Israel’s conscripted military is no more, if it ever was, the “world’s most moral” armed force and the country’s primary social cohesion tool.
Decades of religious ultra-nationalism’s “march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by 1960s German left-wing student leader Rudi Dutschke, have turned the military, long Israel’s pre-eminent secular institution, not only into the militant spearhead of a policy to disenfranchise Palestinians, but also into a misogynous institution that deepens fault lines between Israel’s secular and religious communities.
Militant religious sentiment in the military, or what civil-military relations scholar Yagil Levy calls the “theocratisation” of the armed forces and the creation of a “theocratic military culture,” recently prompted an exasperated conscript combat soldier on Israel’s northern front with Lebanon to tell his father: “This organisation hates secular Jews.”
Religious ultra-nationalists believe their march will ensure that the military does not enable an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank as it did in Gaza when it destroyed settlements and forcibly removed settlers as part of Israel’s 2005 pullback from the Strip.
“The national religious perceived the disengagement from Gaza as a failure and a betrayal. They concluded that they would have to increase their presence in the military, to create another army that would not disengage from the West Bank,” Mr. Levy said.
The conscript’s despairing assessment came 15 years after a senior officer in the military’s Personnel Directorate noted that Jewish identity in the armed forces was changing.
The officer argued that the military had long adhered publicly to religious rules, while allowing soldiers to do what they wanted in private. “Nowadays, the army is deciding for you what kind of Jew you will be: a national-religious Jew,” the officer said.