Cultural Context and Social Movement Outcomes: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance Movement Organizations in Israel

This article aims to contribute to the debates on how cultural context influences mobilization outcomes through a comparative analysis of two Israeli social movement organizations that supported conscientious objectors and draft resisters during the second Palestinian Intifada. This analysis has two objectives. The first is to show how cultural and institutional conditions of Israeli militarism influenced both the discourses and the tactics of resistance of the movement organizations. The second is to demonstrate that different tactics of the movement organizations had a differential impact on the Israeli public and the Israeli political system. It is argued that both the culturally and institutionally embedded gender inequality within Israeli society has determined the choice of the available strategies for the movement organizations, which has in turn influenced the relative success of their campaigns.