Positional Enlistment Logics: Scenarios of Army Enlistment among Descendants of the South Lebanon Army (SLA) Veterans in Israel

In the year 2000 Israel retreated from the Security Strip in Southern Lebanon after having held onto it for 18 years. As a result, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), that had been supported by Israel and became its primary ally in Lebanon during the 1982-2000 conflict against Hezbollah, was instantly disbanded and most of its soldiers and their families fled into Israel for fear of brutal attacks by Hezbollah. The SLA veterans and their families, having no other recourse but to remain in Israel, formed what we refer to as a ‘Betrayal Trauma Community’, alleging over the years that Israel had in fact abandoned them to their individual fates, and transformed them – while living within Israeli society – "from brother to other". In our study we found that dominant representations of SLA families in Israeli media had been closely identified with representations of victimization: ▪️ Defeatedness (difficulty to find employment, struggles over rights, marginality) ▪️ Temporality (difficulty to decide whether they will remain in Israel or return to Lebanon) ▪️ Queerness (being un-fitted to either Jewish or Arab Israeli identities) In the past decade the second generation of the SLA’s community has been openly struggling for their rights, for recognition of their parents’ generation in collective memory, and for the eligibility of SLA combatants to be rehabilitated and most of all to be integrated in Israeli society. In Parallel, an unexpected phenomenon began to emerge, in which growing numbers of the younger generation of this community apply to enlist in the Israeli Defense Forces, predominantly in combat and command roles. The study implements a phenomenological approach to expose what we refer to as ‘recruitment logics’, held by youths belonging to this community, which they ascribe to the act of joining the army. As opposed to the range of logic known in the literature, through which extra-hegemonic communities tend to enlist in military organizations, we have found that the main reason for enlistment, in this case, is based on a ‘Positional Logic’: the strong aspiration that their military service would change the Communal Positioning of the SLA community in Israeli discourse, and that this in turn would change their own sense of Individual Positioning (evoking Lacan’s theory of Dialogical Thinking, which perceived the self as it is reflected in public discourse). ‘Militarism’ in Israel is by definition a representation of empowerment, a belongingness to the hegemony, a sense of acceptance and containment. It is, as is shown by the interviews, an action (in this case – enlistment in the army), that is carried out by a ‘forced immigration community’ responding to its discursive-communicative representations in an attempt to influence and create change. The paper contributes several central concepts including Enlistment Scripts, Positional Recruitment Logics, and Positional Militarism, and illustrates them through the case study of the community of SLA veterans in Israel and their families. More specifically.