The Law and the Thrill of Violence: A Psychoanalytic View of the Image of “The Good Soldier” and the Crisis of That Image in the Israeli Discourse

Throughout Israeli history, the hegemonic cultural discourse has portrayed the Israeli soldier as particularly humane, as someone who fulfills his duty while agonizing over the pain he causes others and striving to minimize it. This portrayal has helped Israeli soldiers cope with the moral tensions in their military service by splitting off and projecting the feelings of shame and evil onto other soldiers, who are said to get a thrill out of violence. In this paper we offer a psychoanalytic discussion of the motivational processes that modulate the soldiers’ conduct within the armed Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Specifically, we address the crisis of the phantasm of the humane soldier – its gradual fading in the Israeli discourse in recent years. Inspired by the Lacanian notions of ethics, we ascribe particular importance to the relations between the soldiers and the law they are asked to represent for the civilian population in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). The role of the Law, according to Lacan, is to regulate the proper distance between the subject and the dangerous Real; the lack of such a distance exposes one to the risk of excessive, omnipotent thrill – what Lacan calls Jouissance. The exceptional law in the occupied territories, however, acts as a perverting force, facilitating excessive Jouissance instead of protecting from it. The law in the OPT bestows upon the soldiers extensive powers of domination over others, powers that exceed conventional human relations in democratic societies. We identify three different types of Jouissance that originate in these power relations, including the visceral thrill many soldiers report in connection with the execution of violence, regardless of their conscious ideological position toward the political conflict. We suggest that these forms of Jouissance limit the soldiers’ ability to use the image of the humane soldier in their efforts to avoid perverse actions and guilt, and thus contribute to the collapse of this phantasm and the gradual erasure of ethics in soldiers’ conduct in the OPT.