The Radicalization of Israel’s Military
How the response to alleged abuse of Palestinian detainees reveals a wider ideological war within the I.D.F.
Photograph by Lucien Lung / Riva Press / Redux
In July, Israel detained ten soldiers who were suspected of raping a Palestinian man at a detention center in southern Israel. This followed reports in the international press—including from the New York Times and CNN—of widespread physical abuse at the same detention center, Sde Teiman. The soldiers detained at Sde Teiman were brought for interrogation at another military base; Israeli protesters stormed both that base and Sde Teiman to demand that the soldiers be released. (The Israel Defense Forces has denied the claim of widespread abuse and the soldiers have denied the rape allegation.) The protesters have been supported by right-wing cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who referred to the accused soldiers as “our best heroes.” Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, has called for an investigation into whether Ben-Gvir, who is the national-security minister, purposely delayed the police from responding to the riots; eventually, military battalions were mobilized to help protect the base where the soldiers were being interrogated.
To talk about what occurred and what it means for Israel’s future, I recently spoke by phone with Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem. He is also one of the co-founders of Breaking the Silence, an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli military has changed over time, whether Israel proper is at risk of becoming more like the West Bank, and what Benjamin Netanyahu really thinks of challenges to the state’s authority.
How does the storming of these bases fit into the history of right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law in Israel?
First and foremost, we need to keep in mind that we have had settler violence in the West Bank for many years, and it has been rising for years without enforcement, or close to no enforcement. So the settler community has been living for decades in a reality where they can break laws. I’ll even take one step back and say the entire settlement project is a project that is drowning in criminality. This can mean building settlements against the rules, the construction of housing on private land, et cetera. It can also mean settlers beating up farmers or shepherds, going into communities and attacking them either to displace Palestinians or to create such a headache for the state that the message is “It’s not worth it for you to actually enforce the law.”
We have had decades of this kind of behavior in the West Bank, and unchecked violence where soldiers were given orders to stand idly by. When I was a soldier in the West Bank during the second intifada, our orders were not to enforce law on the settlers. Our job was not to protect the Palestinians. Our job was to protect the settlers.
Over the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers, who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live, or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and join the attack. Sometimes it’s because specific military units were made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S. was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers. [A spokesperson for the I.D.F. told The New Yorker that “soldiers who encounter violent crimes committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians are required to stop the incident and, when necessary, stall or detain the suspects until the police arrive at the scene.” In cases where soldiers do not obey these instructions, the spokesperson added, “the incidents are thoroughly examined and actions are taken accordingly.”]
So you’re saying that the biggest change is in the makeup of who the soldiers are?
It’s structural to the way the I.D.F. is designed. In a full-scale war, the better equipped, better trained units go to the front line. In our case, now, that’s Lebanon and Gaza. So who stays in the West Bank? Reservists. But it’s not only normal reserve units. It’s also what are called regional-defense units. The West Bank is divided into several regional brigades. Each of them has regional-defense battalions, which are reservist units made of local settlers. So settlers who live in the area of Hebron, for example—many of them are mobilized in the area of Hebron.
And remember, as a soldier, the settlers are on our side, and Palestinians are the enemy, so we’re not going to protect the enemy. Because the settlers host us for a Friday-night schnitzel, because they speak our language, because they have political power. But it’s also because they are completely integrated into the system. On Friday night, they host us for schnitzel. On Sunday morning, or on Monday morning, their security officers sit in the briefings at the headquarters and get updates on what’s happening. On Tuesday, they go and use our shooting range to stay in good shape, whatever. And on Thursday, we’re going to arrest them?
Lawlessness and violence was allowed because the relationship between the military and the settlers on the ground became so symbiotic. It is now so symbiotic that it’s not clear any more where the military starts and ends, and where the civilians start and end.
Can I stop you for a second?
Well, two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army—a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like Smotrich.
In 1990, only two and a half per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That’s about three times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions that can advance their status in the economy post-military service, while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?
In 2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed—the other one was neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the Palestinian—basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter’s parents to show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya’alon, who was the minister of defense at the time—a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the I.D.F.—had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an execution that was filmed.
That was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation, accountability. Now it became, “In our Army, we have different ethics than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And it’s unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this.” For me, that’s the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of the rank and file, the ideas had changed.
Let’s bring the story up to today. How would you describe the current situation in the military, and then what happened this past week?
We have this clash between the old guard and the institutionalists on the one hand, and the rank and file and the nationalist-religious people on the other. The latter want to change the nature and the spirit and the soul of the Army. But I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of the International Criminal Court and international accountability mechanisms here. Because the I.C.C. is looming over us. You can hear this in the political debate in Israel. Many people who are trying to defend the Military Advocate General—which oversees the investigations of soldiers—frame it as important because that’s how we are protecting our soldiers and commanders from the I.C.C. We have to show the world that we have rule of law and we investigate alleged crimes.
And all these testimonies are coming out about the abuse of detainees. This gets out in CNN, and the New York Times, and all over the world, and there’s pressure to actually investigate and look into this. So the Military Advocate General sent the military police, to go and detain a few soldiers for questioning. And right away the call on the networks of the Israeli right is, “They’re coming after our soldiers.”
Everybody comes out. It’s the rank and file, it’s the base of the Likud and the national-religious ideologues. They want to change what’s acceptable in the I.D.F. And you can see it from October onwards with the amount of videos of soldiers talking about rebuilding settlements. All this kind of stuff, right? The erosion of discipline within the I.D.F. is very strong. And suddenly there is this real clash between rule of law, or the story the institution wants to tell the world, versus where the rank and file is. And you get what you saw, which is hundreds of people breaking into military bases in Israel, led by politicians. Ministers supporting them. You could barely find ministers here who are actually criticizing it.
Netanyahu seems like an interesting case here. At one level, it’s very clear what he’s been doing in Gaza, and he has a long history of bigoted remarks and trying to make undemocratic changes to the judicial system. But he also has some interest in being a leader on the world stage who has at least a certain level of respect. When you hear him speak to Congress or wherever else, he doesn’t sound like Smotrich or Ben-Gvir, whatever his actual views are. So I’m curious what his role is—because it seems like the tension you were describing in Israeli society is in some ways manifested within him.
I think that’s a great question. Look, I fully agree with you. I don’t think his politics are the politics of Smotrich or Ben-Gvir. I think that, in a way, Smotrich represents the more ideological national religious shift in terms of demands of where the Army should be and what its value should be, and Ben-Gvir really represents more the working-class rank and file. And I think that Netanyahu is where he is not only because Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are holding his leash but because there is massive frustration from the lack of achievements of the war.
Months ago, after the horrendous massacres of October 7th, we were promised that we were going to wipe out Hamas. We were going to bring all the hostages home. We are months into the war and we haven’t wiped out Hamas. So now what do you do? If you are a center-left person in Israel, you blame Netanyahu and his government because they’re not willing to talk about the day after, because these goals are unachievable by force alone. Which by the way I fully subscribe to. That’s part of why we see a growth in the protest movement against him.
But if you are a right-winger, you basically start to blame the lefty, weak generals who are not willing to do what it takes. You say people in the military are playing a game with the Europeans, with the Americans, with the international community, to protect people from the I.C.C. The far right says, “They’re tying our hands. That’s why we’re not winning. You saw what happened with Rafah. For weeks they were holding us back. They didn’t allow us to go in.”
Before October 7th, the big demon was the courts. Now the far right is channelling a lot of its frustration toward the old guard in the Army. And that’s, I think, where Netanyahu comes into this. If you follow the Israeli media, there are so many times where you have these leaks from cabinet discussions: ministers attacking the chief of staff, ministers attacking generals. All these attacks are part of where you channel the frustration of the Israeli right. But actually the fact is that their program doesn’t work, meaning we’ve almost wiped the Gaza Strip off the face of the earth, and Hamas did not disappear. So you need to blame someone for the failure.
Is there a point at which you think these forces could challenge the state and Netanyahu would fundamentally side with them? I am talking about a challenge to the state within Israel proper.
Yeah. In the West Bank, it’s already happened.
Right, do you see that double standard spreading? Or are you afraid at some point there will be a breaking point?
So look, we’ve seen it with the police. The Israeli police are almost completely captured right now. It is almost fully captured and fully political. It’s not yet happened with the Army. But you see it with the police in the West Bank. You see it with the police versus the protests, and you saw it when the police refused to show up to defend the military bases. To be honest, right after October 7th, we had many cases where Israeli peace activists were threatened. Extremist WhatsApp groups circulated the names and addresses of friends of mine to come and attack them. We reached a point where we wouldn’t even contact the police because we didn’t trust the police. And that was a microcosm of the bigger issue we saw this past week. The police in the West Bank are almost completely settlers and militia. This is where we are. We are now at this crossroads. This is the fight that is happening now in Israel—whether the institutions will prevail or not.
And if I zoom out and connect the West Bank to Israel, I would say that we are in a place where Israel will have to decide whether we are a country that has a settlement project—a colonial project in the West Bank—or we are a colonial project that has a country. And even if our institutions will not be defeated under this government, I think the changes within the Army and those sociological developments are a threat down the road.
Today, the national-religious ideologues are basically a dominant force up to about brigade-commander level. Above it, it’s still the old élite. But every five to ten years, they climb up one stage. Currently, the institution changes them more than they change the institution. But, once it continues enough, you reach a mass where they begin changing the institution more than the institution changes them.
You mentioned that there had been more pressure on the Army to look into allegations of abuse and misconduct after reports started appearing internationally in the New York Times and CNN. Were these reports surprising to you or surprising to people who study this stuff in Israel?
For me, the idea that bad things are happening in Gaza, that bad things will happen in detention centers, is not surprising. But how bad they are, to be honest, is surprising. I fear that we’re just scratching the surface here. And I fear the fact that the media is largely not yet in Gaza. I fear that we’re going to discover that we’ve reached serious new lows in our behavior—in terms of rules of engagement that were extremely permissive in the amount of collateral damage allowed, and in terms of treatment of detainees. For all these things, I fear that we still don’t have the full story.
But I don’t think there is outrage. I think there is a big chunk of Israeli society that, for them, the kind of assault that is alleged against detainees actually sounds reasonable. It sounds reasonable to people in the Knesset today and for ministers in the government. You saw thousands of Israelis standing and defending these soldiers, even with what is alleged that they’ve done. That’s how low we’ve reached. An entire section of Israeli society and the political class and government have actually stood up to defend these actions. ♦
Isaac Chotiner
is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal
contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures
in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.