Managing a Moral Dilemma: Israeli Soldiers in the Intifada

Abstract

The Palestinian uprising (intifada) in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 has created a moral dilemma for at least some Israeli soldiers who are assigned to participate, however reluctantly, in the military effort to suppress it. The dilemma consists in strong commitment to the army, on the one hand, and objections to its tactics of repression on the other. In an attempt to observe the processes of coping with the resulting dissonancewidely assumed to result in the surrender to some sort of routinization-conversations were initiated with soldiers from an upper-middle class background. Their discourse reveals that coping takes the form of searching for (1) cognitive reorganization through frames that reduce inconsistency and justify obedience; and (2) improvising behavior and negotiating with external reality so as to make the dilemma more livable. But while the findings, on the whole, are in line with the axiom that dissonance is reduced even when inconsistency is maintained, it is proposed here that in certain cases where two ego-involving commitments conflict, an individual may willfully attempt to preserve the pain of dissonance rather than to alleviate it.