Israel: Military and Politics

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ISRAEL: MILITARY AND POLITICS

The heavy involvement of the Israeli military in Israel's society, economy, and politics and the occasional politicization of the armed forces.

Over the last decade of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries, issues of military-civilian relations and the role the army (Israel Defense Force, IDF) plays in Israeli society have been intensively studied and analyzed by historians, social scientists, journalists, and others in a plethora of published books and articles. The subject is, however, not new to public awareness, having been on the national agenda since Israel's founding and even earlier. The problem is usually addressed on one or more of three levels: the impact of the military on civilian life; the extent of civil control of the military; and the extent of politicization of the military and its involvement in political decision making.


Impact of the Military on Civilian Life


Israeli society has been marked by the central and pervasive role of the military in Israeli politics, daily life, and culture. Three out of eight politicians who served as prime ministers since 1983 were ex-generals (Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon), one was elected president (Ezer Weizman), and Shimon Peres, although not formally a military person, grew out of the ranks of the Ministry of Defense. During the same period at least a dozen other ex-generals served in the cabinet as ministers. Most of those who served as IDF chiefs of staff ended their careers in politics (Haim Bar-Lev, Mordechai Gur, Rafael Eitan, and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, for example). In the economic sphere, many ex-generals became corporate heads; others became mayors of large towns. Some generals were nominated as chancellors of universities and others have become headmasters of prestigious high schools.

Almost universal military conscription brings entire cohorts of young men and women to serve in the military for long periods. The large participation of civilians in military reserve duty (miluʾim) introduces the military experience into almost all Jewish, and many Druze, households. Military affairs are central in every news broadcast from early morning to late at night, and military jargon permeates modern Hebrew vernacular. Many domestic issues are viewed by Israelis as being essentially security issues. Security considerations prevail in the planning and execution of many civilian projects, such as road construction, land tenure, and housing designs. A pledge to give security considerations first priority is a central part of the political platform


of all parties when candidates run for parliament (the Knesset) and when leaders negotiate to form government coalitions. Security considerations are routinely used to stifle criticism raised against harsh measures taken by the authorities.

Obviously, the salience of the military in Israel's political culture is a result of the prolonged conflict between Israel and the Arabs and the recurrent flare-ups of violence engendered since the early 1920s (some count at least a dozen major violent outbreaks). However, critics of Israeli society have in recent years also observed self-propelling dynamics that cannot always be explained away as inevitable outcomes of the contingencies of conflict with the Arabs. Some moderate critics tend to characterize Israel as a "garrison state" or a "nation in uniform." More strident observers speak of the total "militarization" of Israeli society and politics. Most would admit, however, that, despite the dangers brought by such tendencies to the country's sometimes flawed political system, Israel has managed to maintain its essentially democratic, plural-istic, and liberal political system.



Civil Control of the Military


Concerns of defense and security preoccupied the Zionist settlers in Palestine from the outset. But only in the early 1920s, when Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project took on more violent and institutionalized forms, was the small, self-appointed secret group ha-Shomer (The Watchman, founded in 1907) replaced by a larger and more popular organization called the Haganah (Defense). From its inception it was clear that the military arm of the movement had to be supervised and directed by the political leadership. After a short period in which it was controlled by the Histadrut (the General Federation of Jewish Labor), it came under the supervision of a broadly based political committee, drawing its power from the elected executives of the Jewish Agency (representing the World Zionist Organization) and the Vaʿad Leʾumi (representing the Yishuv, i.e., the Jews of Palestine). The establishment in 1937 of the Irgun Zvaʾi Leʾumi (ETZEL, or IZL) and three years later the further secession of Abraham (Yaʿir) Stern to form Lohamei Herut Yisrael (LEHI, or the Stern Gang) challenged the authority of the democratically elected political leadership of the Yishuv and gave rise to ten years of strife. One result of this dissidence was to eventually fortify the principleto which the majority of the Jews and the much larger Haganah would adherethat military organizations and movements must yield to their civilian leaders.

The outbreak of the Palestinian Revolt of 1936 to 1939 dispelled earlier Zionist hopes that they might eventually convince the Palestinians of the blessing that Jewish colonization of Palestine would bring them. From this point on, few Jews in Palestine doubted the need for a strong military organization. The Haganah was expanded, weapons were purchased, military training became universal, and units of permanent obligatory service were introduced. Most historians view this period as the turning point at which Zionists recognized the need to resort to force.

David Ben-Gurion was a strong proponent of the principle of civilian supremacy over the military. In the mid-1940s he emerged as the undisputed leader of the Zionist movement and became the first prime minister and minister of defense of the State of Israel in May 1948. With the transformation of Menachem Begin's Irgun into a civilian political party in the summer of 1948, the IDF's showdown with (and attack on) the Irgun ship Altalena, and the final crushing of the Stern Gang and the Irgun military squads in Jerusalem following the murder of Count Folke Bernadotte in September, civilian control over the military establishment was assured and was never seriously challenged from the right.

Ben-Gurion was also concerned that most of the command positions in the strongest and most prestigious elite corps of the IDF, the Palmah, were under the ideological influence of MAPAM, a left-wing party that questioned his own authority. Ben-Gurion saw in this situation a dangerous politicization of the military and ordered the disbanding of the Palmah. As soon as the war was over, he dismissed many high-ranking officers affiliated with MAPAM. During the fifteen years of his premiership, he nominated two chiefs of staff who were active members of his own party (Moshe Dayan and Zvi Tzur). But he also nominated to this position three generals who were strictly professional soldiers and did not belong to any party (Yigael Yadin, Mordehai Makleff, and Haim Laskov) and promoted to the rank of general many ex-Palmah battalion commanders. He also assured, before his own resignation, that Yitzhak Rabin, ex-chief of operations of the Palmah, would be nominated as IDF chief of staff in 1964.

Along with his resolve to depoliticize the officer corps, Ben-Gurion never saw a problem in expanding the role of the military in society and using its efficient and disciplined mechanisms to accomplish strictly civilian tasks. Military engineers were often utilized for road and bridge construction. Army instructors were involved in the establishment of agricultural settlements (NAHAL, an acronym for Noʿar Halutzi Lohem, Fighting Pioneer Youth) for new immigrants. When heavy rains or floods threatened to destroy the tent towns used as temporary housing for new immigrants, the military was called in to manage entire civilian communities.

Moreover, Ben-Gurion saw the IDF as the great "nation builder." The compulsory universal service, which included tens of thousands of young immigrants who were inducted soon after their arrival in the country, was designed not only as a security measure but also as an educational endeavor in which Hebrew and elementary schooling were taught and patriotic ideals inculcated. This rationale was also used to justify the establishment of a special military radio station (Galei-Tzahal), a weekly magazine for soldiers (ba-Mahaneh, In the camp) and a monthly journal for officers (Skira Hodshit, Monthly review). Many of these functions were later discontinued when the IDF became overburdened with military assignments and defense budgets became strained. Nevertheless, the recruitment and army training of young immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s may well account for the rapid socialization of those young men and women into Israeli society.


Politicization of the Military


In the mid 1950s, during the brief tenure of Moshe Sharett as prime minister (19541955), the boundaries between the civilian authority and the military leadership were sharply perforated, especially around the controversial role played by the politically minded chief of staff, Moshe Dayan; the chief of military intelligence, Binyamin Givli; and even the minister of defense, Pinhas Lavon (who replaced Ben-Gurion during 1954). What Sharett wrote in the intimacy of his private diarythat many of the military offensives were either taken without proper cabinet authorization or were expanded beyond the scope authorizedwas hardly a secret to the public. Several events gave rise to the widespread impression that the army was acting beyond political control, including the foolhardy activation of a Jewish espionage ring in Egypt in June 1954, the order for which has remained a controversial mystery; the cruel massacre of sixty-five Palestinian civilians in the village of Qibya in October 1953; the unwar-ranted scope of the attack on Syrian positions on the Sea of Galilee in December 1955; and the murder of five Bedouins in the Judean Desert by a group of paratroopers. The return of Ben-Gurion (toward whom the personal loyalty of Dayan was impeccable) to head the ministry of defense at the end of February 1955 stabilized the situation. After that, the legacy of a strict separation of the military command from active politics remained more or less intact for many years. According to the military norm, soldiers, including career officers, were permitted to sign up as members of a political party, vote in elections, and even attend party meetings as observers; but they were not permitted to be active in party life in any mode or form.

In recent years, however, the likelihood that high-ranking officers may become active politicians after retirement (after a half-year "cooling-off" period) has given rise to recurrent suspicions that those officers may be trying to pave their way into politics well ahead of their retirement, compromising their professionalism by acting and expressing themselves in ways aimed at helping them in their future political careers. During the first two decades of statehood the majority of senior officers tended to sympathize with center and left-of-center parties close to the Labor-Zionist movement. In recent years, however, a right-wing swing may have penetrated IDF's high command. Many retired generals have found their place in the ranks of the Likud and even parties to its right (such as Generals Rehavam Zeʾevi and Rafael Eitan).

The nomination of ex-military men to leading political positions has blurred the boundaries between the military and the civil authorities from another perspective as well. Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan were the first military figures to occupy important ministerial posts, but both were already political figures during their military service and both managed, as ministers, to faithfully uphold civil authority vis-à-vis the military. But later, when officers who spent a large part of their lives as professional soldiers entered the government, a shift in civil-military boundaries could be clearly observed. The 1982 war in Lebanon is a case in point. Ariel Sharon, as minister of defense, prosecuted the war effort primarily out of military considerations, clearly exceeding the goals set for him by Prime Minister Begin and his cabinet. Likewise, responses to the second Palestinian Intifada (September 2000), which were handled by three generals (Sharon as prime minister, Shaʾul Mofaz as minister of defense, and Moshe Yaʿalon as chief of staff), reflected more a military perspective than a civil-political one.

The intensification of Palestinian resistance since the fall of 2000 and the ensuing attempts to defuse tensions and put the peace process back on track have demanded of the IDF higher levels of confrontation with civilians, both Arabs and Jews. The wide diffusion of warfare and the localization of operational management have given to the military commandeven to commanders of lower levelsgreater autonomy and ability to influence major political outcomes. On the other hand, scenes of Israeli soldiers battling against Jewish settlers, while not unprecedented, have introduced a new dimension in civil-military relations. The resurgence of a refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories, on the one hand, and the repeated guidance that religious leaders of the settlers' movement give their followers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements, on the other, are still marginal phenomena, but they do point to new cracks in Ben-Gurion's legacy of total depoliticization of the military.

see also irgun zvaʾi leʾumi (izl).


Bibliography


Ben-Eliezer, Uri. The Making of Israeli Militarism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Horowitz, Dan, and Lissak, Moshe. Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Luttwak, Edward, and Horowitz, Dan. The Israeli Army. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

Peri, Yoram. Between Battles and Ballots: Israeli Military in Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Peri, Yoram, and Neubach, Ammon. The Military-Industrial Complex in Israel: A Pilot Study. Tel Aviv: International Center for Peace in the Middle East, 1985.

Perlmutter, Amos. Military and Politics in Israel. London: Cass, 1969.

Perlmutter, Amos. Politics and the Military in Israel: 19671977. London: Cass, 1977.

mordechai bar-on

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