Apr 3rd 2008
Policing the Palestinians has eroded the soul of Israel's “people's army”
THE army medical test had given N, an 18-year-old from Jerusalem, a clean bill of health, making him eligible for a combat unit. But he did not want to fight. “So I went and cried to the mental health officer, told him I had some kind of problem.” When he began his military service recently, he landed a desk job.
More and more people are finding ways to evade tough duty, or duty altogether. Medical, psychological and religious exemptions are on the rise. Army sources estimate that around half of those who obtain a medical certificate to avoid or cut short their service are actually shirkers. The statistics for the 2006 Lebanon war show that religious Zionists and soldiers from kibbutzim, the crucibles of secular socialist Zionism, were over-represented among the dead.
It has always been these, the most ideological, who were the readiest to die for their country. But with the ultra-Orthodox (who get religious exemptions) and Arab populations swelling, and qualms growing among the secular centre, the institution that has traditionally been Israel's melting pot is slowly becoming less and less so. Major-General Elazar Stern, the army's head of personnel and a skullcap-wearing religious Zionist himself, is a living testament to it; in the past people like him were few and far between in the top ranks. Religious Zionists tend to be pro-settlements, and there is concern that the army is becoming more sympathetic to the settlers.
Not that it is hostile now. Military collusion was crucial to the establishment of many West Bank settlements that were built without permission and made official only later. There are also over 100 small settlement “outposts”, unauthorised but nonetheless enjoying mains water, electricity and army protection. The army's defiance of the law can be shocking, as when it waited nearly a year before heeding an order by the Supreme Court to take down a barrier that cut Palestinians off from their land in the West Bank.
Moshe Hager Lau, who runs a mekhina, or pre-army academy, for religious cadets in the southern West Bank, strongly opposes the removal of settlements. Not that he tells his young charges to refuse an order to evacuate settlers: “I tell them to use their conscience.” But the number of young Israelis who spend a year in a mekhina before military service is growing, and their consciences are bound to be affected.
General Stern, who came under attack from fellow religious Zionists for taking part in the Gaza disengagement, believes such refusals will remain rare. For him the changes in conscription patterns carry other dangers: they contribute to the atomisation of Israeli society and leave him short of good soldiers. His recipe for restoring the “people's army” includes more sparing use of exemptions, dishonourable discharges for suspected shirkers and preferential treatment at universities for ex-combat troops.
Most controversially of all, he complained publicly that the army's ethos of self-sacrifice had deteriorated to the point where it valued soldiers' lives too highly to get the job done. He was roundly criticised. But later the Winograd commission investigating the second Lebanon war reached the same conclusion.
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