Danny Kaplan, a post-doctoral fellow at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues in his ground-breaking work Brothers and Others in Arms: The Making of Love and War in Israeli Combat Units (NY: Harrington Park Press, 2002) that Jewish gay and lesbian communities in Israel have been less likely to create gay and lesbian subcultures that resist social norms than gay and lesbian communities in most Western societies:
Many gay subcultures in Western societies offer an image of resistance to surrounding societal norms. The American gay and lesbian community has often inclined to cultural, societal, economic, and geographical segregation. In contrast, the overall picture that gay Israelis seem to portray is one of compliance with mainstream Zionist culture. There may be various reasons for this situation: the strongly knit ties within Israeli society, the small size of the country and society, and the importance of familial values within Jewish tradition. But, unquestionably, the actual participation of the majority of gay and lesbian youth in the military increases this trend toward conformity. (p. 162)
Through his interviews with gay and bisexual soldiers in a wide range of combat units in the Israeli military, Kaplan convincingly makes the case that the centrality of Jewish Israeli gay men's military experience shapes the development of their sexual identity "in a much more structured and institutionalized manner" than in many Western industrial societies:
For Israeli men in general, military service follows earlier Jewish initiation rite[s] such as the brit milah and bar mitzvah in symbolically shaping a collective form of masculine identity. . . .The acquisition of gay identity in Western societies is often viewed as a private, personal process lacking socially acknowledged developmental markers. Even for the minority of gay men who serve in their respective armies, the diverse circumstances of their service -- often as a partial career and at various periods in life -- may defy any attempt to ascribe to it a cultural-collective meaning. In contrast, the involvement of most gay Israeli men in the military within this cultural context of a Zionist rite of passage, shapes the development of their identity in a more clearly defined manner, and in a sense turns it into a ritualized, anticipated, and acknowledged process. (Kaplan, pp. 162-163)
Kaplan, however, "specifically sought for men who were actually assigned to warrior roles and completed their service in combat units," as he "wanted to focus on processes of identity formation and identification among individuals who had adjusted to the military" (p. 123). Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize that, since war fighters who actually serve in combat zones are a minority in a highly complex bureaucracy that a modern military is, if Kaplan or other researchers widen the scope of research and include perspectives of Israeli gay men who either served in non-combat roles, went AWOL, sought deferments, or even tried to acquire the status of conscientious objector, the process of identity formation of Jewish Israeli gay men may turn out to be much more variegated than Brothers and Others in Arms suggests. . . .
While I would like to see more research on Jewish Israeli gay soldiers who actively or passively resist the occupation and how they make sense of their resistance to the occupation in terms of their sexual identity and vice versa, I also believe that Kaplan's work should be on the reading list of anyone who is interested in how the military serves to construct hegemonic masculinity and how some gay men try to assimilate into it. To take just one example, Brothers and Others in Arms offers a keen insight into sexualization of combat:
Stripped of any cultural meaning, the enemy itself could not be appealing as a target. To become a target, it must be sexualized. . . .It is this very eroticization of enemy targets that triggers the objectification process to begin with. As with anonymous sex in the darkroom, the anonymous enemy is the best object choice for military sexual targeting.
At times, the attempt to manage this anonymous-sex fighting machine and restrict its operation to the designated enemy falls short. One very extreme example is an instance where the image of mehablim [literally, "saboteurs" -- a general term for terrorists, guerilla soldiers, or any Arab groups or individuals that operate against Israeli targets] -- in this case, Palestinian enemy men -- merges with another image of subordination, that of actual homosexual intercourse. It seems that the sexual-targeting drive of masculitary soldier could not resist such a temptation. This is one way to understand Shaul's account of one of the brutalities he experienced in the Lebanon War. During the siege on PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) forces in Beirut, he was stationed next to a post where Israeli snipers observed PLO activity in city houses. Suddenly, something unusual appeared in the sniper's binoculars:
One of them said to me, "Come here; I want you to see something." I looked, and I saw two mehablim, one fucking the other in the ass; it was pretty funny. Like real animals. The sniper said to me, "And now look." He aims, and puts a bullet right into the forehead of the one that was being fucked. Holy shit, did the other one freak out! All of a sudden his partner died on him. It was nasty. We were fucking cruel. Cruelty -- but this was war. Human life didn't matter much in a case like this, because this human could pick up his gun and fire at you or your buddies at any moment.It is striking that even in this encounter it is the passive partner who gets the bullet in his ass, while the active partner remains unscathed.
What is more, notice how Shaul himself partly identified with the brutal action, perceiving the enemy men as beasts, and justifying what he saw in the name of war. He sustained this combat sexual act even though it was directed not only against the enemy but also against the idea of homosexual activity, a growing part in Shaul's own identity. (Kaplan, p. 193-4)
This is perhaps the most extreme example from the book, but the episode vividly illustrates that, though Jewish Israeli gay men may successfully negotiate the minefield of military sexuality that is simultaneously homoerotic and homophobic while grappling with their own coming out, serving in a combat unit is likely to force them to kill a part of their gay soul along with Palestinian men who become their sexualized targets.
What is ironic is that, even while their identification with the Zionist nation as an imagined community, the military as an organization, and the hegemonic masculinity prized by both compels them to repudiate Palestinians in particular and subordinate Arabs and all other non-Jews in the Middle East in general, a term that derives from Arabic -- sachbak -- is now central to their vocabulary of camaraderie and sociability:
As part of the canonical place that friendship and male bonding holds in the Zionist ethos, the Yiddish-derived term hevreman became an archetype for the male Sabra [the term that derives from the Arabic name for a prickly pear, used to refer to an Israeli-born Jew, signifying a person who is rough and prickly on the outside and yet rich and tender within, with a connotation of the hegemonic Ashkenazi status] and his contemporary IDF soldier counterpart. Close in meaning to the American concept of a cool guy, it reflects the idea of helping out friends by leading cool activities, which may border on mischief. A current modification of this sociability is the term sachbak, derived from the Arab word for friend. In contrast to the hevreman, sachbak has a slightly demeaning overtone of being overly sociable at the expense of professional and organizational requirements. This blatant sociability has many forms. . . .[Hillel] recounted how it soon developed into intensive physical contact, acted out by the whole group:
We had this ritual called "goal" (literally, as in soccer, scoring the goal). Someone who simply feels like it comes along and shouts "goal, goal, goal!" And he goes and leaps on top of another guy who was sleeping in the tent, and then everybody gets on top of him. Turkish heap, that's what the Jerusalem boys would call it. . . . It was hilarious, it became so fashionable, you'd pass by any tent in one of the artillery battalions, no matter what your home unit was, alas, you go in the tent with everyone else and jump on the guy.(Kaplan, pp. 171-172)
While Kaplan himself does not dwell on the vocabulary of Israeli male bonding here, it is revealing that the very names -- sabra, sachbak, and the "Turkish" heap -- of male bonding in what is distinctly Israeli national culture (as opposed to diverse Jewish cultures in diaspora) are rooted in the images of the Middle East. Some appropriations -- like sabra -- point to the settler nation's attempt to "go native," i.e., to claim the native roots in Palestine figuratively, rather than religiously. It's akin to the American appropriations of cultures of indigenous peoples, e.g., dressing like the Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party and giving Indian names such as Apache, Kiowa, Comanche, and Blackhawk to military hardware. Others suggest that intense physical contact between men that threatens to go out of control is signified by the names that connote the eroticized enemy whose love the IDF teaches its soldiers to renounce and on whom the IDF has its soldiers project sexual mischief.
Given such ambivalent appropriations of the cultural bodies of "enemies," not just dispossessions of their land, water, and other natural resources, it is no wonder that "[m]ost Muslims and Christians of the Palestinian Arab minority within Israel are excluded from service altogether" (Kaplan, p. 117).
In recent years, mainstream gay rights organizations -- especially the Human Rights Campaign -- in the United States have focused upon achieving the equal right to military service as well as marriage above all else. GLBT activists on the left, however, need to think about how to struggle against homophobia, which motivates the state to deny GLBT individuals the rights to marriage and military service, without turning queer communities into just another reserve of docile bodies to be conscripted into defense of the empire -- perhaps as soldiers of the occupation like gay men and lesbians in the IDF.
<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/06/brothers-and-others-in-arms.html> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>