Lived hybridity and armed citizenship: civilian gun ownership in contemporary Israel

This article develops the concept of lived hybridity to theorize civilian gun culture in Israel as a form of agency enacted within contradictory structures of power, legality, and identity. Based on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork and 36 interviews, we show how Israeli gun owners navigate the conflicting logics of state-conferred privilege and liberal individual right. Rather than reflecting pure state militarism, civilian gun ownership emerges as a contested, emotionally charged practice in which individuals selectively internalize and challenge both statist and libertarian paradigms. We argue that lived hybridity constitutes a distinct mode of agency—one that resists binary classifications such as resistance versus compliance or autonomy versus domination. Israeli gun owners do not resolve these contradictions but tactically and reflexively inhabit them. These opposing frameworks coexist and shape one another in practice. In this theoretical view, agency involves not escaping structure, but living its contradictions in ways that produce new logics of firearms ownership.