How Israelis Represent the Problem of Violence in Their Schools 165understandable, behaviors (n. 36).^73 Propositions from widely circulating discourses about
what it means to be an Israeli include those that both directly and indirectly relate to the
political crisis that has tormented the region for many years. Jewish Israelis know that
military service is mandatory and see themselves as surrounded by enemies. These views,
along with among many other related ones, are parts of a discourse that include the related
belief that they are therefore an understandably ̳nervous‘ people. They thus understand a
reference to ̳the situation‘ ( ̳hamatsav‘) to include a complex of difficult social, political and
primarily military pressures that hang dangerously over all of them at all times. In this
ideological construction of what it is to be an Israeli, it is living with ̳the situation‘ that
makes them a generally tense and irritable people, for whom negative behaviors, including
violence, are the means by which these pressures, sometimes regrettably, find expression.
This widely known ideological proposition about the psychological state of the Israeli,
though common, was relatively infrequent and (thus) isolated from reflexive interrelations
with the other propositions in this discursive construction. The reason being suggested for the
relative isolation of this proposition, however, is not because it indexically ̳belongs‘ to older
Israelis, or even to some other specific sub-population or time or social context (see fn. 13
above), but rather because it overlaps in a very restricted way with another discursive
construction. Understanding this requires us to consider briefly the discursive construction of
military violence in Israel (Lomksy-Feder 1999, Lavie 1990).
In studying cultural discourses, outsiders are often surprised. Ideological elements from
one practice can get metaphorically extended to some discursive practices, but (surprisingly)
fail to get extended to others. One such surprising example in this case was how infrequently
Israelis cited the military as a relevant institutional site for the problem of school violence in
Israel. Indeed it was arguably the one major societal institution missing from Tables 1 and 2
above. To Western readers, this omission, at first glance, might seem almost conspiratorial.
The relatively shared views that military violence is an ̳unfortunate necessity‘ because
Israel‘s hand is forced by ̳uncivilized terrorists‘ ( ̳who kill women and children‘ and
̳threaten Israel‘s daily existence‘) partially accounts for the fact that such a causal
explanation was almost completely absent in this case study. Military violence is commonly
represented as something that Israelis would prefer not to carry out. It is a justified form of
̳self defense‘. This is particularly the case in situations where military violence comes close
to other discursive framings that mark it as potentially unethical or immoral. This
demonstrates that ̳violence‘ too is a constructed cultural concept that is relatively constructed
at least in part by the kinds of relative discursive constructions being studied here.
Metaphorically speaking, despite the many visually- and conceptually-based iconic
similarities, these two discourses can be seen to oppose each other. ̳Students fighting each
other in school‘ is not analogically comparable to ̳soldiers fighting an enemy in war‘, or even
(^73) The first of the two ideological propositions that has yet to be discussed: ̳outdated macho values‘ (n. 35) is a
similar example in the logic of the ongoing argument and so is not being discussed in detail. In short, it was
only just frequent enough to be considered a ̳common‘ proposition because it is likely to indexically overlap
with an ̳older‘ (vs. ̳younger‘) writer/speaker identity. Ideologies about ̳what once was‘, like any others, have
different distributions across different groups of people and if this particular ̳historical fact‘ about Israel is one
that is less commonly told today (i.e. less widely distributed in the discourses enacting and commenting on
different cultural activities), it is possible that it is because it is one that is less well known by younger Israelis.
In this sense, while it shows potential for a ̳political‘ divide in representing this particular discursive
construction, there is little ethnographic evidence for that. It appears rather to be an element that is drifting out
of relevance with time.