New Profile

New Profile (Movement for the Civil-ization of Israeli Society) is an Israeli feminist group working to demilitarize Israeli society, to uphold freedom of conscience [Page 1030]in Israel, to end Israel's occupation of the areas conquered in 1967, and to nurture an egalitarian, engaged civil society.

New Profile activists aim to address the society in which they live in an attempt to challenge and change both consciousness and reality. New Profile views the militarized mind-sets prevalent in Israel as a major factor contributing to ongoing warfare in the area. The reproduction of these mind-sets through state education and mainstream culture is crucial, in New Profile's analysis, in maintaining a society willing to conduct warfare over time while prioritizing military action and needs.

According to New Profile, militarization underpins the dominant status in Israel of a Jewish, Western-descended, male hegemony as militarism both depends upon and feeds social stratification, the oppression of nonhegemonic groups, racism, and sexism. Militarization, a process that revolves on “othering,” requires the maintenance of a fearful enemy image, alleged to “understand only force,” and the projection of a defenseless, passive “women-and-children” image, whose need for protection justifies state violence on the one hand and social stratification on the other. Thus, both “the enemy” and “women-and-children” are militarism's others, sanctioning the continued supremacy of a masculine elite of fighters. Accordingly, New Profile views upholding freedom of conscience and ending conscription as pivotal in the process of demilitarizing and democratizing society in Israel.

Based on feminist methods of knowledge building and organizing, New Profile advocacy work sets out to raise consciousness to the naturalization—in Jewish Israeli society—of war, soldierhood, and militarism, and to clarify the responsibility of Israeli society and state for the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the process, New Profile advances the realization that peace is not beyond reach, while encouraging participatory democracy.

New Profile conducts educational interventions against the militarization of Israeli education; offers lectures, study days, and workshops, many of them accompanied by a portable exhibit revealing the normalization of war and the military in Israeli visual culture; operates youth groups and youth seminars providing space for deliberation on politically and socially loaded issues, including conscription; provides moral, emotional, and public support to draft resisters of all kinds, as well as information and legal aid toward realizing the right to resist conscription; raises consciousness to the value and importance of the largely marginalized phenomenon of women's draft resistance.

Founded in 1998, the movement is structured as an experiment in participatory feminist democracy. By 2006, a core group of 40 to 60 active members was still maintaining activities through regular volunteer work. Structurally, New Profile is guided by feminist principles of equal participation, decentralization, and egalitarian power sharing. Possibly as a result of this, New Profile's membership spans an unusually broad age spectrum—women and men aged 17 to 75. Policy decisions are made by open, monthly plenary meetings whose agendas are formulated by rotating facilitators. Supporters and members subscribing to New Profile list serves numbered about 1,500 in 2006.