The Unmaking of Israel (16 page)

In the last legal round, Supreme Court chief justice Dorit Beinisch refused to hear a further appeal by the prosecution to cashier Botavia. Beinisch’s brief ruling says the military appeals court erred in treating Botavia’s ideology as cause for lighter punishment. But appeals by the prosecution, even if allowed under Israeli law, should be kept to a minimum, she said. Beinisch concluded with the hope that there would be no need for the Supreme Court to lay down clearer guidelines on commanders refusing orders for political reasons—in other words, that such insubordination would not recur.

Beinisch’s hope is a fragile one. Over the last two decades, the Israeli military has drawn ever more of its combat soldiers and commanders from two overlapping groups—the religious right and the settlers. Many come to the army directly from religious institutions whose rabbis teach that both military service and the Whole Land of Israel are pillars of Judaism. The army welcomes them as replacements for the sons of the secular elite who once reliably filled frontline roles. Yet in doing so, it is acquiescing in the influence of a politicized clergy over troops and the dominance of the religious right in key units. The authority of the elected government over the military is steadily being eroded.

Formally, Israel has had a universal draft from its birth. Culturally, as historian Motti Golani argues, the combination of the Holocaust and the victory of 1948 reversed traditional Jewish reticence toward the use of force. The Holocaust justified military power as morally necessary; the 1948 war showed that Jewish arms were effective. Henceforth, one’s Israeliness “was measured by one’s ability to fight,” Golani says.

In reality, the army was never the great equalizer of Israeli myth. Only small groups of Israeli Arabs, minorities within the minority, were subject to conscription. The deferral for a few hundred yeshivah students developed into a near-blanket exemption for the ultra-Orthodox. Orthodox women could opt out of serving. Returning to the army annually for reserve duty was a ritual that lasted into one’s fifties—for Jewish men. Civilian class differences carried over into the military. Secular Jews of European ancestry—especially from kibbutz and moshav—were more likely to serve in the most respected combat units and the officer corps, with Middle Eastern Jews assigned support jobs. Combat roles, until recently, were entirely closed to women. If service and sacrifice equaled citizenship, some Israelis were more authentic citizens than others. They also had an avenue of advancement closed to others. In Israel’s early years, the economy was largely controlled by politicians, and the founding politicians resolutely held on to power. An army career was a way for a man from the right background to climb toward leadership and prominence.

By the 1980s, a shift began to emerge. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon ignited unprecedented public debate about the government’s use of the military. A purportedly limited operation turned into a march to Beirut aimed at remaking the Lebanese regime—a war of choice, not of self-defense. The crisis of confidence was greatest among the Israelis who had identified most strongly with the military—secular Jews from kibbutzim and the urban middle class. For the first time, reservists rejected call-up orders, on grounds that could be described either as political opposition to the war or as conscientious objection to immoral use of force. According to the pro-refusal movement Yesh Gvul (“There’s a Limit”), 168 “refuseniks” were jailed for refusing to serve in Lebanon, with the army quietly refraining from prosecuting many others. An unknown number chose “gray refusal,” using pretexts such as illness to avoid duty in Lebanon. The eruption of the First Intifada at the end of 1987 sparked a new wave of refusal to serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as did the Second Intifada in 2000. Some of those who chose jail over serving in occupied territory were combat officers, poster boys for the old ethic of self-sacrifice.

In the meantime, the Israel economy was expanding, privatizing, and becoming more technological. There were new paths to success. None of this meant that secular teenage boys stopped aspiring to be pilots or commandos. But as a source of combat soldiers and officers, the old elite was no longer as reliable—either in the numbers it could supply or in unquestioning identification with the mission.

Among the Orthodox, the shift took the opposite direction. From independence on, religious Zionists valued military service while fearing the army’s corrosive influence on young souls. Religious soldiers, especially in combat units, faced intense social pressure—not to pray thrice daily, not to keep the Sabbath, not to stand out by being Orthodox. A desk job or a place in the army rabbinate allowed one to slide more easily through the military.

In the 1960s, the IDF agreed to a new program for Orthodox men—the
hesder
(“arrangement”) yeshivah. It was modeled on the Nahal Brigade, whose soldiers alternated between active duty and paramilitary farming outposts. Instead of farming,
hesder
soldiers studied Talmud. During active duty, they served in separate companies, or later in separate platoons. While in yeshivah, they were available for immediate call-up.
Hesder
soldiers had to commit themselves to extra time in the combined program, but spent fewer months than other conscripts in active service.

Only one
hesder
yeshivah existed before the Six-Day War. Afterward, amid the messianic fervor that merged nationalism and religious revival, more Orthodox men wanted to combine combat service and religious study. The government had a practical reason to lend support: like a Nahal outpost, a
hesder
yeshivah was a way to create a presence in newly conquered territory. One was established next to Kfar Etzion, another in Kiryat Arba. When the Likud took power, more were set up in the new religious settlements. They attracted rabbis who saw the Whole Land of Israel as a signpost to redemption. The army got a new source of combat soldiers with high morale. The yeshivot produced young teachers for Orthodox schools who were imbued with the theology of nationalism, and new recruits for ideological settlements. The “arrangement” was one more way in which the state, in a fit of absence of mind, promoted religious radicalism.

Yet the
hesder
program had limited appeal. A young man signing up for it after finishing an Orthodox high school had to commit himself to several more years of studying Talmud. The most prestigious units would not take
hesder
soldiers, who would serve too little time to justify the investment of long training. Socially,
hesder
soldiers faced criticism that by spending less time on active duty, they were shirking their fair share of the military burden.

A new kind of religious institution, the premilitary academy, offered an alternative. The first academy, Bnei David, opened in 1987, in the settlement of Eli on the road from Ramallah to Nablus. One of the founding rabbis, Eli Sadan, was a disciple of Tzvi Yehudah Kook; the other was an ex-colonel, Yigal Levinstein, who found right-wing religion after leaving the uniform. They aimed at preparing Orthodox recruits to serve in the same units as secular soldiers and resist pressure to give up religion. They also sought to inspire their graduates to volunteer for elite units and rise through the ranks. To enroll, students received a one-year draft deferment. The academy put less stress than a yeshivah would on Talmud study. Instead, it served up large portions of “faith studies,” inspirational lessons intended to fortify students’ belief and imbue in them the sacred significance of being a Jewish soldier. The program included physical conditioning to help graduates qualify for top combat units.

According to Levinstein, a conversation with General Amram Mitzna, then the head of the Central Command, prodded him to start the academy. Secular, born on a kibbutz, Mitzna was the classic Israeli general. (Years later, he would make a failed run for prime minister as Labor’s dovish alternative to Ariel Sharon.) The general said Israeli society was in a “crisis of values” that could infect the army. The Orthodox community had “deep values” and “should make a higher-quality contribution to the army.” In Levinstein’s depiction, Mitzna was passing the torch of military service from secular society to the Orthodox.

Bnei David flourished and invited emulation. More academies were established. They eventually included nonreligious ones, each with its own formula for preparing motivated soldiers. By 2000, there were fifteen pre-army academies; by 2010, there were thirty-six. The Orthodox ones attracted more students, especially in proportion to the community on which they drew, since only 14 percent of male conscripts each year were graduates of religious schools. In parallel, more
hesder
yeshivot sprang up.

In inventing the premilitary academy, the religious community could for once lay claim to setting a trend. In making military service into a supreme ideal, though, it was coming late, just as it had in embracing the ideal of settlement after 1967—seizing a value just as it became passé in the wider society.

Predictably, the secular value was reborn as a religious one—or rediscovered as having being religious all along. A eulogy for Sergeant Yossi Weinstock, a
hesder
soldier who fell in South Lebanon in 1995, illustrates ideas that permeated the religious Zionist community. It was true, said a friend of Weinstock’s father, that Orthodox Jews had long been underrepresented in defending the Jewish people, though that was changing. But, he said, what had actually motivated the secular founders of kibbutzim, along with secular “paratroopers, infantrymen . . . and pilots,” was the Jewish religious passion that they inherited from their forefathers. “That passion is weakening as each generation grows more distant from the [religious] wellsprings.” That was why secularists were willing to give up parts of the Land of Israel for “momentary convenience,” the eulogist said. In contrast, there were men such as Sergeant Weinstock. They showed they “loved the Lord with all their soul” by “giving up their lives for the [Jewish] people and the Land.” These were common themes. Earnest students in religious high schools learned to describe fallen soldiers as “martyrs” worthy of emulation.

In these descriptions, I should stress, a soldier was not precisely defending the country. He was defending the Jewish people and the Land of Israel—the ethnic group and its territory—whose welfare was described as being virtually identical.

The effect of the academies can be seen statistically. Nearly all IDF officers begin service as privates. Those who excel are offered the chance to volunteer for officers’ training, which means signing up for longer service. In 1990, according to an internal IDF study, just 2.5 percent of the men finishing the infantry officers’ course were graduates of Orthodox high schools. In 2007, close to a third of new infantry officers were Orthodox. Penetrating higher ranks took longer. But by 2010, six of the eight top commanders in the Golani Brigade, one of the IDF’s main infantry units, were Orthodox, with ranks of colonel or lieutenant colonel. At least five of the six were alumni of yeshivot known for messianic nationalism or of the Bnei David academy.

The exact overlap between Orthodox officers and settler officers is unknown. But the proportion of the latter has also climbed. The army magazine
Bamahaneh
reported in 2010 that 12.5 percent of all company commanders in the ground forces were residents of settlements, though settlers made up just 5 percent of Israel’s Jewish population.

Similar changes have taken place at lower ranks. Alumni of the pre-army academies are represented in high numbers in combat units, especially selective ones such as commandos. The proportion of religious Zionists among infantrymen killed during the Second Intifada has been estimated as twice their proportion among Israeli Jewish men.

The IDF has not simply become a place where more soldiers are Orthodox. In the frontline forces and officer class, the role of men whose identity has been shaped in the crucibles of theological nationalism keeps growing. When the change began, the IDF could believe it had found a solution to a problem. It was getting soldiers who had no questions about service in occupied territory. They would not refuse orders on political grounds.

That was before the army got orders that put military service and sanctifying the land at odds with each other.

Here I must pause. The classic Israeli ideal of military service deserves to be judged with care, with respectful ambivalence. So does selective refusal of military orders.

The importance of subordinating one’s life to a collective need is rooted deeply in Israeli history. In American English, the word
pioneer
conjures up a lone frontiersman. The equivalent Hebrew word calls up an early kibbutznik, the very shirt on his back belonging to the commune. A friend of mine, born on a kibbutz in the 1940s, was given her name not by her parents but by a vote of the kibbutz general meeting. This symbolized an era: selflessness, living for the cause, could give an individual a great deal of meaning, but not a large amount of room to be an individual.

After independence, the army became the last great communal effort in which everyone could, supposedly, take part. At the peak of conscription, Israel drafted over 90 percent of eligible men, more than any other country in the twentieth century—so Reuven Gal, formerly the army’s chief psychologist, told me in the mid-1990s. This figure was misleading: Arabs were not eligible. The egalitarianism of universal service was a facade for an ethnic definition of being Israeli.

By the 1990s, in any case, universal service was also fading among Jews. The army still needed as many smart, fit combat soldiers as it could get, but a rising population provided too many conscripts for other jobs. With politicians afraid to question the universal draft, the IDF was left to improvise. It exempted more eighteen-year-olds on physical or psychological grounds, and quickly discharged soldiers who didn’t fit in. For the right, especially the religious right, the drop in military service is one more proof that Israel is losing touch with its core values. In fact, the right’s insistence that settlement and military service must remain Israel’s core values is anachronistic.