Enabling Militarism? The Inclusion of Soldiers with Disabilities in the Israeli Military

Abstract

AbstractSoldiers are rarely imagined as having disabilities, other than when they are injured in war. Yet in recent years the Israeli military has devoted considerable resources to programs promoting the inclusion of soldiers with intellectual disabilities. This paper critically examines two such programs, arguing that they should prompt a reexamination of assumptions in both critical military studies and critical disability studies. These two fields are rarely placed in dialogue, especially in international relations. Yet this paper argues that they have productive insights to offer each other and suggests that the Israeli case raises important questions when their analytical frames are combined. First, the paper argues that this example complicates the category of soldier fitness in critical military studies and reveals that militarist distinctions between ability and disability can be destabilized in ways suggested elsewhere by critical disability studies. Second, however, the paper cautions that the emancipatory potential of alternative “crip” subjectivities explored in critical disability studies remains circumscribed by geopolitical processes (including neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and militarism), which international relations is well placed to analyze. These arguments are advanced by showing how these inclusionary programs for soldiers with disabilities are implicated in the debilitating violence of Israel's settler colonial project.