The Israeli army and state after disengagement
Peri, Yoram
IN THE SUMMER Of 2005 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out one of its largest military campaigns in many years. Fifty thousand soldiers were sent to confront an adversary numbering ten...
...Attendance at these religious academies is recognized by the military as partial fulfillment of military service...
...Where will the mili6 DISSENT / Winter 2006 tary find people to fill its leading ranks in the absence of what was once a significant highly motivated group of recruits...
...Most were in the regular army...
...Therefore, he ordered the IDF to evacuate the Gaza Strip at all costs, even if it meant using force against the settlers...
...At the same time, holding on to the territories has become a heavy burden on Israeli society...
...Fifty thousand soldiers were sent to confront an adversary numbering ten thousand...
...But by 2005, Sharon, now prime minister, concluded that because Israel had been unable to stamp out the Second Intifada, it would be better to withdraw from the Gaza Strip even without a peace treaty...
...The Palestinians, according to this approach, are not yet ready to reach a full political settlement with Israel, and violent conflict will therefore continue despite the statements of Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Authority's president...
...He was an adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1970s...
...For this reason, the IDF is planning to close down yeshivot hesder headed by rabbis who told their students to disobey orders...
...It was a section of the Israeli population...
...Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin instructed his military chief of staff to evict the militants, but Lieutenant General Mordecai Gur objected...
...The verbal attacks were often more virulent and painful than physical blows...
...Rabin, a new and weak prime minister, did not insist...
...The IDF's identity has changed since the beginning of the 1990s because Israeli society has changed...
...That was in 1951, three years after the establishment of the state, when the IDF broke a seamen's strike in the port of Haifa...
...But will his call for the adoption of a civilian discourse win the hearts of the electorate in this warring society...
...Yet even if the fear of mass refusal was exaggerated, the problem of dual loyalty remains and will become much more severe if and when the IDF is required to evacuate settlements in the West Bank...
...General Moshe Ya'alon was not actually fired, but his term of office was not extended, a sharp departure from past practice...
...The rigid stance of the rabbis became subject to criticism, and some asserted that it was wrong to put the "Land" above "State...
...Jewish history will never forgive you," they shouted at soldiers, calling them "Quislings," "Kapo," and even "Judenrat" (all terms associated with Nazi collaborators...
...On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, religious officers were driven out of synagogues, and soldiers who hitched rides by chance with religious nationalists often DISSENT / Winter 2006 15 found themselves dropped off as soon as they revealed that they had helped to evict settlers...
...This behavior continued for months after the withdrawal...
...In fact, Gur wanted Israel to expand the Jewish presence in the territories conquered in 1967...
...Disputes between the government and the generals do not usually reach public knowledge...
...By 2005, half of the junior command and approximately 30 percent of the senior officers were religious, and, for the first time in Israel's history, four members of the general staff wore skullcaps...
...IDF soldiers and officers were attacked physically and verbally by "orange people" (the color chosen as a symbol by opponents of disengagement...
...It extended to the IDF as an institution and all that it has represented to Israelis...
...But unlike the past, the adversary was not an external enemy...
...The traumatic effect of this step on the young society was so profound that no subsequent government ventured to use the military in internal disputes among Jews...
...Nobody was more skillful than he in exploiting the weaknesses of left-center governments in order to promote more settlements in the occupied territories...
...The outbreak of the Second Intifada exacerbated these trends...
...This was in 1975, when religious-nationalist settlers from the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement took over an old building in Sebastia, near Nablus, and established the first illegal settlement in the north of the West Bank...
...After the Second Intifada broke out in September 2000, it rose even higher...
...The IDF enjoyed a level of esteem of 80 percent or over...
...During the Succoth holidays in October, Major General Eliezer Stern, head of the IDF's manpower division and himself a religious man, was attacked by an angry mob of worshippers while going with his sons to pray at the Western Wall...
...The religious students who go to them actually do only half of the usual three years of compulsory military service...
...The IDF senior command and the government were unequivocal in response: they insisted that soldiers could not obey orders from a source outside the military...
...Religious soldiers and officers received orders from their commanders all while rabbis called on them to disobey orders that might lead to evacuating "holy" land...
...This idea was expressed most succinctly by Ya'alon...
...They also serve in homogeneous groups, mainly in combat units...
...Years later, he admitted to me that this was one of the biggest mistakes of his first term as prime minister...
...There was one case in which a prime minister's reluctance to use force damaged his government's authority...
...The rupture between the religious nationalist tribe and the IDF did not only entail uniformed soldiers...
...The percentage of religious men among the senior IDF officers grew exponentially in the past decade...
...For the first time, they had to choose between uncompromising religious loyalty to the "Land of Israel" and acceptance of the supreme authority of the "State of Israel...
...However, as "there is no Palestinian partner for negotiation," Israel should "take its future in its own hands," adopt a unilateral approach, and pursue unilateral disengagement...
...Conflicting Commands The disengagement crisis is really about dual authority...
...The expulsion was a trauma, not only for the evicted and for the evicting soldiers—who received very extensive training from military psychologists—but also for many other Israelis, particularly religious nationalists...
...This is a particularly potent matter in Israel because the Jewish state faces ongoing political crises, chronic weaknesses in its political echelon, and a strong tradition of military influence in political decisions...
...Although the split within the Likud Party, initiated by Prime Minister Sharon's turn to the center, enhances this possibility, the answer will be known only after the next general election...
...Only sixty-three soldiers refused to obey...
...And last summer, this same army was throwing Jews out of the "Holy Land" and "serving the interests of the enemies of the state," according to religious nationalists...
...It allowed the radical right to believe it was possible to force the hand of the government and to establish many more illegal settlements in the West Bank...
...This transformed the sleepy party, for Peretz, a dovish, social democratic trade unionist of Moroccan origins, was critical not only of the Ashkenazi elite and the neoliberal manifesto of the party, but also of the security ethos so dominant in Israeli culture at large...
...In recent years, the religious nationalists have made strenuous efforts to expand their cultural capital and encouraged their adherents, especially the young, to enter two major centers of power: the media and the military...
...Religious Zionists have, in the past, sought to integrate nationalism with religion in contrast to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish camp in Israel, which was antagonistic to secular Zionism and its product, the Jewish state...
...The failure to prevent the disengagement forced some of them into spiritual stocktaking...
...Some religious Zionists lean toward the ultra-Orthodox attitude of self-seclusion and disengagement from the state...
...Ariel Sharon remembers this episode only too well...
...However, he told the prime minister that an order to remove the settlers would result in a mass refusal by many troops to obey, and this would degenerate into violence...
...Instead, military careers are increasingly a means for social mobility, especially for Israelis from nonelite segments of society, often of Middle Eastern origin or religious...
...An identity crisis is at hand...
...This new attitude is a major change...
...At the same time, the IDF supported the expansion of special yeshivot hesder...
...Low-intensity conflicts are now being fought in many parts of the world, and they lead to a blurring of boundaries between politicians and officers...
...He also understood that a failure by the army to execute the government decision would subvert Israel's ability to maintain a stable administration and might undermine the regime itself...
...Still, officers have not changed their habit of expressing themselves publicly on political issues that ought to be in the preserve of the civilian echelon in an enlightened democracy...
...Israel's military elite used to come largely from upper-middle-class Jews of Ashkenazi origin, graduates of highly regarded high schools and the kibbutz movement...
...This reflected harsh clashes between the military and its civilian superiors, and high officers have not hidden their critical, even scornful, opinions of the Sharon administration...
...YORAM PERI is a professor at Tel Aviv University...
...Only five were professional officers...
...The IDF was central to the development of the new consensus that has emerged since 2004, and of which Sharon is the ultimate representative...
...In some cases there were loud complaints that the IDF became the tail wagging the dog, a phenomenon confirmed by several books published in Israel in 2005...
...Others reacted in an opposite manner, calling for religious Zionists to withdraw from normal participation in public life...
...The police barely managed to extricate him...
...His book Generals in the Cabinet Room: How the Military Shapes Israel's Policy will be published this winter...
...POSTSCRIPT: This new consensus, widely adopted by the majority of Israelis for more than two years, was unexpectedly challenged, DISSENT / Winter 2006 17 when an upheaval took place in November: Labor Party chair Shimon Peres was defeated and replaced by Amir Peretz...
...The atmosphere calmed down somewhat after a new chief of staff, Dan Halutz, was nominated in 2005...
...The evacuation of Gaza also exposed another severe problem: the role of the IDF in shaping national policy...
...Postmodern Israel has witnessed the collapse of many myths, but the IDF remained one of its last sacred institutions...
...In a study I conducted during the disengagement, almost 40 percent of the Jewish population thought that rabbinical authorities should have the same say as Parliament if there were a case in which there is a contradiction between religion and state...
...they have even stopped reciting their special prayer for the state...
...In other words, Israelis will have to understand that Israel will remain a warring society...
...Only once before had an Israeli government ordered soldiers to bring Israeli citizens to heel...
...These segments have a high representation of "orange people" in them, and the impact of the current situation is unclear...
...They became known to the whole nation in 2004 when, for the first time in its history, the IDF's chief of staff lost his job...
...It is also a crisis for the military itself...
...They were tried by military courts and imprisoned...
...Polls say that public credibility of the Knesset, the political parties, and the media hover between 20 percent and 30 percent...
...Conflicting Loyalties The withdrawal from Gaza provoked among religious Zionists their gravest historical crisis to date...
...This is no longer so much the case...
...In fact, disobedience was minimal, despite the calls by rabbis and dire estimates that thousands of soldiers would refuse to participate in the withdrawal...
...These tensions reflect a fundamental problem in the Jewish state: the absence of adequate separation between religion and politics...
...Although a thousand Israelis (and three times as many Palestinians) died in this conflict, the Israeli military and the General Security Service (Shin Bet) were perceived as the only shields that protected Israelis from what they believed was the Palestinian dream of the total destruction of Israel...
...Leaders of these clericalists ruled that the "Land" takes precedence over government decisions, and therefore government decisions to withdraw were treason perpetrated by the State...
...Moreover, Israel's next elections are due in March 2006, and the military is (as it has been) a critical source for recruitment of political leaders...
...The impact of globalization, the development of a post-materialist value system, the growth of an individualistic culture, and the decline of the old labor movement have had important consequences...
...The military, the representative par excellence of statehood, has lost its aura for them and has become the symbol of hostile "alien" rule...
...Our generation is fated to go on living by the sword," he declared when he stepped down as chief of staff...
...Never—until the summer of 2005...
...Consequently, the lines of defense must be shortened, and Israel should withdraw from some areas, not only in the Gaza Strip but also in the West Bank...
...Will there be a steep decline in motivation to enlist in the professional army, as distinct from compulsory service into which almost all Israelis are drafted at age eighteen...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
