r/socialism • u/ArmyOfMemories Noam Chomsky • Jun 05 '24
Political Theory 'Israel's Death Hierarchy" - Casualty aversion in a militarized democracy'. The higher a group is on the hierarchy, the more protected from risk they are. Since the 1st Intifada, the gap between Israeli soldiers and 'enemy civilians' (ie Palestinians, Lebanese, etc.) has increased exponentially.
The book.
Yigal Levy's 'death hierarchy' theory. How Israel copes with its 'casualty-sensitivity syndrome'.
An Israeli academic, Yagil Levy, wrote a book about Israel's "death hierarchy" - theorizing that 'lower class' recruits and Palestinian Arabs are at the bottom of what the Israeli government/military considers to be acceptable risk.
Previously, upper class recruits were sacrificed in exchange for social assets - but as the conflict changed & risk increased, the 'sacrificing group' shifted to 'lower classes' and even 'citizens on the periphery' (ie Israeli citizens who lived in areas within range of rocket attacks; ie near the Gaza concentration camp).
Then when the risk increased even further the 'sacrificing group' shifted to enemy civilians, ie the Palestinians - whose human rights are completely disregarded by Israel.
Israel thus once again reformulated the death hierarchy by favoring the lives of soldiers drawn from privileged groups over the lives of those drawn from the lower classes. But, when Israel could no longer risk the lives of its citizens or of peripheral soldiers alone and thus had to risk privileged soldiers again, it turned to the use of excessive force. This reduced the risk to which soldiers were exposed, this time at the expense of enemy civilians, as the Gaza offensive of 2009 best exemplifies. Apparently, the rights were again rebalanced. That is how Israel coped with the casualty-sensitivity syndrome, a way that invites a broader theoretical outlook.
- Levy, Yagil. Israel’s Death Hierarchy: 4 (Warfare and Culture) (pp. 8-9). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
For example, some have noted that there's a overrepresentation of Ethiopian Jews among the IDF casualties in Gaza. This is explained by 'death hierarchy' theory since Ethiopian Jews face systemic discrimination inside Israel. They are put in more dangerous combat situations which in-turn increases their risk. Israel observes relatively less political fallout when these soldiers die in combat.
These designated 'lower class' recruits are the lowest ranking IDF groups in the "death hierarchy" theory, meaning Israel will treat them as 'sacrificing groups'. The lowest tier is obviously enemy civilians, ie Palestinian/Lebanese/Syrian/etc., wherein Israel completely disregards their rights.
Farther down the hierarchy are conscripts from lower-status groups. Their room for choice is restricted for two reasons. First, many of them have an ingrained ethno-nationalist orientation and want to leverage the advantages that military service may bring them, such as social mobility and social recognition. These factors weaken their resistance to military dictates.
- Levy, Yagil. Israel’s Death Hierarchy: 4 (Warfare and Culture) (p. 136). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
In between the lowest ranking IDF demographics & enemy civilians would be Israeli 'citizens on the periphery', meaning those who cannot afford to live in the center of Israel away from combat zones. Israeli society is a deeply discriminatory, and it's no coincidence that many of the citizens who live in the South are Mizrahi immigrants and those of the former Soviet Union - both of whom are considered by Israel to be "lower-status groups". Again, they are treated as 'sacrificing groups' for Israel in the 'hierarchy'.
Occupying one of the lowest rungs in the hierarchy are the people living in peripheral regions of the state. Take, for example, the residents of the communities around the Gaza Strip, who were targeted by the firing of Qassam rockets from Gaza. Their location along the borders is not necessarily the result of free choice, particularly for residents of Sderot, a small town in the south, less than a mile from Gaza. Sderot has been the target of Palestinian rocket attacks since 2001. Its population is mainly composed of Mizrahi immigrants who arrived in Israel in the 1950s and of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who came in the 1990s; both are lower-status groups. Eleven citizens, eight of them from Sderot, were killed between 2001 and 2008 by Qassam rocket fire.
The residents’ limited financial resources prevent them from leaving the region. The market economy is an important mechanism preventing migration, as Zohar Avitan, an activist in Sderot, points out: “Our region has no buyers. We aren’t traded on the stock exchange, and the land that we are entrusted with has no capital-generating real-estate value” (2007).
- Levy, Yagil. Israel’s Death Hierarchy: 4 (Warfare and Culture) (pp. 137-138). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
Levy's book theorized Israel's "death hierarchy" (the mortality gap between Israeli soldiers & Palestinian civilians) has exponentially increased since the 1st Intifada.
Like other democracies fighting “small wars,” Israel created a force-casualty tradeoff by becoming more sensitive to its own military losses at the expense of the enemy’s noncombatant losses, reflected in an increasing use of lethality. This tradeoff is evident in the ratio of fatalities between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian citizens, which increased from one Israeli soldier for six civilians killed in the first Intifada (1987–1993) to one Israeli soldier for eighty-four Palestinian civilians killed in the 2009 offensive in the Gaza Strip.
- Levy, Yagil. Israel’s Death Hierarchy: 4 (Warfare and Culture) (p. 11). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
One of the major variables for the 'hierarchy' theory is "the potential for protest and dissension." For example, IDF reservists are ranked the highest in the 'death hierarchy' - because they have the highest potential to engage in "critical collective action" following their service.
Reservists are positioned as the most protected group in the death hierarchy. Reservists are more likely than conscripts to engage in political protest for two reasons. First, reservists are “mobilized civilians” or “civilianized soldiers” who bring their civil values with them to reserve duty and thereby bargain with the army over the nature and conditions of their service. Upon their return to civilian life, they are likely to translate the experience of their reserve duty into political energy (see Lomsky-Feder, Gazit, and Ben-Ari 2008). Second, secular middle-class members are represented in the reserve army in greater proportions than in the compulsory army, because the social composition of the reserves mirrors the composition of the compulsory army of about ten or fifteen years previously (the 1990s, in this case, during which the secular middle class was highly represented before the social realignment of the ranks had matured), or because of mobility acquired in civilian life. Hence, they have more time and resources, as well as greater potential than other groups to engage in a relatively critical collective action.
- Levy, Yagil. Israel’s Death Hierarchy: 4 (Warfare and Culture) (pp. 129-130). NYU Press. Kindle Edition.
Thus, the fallout from their deaths incurs a greater political cost on Israel.
I find this fascinating because we're constantly bombarded with propaganda about 'democracy' IN GENERAL in Western society. But the fundamental question about 'democracy' is - who are the 'demos'? Credit to another Redditor, uNational_flatworm, for this summary:
But going back to its founding in Athens, democracy has always made a problem of who the demos are. One of the founding gestures of the democracy was to define the demos, and to account for the margins the Athenians allowed for citizens to dispute each other's blood lineage and vote on whether someone was really a citizen. If they were agreed not to be, they were enslaved. The rhetoric around whether Israel is really a democracy tends to miss how the stakes introduced by the democracy are in a sense exactly why Israel's politics orbit around how to ethnically cleanse the territory it claims of Palestinians.
Israel's racial, economic, religious 'hierarchies' demonstrate how it's not a democracy for its citizens - but rather first and foremost a democracy for Israeli Jews, and then within that group Israel further discriminates based varying ethnicities, economic class, etc.
Of course, Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as second-class citizens (despite the exceptions of social mobility that hasbara might cite; the exceptions are not the rule obviously) and Palestinians of the OPT have no basic civil rights.
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u/space_beard Jun 05 '24
Good post with material analysis of Israel’s genocidal logics. We need more stuff like this in the sub!
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u/AdventureBirdDog Jun 06 '24
How do we know that Ethiopian Jews account for a disproportionate amount of Israeli Casualties? I can't find out much about the casualties online. But seems like something that should be talked about more as is shows just how blatant racism is in Israel amongst Israelis themselves
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u/ArmyOfMemories Noam Chomsky Jun 06 '24
I used that example based on observations someone made in another subreddit. That's what reminded me of this book & the theory.
Some informal data exists, but I haven't thoroughly looked into the demographics of IDF casualties during the Gaza genocide.
"Ethiopians are 1.7 percent of the Israeli population and around 5 percent of the dead soldiers," he said.
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u/AdventureBirdDog Jun 06 '24
Wow thats pretty wild. Isn't surprising though when you consider that Israel forcibly sterilized Ethiopian jewish women arriving to the country. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-women-given-contraceptives-israel
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