166 Douglas J. Glick
̳solders fighting with Palestinian civilians in the territories‘. That said, it should not be
forgotten that there is a commonality shared by these two discursive constructions: a
generally agitated psychological state is found in both. What then is the difference or, put
another way, how are these discourses both opposed and yet interrelated at the same time?
A state of psychological agitation commonly appears in causal accounts of school
violence as a regrettable, but understandable, cause for the students‘ behavior. That same
state, however, is only applicable to problematic instances of military violence. It serves as a
psychological defense for military violence that could be considered at best ̳ethically
troubling‘ and at worst ̳abusive‘. All of this however is framed by the difficult situation that
Israelis find themselves in and thus the unfortunate need for military violence that they feel
has been forced on them. Thus, the discursive construction of the violence in the military
setting is, among other differences, not ̳problematic‘ in the way that school violence is. In
school violence, recall, the violence is represented as ̳problematic‘ by ideological definition.
It is thus not the type of violence that can motivate the relevance of a state of psychological
agitation for students. The political situation and the agitated psychological state which it
fosters is more likely to influence them because they are young or because of the specifics of
particular cases.
The argument here then is that this particular causal proposition remains relatively
isolated and reflexively weak because it is found in a (less significant) discourse about school
violence. To increase its reflexive strength would be to analogically map more of its indexical
life into the problem of school violence. To do so, however, is to bring together cultural
practices that are not mutually supporting. To do so is in essence to metaphorically suggest
that Israelis are at least in part responsible for what then also becomes explicitly problematic
military ̳violence‘ (vs. self-defense, etc.). A position like that, needless to say, can be taken
as a sign of national disloyalty.
In studying the relationships among discursive constructions, the relative isolation of this
kind of proposition in the focal discourse seems to be based on the fact that it indexes a
different discursive construction in problematic, largely oppositional, ways. It points to its
potential for becoming a destabilizing analogical force. While this ̳surprising‘ lack of a
connection across these practices for Israelis is truly an ode to the relative ways in which
cultural ideologies ̳travel‘ across distinct social practices in light of socio-cultural history, it
is also contains a more general semiotic lesson about the analogical bases for the roots of
ideologically motivated social change.^74
Turning to a second set of closing considerations, one can ask what can be learned from
propositions that were not found often enough to be considered regular members of the focal
discursive construction. Recall that the discursive construction under study here is about the
secular school system in Israel. There is in fact, however, a powerful religious education
system that exists independently alongside the secular one. If we isolate out the religious
paper in this study, consider one new and at least for this particular newspaper, relatively
common proposition. Along with the others, the religious newspaper participated in
representing school violence (in the secular school system) as the result of general
institutional and societal dysfunction. They were relatively unique, however, in frequently
adding an interesting extension here. They extended the scope of this sign and saw school
violence itself as one instance of many in a different discursive construction, one that was
(^74) I owe my realization of the importance of this point to Judith Irvine‘s thoughtful comments on my paper.