What is a woman who opposes her son’s enlistment in the Holy of Holies of Israeli society to do? A report from the front
You work for the army
For years they have been meeting all over the country: mothers of soldiers who oppose the idea in the name of which their sons are sent to the army. They do not call themselves “feminists” and they do not call themselves “pacifists”. They have a different view, according to which it is possible to find a solution by means of dialogue and not violence. They are educated women who understand that in order to function in a military setting, their sons have to undergo an emotional transformation and become tough and desensitized to carry out violent practices against civilians the ages of their younger siblings or their grandparents.
The mothers who bore and raised their sons are torn between the need to protect their sons and the national need to send them to the army. Should she sign off on her son joining a combat unit even though she knows that it would endanger his life? In order to protect him, should she convince him not to go, and thereby separate him from the collective, from his friends, from his reference group, from the outlooks in the light of which he grew up, and make him different from everybody else?
Thirty such women gathered to watch “Weekend”, a documentary film by Tamar Wishnitzer-Haviv, which documents three soldiers’ mothers over one weekend. Their main activities throughout the weekend in which their sons come home are washing and cooking – they ceaselessly do laundry, hang it to dry, iron, cook and wash dishes. Afterwards come the heavy, sometimes alienating silences. She tries to ask, “How are you?” – or “What do you do there?” – and receives is answered laconically at best, or with silence. He’s a “man” now, and what he does “there” is no longer her business.
Post-dated cheque
The conversation in the room at the end of the film reflects the pain, the isolation, the anger and the price paid by the mothers who refuse to automatically internalize the national commandment to stand at attention for the role that is not to be questioned: “soldier’s mother”.
Anat says that there is no biological logic to sending a child to the army, and that a woman who does send her son to the army does it with her eyes closed. “My mother, who paid no price when she sent two sons to the army, paid dearly years later, when they were both killed in the Yom Kippur War. And we close our eyes”, says Anat again, who “enlisted” a son, having internalized the idea that we are all potential bereaved mothers. “Yes, we want to be defended, but we want it do be done through negotiations and not with weapons – and they don’t want to hear that voice from us”, she adds. Like others, she too does not want to be identified, because she has a public position and fears being singled out.
Raheli Merhav, one of the founders of “Parents taking responsibility”, an organization that deals independently with the phenomenon of violence among youth, speaks of how hard it was for women to sign a petition against sending their sons to the army. “All our lives we were taught to be nice, to please others, and everyone who didn’t want to sign had a different excuse: ‘I work for the Education Ministry’, ‘My husband won’t let me’, ‘The family won’t accept it’. I told my son: ‘You won’t go to the army, it’s exploitation of minors’. In the end he went, because all his friends went; then I decided not to attend the completion of his training and the swearing-in ceremony. ‘I’m not a statistic in this film’, I told him. And that created a lot of tension at home, because ‘if you’re opposed to the army, then you’re also opposed to me.’”
“The IDF is our Third Temple”, she continues, “and if you ask any Israeli what is the most valuable thing that must not be lost, most people will say the IDF; not agriculture, medicine or Hebrew literature. So I come out against the Holy of Holies, and that’s a war that’s practically lost in advance. But something compels me, it sticks in my throat, I’m a human being too, I have an opinion too, and I can’t live my life without saying what I have to say. The option of not speaking was a kind of death. And I didn’t agree to die.”
“I remember, a week before enlistment, a very big quarrel with my son after Friday dinner. I told him, ‘in any case maybe you’ll consider refusing.’ He got upset, went out to the street and had a conversation with me yelling on the street. ‘You don’t keep your promises, you don’t trust me, stop interfering in my life.’ My husband was in the market, he told me: ‘Listen, if he had a gun, he’d shoot you, himself, or both of you.’ That was his father’s way of telling me, ‘stop it, you’re playing with fire.’”
An army of laundry
Feminist theory holds that the State enlists women for its needs. For the State, the role of women is to give birth to as many children as possible, to teach them to identify with the State and to educate them to sacrifice themselves for it.
And indeed, Israel is a prolific society, and most women educate their children to join the army and contribute to the State. The State enlists the women to strengthen the men. It first finds expression when they tell their boys: “Don’t cry like a girl!” – and it culminates with their visits to the army base with food and clean clothes. The mother fulfils that role from a definitely inferior position, because a society is militaristic and creates clear gender inequality. “Do you work for the army, Madame?” – a woman asked the feminist theoretician Adrienne Rich, when she learned that she had three sons.
“I want to know”, concludes Raheli Merhav, “that the army people have invested the same amount of time in finding non-violent solutions as they invested in making wars.” And as for Michal Pundak, the mother who told her son, “if you go to the army, you’ll have to walk over me, because I’ll sit in the doorway”, she concluded the discussion by saying: “Maybe we don’t love our children that much. Because if we loved them that much, we wouldn’t let this happen.”
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent
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