ISRAEL
Since 1980
Guy Ben-Porat,
Yagil Levy,
Shlomo Mizrahi,
Arye Naor, and
Erez Tzfadia
5
Military–Society Relations: the Demise of
the “People’s Army”
Yagil Levy
“The civilian is a soldier on eleven months’ annual leave.” That sentiment,
expressed in the early 1950s by General Yigael Yadin, the
second Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),
has prevailed throughout Israel’s history. Israelis have long viewed the
IDF as more than simply the military; in popular mythology, the IDF
is “the people’s army,” a crucial institution for both the defense of
the state and the self-image of the nation. Nevertheless, the relationship
between the Jewish-Israeli society and its army has been a
tumultuous one. From its lofty status as a powerful “people’s army”
in the mid-1950s, the army has met with a succession of crises since
the 1973 war, which intensiﬁed following its display of weakness in
the First Lebanon War (1982–5) and the ﬁrst Intifada (1987–93). These
crises have led to a dilution of the army’s resources, a reduction in
its political support, a decline in its symbols, and even its gradual
abandonment by social elites. The Al-Aqsa Intifada, the second major
wave of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, which erupted in
September 2000, ﬁlled the army’s sails with fresh wind, though only
temporarily. The Disengagement Plan (summer of 2005) placed the
army once again in the midst of the political debate. Then the Second
Lebanon War (summer of 2006) worsened the army’s status. The
prospect of replacing the drafted “people’s army” with a voluntaryprofessional
military, something not considered in the past, is now
seriously discussed.
The People’s Army
The French republican principle of the “citizen-soldier” was well
assimilated in Israeli society. The IDF was founded along with the
117
118 Yagil Levy
establishment of the state in 1948 and was organized on the basis of
compulsory enlistment for every Jewish man and woman, the length of
which settled in the 1970s at two years for women and three years for
men. The army’s core was a small regular army, consisting primarily of
conscripts, with the ofﬁcer corps and part of the professional echelon
staffed by career personnel. A large reserve army was also established
(inspired by the Swiss model), composed of conscripts obligated to
do several weeks of reserve duty every year in order to maintain their
ﬁtness as soldiers in case of war. The standing army, according to this
model, functions as the “manufactory” of the reserve army, as well as
the initial forces assigned to curb an enemy’s attack until mobilization
of the reserves can be completed. This model facilitated a maximum
extraction of manpower to reduce Israel’s perceived inferiority to the
Arab countries in both territorial and demographic terms, but without
overburdening the civilian sectors, with the political costs that
overburdening entails.
Political and military preparations for what was perceived as the
inevitable “second round” of ﬁghting became the cornerstone of politics,
assuming that the military answer to that threat was the exclusive
one. Israelis viewed the conﬂict with the Arab nations as a zerosum
game, in which Israel’s defeat would deprive it of its survival
as an independent entity. Hence, the “hard-line” school has always
triumphed over the moderate ones, and diplomatic alternatives were
ruled out. Against this background, Israel twice initiated pre-emptive
strikes – the 1956 Suez War and the 1967 Six Day War – to eliminate
what it had perceived as an existential threat posed by the neighboring
Arabs. Of particular importance was the 1967 war, which
ended with a massive Israeli victory, marked by the destruction of
the ﬁghting Arab armies and the conquest of large territories. After
1967 people felt more secure, and the idea that Israel was in danger
of being wiped out was replaced by the motif of “security borders.”
This was a concept that eliminated existential danger and aggrandized
Israel’s military might, if only it would be allowed to preserve its new
borders.
The centrality of war preparation and the glorious image of the
IDF established its social centrality. This enabled the political leadership
to use the IDF to establish internal control and authority beyond
the army’s instrumental missions. The model of a “nation in arms”
was meshed with the model of state-building embraced by David
Ben-Gurion, the state founder. It was a model characterized by a
Military–Society Relations 119
whole society ready for call-up, suspension of certain civil liberties,
over-intrusiveness of state institutions, and a seemingly uniform
Jewish-Western Israeli identity, devoid of ethnicity.
Under the wing of statism (Mamlachtiyut) – the state ideology that
inculcated the idea that the state is a supreme entity, supplanting any
particularist conception incompatible with state-directed goals – mass
compulsory recruitment tied a Gordian knot between soldiering and
citizenship in its most fundamental sense. Under the halo of the “people’s
army,” this arrangement gave the army a favored symbolic status,
and cultivated its image as a universal and depoliticized military that
stands above society’s sectarian divisions. Military service was not only
a legal obligation imbued with symbolic meaning; it was also constructed
in terms of social experience that determines the boundaries
of society. So militarization ran its course: the perceived threat to Israel
was diseursively intensiﬁed and the army took on the roles of “nation
builder” and “melting pot.”
Ethnically, the IDF was consolidated and spearheaded by the dominant
social group of middle-class, secular Ashkenazi men – the very
group that had founded the army, populated its senior ranks, and that
was identiﬁed with its achievements. The army was purportedly built
on egalitarian foundations, although in fact, and as a by-product of
its being shaped as a Western and modern army, the Ashkenazi secular
group was designated to set the tone in terms of its quality. The
Ashkenazi warrior-Sabre represented the dominant and proper (nondiasporic)
masculinity of men who could pass the ultimate masculine
test: combat.
Peripheral social groups, and in particular the Mizrachim, who had
immigrated mainly from Arab countries in the state’s early years, were
portrayed as able to contribute to the army quantitatively, but not
to shape its qualitative values. Women, who were deployed primarily
in auxiliary roles, as well as standing as mothers at the forefront
of the demographic (Jewish) struggle, were forced to the margins as
well. Religious recruits were led by their fear of the secularizing inﬂuence
of the army into auxiliary roles rather than a full military career.
The exemption of other groups – Palestinian citizens and the young
Ultra-Orthodox – from any kind of service distanced them from the
construction site of the new Jewish Israeliness, and added to the value
of those who did serve, especially Mizrachim.
Owing to the statism, military service became a decisive standard
by which rights were awarded to individuals and collectives acting in
120 Yagil Levy
the service of the state. Male Ashkenazi warriors, identiﬁed with the
military’s gloriﬁcation, succeeded in translating their military dominance
into legitimate social dominance. Military hierarchy deﬁnitively
shaped the social hierarchy. At the same time, the IDF’s very massbased,
universal conscription led to its perception as an interethnic
“melting pot,” as only in the military could all Israeli Jews meet on
equal terms, without social barriers. Clearly, the ethos of the “melting
pot” played a leading role in the state’s absorption of the inﬂux of
Mizrachim and was instrumental in mitigating interethnic tensions.
The secular Ashkenazi group bore the burden of war for as long
as it advanced its social status. Other groups – mainly Mizrachim,
women, the national-religious, and, later on, immigrants from the
former Soviet Union and Ethiopia – assimilated the principle of the
citizen-soldier and its anticipated social rewards. This structure was,
then, constituted on materialist militarism, that is military sacriﬁce for
social rewards, at least by the 1980s.
The 1980s – After the Watershed
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the watershed after which the
IDF’s social status has seen a gradual decline. The war created a political
opportunity, of which mass protest movements took advantage.
The ﬁrst wave of protest movements focused on supervising the military
performance in the war in light of the “blunder.” These activities
were launched by protest groups of ex-reservists. Until then, the Israeli
citizenry had not played an active role in monitoring military activities,
but had passively tolerated military policies. After this protest the
government established a judicial commission of inquiry (the Agranat
Commission) to investigate the military’s functioning in the war. The
commission’s ﬁndings led to the dismissal of several generals and ultimately
to the resignation of Golda Meir’s government. The protest
helped, and was assisted by, the development of a press that became
relatively independent from the political elites and gradually shifted its
commitment from the ruling establishment to its reading/consuming
public, to whom it felt primarily obliged. The ﬁrst wave of protest
followed the 1973 war and the second wave occurred at the end of
the 1970s. Peace Now was the most notable organization involved.
A mass movement of young, mainly Ashkenazi, ex-servicepersons led
Military–Society Relations 121
by ofﬁcers in the reserves, it called on the government to exploit all
political opportunities for peace.
But the most crucial turning point was the First Lebanon War. The
Lebanon War was initiated by Israel in 1982 to eradicate the PLOcontrolled
quasi-state that had been formed in Southern Lebanon and
that was perceived as a threat to the Israeli population living by the
border (see chapter 1). The Begin government expanded the original
goals, which had been partially agreed by the main political parties. In
consequence, the IDF was forced to remain on south Lebanon’s land
for almost twenty more years, suffering heavy losses and withdrawing
partially, in 1985, to a “security zone” established in Lebanon and
then completely, in 2000, to the international border line. A similar
scenario repeated itself during the Intifada that erupted in 1987 – the
violent uprising by the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip against Israel’s military rule. It became clear that the IDF had a
limited capacity to contain the uprising, but not to annihilate it.
During the war in Lebanon, several new protest movements
emerged and left their imprint on society–military relations. Yesh Gvul
(“There is a limit/border”), organized reserve soldiers for the ﬁrst time
to selectively refuse to carry out military missions in Lebanon (and later
in the occupied territories) because of the IDF’s allegedly aggressive
behavior. Other organizations, such as Soldiers Against Silence and
Parents Against Silence, sprang up to protest against the extension of
the war in Lebanon. By demanding an alternative to the accepted military
way, these movements broadened their critical scope to include
not only the army’s modus operandum, but also its very purpose.
Central to this discourse was the unprecedented deﬁnition of the
Lebanon War as a “war of choice” as distinct from the ostensible “wars
of no choice” of the past, thus instilling the notion of an alternative to
bellicosity. Largely as a result of these protests, the IDF partly and unilaterally
withdrew from Lebanon in 1985. Additional protest groups
followed, the most notable of which was Four Mothers, composed of
parents of soldiers who had served in Lebanon, who demanded an
immediate and complete withdrawal from this front in the middle
of the 1990s. The effect of these movements’ activity was to bring
about restrictions, both direct and indirect, over the military’s activity.
Restrictions of this sort were increased after the outbreak of the
ﬁrst Intifada (1987), which brought the army into a political struggle
for control over a population. This was a situation that threatened to
122 Yagil Levy
fracture the ranks of the army, populated by soldiers from Israel’s left
and right wings. It also threatened to drive a wedge between military
commanders and political forces, which were in conﬂict over the
appropriate strategy for the army to adopt. Further cracks in the army’s
unity were caused by the nature of the soldiers’ policing missions,
which were seen increasingly as a failing struggle against a militarily
inferior population. As a result, political protests were renewed with
fresh energy, led by Peace Now and Yesh Gvul.
The Decline of State Militarism
The year 1973, and more notably the First Lebanon War, were the
start of the decline of state militarism embodied in the Mamlachtiyut
and the centrality of the “people’s army.” Four main processes were
responsible for this shift, out of which the protest movements grew.
The ﬁrst was the signiﬁcant increase in the use of social resources to
maintain the Arab–Israeli conﬂict in the wake of the 1973 October war.
This involved a considerable extension of military service: from 1970,
compulsory service for males was extended from 30 to 36 months
and the burden of reserve duty became 60 to 100 percent higher
than the 1950–72 levels. In addition, there was a steep increase in
defense spending, from about 10 percent of the GDP in the pre-
1967 war period to about 23 percent in the years 1968–73, rising to
about 28 percent from 1974 to 1980. Even though American aid alone
covered about 40 percent of the defense budget, the rise in defense
spending considerably exceeded GNP growth, in a way that increased
the national debt. The state therefore failed to balance, as it had in
previous wars, the security burden imposed on its citizens and the
rewards they were provided with, especially as the 1973 war brought
with it a ﬁnancial crisis.
Second, the security burden became increasingly incongruent with
the consumerist values growing in Israeli society from the late 1970s
onward, generated by the rise in the standard of living produced by
the 1967 Six Day War.
Third, the IDF’s prestige declined as it demonstrated deﬁcient
prowess against Arab standing armies in the 1973 war and against
Muslim militia in the Lebanon War, which eroded the prestige formerly
conferred on military participants. In parallel, the diminishment
of the external threat depleted the military sacriﬁce part of its value
Military–Society Relations 123
as a struggle over the very national existence. Concurrently, the army
became a site for political clashes, especially when the dispute over the
state’s borders sharpened and disagreements over the army’s conduct
heightened.
Fourth, and crucial, were the cultural and economic globalization of
Israeli society from the middle 1980s and the structural changes in the
economy in the spirit of the neoliberal doctrines that were introduced
(see chapter 4). Globalization strengthened the ethos of the market
economy with its characteristic liberal discourse, which challenged
the previous collectivist commitments and symbols. Prominent in the
liberal agenda were new values such as individualism, privatization,
competition, achievement, and efﬁciency. In this framework, violent
conﬂict was portrayed as an obstacle in the way of Israel’s participation
in the global economy. Naturally, the market economy discourse also
laid down the basis for an increasingly strident critique of the army’s
resources, as its budget was the largest single proportion of government
spending. In practice, in the years 1980–2006, military spending as a
proportion of GDP dropped by more than 50 percent, while GDP rose
by about 200 percent, with most of the cutbacks directed at private
consumption
The overall result of these four processes was the erosion of the
army’s role in deﬁning the social hierarchy. The value of one’s contribution
to the state by means of military service was no longer necessarily
the criterion that would determine the distribution of social goods
and justify social domination, as individual achievement replaced the
test of statism. Equally, groups that do not serve in the army, or who
make a lesser contribution – such as the Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Palestinian
citizens of Israel, and women – made certain achievements that
were not dependent on the test of military service but rather were
based on their own political power, wrapped in the liberal discourse
of citizenship. Nothing was more symbolic of this than the decisions
made by Yitzhak Rabin’s government (in the early 1990s) to drop the
requirement for military service as a basic condition for employment
in the public sector, and to make the payment of child beneﬁts no
longer exclusive to ex-servicepersons.
Military service lost even more of its value as the vertical military
hierarchy no longer provided the professional, value-based socialization
required by an economy characterized by the emergence of ﬂathierarchy
high-tech organizations. Reserve duty also became a heavier
burden in both absolute and relative terms, and it began to hamper
124 Yagil Levy
reserve soldiers both from effectively contending in an increasingly
competitive labor market, and from fulﬁlling their roles as fathers
within a more equal division of labor in the family. In short, competition
was arising between the “military time” and the “civilian
time.”
The “Motivation Crisis”
Alongside protest activities, the change in orientation among the secular
Ashkenazi middle class could be seen in the form of pressure to
lessen military sacriﬁce or to increase the rewards for it. One mode
of action was reﬂected in the cultivation of internal pressures of various
kinds to divert resources from military reinforcement to private
consumption (including reducing tax burdens). This reduced investment
in security (as a proportion of GDP) from a peak of 31 percent
in 1974–6 to around 17 percent in 1986–90 and around 10 percent
during the 1990s.
A second mode of action could be seen in the gradual forsaking of
the army, and especially a reduction in motivation for combat duty –
the “motivation crisis” syndrome, as some aspects of this were termed
in public discourse during the middle of the 1990s. This trend had a
number of aspects: a slow and continual decline in general willingness
to enlist, and particularly to enlist in combat units; fewer volunteers
for ofﬁcer training; a rise in the number of potential recruits purposely
trying to alter their medical proﬁle – which determines the soldier’s
qualiﬁcation to perform his/her duties – as a means to avoid combat
duty (see also chapter 6); a rise in the number of enlistees requesting
to serve at a base close to their home; and a signiﬁcant increase in the
number of young people dropping out before and during their service,
ostensibly on mental health grounds. Secular Ashkenazim were at the
forefront of this crisis, joined by the upwardly mobile Mizrachim,
who adopted a pattern of motivation similar to that of the secular
Ashkenazim. Among the latter, the collective agricultural sector –
the kibbutzim and moshavim, who were symbolically identiﬁed with
having made a vital contribution to the IDF was especially affected
by the erosion of the IDF’s status following Lebanon, and displayed
attenuated motivation.
The state exacerbated the motivation crisis by its own actions. Not
only did it contribute to the erosion of symbolic rewards by directing
Military–Society Relations 125
the IDF to politically disputed missions in Lebanon and the territories,
it also began to reform the conscription system from being inclusionist
to selective. Two processes are particularly worth mentioning. First, in
1985 the reserve army was reformed and the burden of reserve duty
was reduced. The main thrust of the reform was gradually to transfer
the cost of reserve duty from the National Insurance Institute to the
army. Previously, the daily cost of a reserve soldier (primarily compensating
him/her for loss of earnings) was not borne by the security
budget, and so the reserve army was managed largely in isolation from
economic considerations. The reform provided an incentive for the
army to rein in its usage of reservists and to divert resources to other
purposes. This process was part of a broad cutback in the security
budget in the framework of the “Economic Stability Plan,” which, in
1985, eliminated the hyper-inﬂation, and heralded the gradual shift
to a “market society” (see chapter 4). Indeed, beyond its budgetary
implications, the reform meant that the reserves began to be managed
according to the perquisites of the market economy, and a price tag was
attached to the service of reserve soldiers. This resulted in a dramatic
reduction in the number of overall reserve duty days, and an easing of
the burden of reserve duties. To illustrate: in 2001, reserve duty was
funded on the basis of 3.8 million days per year instead of 10 million in
1985, before the reform. At the same time, the number of days served
by reservists dropped from an average of 26 days per year in 1990, to
16 in 2000. On top of that, only a small percentage of the population
participates in a signiﬁcant reserve service. In short, the reform of the
reserves brought about for the ﬁrst time a semi-selective recruitment
model, which deviated from the universalist principles of an inclusive
“people’s army.”
However, this is a case of trying to right one wrong with another:
the army’s inefﬁciency, characterized by the wasteful recruitment of
reservists, was resolved by increasing inequality in the reserves. The
cutback in reserve duty days weighed most heavily on combat units,
where the middle class was bearing most of the burden, in terms of
both the reservists and their employers. The burden placed on noncombat
forces, with their larger representation of other social strata,
was lightened as reserve duty days were reduced and cheaper, civilian
alternatives to reservists were found. A new contradiction thus
emerged from the directives of the market economy: economic savings
for the army at the cost of an increased ﬁnancial burden on
the middle class, itself already faced with a high tax burden and the
126 Yagil Levy
contradictory pressures of the market economy. Consequently, from
the middle of the 1990s, reservists were organized to claim their rights,
as detailed below.
Second, selectivity encompassed the compulsory army as well.
Numerically speaking, the defection of secular Ashkenazim, together
with the expansion of the non-military Torah-study route (see more
below), and the disqualiﬁcation of poorly educated draftees, largely
owing to the growing human reservoir following the mass immigration
in the 1990s from the former Soviet Union, led to a reduction in
recruitment rates: since the year 2000 less than 60 percent of Jewish
men have been serving full military service, and this number continues
to drop.
Naturally, growing selectivity ampliﬁed the enlisted persons’ bargaining
power with the IDF, especially as selectivity also cracked the
military’s image as an inclusionist “people’s army,” the boundaries of
which overlaid those of the Israeli-Jewish community, and thus further
devalued its status. Several patterns of bargaining can thus be observed.
Personal bargaining: Since the 1990s, soldiers have begun to negotiate
with the army in person or via their families or other networks.
These negotiations can determine the individual’s role in the army, the
conditions under which he/she serves, restrictions on his/her service
and military function, and even the very fact of his/her serving at all.
The strengthening of liberal values and their partial inﬁltration into
modes of action among governmental institutions, have empowered
the individual’s standpoint and put him/her in a stronger negotiating
position, sometimes with the assistance of the legal system. The media
has featured many stories of artists, athletes, and models who chose
not serve in the military, as it would interfere with their careers.
Military parenting: This can be seen in the increasing and quite open
involvement of parents in affairs of the army. Parents, among them
bereaved parents, even get involved in matters such as training accidents,
operational accidents, the political justiﬁcation of missions, and
military service conditions. This involvement is effective because many
of the parents are themselves army veterans or reservists who “know
the system.”
The political selection of missions: This can be seen in the strengthening of
the phenomena of both explicit and selective, and “gray” conscientious
Military–Society Relations 127
objection, and the appearance of political movements that ideologically
endorse it.
Economic bargaining: Military duties became conditional on economic
remuneration. The most striking illustration is the “revolts” in the late
1990s among reservists (such as pilots) arising from a lack of insurance
cover, and consumerist-style associations of reserve soldiers demanding
easier conditions, as well as appropriate ﬁnancial compensation for
their service. Pressure to increase the monetary rewards for reservists
and their employers were partially answered by improved compensation
for reservists (especially those serving for longer periods of time).
Redistributional bargaining: This involved pressure to redistribute the
burden, especially the demand in the 1990s to recruit yeshiva students.
It was a rearguard action to piece together the remnants of the
republican principle of civic duty, if not by increasing the rights of
those who bore the burden or negating the rights of those who did
not, then by making greater demands on the latter. Amendments to
legislation only partially met this demand, however.
To a large extent, these patterns of bargaining embodied a retreat
from “obligatory militarism,” which sees compulsory military service
as an unconditional contribution to the state, and the adoption of
“contractual militarism,” that is, making service conditional on its
meeting the individual’s ambitions and interests. The very activity
of protest groups and the “motivation crisis” undermined the status
of militarism in Israel. At the same time, demilitarization found its
expression in the opening of a new cultural space for voices challenging
the centrality of the military and the state of war in Israeli’s experience.
The State’s Response
This interlocked process – protest, de-militarization, and the motivation
crisis – produced two contradictory effects along two different
life cycles. While the long-term effect was a realignment of the social
composition of the IDF, the short-term effect was to reduce military
control over human and material resources, thus limiting the
military’s freedom of action in the realm of statecraft. The more the
political disputes over the use of military force intensiﬁed, the more
Israel’s capacity to use force declined because the state bureaucracy
128 Yagil Levy
and the military establishment had to calculate carefully the expected
political outcomes. Accordingly, Israeli statecraft, in which the military
had long played a central role, was channeled into non-military
pursuits.
The visible result was the de-escalation of the Israeli–Arab conﬂict –
that is the level of friction between Israel and its Arab neighbors was
reduced so that the level of social investment in security, in both material
and human terms, reﬂected the fact that military sacriﬁce was perceived
as less legitimate than it had been before. The IDF, protective
of its internal integration, social status, and its decreasing human and
material resources, found itself being driven increasingly to adjust to
a civilian set of considerations, under pressure from civilian groups.
It was precisely because it was a “people’s army,” with the resources,
prestige, and the professional mobility of the ofﬁcer corps in the civilian
labor market that this status entails, that the IDF was sensitive to
shifts in the proﬁle of the social legitimacy it enjoyed. The IDF therefore
cooperated with the political powers in managing de-escalation.
In addition to attempting to cool down the conﬂict, the government
and the army were geared to divert resources (including legitimation)
from the Egyptian conﬂict to the Palestinian one, through which the
main battle over the “Land of Israel” would be determined.
The ﬁrst move was the peace treaty signed with Egypt in 1979 at
the price of Israel’s full withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. Central
to this move was the IDF’s interest in decreasing its human and material
costs by eliminating the Egyptian threat and gaining American
aid to help rebuild the army. Nonetheless, the government reversed
the de-escalation process by launching the First Lebanon War. A battle
against a demonic (PLO), yet inferior enemy, could have annulled the
effects of the 1973 war on the IDF’s position as much as it could have
defeated the Palestinian national spirit, had it ended with a glorious
and swift victory. But the war concluded with the withdrawal of most
of the exhausted Israeli forces from Lebanon in 1985, under political
pressure by protest groups but in return for generous American aid,
and was accompanied by a cut in the defense budget and the downsizing
of the military industries. Later, the Labor Party under Yitzhak
Rabin displayed greater ﬂexibility than the previous Likud-dominated
government in taking advantage of international and regional developments
(the fall of the Soviet Union and Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf
War), which weakened the PLO’s power alongside the IDF’s inability
to rule the Palestinians militarily. The result was an acceleration of the
Military–Society Relations 129
diplomatic processes, with the Oslo Agreement (1993) at the center.
Resentment of the human and material costs of war also played a role
in Israel’s unilateral and complete withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000
and in the military’s support for diplomatic overtures with Syria in
1992–2000.
However, the demilitarization and the peace process, which
involved territorial concessions, gave rise to a counter-reaction
amongst peripheral and religious groups, just as they eroded the IDF’s
social and autonomous status and motivated it to rehabilitate its position.
So, the strategy of demilitarization could only be an interim
rather than a long-term measure, which helped to reduce pressures
from the political leadership and the IDF. Thus, the second contradictory
effect, a long-term one, was a change in the military’s social
composition, which also empowered the army to resume belligerency.
The Ethno-National Challenge
With, on the one hand, the declining interest of the elites in military
service and, on the other hand, the downturn in the image of
the omnipotent Ashkenazi warrior-Sabre in wars, other groups were
able to enter the political scene and challenge, directly and indirectly,
the hegemonic military symbols. The ethno-national ethos was at the
center of the challenges issued by the more peripheral groups. Ethnonationalism
strengthened in response to the aftermath of the Six Day
War, in which the Israeli-Jewish community renewed its encounter
with historically venerated sites such as the Old City of Jerusalem and
Hebron. For religious and rightist cycles, the occupation was a stimulus
to reassert their identiﬁcation with Jewish tradition (see chapters
1 and 2). Traditional Judaism, which invoked the primordial in the
building of the Israeli-Jewish community, became for many a crucial
factor in re-demarcating the boundaries of Israeli society.
In this way, citizenship came to be based not on individual rights
deriving from the individual’s belonging formally to the state, but on
rights rooted in the membership of a collective community, whose
primordial identity was Jewish. Groups expected to achieve status
by merely belonging to the Jewish collective – status was no longer
seen as dependent on historical or contemporary contributions, military
or otherwise, as had been associated with Ashkenazi dominance
and legitimized by the statist, republican discourse. This led to the
130 Yagil Levy
Mamlachtiyut-informed republican ethos being challenged not only
by the liberal, market-oriented discourse, described in chapter 4, but
also by an ethno-national discourse. Introduced originally by the Likud
and Gush Emunim, the ethno-national discourse became a magnet for
less mobile Mizrachi and religious groups – who had been marginalized
and thereby alienated by statism – and offered them unconditional,
meaningful partnership in shaping the “common good” of the
Jewish-Israeli community.
In the spirit of this change, the main type of challenge to the Ashkenazi
hegemony in the army was posited by groups who had been disappointed
by their inability to gain the recognition or attain a worthy
status in the army, namely Shas, a Mizrachi Ultra-Orthodox movement.
Set up in the 1980s, Shas successfully demanded that yeshiva
students’ exemption from military service would increase but at the
same time would not be at the cost of the privileges awarded to exservicepersons.
This presented an alternative to the centrality of the
army and the Gordian knot that had been tied between soldiering and
citizenship. Shas contributed to the institutionalization of the military
exemption given to yeshiva students under the heading of Torato
Omanuto (“the study of Torah is his livelihood”). It made a political
commitment to uphold the exemption and even to expand it.
The exemption of Orthodox men from the army was a part of the
religious–secular status quo established in pre- and early statehood (see
chapter 1). A few hundred young people were exempted in the early
years of the state, as Ben-Gurion’s gesture to the Ultra-Orthodox
rabbinate during the early 1950s towards rebuilding the Orthodox
yeshivas after the devastation of the Holocaust. In the 1990s this number
climbed to around 10 percent of potential recruits. Furthermore,
Shas refused to bow down to hegemonic secular militarism as the
Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox parties did, instead unhesitatingly presenting
the route of studying Torah as no less worthy, if not more so,
than the military one. Shas thus constructed an alternative pattern of
rewards for an increasingly Ultra-Orthodox population in the form of
a huge project of Mizrachi yeshivas. This route offered greater material
and symbolic rewards than military participation, which, for such
young people, had meant either “dropping out” or taking a marginal
position in the blue-collar segments of the military. However, the
ethno-national groups not only challenged the Ashkenazi hegemony
in discourse and politically; they also increased their practical hold on
the IDF.
Military–Society Relations 131
The “Army of the Peripheries”
Five groups (hereafter referred to as the “new groups”), which had
previously been relegated to a peripheral status in the army’s ranks,
came to ﬁll the vacuum created by the secular Ashkenazi middle class’s
partial abandonment of combat units: Mizrachim – at ﬁrst the relatively
socially mobile Mizrachim, and later the less mobile ones; the national
religious youth; new immigrants, mainly those from the former Soviet
Union and Ethiopia; Druze and Bedouin citizens of Israel; and, more
slowly, women. This change in the army’s composition began in the
1980s, although it sped up during the 1990s alongside the Oslo Process
and the withdrawal from Lebanon.
These new groups perceived the army as a sphere in which they
could construct new routes of mobility and legitimately attain various
civil rights, whilst proving that they too were capable of the elite
groups’ achievements in combat. This was quite often a direct challenge
to Ashkenazi secular dominance. As many of their members
held ethno-national values, these groups viewed military duties as a
means to fulﬁll their ideological values by protecting the borders of
the “Greater Land of Israel” against the perceived hostility of the Arab
world.
While the Ashkenazi and Mizrachi middle class reformulated their
military contribution and gradually staffed positions in the elite and the
sophisticated technological units, the new groups increasingly staffed
“blue-collar” combat positions in greater numbers, in the following
ways.
Women: The lack of high-quality manpower, as deﬁned by IDF ofﬁcers,
was instrumental in the advancement of women in the army.
Demands from women’s organizations, and the “motivation crisis,”
spurred on the army to expand the recruitment of women, who, until
the 1980s, had been restricted to auxiliary roles. Field positions had
been slowly opened up to women since the First Lebanon War, and
women were gradually being given greater access to combat roles. The
watershed was Alice Miller’s petition to the High Court of Justice in
1995. The court accepted her complaint regarding the rejection of her
application to the pilot training course, and these courses were consequently
opened up to women. In 2003 it was decided that women
serving in combat positions would have to serve for 36 months, like
their male counterparts, instead of 24 months.
132 Yagil Levy
The Mizrachim: The army was relatively open to Mizrachim from the
1980s onwards, though their mode of integration reﬂected changes in
their internal stratiﬁcation. The most mobile Mizrachi groups, who
entered the upper ladders of the middle class, had internalized the
republican principle from the outset, understanding that military service
was a tool for social mobility, and accordingly deepened their hold
on the army. However, during the 1990s, many Mizrachim began
to attain mobility in the middle class without regard to their military
achievements, thus devaluing the signiﬁcance of military service.
Mizrachi youth from the upper echelons of the middle class began
to adopt similar attitudes to their Ashkenazi friends: in other words,
their motivation towards the army declined. On the other hand, for
Mizrachi youth from the lower strata of the middle class, military service
remained an important test of citizenship. In fact, these Mizrachi
renewed the traditional military ethos of the sacriﬁcial service elite.
This could be seen as an act of deﬁance in the face of the secular
Ashkenazi service elite, and – in operational terms – led to this group’s
increased presence in combat units and among ofﬁcers. Mizrachim,
then, were “climbing down the escalator” – increasing their grasp on
senior positions while these steps forward were paralleled by a devaluation
of the military status.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union: In a similar way to the
Mizrachim, immigrants from the former Soviet Union saw military
service as a symbolic “entrance pass” into Israeli society, and even as
a test for gaining formal citizenship. This also applied to Christian
immigrants (who came to Israel as part of mixed-religion families),
who found the army to be a fast and convenient route for converting
to Judaism, or at least an entry point to Israeli society based
on their military contribution. Immigrants from the 1990s exploited
the “motivation crisis” to gain promotion through the ranks. By
the early years of the twenty-ﬁrst century this group comprised about
20 percent of the ground forces.
Immigrants from Ethiopia: For young immigrants from Ethiopia, military
service not only provided access to an Israeli identity, but was
also a way of improving their self-conﬁdence and even ﬁnding a certain
feeling of superiority over their counterparts. This was based on
their self-image as more self-disciplined soldiers, who were prepared to
serve far from their family homes, and to accept the military hierarchy.
Military–Society Relations 133
The Druze and Palestinian citizens: From the 1980s the IDF began to
make a greater effort to persuade Bedouins – who were separated from
the Palestinian minority and not subject to the draft – to volunteer for
combat duty – and not only to serve as trackers, which had been their
traditional role in the military. These efforts resulted in the establishment
(in the early 1990s) of a patrol battalion that served during the
Intifada on Israel’s border with the Palestinian Authority in the area
of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Bedouins’ motivation was manifold:
an ambition to attain equal rights through signing up to the army; an
attraction to military activities, channeled into serving in the IDF; and
seeing service in the army as a profession at a time of unemployment
and economic instability. For the state and the army, recruiting the
Bedouins was not only a way of dealing with a lack of manpower
but also an attempt at holding back increased Islamization among that
group.
Men from the Druze community are subject to compulsory recruitment,
and from the 1990s some of the restrictions regarding their service
were lifted, and they began to be integrated into combat units
alongside Jewish soldiers. For the Druze, unlike the Bedouins, ﬁghting
the Palestinians is a tool in shaping an Israeli, and not an Arab, identity.
In return, the state provides preferential rewards in comparison to
those offered to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
The religious: A major part of the army’s changing social architecture
could be seen in the increasing number of “knitted skullcaps” in the
army from the 1980s onwards, central to which was the gradual cognizance
among religious Zionist youth that the time had come to lay
down a challenge to the secular Ashkenazi nation-founding stratum.
The foundation of the yeshivot hesder (“arrangement academies”) – a
special program, begun in 1965, that enabled Torah study in a yeshiva
alongside combat service in homogeneously religious companies –
helped to overcome the rabbis’ earlier reticence, which centered on
an anxiety that religious youth would be exposed to the secularizing
inﬂuence of the army. For this group, the main symbolic return for
military participation was carrying out the mission of the renewal of
the Jewish hold in the perceived holy lands. To a large extent, the
settlement project in the West Bank by Gush Emunim, which was
imbued with religious meaning, turned Ashkenazi religious Zionism
from a marginal sector, before the 1970s, into a central political
and cultural stream. The increased recruitment to the army formed a
134 Yagil Levy
complementary layer to the activity of Gush Emunim, which after the
1973 war had ideologically led the Jewish settlement project in the
West Bank (see also chapters 1–3).
This process expanded after the First Lebanon War and coincided
with the “motivation crisis” discussed on pp. 124–7. Gradually, more
and more settlers of the West Bank and Gaza Strip joined the ranks.
As the numbers of religious combat soldiers grew, their rabbis had a
stronger position of power from which to negotiate with the army
to gain inﬂuence on the army’s values and leverage to enable their
military service to fulﬁll their ideological mission.
The Political Impact of a Multicultural Army
With the change in the army’s social composition, military service
gradually came to be based on social groups who had internalized the
fundamentals of military culture and were supportive of the army’s role
in the territories and elsewhere. In contrast, the criticism of the IDF
and the restrictions placed on its functioning after 1980 were largely
the result of secular Ashkenazi organizational activities. These organizations
strove to subject the army’s behavior to a logic that was at least
partially non-military, and even when it was military, it contradicted
the army’s organizational rationale. This formed the common ground
of movements such as Peace Now, Yesh Gvul, Soldiers Against Silence,
and Four Mothers. The IDF therefore played an active role in creating
arrangements that would actually make the army a multicultural site
and thus encourage members of the new groups to join the forces.
In order to minimize politicization of the ranks, and in attempt to
remain in consensus, the army began to remove reservists from friction
zones. The First Lebanon War laid bare the political collapse of the
model of a middle-class-based reserve army. The middle class levered
its military participation into political involvement – mainly in the
shape of protest organizations – which contributed to the fracturing
of the army’s professional autonomy. The lesson that had been learnt
was implemented in Lebanon from 1985 to 2000, as the ﬁghting was
increasingly carried out by the conscript army, which was easier to
control. A similar pattern was repeated successfully during the Al-Aqsa
Intifada.
The ethno-class stratiﬁcation of the IDF, unlike in other armies,
is considered a taboo subject. Indeed, in keeping with the discourse
Military–Society Relations 135
that portrays the “people’s army” as being above ethno-class divisions
in Israeli society, no ofﬁcial statistics are available regarding the representation
of different groups. Although the IDF’s claim to a “people’s
army” is no longer tenable, as less than 60 percent of the Jewish population
completes military service, the army clings to the rhetoric and
doctrine of the “people’s army,” the source of its preferential status in
Israeli society. Mapping the casualties in the Al-Aqsa Intifada provided
an indication of the change in the social composition of the army since
the ﬁrst week of the First Lebanon War (June 1982), in which most
of the military forces, both regular soldiers and reservists, were active.
In the ﬁrst week of the Lebanon War, about 48 percent of those
killed were secular Ashkenazim, who had previously manned core
positions in the military. In contrast, in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, only
about 28 percent of the fatalities came from these groups, with soldiers
from the more peripheral and religious groups taking their place.
If we calculate the fatality rates of the core of the secular middle class –
the Ashkenazi groups together with the Mizrachi middle class – the
drop is from about 68 percent to around 46 percent, while the demographic
weight of these groups remained almost stable, so demography
alone may not account for this change. This picture was repeated in
the Second Lebanon War, with the exception that the kibbutz youth
increased their share. Part of this trend resulted from the efforts by the
kibbutz movement’s leaders to counter the decline of this group in the
IDF and the kibbutz youth’s over-presence in the still attractive elite
units, which were overburdened in the war.
The change in the casualties map gave the army more room for
maneuver in the direction of autonomous action. By the time the
Al-Aqsa Intifada erupted in September 2000 at the Palestinian
initiative – following the failure to arrive at a ﬁnal agreement during
the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 – the army’s composition
was based mainly on the new groups. As a result, the IDF could deploy
force with renewed legitimacy. Indeed, the army systematically acted
to escalate its response to the uprising by excessive response to the
Palestinian hostilities, thus leading to many Palestinian casualties and
to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority. A peace coalition, which
might have attempted to curb the IDF politically, energized by protests
ﬂourishing from within the military ranks, as in previous wars, did not
emerge. Given that the instigators of political protest were mainly
ex-soldiers, especially reservists, and their families, the social realignment
had a crucial effect on the reshaping of the bereavement ethos,
136 Yagil Levy
from protest, which typiﬁed the First Lebanon War, to the acceptance
of the sacriﬁce submissively, with conciliation, forgiveness, and even
pride.
Even if this was not its intention at the outset, the army saw in the
conﬂict with the Palestinians a good opportunity to halt the decline
of its lofty social status. Just before the Intifada the IDF had hurriedly
and unilaterally retreated from Lebanon on the government’s orders,
with the Hezbollah’s militias snapping at its heels. Moreover, since the
middle of the 1990s the army had been dealing with the “motivation
crisis.” And as if this were not enough, not only did the army’s primary
mission – ﬁghting in Lebanon – come to an end, but this itself
intensiﬁed the “threat” that the market economy would eat away at
the army’s resources; and indeed, the budget proposal of the year 2001
included a relatively deep cutback in the army’s spending. The ﬁrst
years of the Al-Aqsa Intifada tempered this decline and put it on hold.
Nonetheless, even the Intifada was not effective in entirely deﬂecting
this process, which led to the Disengagement Plan.
The Disengagement Plan
In 2003 the army could point to real achievements in reducing the
number of terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinian organizations.
Paradoxically, this was also the year that saw a rise in public criticism
over the IDF’s performance in the occupied territories. Two years
later, the result was the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and
the north of the West Bank in what was termed the “Disengagement
Plan.”
A combination of several challenges was at the center of the decline
in the army’s legitimacy. Critical was the erosion of the legitimacy
of the army’s ﬁnancial and human resources indicated by the uppermiddle
class’s (direct and indirect) pressure to cut the defense budget
and to reform the conscription model in a way that would reduce
the burden. Consequently, in 2004, while the IDF was ﬁghting, the
government ratiﬁed cuts in the budget, while simultaneously providing
tax relief to the beneﬁt of the middle class and above. Later, in 2005,
the government adopted a reform plan that would reduce the load on
army reserve soldiers by reducing the exemption age to forty, deploying
reserves in emergencies only, shortening the period of service, and
releasing thousands of soldiers from the service. A similar reform was
Military–Society Relations 137
adopted with regard to compulsory service in an attempt to gradually
shorten it from three to two years.
The legitimacy of ﬁghting was eroded at the same time. Israel’s
increasing globalization brought with it openness to the normative
judgments passed by global institutions. Limits in the use of force
were more deeply recognized with growing criticism of the IDF’s
conduct in the occupied territories. Normative restrictions were then
increasingly placed on the use of ﬁrearms, such as house destruction,
conduct at roadblocks, air bombing in civilian concentrations, several
practices of policing and more. In addition, the years 2003–4 saw the
strengthening of the refusal movement, not necessarily in terms of
numbers, but qualitatively, ﬁrst, in the shape of the higher-ranking
ofﬁcers and members of elite units who joined the movement and,
second, in high-proﬁle media coverage of the movement.
These trends gradually narrowed the army’s freedom of action once
more, and, in particular, reduced its resources, thereby increasing the
need to ﬁnd alternative modes of ﬁghting/policing. Against this background
the IDF cooperated with the political leadership in carrying
out the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, with the evacuation of the
Jewish settlements serving as a model that would decrease the IDF’s
friction with the Palestinian population and the costs involved in protecting
the settlements. Politically, the army joined the “no partner”
thesis of mainstream Israeli politics that underscored the unilateral ini-
tiatives.
Over the course of one week in the summer of 2005, the IDF
unprecedentedly evacuated thousands of Jewish settlers from the Gaza
Strip and the northern West Bank. The army’s evacuation tactics relied
on the concentration of large forces of soldiers in the settlements being
evacuated, creating a signiﬁcant relative quantitative advantage for the
army over the settlers, who were expected to oppose their evacuation
aggressively. Furthermore, not only was the evacuation swift, but
the army maintained the unity of its ranks, even in executing a politically
controversial mission. Early predictions that the evacuation of
settlements would result in massive refusals within the army’s ranks,
mainly among the national religious conscripts who identiﬁed with
the settlement project, proved completely false.
It could be argued that the effective functioning of the army rested
largely on the religious networks’ interests in preserving their mobility
within the IDF’s ranks. Mass refusal accompanied by violent clashes
between the army and the uprooted settlers (whose youth gradually
138 Yagil Levy
seized positions within the ground forces) would have endangered the
achievements the “knitted skullcaps” had accomplished since the 1980s
and would raise questions about the ability of the group to continue
to deepen its hold on the army and rise to the very top, in the spirit
of the group’s leadership.
Despite, or maybe owing to, the IDF’s effective performance, the
Disengagement distanced from the army a section of the religious
recruits, for whom the destruction of the settlement enterprise threatened
to return religious Zionism to the status of a sector and thus also
threatened the identity of considerable numbers of the conscripts. A
new form of “motivation crisis,” this time among the religious, was
monitored at several levels.
The Civil Agenda and the Second Lebanon War
The Disengagement coincided with the trend towards de-escalation to
generate a renewal of the “civil agenda.” More than ever, this agenda
threatened to cut back the IDF’s resources and divert part of the defense
budget to welfare or tax cuts. Signiﬁcantly, following the elections of
2006, the most civilian leadership in Israel’s history took the reins,
with Ehud Olmert as prime minister and Amir Peretz, the former
leader of the Hisatdrut and a dovish politician, as a defense minister.
The term “civilian,” related not only to the background of the leaders
but to their political agenda as well – i.e., the “convergence plan” of
withdrawal from most of the West Bank and the cutback in the defense
budget. However, it was the “civilian” leadership that retaliated to the
abduction of two reserve soldiers by the Hezbollah in July 2006 with
a large-scale operation that escalated into the Second Lebanon War.
This month-long war, in which Israel launched massive airstrikes
on the Lebanese civilian infrastructure while Hezbollah launched
Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, gradually escalated to include
the city of Haifa. As Israel’s much-hyped high-tech army failed to stop
Katyusha rockets from landing in its cities, a ground invasion of southern
Lebanon took place. After a month, the UN brokered a ceaseﬁre
resolution and the war ended with the deployment of the Lebanese
army and a multinational force along the border.
This war ended, more than any past war, with a strong public
sense that the IDF had failed in its mission. The civilian population
had suffered heavier casualties and damage (which, of course, were
Military–Society Relations 139
dramatically lower than that of the Lebanese population) than at any
time since the 1948 war, and the IDF had seemed ineffective at preventing
it. Ground clashes between the IDF and the Hezbollah forces
further exposed the IDF’s weakness, inﬂicting heavy losses, and revealing
the low level of the forces’ preparedness and the command’s performance.
The embroilment of the IDF in a long “policing war” in
the occupied territories, which distanced it from the real battleﬁeld,
the regular cutback in its resources, the gap between the legitimacy
of using force and the legitimacy of investing resources in the use of
force, which resulted in hesitancy in calling up the reserves and launching
the ground operation, and ﬁnally the failure to acknowledge the
limitations in using force, were among the factors contributing to the
IDF’s malfunction.
In sharp contradiction to the Al-Aqsa Intifada, organizations of
reservists and bereaved families engineered the protests that brought
about the appointment of a government committee to investigate the
war. For multiple reasons, the army in effect gave up on the reserve
system in its traditional form and granted low priority to training
and equipping reservists. When the war erupted and the reserve divisions
were mobilized and hesitantly sent to ﬁght for ambiguous goals,
it became apparent that the IDF simply violated the “psychological
contract” established with the reservist. Within the terms of this contract,
the reservist is always ready to be called up, while the IDF’s part
is to ensure that the reservist will be trained, equipped, and utilized
effectively. The IDF and its political supervisors thereby lost part of
the autonomy they had regained during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
The Political Supervision of the IDF
Complaints regarding the weakness of civilian control of the army are
often heard in the public and academic discourse in Israel. Nevertheless,
a study of the political–military relations in Israel reveals an
apparent paradox: within a period of about seventy years, the more
the militarization of Israeli society and politics increased, the more
successful politicians were in institutionalizing effective control over
the IDF. Militarization passed through three main stages: (1) accepting
the use of force as a legitimate political instrument during the
pre-state period (1920–48); (2) giving this instrument priority over
political-diplomatic means in the state’s ﬁrst years up to the point in
140 Yagil Levy
which (3) military discourse gradually predominated over political discourse
after the 1967 war. Each stage was accompanied by a gradual
increase in resources devoted to war preparation and an ampliﬁcation
of force-oriented preferences reﬂected in foreign policies. Even ostensibly
diplomatic arrangements, the most important of which were the
Oslo Accords, were formulated in military terms.
At the same time, political control over the IDF was tightened.
Inculcation of the principle of subordination of the armed forces to
the political leadership during the pre-state period gave way to the
construction of formal and informal restraints on autonomous military
action. During the 1980s the principle of political control over the
army was further institutionalized when a state commission of inquiry
held the political powers liable for the massacre perpetrated by the
Christian phalange in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila
in Beirut, and forced Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to resign. Other
areas (such as the defense budget) were later monitored, with greater
involvement of the Knesset and civilian agencies.
The militarization of politics has contributed greatly to this monitoring
of the army. It has made the army interested in being portrayed as
a universal, apolitical organization that does the government’s bidding,
and has created a dependence on the political leadership as the army’s
supplier of resources. And, paradoxically, the very increase of military
ﬁgures taking up eminent positions in politics, has contributed to the
tightening of operative control over the IDF. Fewer and fewer spheres
of military action have remained autonomous or hidden from the public
eye. Institutional monitoring by civilian agencies has become much
more powerful since the First Lebanon War, and has been backed up by
public monitoring, as social movements have stepped into the arena.
Assisted by the press, groups such as soldiers’ parents and reservists
have ampliﬁed their scrutiny of traditionally professional issues, thus
undermining the IDF’s autonomy at several levels. This has included
journalists’ and parents’ investigations of accidents in military operations
and training; reservists’ critique of the distribution of the military
burden, generating legislative attempts at limiting the IDF’s powers to
call up reservists; homosexuals’ and women’s successful struggle to
lift limitations on their military promotion; press scrutiny of budgets,
nominations, and military performance; and more. While previous
political supervision of the army had been mainly concerned with
formal, institutional aspects, from this point on it also took the form
of wider public supervision carried out by social groups.
Military–Society Relations 141
Nevertheless, militarization means the supremacy of military thinking
over political-civilian thinking. In other words, the military view
of political reality has become the main anchor of Israeli statesmanship.
Consequently, though the army became subjected to “oversurveillance”
by civilian institutions, these institutions were not provided
with more capacity to prevent military escalation that does not
serve political goals. As Israel’s political-military history since the 1980s
indicates, the army did not rebel in a determined fashion against the
authority of the political echelon, but rather took advantage of its
weakness (as during the Al-Aqsa Intifada when the political leadership
explicitly refrained from enforcing restraint over the IDF), or exploited
the freedom of action afforded it by politicians on the grounds of the
primacy of political military thinking.
Forecasting Premises
It is safe to predict that in the near future the military will continue
to maintain, at least in part, its centrality in the Jewish-Israeli society,
whether because of the collective memory of its central position in the
past or the visibility of the friction between Israel and the Arab world.
To a large extent, the IDF will face the typical difﬁculties of functioning
in a “twilight zone” of neither full-scale war nor full peace.
Similarly, it seems safe to envisage a consistent decline in the scope of
military participation and of defense expenditure despite the trend of
temporary resource increases after wars. The gradual shift to a selective
draft and the possibility that conscription will be abolished altogether
in the fairly near future are the main options that are predicted. As
discussed, since the late 1990s the IDF has shifted to a semi-selective
model of conscription, although the mandatory service has not been
formally ended. With the reforms in the conscription model and the
aftermath of the Disengagement and the Second Lebanon War, this
trend will intensify. Simply put, the IDF has gradually and systematically
lost the conﬁdence of various groups since the turning point of
the 1980s: the Ashkenazi upper-middle class in the politically disputed
First Lebanon War and the ﬁrst Intifada, the national religious groups
in the Disengagement, and the middle-class reservists in the Second
Lebanon War. It is reasonable to assume that in the wake of these wars,
the erosion of conﬁdence will increase the difﬁculty of drafting and
activating the reserves.
142 Yagil Levy
With the drying up of the valuable symbolic rewards that the IDF
can offer to its recruits, the professionalization of the IDF seems the
most likely avenue. Professionalization would provide the army with
several advantages: (1) a trade-off between increased monetary rewards,
claimed by both reservists and conscripts, and decreased personnel;
(2) professionalization of ranks by basing the model on service by
relatively few, for relatively long periods, to ensure that they maintain
ﬁtness, in return for monetary compensation; (3) de-politicization of
the ranks by “purchasing” services rather than recruiting soldiers, thus
mitigating previous ethical orientations. Soldiers of this “professional
army” would not suffer from pangs of conscience when carrying out
their assignments.
In common with the experience of other Western armies, the
realignment of the social composition of the IDF toward further
reliance on religious and peripheral may aggravate the militarization
of the ranks. A volunteer army would draw the bulk of its personnel
from Israel’s lower middle class and religious sectors. Material rewards,
the potential for professional and social mobility, and militaristic values
already attract more recruits from these groups to the military than
from other parts of the population. Ending conscription would sharpen
that bias. The result could be an army ﬁlled primarily by politically
conservative groups, providing the familiar linkage between lowerclass
position, religious, and rightist orientations. The predominance
of these groups in the army would inevitably heighten militarism and
aggravate tension between the IDF high command and civilian elites,
who would distance themselves from the army and the implications
of its aggressive actions.
This implies a contradiction between the military as a magnet for
the peripheral groups and its gradual decline as a central institution
in the perception of the dominant social class. While the middle-class
groups are likely to distance themselves from the IDF and to seek
to decrease its resources as part of the neoliberal, hegemonic ethos
of “small government,” for the more peripheral groups the IDF is
likely to remain attractive for the symbolic rewards it can offer. Even
labor immigrants (from Thailand and East Europe for example) may
in the medium term acquire a selective entry ticket to the military as
part of their naturalization process. Two simultaneous, contradictory
processes – demilitarization and remilitarization – then, will affect the
military’s functioning.
Military–Society Relations 143
With the rise of “identity politics,” i.e., activity by culturally
excluded groups aimed at reclaiming the acknowledgment of their
distinctiveness, tensions are likely to become more acute in Israeli society
as a whole, and in the military in particular, as different cultural
groups compete for resources. This can be seen already in the accelerated
promotion of women in the military in 2000, which led military
and civilian rabbis to demand, successfully, that restrictions be imposed
on the physical proximity of men and women in ﬁeld units. Similarly,
the ﬂagrant presence of gays/lesbians in the IDF seeded homophobic
trends from about 2005 onwards.
Summary
This chapter’s point of departure was the need to get to the root of the
ﬂuctuations in the IDF’s social status, which embodied a shift from the
mythological “people’s army” to an army plunged into a state of crisis
with the civilian society, itself in a crisis of identity. Relations between
the military and society in Israel have taken a cyclic course. Within
a period of about twenty-ﬁve years, those relations have passed from
the post-1967 climax of militarization to the demilitarization of the
1980s–1990s, and then back to remilitarization, as the conﬂict with the
Palestinian Authority since 2000 indicates. Crucial to each phase was
the social composition of the military, which determined the attitude
of the groups within it to military service and to the burden entailed
in waging a protracted war.
Militarization was driven by the rewards the Ashkenazi groups
reaped from military service, central to which was their ability to
translate their military dominance into legitimate social dominance
owing to the army’s role in deﬁning the social hierarchy. When these
rewards lost part of their value, with the burden of military sacriﬁce
actually increasing rather than decreasing, what can be termed a “progressive
motivation crisis” emerged. It was led by groups from the
secular Ashkenazi middle class. At ﬁrst the military way lost some of
its legitimacy (especially after the First Lebanon War), as seen through
the appearance of protest groups; later on, support for the allocation
of material resources to the army declined (mid-1980s); and, ﬁnally,
abandonment of the army was expressed in the various ways in which
people distanced themselves from service (1990s).
144 Yagil Levy
The de-escalation of the Arab–Israeli conﬂict led, in the short term,
to the Oslo Process and the withdrawal of militarism. In the long term
it brought about the state’s renewed ability to manage autonomous
militaristic policies, largely because of the reconstruction of the army’s
social composition in favour of ethno-nationalist groups who displayed
more loyalty to the military way. It was a gradual shift from the “people’s
army” to the “army of the peripheries.” As the ﬁrst years of
the Al-Aqsa Intifada showed, the state regained much of its internal
autonomy by reconstituting the equation between sacriﬁce and
reward, this time by drawing on religious and peripheral groups. Nevertheless,
the Israeli state shifted and modiﬁed its mode of warfare and
initiated the partial withdrawal from the Palestinian-populated territories,
starting with the “Disengagement Plan” from the Gaza Strip.
Paradoxically, although the army gained more freedom of action as a
result of the social realignment of its ranks, its resources were contracted
by the market-oriented pressures. This worked to re-narrow
its space of operation, especially when it comes to costly moves. Since
the deemed ﬁasco in the Second Lebanon War has not reversed this
trend, the decline of the IDF looks more certain than ever. The road
to the volunteer-professional army is almost inevitable.
Cyclicality, which has typiﬁed Israel’s history, is at a crossroads, now
that the third cycle – remilitarization – has run its course. However,
the cycle is neither endless nor one-directional. In Israel, at least, the
relations between the new dominant groups of the future military and
the dominant groups in society will determine the proﬁle of the fourth
cycle – back to the ﬁrst or back to the second.
Further Reading
Arian, Asher 1995. Security Threatened: Surveying Israeli Opinion on Peace and War. New
York: Cambridge University Press
Barnett, Michael N. 1992. Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society
in Egypt and Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, et al. 2005. The Israeli–Palestinian Violent Confrontation 2000–
2004 – from Conﬂict Resolution to Conﬂict Management. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute
for Israel Studies
Barzilai, Gad 1996. Wars, Internal Politics, and Political Order: a Jewish Democracy in the
Middle East. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press
Ben-Eliezer, Uri 1998. The Making of Israeli Militarism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press
Ezrahi, Yaron 1997. Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel. Berkeley:
University of California Press
Military–Society Relations 145
Kimmerling, Baruch 2001. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the
Military. Berkeley: University of California Press
Lomsky-Feder, Edna, and Ben-Ari Eyal (eds.) 1999. The Military and Militarism in
Israeli Society Albany, NY: State University of New York Press
Maoz, Zeev 2006. Defending the Holy Land: a Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and
Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press
Peri, Yoram 2006. Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israeli Policy.
Washington DC: United States Institute of Peace Press
Ram, Uri 2007. The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem.
London: Routledge
Swirski, Shlomo 2005. The Price of Occupation: the Cost of the Occupation to Israeli Society.
Tel Aviv: Adva Center