This past quarter I was first exposed to the illogic of war. For weeks I felt a welling up of grief – an accumulation of pain, horror and sorrow growing out of my sudden introduction to necropolitics and the ruthless machine we call war. Like an insurgency no longer able to resist the humiliation of oppression, my grief finally surfaced in an almost uncontrollable flood of emotion.

The moment came while watching a 14-minute time-lapse video created by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, in which ten of the world’s most powerful nations take turns blowing themselves up, playing with quantities of plutonium and uranium that tease of nuclear winter. I curled my legs into my chest sank deep into my chair, ready to surrender. I felt consumed by the magnitude of death that hovered dangerously close to mass extinction and I let my body fold into itself. Tears clogged my sight until gravity forced them down my cheeks.

What is the consequence of such pain and destruction on such a massive scale? In terms of the individual, it is becoming more and more clear to me that systematic patterns of dishonoring pain are tied to the every-day biochemical imbalances we call depression, anxiety, and chronic illness. Now, scaling up to the level of the planet, perhaps our failure to recognize and lament this world’s history of war, genocide, colonialism, slavery, and oppression has finally resurfaced as modern crises such climate change, terrorism, social isolation, mass poverty and more. The ability of the United States in particular to shamelessly gloss over the expulsion and murder of millions of Americans from their native land is indicative of not only the U.S.’s but also this entire worlds capacity to casually and consistently ignore genocide as the principle means of establishing a nation.

Sukie Colegrave once said, “Pain is the seedbed of psychological acceptance.” In other words, pain is often good. Pain is a teacher that directs our attention to a place in need of care and nourishment. Thus, when we circumvent our pain we circumvent one of life’s many lessons. And so to deny my grief surrounding war would be to deny my potential for growth and acceptance. Several days later I came to the realization that there is no way to surrender to the machine, for I am already a piece of its inner most workings. There is no counterinsurgent waiting eagerly for me to raise my white flag, for my body already feeds his hunger. There is only a mushrooming of people, organizations and movements working slowly and steadily to dismantle the machine.

One movement in particular caught my eye. New Profile is a feminist insurgency organization working to demilitarize Israel. While establishing networks for those who wish to avoid mandatory conscription, New Profile is simultaneously challenging the assumption that there is such a thing as good Israeli’s and bad Israeli’s. They are saying that we are all slaves of something and in doing so are placing the blame of war and violence on a particular psychosocial culture created by the nation of Israel.

This plays off of the Marxist idea that every day choices are only deviant or criminal, legitimate or just, in relation to the laws in place. Such a mindset absolves individuals of responsibility and instead makes the claim that true war is typified most by government institutions, through education, media and propaganda, for instance, that inhibit free, conscious thought, and not by the Israeli soldiers themselves. In scaling blame up to the level of social institutions and ideology, New Profile is effectively arguing that violence is not the product of soldiers; rather it is a product of a state. Once we accept this notion, we see that as an Israeli citizen, to comply with the law is to subjugate oneself to injustice.

Nonetheless, both murder and extreme disrespect have been central components of the Occupation, and there is no denying the violence that suffocates Palestinian life. Yet, when we place the dehumanizing behavior of many Israeli soldiers within the historical context of post-1948 Israel, we see that violence tends to surface in times and spaces when an Israeli soldier’s limited access to free will jeopardizes his or her claim to a gendered position of power. In this environment, individual powerlessness is often turned outward on Palestinian people.

Evidently, the highly violent and controversial politics of Israeli soldiers that New Profile illuminates can also be seen as the social and political struggle for the rehumanization of Israeli citizens. I am not excusing this widely aggressive, offensive and immoral behavior; rather I am suggesting that the actions of soldiers convey a sense of social realism, a sort of street ethnography of oppressive social practices and institutions.

What does this say about human nature? When you grow up in a country that tells you over and over that serving is your ultimate responsibility to the state, that a true Israeli doesn’t dodge the draft, that you will become a parasite if not in the army, you come to believe that being a part of a military is what makes you human. You come to believe that you exist solely for the sake of war, not for yourself, your own beliefs or your own dreams.

Unlike people in other countries who may have the freedom to actively choose a life in the military, many conscripted Israeli’s are forced to separate from their identity and deny their politics. This separation, this disintegration of identity and behavior leads to a loss of self, a loss of morality and an absence of empathy for humanity.

Which explains why good, moral, patriotic, democratic people suddenly find themselves in the front seat of a bulldozer reducing someone’s home to rubble or standing at a checkpoint in Gaza and not letting a sick child through.

This splitting of the Israeli psyche is what fuels the Israeli Defense Force, keeps militarism virtually invisible in Israeli society, and perpetuates the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian. Yet, those who are resisting the machine, who New Profile supports, are proving that integration is the ultimate truth. They are proving that the alignment of identity and behavior, or what New Profile has identified as freedom of choice, is intrinsic to the human condition. People would rather go to prison, face physical and emotional abuse, risk unemployment, social isolation and be ostracized by family and friends, than deny their right to express their beliefs and allow their identity and behavior to exist in harmony.