In a video uploaded to YouTube on 16 August 2007, which as of November 2022 had upwards of 385,000 views, a series of close-ups show an Israeli soldier holding a rifle aimed at a Palestinian child who is about to throw a rock ( Jutsinson 2007). Footnote 1 The camera frame expands, and we see that the two are actually skeet shooting. The soldier of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) successfully shoots the clay target — the rock. To (noncredited) music, an elaboration of klezmer music “orientalized” to blend in an Arab sound, the two rhythmically walk from opposite directions toward each other and high-five. Like the beginning of a contact improvisation duet, the child puts his hand on the soldier’s shoulder, the soldier lifts the kid on his back, and so they follow their spiraling dynamic by spinning together. When the child lands, the soldier takes off his helmet, puts it on the child, and pats the kid’s head. Finally, in a blurry shot of a steady-paced sequence, the soldier hands his rifle to the kid. The two exchange a dap greeting (a friendly, intricately choreographed substitute for a handshake that men, in particular, perform), and then walk away in opposite directions.
A widely viewed video orchestrates a misunderstanding, then the reveal: there is no violence, just joyous dancing together. From the YouTube video “Killer Israeli soldier” (https://youtu.be/K2caeWiuJBg). (Screenshot by Melissa Melpignano)
This video was produced by The People’s Voice, a civilian campaign promoting the reconciliation between Israel and Palestine started by Ami Ayalon, Israeli Labor party politician and former head of the Israeli secret services (Shin Bet), and Sari Nusseibeh, Palestinian professor and politician. Footnote 2 In this video, dance is utilized as the ultimate celebratory practice of a hopeful and imaginary peace, as the manifestation of a realizable coexistence, represented through the physical proximity of attuned bodies.
The setup before a surprising outcome: an Israeli soldier points at a target. From the YouTube video “Killer Israeli soldier” (https://youtu.be/K2caeWiuJBg). (Screenshot by Melissa Melpignano)
Dance in the Army
Civilianizing, Humanizing, and Mitigating Violence
This choreographed video, with its digital outreach, transfigures the violence embedded into the rifle and the rock by suspending and transforming them from signifiers of violence into tools for playfulness and mutual trust. In the frame that reveals the passage from anticipated violence to friendly play, dance is conceptualized as a conciliatory (almost utopian) practice that is the epitome of conflict resolution, and as a “civilianizing” tool in the militarized enmity of Israel and Palestine. Dance is employed to mitigate the military and political/governmental charge of the visual elements of the video — guns, rocks, uniforms, crumbling buildings — and reframe the conflict; dance is a reconciling, celebratory, and, maybe, innocuous, practice. Footnote 3 That is to say, in this visual example, dance works as a “civilianizing” dispositif that, together with camera work and editing, breaks the audience’s expectations about the use of violence associated with the Israeli soldier in full army gear. The camera work first generates a sense of suspense built on the infamous violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and then tricks the viewer by flipping the visual and physical semantics of the conflict itself, and proposing a nonconfrontational, playful ending. More specifically, in this parodic performance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — where the power inscribed in the body of the soldier is purposefully deactivated, “the Israeli soldier” and “the Palestinian kid” work as dramaturgical emblems of the power disparity between Israel and Palestine. Such dramaturgical construction reemphasizes and reiterates the status quo in terms of military, economic, and infrastructural imbalance between the Israeli and the Palestinian counterparts.
The video shot of a Palestinian kid throwing a rock. From the YouTube video “Killer Israeli soldier” (https://youtu.be/K2caeWiuJBg). (Screenshot by Melissa Melpignano)
The use of dance as a mitigating tool for the violence expected in the interaction between the IDF soldier and the Palestinian child relies on two factors. The first is the historical investment of Israeli and pre-state institutions in dance. A commitment to the fabrication of a specific Israeli corporeal culture able to embody and represent the Zionist principles on which the state was established has informed an epistemic construction of dance in Israel as a harmless, optimistic, nation-building, peace-making, difference-leveling, and humanizing practice produced by or through state-informed institutions. Footnote 4 The Zionist political project that informed the establishment of dance institutions and of a dance culture in Israel has produced a generalized “structure of feeling” about dance in the Jewish State (which some dance artists and scholars have recently challenged). Footnote 5 Hence, in the specific context of the IDF, dance was traditionally assigned a disciplining and simultaneously recreational role. This point directly connects to the second factor that allows the use of dance as a mitigating tool for violence in Israel: the continuity and codependence of Israeli civilian and military life. In Israel, military service is compulsory for men (age 18–29) and women (age 18–26) who pass medical fitness tests, with specific exceptions. While in general Arab and Muslim citizens are exempt, men from Druze (Arabic-speaking religious minority) and Circassian (Muslim minority) communities must serve. Until 2014, Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish men were exempt. Women can request an exemption for religious reasons, pregnancy, and parenthood; all married women have automatic exemption. Often indicated as “the people’s army,” the Israel Defense Forces works as a metonymy of a “national corporeal history” that relied on values of toughness, operativity, and commitment to the land in order to forge the Sabra — the native Israeli. Footnote 6 The Israeli soldier, as part of an army that works as an emblem of the state and of Jewish-Zionist territorial sovereignty in the region, is the most symbolic and globally recognizable embodiment of Sabra corporeality.
The relationship between the IDF and dance is a long and institutionalized one. Footnote 7 The practice of dance (such as folk, modern, and jazz) as a civilian activity within the army worked as a strategy to bind the citizen-soldier’s life to Israel’s raison d’état, and thus reinforce the Israeli civil-military paradigm. Footnote 8 In this way, dance supports the army and advances the state polity. Even the unarmed, noninstitutionalized practice of dance among on-duty Israeli soldiers promotes and reiterates the army’s necropower. According to Achille Mbembe’s theory (2003), necropower is the legalized power of prescribing death, inducing death, and letting die, which involves producing spaces of death and organizing the training of personnel in charge of the exercise of those tasks. Following Mbembe, I define necropower as the legalized performance of practices exercised by subjects authorized to determine who may live (and how) and who may die (and how). Footnote 9
Videos of Israeli soldiers dancing while on duty in the Occupied Territories have been widely circulated on YouTube and other platforms. As anthropologists Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein emphasize, digital cultures play a fundamental role in the practice and representation of “the Israeli military occupation of Palestine, a context in which the narrative of digital democracy — or rather, the proposition that the digital be understood as a ‘natural’ domain for anti-hegemonic politics — is widely embraced as a means to explain activist triumph in the face of repressive state military campaigns” (2011). Footnote 10 On-duty Israeli soldiers dancing outside of an institutionalized event in the Occupied Territories utilize the digital platform as a site of competition against activist, anti-Occupation, antimilitary initiatives. Footnote 11 During the Second Intifada (2000–2005, the Al-Aqsa Intifada), IDF officers, especially religious and settler ones, increased their presence on Israeli television and radio in order to orient and control the flux of information reaching the general Israeli public. Footnote 12
In 2008, the IDF started to invest in social media outreach, launching its own YouTube channel. At that time, soldiers were not authorized to carry personal smartphones during missions and active combat for security reasons. However, oral testimonies I collected (the interviewees prefer to remain anonymous) testify that soldiers were in fact utilizing personal smartphones while on active duty. Footnote 13 In the social media era, the possibility of sharing photos of everyday military life or videos taken during clashes between the IDF soldiers and Palestinians has helped to reduce the distance between the popular perception of military life and the actual lives of soldiers, but also has put the soldiers themselves in closer contact with the civil realm.
The shortening of such a distance has radically different implications when the soldiers are simultaneously related to a variety of “networked publics,” namely the Israeli and the Palestinian civil realms as well as a global spectatorship. Footnote 14 Once again, the classical discourse of the Israeli civil-military relations, overlooking the centrality of the Palestinian civilians in its theorizations of the “civil,” dismisses the colonial power embedded in Israeli militarism and its ongoing performance of power through the presence of the IDF bodies.
Taking this into account, in the videos I analyze, dance manifests as a recreational practice with which soldiers engage to simultaneously humanize themselves and overperform their power by mitigating the traditional performance of military strength through noninstitutionalized dances characterized by a cheerful character. The two dimensions — a feeling of humanization in the soldier and reaffirmation of military power — present simultaneously, and the latter prevails. The humanizing interpretation, often fostered by commentators generally aligned with the IDF’s military agenda, works as a justifying frame for the soldiers’ misbehavior (dancing on duty) within the IDF as well as for their status as soldiers of an occupying force. Whether it is the soldiers who dance to self-humanize or the public that reads the soldiers’ dancing as a humanizing activity, “humanization” works as a mode of civilianization. In other words, in this humanizing discourse dance is read as a process of suspension of the soldier’s military self. Thus, in the end, as a ready-to-use source for the momentary display of civilian and human qualities, dance reinstantiates the soldier’s military status and what it implies. Footnote 15
Dance, then, is a mitigating tool that reaffirms hegemonic and settler colonial dominion within the IDF. IDF soldiers dancing in a self-organized — or seemingly self-organized — manner in the Occupied Territories relate to the military power structure, and the organization of their dances impacts the conceptualization and representation of the conflict. Within this frame, dance operates as a practice of “soft power” for the exercise of military control and necropower.
How do soldiers organize dances within the military/militarized space they inhabit? What kind of status do their soldier bodies acquire when dancing in a uniform outside of their military disciplinary norm? And how does such a status alter when the dancing soldier bodies circulate on a platform of global reach such as YouTube? Rebecca L. Stein explains that “[the Israeli] State work on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube employs a new set of rhetorics, modes of address, and aesthetics that endeavor to vernacularize or personalize the state through social media platforms, lending it a new kind of everyman valence — this being a particularly important project, officials argue, in times of unpopular military interventions” (2012:912). In this way, the circulation of soldiers’ dances through social media further overlaps civilian and military realms, and further amplifies the civilianizing feeling already expressed in the videos through an amateur and social dance aesthetic. At the same time, social media expose military and state bodies to comments and manipulations the army’s high commands or the state cannot control. So, how do soldiers compromise their act of dancing while on duty, risking disciplinary punishment? What is at stake when dance is the chosen performance practice of soldiers on duty in a climate of normalized hostility and legalized violence such as in the Occupied Territories?
Rocking the Casbah
A video posted, removed, and reposted multiple times on YouTube, originally uploaded in Summer 2010 under the title “Soldiers Dance in Hebron,” shows six IDF male soldiers from the Naḥal Brigade, armed and wearing full combat gear, in the occupied city center of Hebron/Al-Khalil, in the West Bank (Eyal Yablonka Reference Yablonka2010). Footnote 16 While patrolling, as soon as they hear the Muslim call to prayer the soldiers start a choreographed dance to the hit “Tik Tok” by American pop singer Kesha. The camera does not shake. The point of view has been previously strategized and the timing carefully orchestrated. Six soldiers, fully equipped, slowly walk on a street in a residential area of Hebron/Al-Khalil. They arrange themselves in two lines. Initially, the soldiers act as if they are patrolling in a combat zone, attentively looking around for possible enemies, knees bent, watching each other’s backs, embracing their heavy rifles, simultaneously reproducing themselves and staging their own self-parody through their theatricalization of military behavior. They crouch on one knee; the song starts, and they slowly stand up: “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy/Grab my glasses, I’m out the door: I’m gonna hit this city.” Once the beat intensifies, the soldiers begin to move in unison and create duets, reproducing the popular movements of the Macarena while facing one another, smoothly bouncing their legs. When the chorus starts — “Don’t stop, make it pop/DJ, blow my speakers up/Tonight, I’ma fight/Till we see the sunlight” — they turn in a canon, then reestablish their duets, extending the bouncing movement quality to their upper body.
IDF soldiers in full gear dance a macarena move in the occupied city of Hebron/Al-Khalil. From the YouTube video “IDF Israeli soldiers dancing to Kesha – Tik Tok in Hebron (Rock the Casba) [sic].” (https://youtu.be/xVVte550dyU). (Screenshot by TDR)
Now, their rifles hang and swing along the front side of their bodies. Phallic representations are common in military iconography, and are particularly emphasized in these self-choreographed videos. To read the dangling rifle simply as the soldiers waiving military force and enfeebling their masculinity contrasts with the bodily control, the homosocial cohesiveness, and the choreographic precision the soldiers display in the video. In fact, the rifle becomes an extension of the soldier’s body, and its swinging movement coherently follows and completes the bouncy, relaxed persona the soldiers perform. In this choreography, the soldiers display how to be spatially and temporally in charge, even when suspending the performance of the military norm through dance. At this point, the six soldiers hold each other’s hands, turn underneath each other’s arms, and, always bouncing, exit the “scene” while reperforming an exaggerated, theatricalized version of their military patrol. “And the party don’t stop, no.”
The video, recorded and posted on social media by another soldier, immediately went viral on Facebook. The IDF ordered its removal but, as we know, content circulating on social media behaves like the mythological Hydra: even as you remove a video or a post, hundreds of reproductions are already circulating. Footnote 17
It is clear that these soldiers are not professionally trained in dance, yet they are able to display both precision in the execution of their nonvirtuosic movements and a certain mastery, which likely required rehearsals. The choreography is carefully planned. The bodies of the soldiers, positioned in two rows, parallel the walls of the Palestinian homes, as if impressing their presence on the local architecture. The choreography shows the established territorial presence of the soldiers while simultaneously furthering and intensifying the territorializing strategy of occupation to which their stationing in Hebron/Al-Khalil already testifies.
This dance, based on commercial, globally marketed music and movements, explicitly interferes with the sacred moment of the Muslim call to prayer. The music of Kesha dominates the soundscape, and the choreography takes over the territory. This form of cultural harassment parallels the expanding importance that religiosity acquired in the IDF in the last couple of decades, along with the growing political control granted to extreme right-wing, religious politicians in the Netanyahu government. Indeed, in this video, I conceive the dominant presence of the soldiers during the Muslim prayer as a form of colonial secularism. Footnote 18 In this video, IDF soldiers, through their spatial (physical and acoustic) and timely takeover, display a macho secularism aimed at overpowering the sacrality of the Muslim prayer in Palestinian territory. In the present context of Israel/Palestine, notions of secular and religious do not operate as a dichotomous, oppositional binary; on the contrary, they are strategically used, especially by Israeli institutional subjects, to reaffirm territorial and cultural dominion.
Furthermore, the disrespect the six soldiers manifest can be situated along the same lines as wider post-9/11, Western, anti-Muslim sentiments (and policies) nurturing the US-led rhetoric of the global West as the “free world.” It is significant, in fact, that in its re-uploads the video appeared multiple times under the title “Rock the Casba” (sic). Footnote 19 In a probably gradual yet blatant manner, such a title attributed to the viral reiterations of this dance, along with the eloquent lyrics accompanying the choreography, alludes to George W. Bush’s global war on terror, furthering Western depictions that popularize the Muslim as “other,” and in particular, in this case, the Palestinian as terrorist. Footnote 20 Similarly, the self-definition of the IDF as “moral” and “pure,” per its official doctrine, ultimately serves to morally, and only afterwards militarily, justify and legitimize the Israeli soldiers’ behavior in the Occupied Territories. Footnote 21 In the end, the choreographic disruption of the Muslim call to prayer in the center of Hebron/Al-Khalil becomes a form of cultural, temporal, and spatial displacement, part of the normalized everyday life of conflict in the West Bank.
The audience of the six soldiers’ performance is the digital global one. In the video, local Palestinians are absent — kept off scene even in their everyday, public environment. In Israel, the video had wide resonance across media. Kuntsman and Stein report that “spoofs and remakes [of the video] proliferated on popular Israeli comedy shows, whose viewers were invited to produce their own remix. Dozens would eventually make their way to YouTube” (2011:5). These reproductions transfer the parodic mode of the choreography from the military setting to the civil realm, expanding the very colonial significance of the dance while blurring the original from reproduction to reproduction. Unlike the precise reenactments that solemnly celebrate a military institution by reproducing historical battles, bridging past and present for the archive of the future, the Israeli dancing soldiers on YouTube reproduce their experience of control in Hebron/Al-Khalil through a choreographed theatricalization; its digital reproduction makes it visible beyond the space of the Occupation and extends its duration into the ongoing present of the virtual.
A Panoptical Feast
On 29 August 2013, the international edition of the Guardian made a case out of a video that shows Israeli male soldiers from the Rotem Battalion of the prestigious Givati Brigade dancing among Palestinian civilians in a club in Hebron/Al-Khalil (AP 2013). Footnote 22 As claimed by the YouTube user identified as the uploader of the video, IDF soldiers on duty in full gear (weapons and helmet included) enter a Palestinian wedding party during a patrol in Hebron/Al-Khalil’s Jaabra neighborhood, and join the Palestinian guests in the club dancing to “Gangnam Style” by South Korean pop singer PSY, which became a global, viral hit thanks also to the easy-to-learn choreography, whose steps imitate horseback riding. Footnote 23
The framework of the Palestinian wedding dance complicates the intertwining politics of masculinity within the Israeli and Palestinian cultures. During the wedding celebration, which represents the social recognition of a male’s accomplished manhood, the groom (and sometimes other males after him) is “lifted onto the shoulders of his friends and family and processed through the crowd triumphantly” (McDonald Reference McDonald2010:202). This ritual is similarly practiced in Jewish weddings and doubtlessly was familiar to the IDF soldiers. In the video, an Israeli soldier gets lifted on the shoulders of a Palestinian man. At this point, the Israeli and the Palestinian next to him join hands, while the soldier keeps holding his rifle with the other hand. Following the rhythm and the energy of the pop song, the two men bounce on the other men’s shoulders. In this video, dance works as a laissez-passer for the temporary suspension of hostility and the reciprocal acknowledgment and display of triumphant masculinity, the ultimate, reciprocal recognition of the homosocial code on which nationalisms and state formations are built. Footnote 24
An Israeli soldier is still holding his rifle while on the shoulders of a Palestinian man. From The Guardian’s “Israeli soldiers dance to Gangnam Style at Palestinian wedding-video” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/aug/29/israeli-soldiers-gangnam-style-dance-palestinian-wedding-video). (Screenshot by Melissa Melpignano)
The video, recorded with a mobile phone, was broadcast on Israeli television. Channel 2 presented it as an “incident,” and acknowledged that the IDF suspended the soldiers (boycott apartheid 2013). Among the audience of YouTube viewers, several greeted the viral video as an example of peace and coexistence; others blamed the soldiers for risking their lives, assuming the presence of Hamas members at the party. Mainstream media did not acknowledge the soldiers’ trespassing on a private space during a private celebration. Despite the improvisational organization of this dance, the soldiers never ceased to manifest their military function of control over the territory and the Palestinians. This is emblematically represented by the soldier holding his rifle above the crowd in a panoptical configuration, further emphasized by the ongoing jumpy motion of the male crowd below him. This all-male scenario, in which competing masculinities meet, reaffirms and exalts the oedipal core of the historical emergence of state-nationalism and colonialism (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:170). In particular, while in the previous video the six Naḥal soldiers performed group discipline and their ruling authority over the public space, the Givati soldiers further display their military control by exercising it in a private space. At the same time, the Israeli soldiers allow the Palestinians to be in charge of their bodies. During this Palestinian wedding party, dance operates as an instantaneous, conciliatory strategy that suspends the hostility between Israeli male soldiers and Palestinian men through a performance of reciprocal trust, coexistence, and enjoyment based on an implicit, homosocial contract between masculinities. Indeed, in this dance of celebration, the absent figure is that of the woman, which is probably what made the participation of the Israeli soldiers acceptable in the first place.
A War Dance
A third example comes from a video recorded in a military outpost in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge, in Summer 2014.Footnote 25 The video was uploaded on 21 July 2014 by YouTube user The Heartland of Israel with the title “IDF Soldiers Take a Little R&R” (The Heartland of Israel 2014). The account belongs to Lev HaOlam, an organization that supports the expansion of Zionist settlements, and promotes the commercialization of the settlers’ agricultural products.
Even though the title suggests that this video represents a moment of “rest and recuperation,” different elements arguably reveal it as a preparatory ritual for soldiers getting ready for a mission. The caption of the video combines a sense of soldier’s bravado — it frames the dance as “a break from fighting the terrorism in Gaza” — and a sense of care and fear for the soldiers’ destiny — “They are singing and dancing, celebrating while they can, before they must return to danger.” But this video neither celebrates the soldiers’ lives nor mourns their finitude; instead, it exalts the state and, more specifically, the state in its religious, messianic articulation. The video is set in a military warehouse full of soldiers in uniform, some with backpacks, their faces covered with camouflage paint. Many wear a kippah (the skullcap some Jewish men wear). At the entrance of the building, three soldiers and two Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) men jump on the roof of a partially visible, multicolored minivan. This works as a rhetorical, aesthetic marker of the recreational framework of the event, which authorizes the use of movement and dance within the military context.
The amplified voice of a man leads the event. The set-up replicates a club party; the music comes from speakers. The song “Mi Shemaamin” (Those Who Believe; 2010) by Eyal Golan starts like the chorus of a football chant with male voices singing “The one who believes is not scared.” Footnote 26 The soldiers sing along, and some form a circle while jumping. The lyrics remind the soldiers that they are in God’s hands, that “He protects us from everyone,” and that “the nation of Israel will not give up.” Here, the typical Israeli military brotherhood and camaraderie assumes a clear religious imprint. Footnote 27 The soldiers in the circle hold each other’s shoulders or waists, and rhythmically jump in unison, a frantic hora deprived of lightness and choreographic detail. Footnote 28 Arranged with the sound strategies of EDM (electronic dance music), characterized by a powerful bass and intense rhythmical frequency, Golan’s song invites the soldiers to participate in the experience of club culture (Malbon Reference Malbon1999). This scenario modernizes the culture of the ecstatic religious dances of the ḥasidic tradition, recontextualizing them in the Israeli war context. As Jewish modern dancer Pauline Koner writes in a program note, “The ḥasidic dance portrays the ecstatic mood of the old ḥasidic cult to whom song and dance was a means of reaching a state of religious exaltation” (in Rossen Reference Rossen2011:342). In the video, religious exaltation serves the warfare system. At the same time, the ecstatic dance contributes to the current mainstream discourse on Religious Zionism, for a long time marginal in the traditionally secular Israeli army, within the structure of the IDF as one of the most emblematic sites of performance of Israeliness. Footnote 29 Utilizing dance and mainstream pop music to normalize religious zeal in the army, religious leaders and soldiers employ secular strategies to implement their messianic agenda within the IDF. Footnote 30 Dancing and combat are conceived as two markers of Israeli identity, channels to achieve full Israeliness. Dance can also propel the social normalization of Haredi Israelis and religious settlers living in the Occupied Territories who previously have been considered marginal, problematic elements of Israeli society by secular Israelis (see Dalsheim and Harel Reference Dalsheim and Harel2009; and Ellis Reference Ellis2014).
Haredi men and soldiers rally other IDF soldiers from the roof of a minivan. From the YouTube video “IDF Soldiers Take a Little R&R” (https://youtu.be/zL7J6G3BM1k). (Screenshot by TDR)
More men join the conglomerate of soldiers, forming concentric circles. When the refrain starts, the majority of the men push one arm up in the air on the beat — a typical techno/house music dance club gesture. This collective stance contributes to the ecstatic communal feeling of the event (see Malbon Reference Malbon1999:93). These “brothers in arms,” through their gesturing and the jumping, exalted by the lyrics, simultaneously perform military tribalism and godly verticality.
A Haredi man emerges from the mass of IDF soldiers, waving the flag of Israel. From the YouTube video “IDF Soldiers Take a Little R&R” (https://youtu.be/zL7J6G3BM1k). (Screenshot by TDR)
The choreography is spatially dominated by a Haredi man, who stands out among the soldiers with his payot (curled sidelocks), beard, and kippah, a full-head covering. Waving the Israeli flag, he emerges from the mass, lifted by some soldiers. The Haredi man with the flag occupies the center of the choreography and becomes the body of reference.
In fact, he initiates the further development of the collective dance ritual by passing the flag to the soldiers who keep waving it while he continues to chant and dance, waving his arms. Through his choreographic — visual and kinesthetic — leadership, the Haredi man represents the “Jewish State” and the reiteration of its messianic political struggle, namely to settle in all of the Biblical Land of Israel or Greater Land of Israel — including of course where the Palestinians hope to establish their state. Other soldiers get lifted on their comrades’ shoulders, all collectively clapping on the beat to increase the communal exaltation. At the margins of the circle, many soldiers not dancing are filming with their phones or laughing. The two Haredi men on the roof of the minivan also monitor and film the scene from above. Some soldiers look worried and nervous, probably thinking about the upcoming mission, not to be persuaded by this war-dance ritual. From the panoptical perspective of the Haredi man with the flag and the visual peripheral dominion of the other two Haredi, this war dance celebrates the spatial and political sovereignty of Ultra-Orthodoxy over the soldiers.
The Necropower of the Soldiers’ Carnival
The three dances analyzed share the same stage, the Occupied Territories, and, more broadly, the Occupation. Dance movement is superimposed over military movement. The former, performed by lower-level conscripted soldiers, inserts itself into a much larger choreography, that of the Occupation, a movement regulated from above by military discipline and rule, and governmental power. All three dances are characterized by jumping and bouncing as a movement marker that, in this context, underlines the soldiers’ reliance on gravity as a choreographic tool to perform literally the weight of the Israeli military’s territorial rootedness. By wearing their uniforms and carrying their rifles and other military equipment, the soldiers never stop performing their role as the ruling force.
In the first video (Hebron, 2010), soldiers do not merely mock military discipline by choreographing an MTV-like dance. In the second video (Palestinian wedding, 2013), the soldiers joining the Palestinian wedding do not merely represent a possible, peaceful coexistence. In the third video (precombat ritual, 2014), the collective dance is not merely a traditional motivational ritual among soldiers. In all three videos, dance increases the soldiers’ representational index of power: dance adds a further dimension of power to their role. As soldiers, the vector that regulates their power works top-down (military hierarchy), while choreographic and dance initiatives install on and through their bodies an extra vector of dominion that moves from the bottom-up. Within this view, therefore, I do not consider these soldiers to be practicing dance as an antianxiety, recreational tactic or as a return to (or illusion of) civilian life, but as a strategy to reaffirm their own control over the local territory, hence as a reinforcement of their military role. By dancing in the Occupied Territories, the soldiers are not actually mitigating their military power. On the contrary, what dance allows them to mitigate is the blatancy of the violent power their role implies and legalizes. In this way the Israeli dancing soldiers adhere to their military task but subvert the behavioral code prescribed by the military institution. In particular, in the cases of the first and second videos (Hebron, 2010 and Palestinian wedding, 2013), the IDF high command reprimanded and punished some of the dancing soldiers, accusing them of misconduct. In the history of the IDF, dance has been utilized as a practice of entertainment by soldiers for fellow soldiers during missions and for military as well as civilian audiences in state-funded international tours in the West to promote the IDF’s “purity of arms” doctrine. Under the command of Rafael Eitan, at the dawn of the 1982 Lebanon War, such dance initiatives were banned because the authorities argued that dance had become a distracting and feminizing practice (see Melpignano Reference Melpignano2019). In other words, the use of dance in the IDF, like any other behavioral and aesthetic code that defines the soldier’s body, needs to be regimented. Hence, what the IDF high command actually punished in the cases of the dancing soldiers here analyzed is their claim to power — the power to autonomously redefine the use of their soldier bodies through dance, but without deviating from the IDF’s strategic agenda.
In fact, the first two videos in particular display how the occupying force domesticates the space of the occupied population; the manifest power is a form of knowledge rather than the blatant exercise of violence (see Foucault [Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1978] 1991; Deleuze Reference Deleuze1995; and Barney et al. 2016). The soldiers utilize dance in a military setting to mitigate and substitute for the overt exercise of violence. In other words, dance is employed as a strategy of control. These videos manifest an articulation of dance as “soft power,” a power aimed at attracting interest, consent, submission, affiliation. Footnote 31 It is revealing to observe, through a qualitative sentiment analysis I conducted on the comments to the three videos, that only 1.8% of the commentors perceived the soldier’s dances as distracting from their military function, while 26.3% of the comments directly linked dance practice to the exercise of military and political power. Footnote 32
Ultimately, by filtering dance as soft power, the Israeli dancing soldiers find their way to affirm their bottom-up territorial power in the Occupied Territories as well as on the digital stage where their videos circulate. Since conscripted soldiers utilize “soft” digital channels like YouTube to affirm their power, the IDF official top-down power is not undermined; on the contrary, the soldiers’ dances restate and reinforce the IDF power overall.
These globalized, public, bottom-up, irrepressible (because they are viral and regenerated through sharing) videos of dancing soldiers on duty represent the parodic development of the life cycle of the Israel Defense Forces. To theoretically frame this point, I rely on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of parody in Rabelais and His World (1984a), where parody does not merely indicate a caricature or an exaggeration (as it is often intended). Instead, here parody indicates a sort of mechanism of forgery, through which a word that in a “serious” genre (like a tragic novel) has a specific semantics is brutally separated from that “serious” discourse and, as such, shows new possible meanings and generates new discourses. Similarly, I look at the bodies of the Israeli soldiers as subjects of a parodic mechanism: by separating their bodies from the disciplined and historically expected behavior of the institution in which they are inscribed (the IDF), they engage in actions and behaviors that exceed the prescribed ones, potentially generating discourses that go beyond those the institution conceived for them.
These dances enact the main tool of the occupying military power: they take up Palestinian civilian space (the city-center of Hebron/Al-Khalil, a private Palestinian wedding, a temporary military outpost in Gaza), exercising and reasserting territorial control through the “soft” means of dance performance. The dancing Israeli soldiers appropriate the utterance of dominion and control designed by the highest ranks and reinforced on a daily basis by means of the Occupation — their shared-insta-tweeted presence in Palestinian space — utilizing it for their own purpose “by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word [in this case “Occupation”] which already has — and retains — its own orientation” (Bakhtin 1984b:156). Therefore, here, dance is a tool of the soldiers practicing the Israeli Occupation. Individual soldiers may or may not be aware of this situation; may or may not know that, for instance, in “celebrating with” they are demonstrating their “occupying force.” Whether approved or not by the IDF high ranks, whether practiced by soldiers for their own recreational, humanizing, civilianizing, or celebratory purposes, these dances restate and reinforce the Israeli military occupying power.
The dancing discussed here works as a reiteration of dominion, a tool of the colonial apparatus. Dance is neither a parody of the Palestinians nor of the Occupation; instead, soldiers utilize the parodic strategy to exercise power by deviating from the hierarchy that dictates the limits of their own power. And, yes, this further excludes the Palestinians from the Israeli military-political discourse about the Occupation and from the soldiers’ horizon of livability — meaning that, within this discourse, soldiers measure how to make their lives more livable in the army where they perform the hierarchy of dominant power. The exercise of a desire for and reiteration of power feeds the military machine, which is to say that, by dancing on duty and by violating the normative behavioral code of the army, the soldiers do not escape the military framework of power and dominion but on the contrary, it is that framework that allows them to behave as they do — to dance.
Moreover, referring once more to Bakhtin, these dance videos express the Israeli soldiers’ own carnival. Bakhtin defines carnival as “a temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of certain norms and prohibitions of usual life” (1984b:122–23). Building on the parody of military discipline that allows the soldiers to represent their occupying power, soldiers employ dance to suspend the disciplinary norm (including the norm that defines the Palestinians as the enemy, as in the case of the wedding video), and grant themselves permission to employ and enjoy dancing among and with the people they institutionally dominate. Considering the necropower these dances demonstrate and increase, the dancing soldiers are enacting a perverse carnival. Footnote 33
This perverse carnival manifests differently in each of the three videos. The first utilizes choreography as a ruling paradigm, while mocking it within a global-pop-commercial frame, the strategic system of territorialization based on the synchronized movement of the collective. The second, the Palestinian wedding dance where Palestinians lift Israeli soldiers, is a strategy that, even as the soldiers suspend their own military discipline, demonstrates their control over Palestinian civilians beyond the military frame. Finally, in the third video, the precombat war dance, the perverse carnival manifests in the staging of the nationalist parade where the accumulation of aggressive energy for combat builds up as a mass celebration of national symbols, following the lyrics of an Israeli pop song.
The anchorwoman of Israel’s Channel 2 characterized the scene of Israeli soldiers at the Palestinian wedding as “surreal” (boycott apartheid 2013). I think that what she called surreal is the perverse use of dance as a means to reiterate necropower: the unexpected but not innocent use of dance as an intensifier of dominion as the soldier moves in an unconventionally smooth, loose, and bouncy manner. In all these instances dance is used — wittingly or not — by the IDF as a new tool of hegemonic control that so-called “democratic” social media with its global reach has introduced from the bottom of the hierarchy of power.
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