. The women's decision to testify indicated the contract with a state includes a moral element.
As the military's violence is so often silenced or denied, they expect to serve in a very mobile military force.
Accordingly, they further the experiences they went through in and to pay territories violated the moral clause in their contract.
They came to realise that the military employs violence and regular basis and that the boundaries of legitimate Powell are very often crossed.
It was this disillusionment and even rage of the violation of the contract that drove them to testify.
Ghali story is a case in point. Before enlisting, Ghali had right wing views and she supported the occupation.
And she voted for right wing parties serving as a Border Patrol police officer and the Jordanian model.
She was in charge of controlling Palestinians movement including by the soldiers
help politicising moment which which was completely life changing eventful
[INAUDIBLE] occurred when the young woman was detained because a woman soldier
complained that she talked burqa to Ghali perceived interaction is floating.
She said to us in the interview, Take two, two.
In the testimony, the Palestinian was sure that it was all in good fun because we're talking here about young people all the same age.
But the interaction turned out into militarised power relations and the young man was detained.
Gali said the station commander was responsible for everything that happened then and it was he who took the boy into detention and I followed them.
We got to the police station and they went into a closed woman. I remained outside the door.
I didn't know why I stayed there. I didn't have to.
I don't know. Something told me to stay. Now, looking back, I recall I heard through the closed door everything that was going on inside.
It was then that Ghali became a direct witness to violence that went inside the home.
And from that incident and world, she decided to know.
She started asking everyone she met. What did you do in the army? What did you do yesterday?
What do you do in the military? She started taking testimonies herself, and her political point of view completely changed.
And she became an activist. So neither who served in Cologne is an education officer.
The politicising moment was first arrived on the base, the first, then the base,
and she goes to meet the soldiers in the base and she finds out the soldiers steal prayer beads from the Palestinians.
Prayer beads, massive budget. And she says, is it no soldier?
And this and the base.
I went to a routine welcome interview with a brigade commander the following day, and you ask me, So what do you think of the brigade?
So file? And I said, It's fine, except that I saw soldiers with my belt and Korans from Qalqilya that they took as souvenirs.
The commander followed up on the report with the soldiers. They to Mendell, who said, I've never seen this girl.
She's lying. She's making it up. What are you saying? My soldiers would never do a thing like that.
And the confrontation between Iran and the commander continued over the phone.
And that's what Neil said. I told him, look, it happened.
And he said, Who are you anyway? You're pipsqueak. You don't understand anything.
And from that moment on, I was banned from the company for four months.
I was not allowed near them. Sunil I was caught here between a loyalty to her soldiers and her loyalty to her own moral code.
The violation of the moral code made her speak up and she was willing to pay the price for it.
The politicising moments we find out that she and her male colleagues experience tuned out to destroy everything, to ruin everything.
After this politicising moment, they disrupt the process of initiation into the military's gender regime.
They question the loyalty and belonging to the state, and they counteract compliance with a gendered citizenship.
The second concept is gendered experiences. The testimonies indicate that not only the violation of an implied mobile contract,
but also the women's gendered experiences had a part in pushing them to speak up.
Often these women were the first among the first women in combat units,
or the first to serve in support roles like the education wars in the Occupied Territories.
The Army conveys to these women that they are crucially necessarily.
But despite this, during the service, they have to cope with discrimination,
exclusion and silencing those still active and distrust of the men soldiers will convey to the women through ongoing initiation rites,
challenge them to exhibit more violence to all Palestinians to prove that they deserve to be in combat.
Daphne Combatant described this like she said, five of us girls joined a new company.
This was the first time girls served there. We had a difficult time.
Everyone looking at us testing as it was a truly battle for survival, always having to prove ourselves and live in the shadow of force.
Other women mentioned the loneliness of being only a few girls among dozens of men in a sexually charged atmosphere brimming with contempt for women,
inferior, live in condition and devalued.
Was this narrative attached to the women's feeling of being outsiders within excluded from the camaraderie of men?
The outsiders position has a silencing effect.
The women often felt that they could not voice criticism or cast doubt because of the very real fear of being ostracised.
The very few who did so well marked as leftist or informers and had to pay a small initiation light to prove their loyalty.
As the testimonies demonstrate that in addition to the general silencing mechanisms that I mentioned earlier,
there were also specific gendered silencing mechanisms that are deployed specifically against women.
The ambivalent position as women in a masculinist environment.
The experience of outsiders within and especially the gendered hostility they experienced, pushed them to speak up.
Moreover, these experiences made them interpret the military day to day life, form a gender experience.
In the testimonies, they very often criticised the men, the soldiers who abuse Palestinians and describe them as infantile, macho bravery.
In particular, they blamed the male soldiers for having fun, for enjoying the violence, for being overenthusiastic.
These are the ones that repeated again and again overenthusiastic.
Tell a combatant. Describe the men's soldiers behaviour during house searches, she said.
The deputy company commander went out to map a Palestinian house.
When he came back he said to me, we messed up the house. He was so enthusiastic about it and instead of thinking, Wow, we are such men.
In my mind, I was thinking about those women who are now cleaning up the mess that the soldiers made and the feel of the children at home.
So things like that happened. And then you surprised that the age of 18 they blow themselves up?
Because criticism is directed at the man's behaviour characterised by enthusiasm and pleasure in violence.
While the Commander demonstrated his masculinity by exhibiting his power over the occupied population,
Taylor identified with the women victims of the suit by portraying the soldiers as immature.
The women deconstruct the image of the demonic masculinity that is based on
the emotional and physically self-controlled and disciplined combat soldier.
Hence the women's ambivalent position in the military construct.
How they know or do not know what takes place in the occupied territories.
The patriarchal ideology very often trivialises women into the position of the ones who don't know or don't know enough.
Especially in the security arena. At the same time, the women are so disappointed.
By the violation of the moral contract, which, together with a gendered experience, says, and that makes them speak up.
The decision to testify reflects a position of knowledge as well as the ethical position to break the silence and give the knowledge a public voice.
Thus, the military's gender regime, which shapes the gendered experience, says, also shapes the political voice.
And now we are coming towards the conclusion. Yes, living at home is the.
First of all,
I want to emphasise not all women soldiers who have served in the territories experience in mobile crisis and most of them do not choose to testify.
It's this very small minority that chooses to testify and talk about the service.
So what does the silence of the majority teaches us and what and what the testimonies what do the testimonies teach us about gender citizenship?
The ignorance of most women of military violence teaches us that violence is not a part of the women's perceived contract with the military.
Most women do not expect to be exposed to violence.
They enlist because this is the law and they expect to serve the service to give them
a sense of respectability or belonging or boost the future of professional career.
They do not expect to encounter violence. Conversely, in the men's contract with the military, violence is very central.
Of course, the combat soldier knows he will encounter violence, but also men, combat soldiers.
Evaluate the service in comparison to the combat soldier.
And they think about violence as violence is not part of women's contact with the military.
We often see that when a woman soldier dies in action,
the public outrage and anxiety are much more intense than when a woman civilian dies in a terrorist attack, for example.
Hence, women combat participation challenges the perception that women need protection even when they are soldiers.
And moreover, women in combat challenges, men's exclusiveness in the battlefield, and the resulting benefits that men get from the combat wars.
This is why opening combat calls to women is declared on both sides of the Atlantic, raises such a powerful opposition, and especially so in Islam.
Removing violence from women's contact with the military indicates the status as being a titans within.
Of course they enlist, but they do not take part in the most tame central action of the military, which is participating in the violence.
Thus, they are marked as incomplete, militarily subject and hence lacking in the citizenship.
Hence, women in Israel are not excluded from the public sphere.
They are not excluded from the security field. They are not excluded from being citizens.
Bath is killed, Pateman said many, many years ago.
They are incorporated into public life as women, as beings whose sexual embodiment prevents them from enjoying the same political standing as men.
In other words, the military service establishes them as citizens, but not as equal citizens with a line separating them from full citizenship.
Is participating in military violence, hence participation in violence as a constituting role in shaping full citizenship in Israel.
It's one of the saddest conclusions that we live definitely must assume, since violence is not part of women's contact with the military.
Most women come to accept the traditional view of women in need of men's protection, and they internalise the marginal place also in civilian life.
Taking that marginality for granted has two major implications for women's citizenship in Israel.
The first implication is that women untangle the Republican link between military service and claiming civilian lives.
Men very often require from the state symbolic and material benefits in return for the violent contribution,
while women feel that they are not entitled to that.
Many women feel grateful for having received the opportunity to constitute their belonging to the nation through military service.
And they see it as the exercise of the civil right and its own that they do not claim any additional civil benefits.
When women in Israel do claim civil benefits or make claims in the state.
They do it usually as mothers, always mothers for soldiers rather than as veterans.
And thus they produce the gendered citizenship and gendered civilian hierarchies.
Second, since women do not take part in violence, they do not assume they can leverage their military service to obtain political voice,
and they do not consider themselves entitled to political criticism.
So the testimonies are very unique in that sense.
The testimonies of the women silence breakers indicate what can make a woman soldier decide to speak.
Truth to power is for Cozad. After all, brutal violations of the moral contract and of the gendered expectations lead to political
disillusionment and to the decision to be active in civil society organisations.
We could say that is their politicising moments that captured the violation of the moral engendered contract and pushed them to speak up.
Hence the case of the Silence Breakers show that military service can be a new source,
an unexpected source for women's symbolic power in the political field.
The hyper masculine organisation, which is very often marginalising women, can also be leveraged to justify political criticism and political agency.
However, of course, leveraging military service to justify a political voice is also a source of its weakness, because when women do so,
they usually affirm the male dominated Republican ethos, the great Sally that grants political superiority and power to male warriors.
Thus, the testimonies that produce the role of the military is a citizenship conferring institution,
and they produce masculine power within the state.
But this criticism notwithstanding, still, I want to conclude and said that the women's testimony offered an alternative framing of soldiering,
gender and anti-military discourse, though by challenging the demonic masculinity of the combat soldier who embodies the nation state.
Though testimonies through Sally Field testimonies like the ones we've seen and heard today,
these women untie the Gordian knot between military state and masculinity.
Thank you.