THE DECLINE OF THE NATION-IN-ARMS

For many years, Israel was a nation-state-in-arms, referring to a model of the total mobilization of the society for war. Its development can be traced to 19th-century Europe and the close linkage in the modern era between the state and war, on the one hand, and between nationalism and militarism, on the other. This connection facilitated the mass mobilization of loyal citizens for war—which became ever more totalistic. In fact, in many European nation-states during the 19th century, army and war were removed from a narrow sphere that was extraneous to the society—a situation characteristic of mercenary forces or professional armies—and came to constitute part of the state-managed project involving the entire society. This development was manifested primarily by means of military conscription and the creation of an army-nation.¹

At the end of the 19th century, states such as Republican France, Prussia-Germany, and Japan, which imitated Europe, went one step further, becoming classic nations-in-arms. Many other European countries also assumed some features of a nation-in-arms. The point was to blur the distinction between army and society and place the armed forces at the center of national existence, all with one goal in mind: to win wars.²

Israel adopted the European model. The traits of a nation-state-in-arms emerged in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s: mandatory army service that served as an informal criterion of citizenship; reserve army duty; women's service; an engagé society and a broad definition of security; an army that became a school for the nation and created, and then preserved, ethno-national superiority by means of force; and cultural production that consistently legitimated military solutions to political problems at the national level, a phenomenon defined as militarism.³

To this day, in fact, Israel has not divested itself of some of its traits as a nation-state-in-arms.⁴ In any event, the Lebanon war of 1982–85, the Intifada beginning in 1988, and the Gulf War of 1991 can be seen as historical turning points that reflected a sweeping change that was being fomented in the Israeli society overall and in the Israeli army in particular. Nor did that change take place in isolation from the new global trends in this period.

In the second half of the 20th century, the West moved away from the model of the mass army that prepared itself to fight total wars.⁵

And even if the Cold War obliged extensive military deployment and large-scale defense expenditures, as the century drew to a close, “new times” appeared to set in.⁶ In the post–Cold War era, the army in Western states was often defined as a peace-seeking force. A distinct product of the pressure applied to it by the civil society, the army was perceived to have altered its scale of values and no longer to be interested in wreaking destruction, threatening annihilation, or inflicting casualties. This type of end-of-war conception is usually part of liberal rhetoric, which appears every few decades in different formats and was adumbrated in this case by Francis Fukuyama.⁷ In the wake of his book, though often with reservations about his sweeping arguments, additional works appeared that dealt with the end of war. They describe a situation not only in which it is the new geo-strategic reality that dictates the advent of peace, but also in which the capitalist economy and liberalism render war unprofitable. It is a world in which “hard” military conflicts in the international arena are replaced in the post-modern era by “soft” conflicts that are “fought” mainly in the economy.⁸

However vague and multi-dimensional, the term “post-modern” refers to a situation in which pure totalism no longer exists and there are no absolute standards of knowledge or objective judgment of unfolding events. Gone was the thrust that had characterized the modern era: to construct reality on the basis of a transcendent vision by means of human activity and cooperation and to wage fierce conflict against those espousing a different vision. If we are entering a post-modern age, then one of its most distinctive attributes is a loss of social coherence in favor of cultural images and social forms and identities marked by fragmentation, multiplicity, plurality, and indeterminancy.⁹

Of course, post-modernism involves more than intellectual criticism directed against modernism and its arrangements, which prefer uniformity over difference. The concept is valuable to explain significant changes in societal organization: the nation-state and its institutions are becoming more fragile, vulnerable, and frequently weaker, with new actors at both the global and the local level contesting, directly and indirectly, the nation-state's “truth.” This is the essence of the post-modern condition: it gives rise to tensions and to cultural, economic, and—critical for our purposes—military changes.

To judge by the literature on the subject, armies in the post-modern era are undergoing organizational restructuring, with their goals also changing. The tendency is toward downsizing, in contrast to the gigantic, budget-devouring, war-hungry military machines of the classic modern era. Armies are also accepting groups to which military bases were once off-limits (women, homosexuals, various minorities, and so forth). The emphasis is on differentiation in the social composition, specialization within the organization, the use of advanced technology, and the creation of new “social-military” roles, such as the soldier–technocrat, the soldier–scholar, and the soldier–diplomat.¹⁰

Underlying the new definition, according to the academic literature, is the fact that post-modern armies are interconnected with the society and are called on to prove that they are upholding its basic values: equality, liberty, justice, and tolerance. These “peace-making armies” are no longer associated with male recruitment, masculine virtues, chauvinism, jingoism, militarism, and national patriotism. They now engage in “peace-keeping operations” and even in humanitarian missions.¹¹

Moreover, the literature maintains, post-modern armies often operate within a social context that no longer accepts as self-evident traditional claims of professional autonomy. That is, the army functions in conditions of market competition, according to neo-liberal capitalist criteria.¹²

Ultimately, then, according to the well-known thesis propounded by Charles Moskos, armies turn from an institution into an occupation. Where once there was a professional group founded on proficiency, self-esteem, corporatism, and a sense of mission, now serving in the army is “just another job,” an occupation like any other.¹³

Of course, there are some who discount this theory and say that these developments are confined to advanced capitalist states. Some remain realistic about the continuation of regional conflicts, certainly the eruption of ethnic conflicts, and even religious clashes as local counter-reactions to globalization.¹⁴

Manifestly, the Middle East fits such a description. However, the central, and also the most problematic, element in most of the literature on post-modern armies is, beyond its liberal end-of-war diagnosis, the causal connection adduced in explanation.

In fact, this literature rests on a structural-functionalist foundation according to which change in the army can be explained in terms of the military's adaptation and responsiveness to social pressures. Thus, in the peace-seeking, post-modern society of the post–Cold War era, armies undergo changes accordingly, in terms of both organization and roles.¹⁵

This article will consider a different possibility through the Israeli case. It will demonstrate how an army is becoming a post-modern entity but not a peace-making one. Moreover, it will explain such change not solely by societal pressures, but through the army's ability, first, to preserve its centrality within the society; and second, to ensure that military force will continue to act as a major factor in political decision-making in the new times.

What follows is an attempt to analyze that claim. The first section describes the changes that are occurring within Israeli society as a whole, and more specifically the extensive societal pressures that are being exerted on the army—so much so that a “society”–against–“army” syndrome is discernible. The following sections deal with the IDF's reaction to these pressures. Section two shows how the IDF has become a post-modern army that, because of its new role and organization, is involved in domestic politics (section three) to a degree that influences Israel's security policy directly from the battlefield, based on militaristic assumptions, and even at the risk of creating an “army”–against–“society” syndrome (section four).

SOCIETAL PRESSURES ON THE ARMY

Although some may disagree about the causes, few will dispute that the Israeli society has been undergoing a process of change since the second half of the 1980s. Above all, this has been an economic change. Beginning in 1985, the government, as part of its efforts to deal with hyperinflation—then running at 450 percent a year—launched a new policy that revolved around privatization and less government intervention in the economy. These so-called neo-liberal moves had the effect of linking the Israeli economy to the world economy and to global competition. In the first half of the 1990s a number of factors combined to generate an impressive spurt in the Israeli economy: massive immigration from the former Soviet Union, which produced large reserves of human capital; the high-tech revolution, in which Israel became one of the ten leading centers in the world; and the peace process, which made Israel a desirable target for investors, especially after the September 1993 Oslo Agreement.¹⁶

Shimon Peres's idea of the “New Middle East,” a term that came to be perceived ironically by the Israeli public, was a direct product of these economic developments.¹⁷

An additional factor that undoubtedly drove the social change in Israel was the termination of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, until then the major provider of funding and arms to the Arab states. The Middle East ceased to be the training ground for the two superpowers, as it had been during the Cold War. The peace agreements Israel signed as a result of the end of the Cold War—with Jordan and the Palestinians—were based on the perception that, in the current situation, Israel no longer faced an existential threat. The Oslo Agreement was particularly noteworthy in this connection: ratified by the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) in 1995, it produced a withdrawal from most of the territories that were conquered in 1967, a move that symbolically, if not practically, attested to a genuine change.¹⁸

Israeli domestic politics also underwent a dramatic transformation—notably, an electoral reform that gave expression to the decline in the power of the mass parties and the Parliament. The electoral reform was motivated by the public's lack of confidence in the parties and what they stood for, both “ideally” (“old” ideologies, consisting of class-based attitudes, left–right polarization, national sentiments, and so forth) and “materially” (an iron law of oligarchy, overt and covert corruption, estrangement between the public and their representatives, and so on).¹⁹

By the early 1990s, the Israeli public had grown unhappy with the situation, resulting in a kind of bypass of party politics in which large numbers of new social movements and associations were formed that reflected a new scale of values and a revised set of priorities.²⁰

Effectively, a neo-liberal culture of popularity ratings began to develop, marked by personal choice, marketing, commercialization, and competition. The emphasis on private consumption intersected with post-materialist values that revolved around the needs, liberties, desires, the body of the individual, and the importance of the environment, both local and ecological. Once a society that blurred cultural differences in the name of the ethos of the melting pot and national unity, Israel became aware (though not necessarily tolerant) of its multiplicity of cultures. It was a society more receptive to external influences, though also riddled with internal contradictions, tensions, increasingly overt conflicts, and local reactions to the threat of globalization.²¹

Some descriptions of Israel's divestiture of its collective past and its transmutation into an individualist society are blatantly exaggerated and overly simplistic. Still, Israeli society is certainly not what it was: a kind of reflection of the nation-state and the one “truth” it espoused.²²

These developments inevitably affected the status of the army. A separation occurred between “army” and “society,” the result of the incremental enfeeblement of the army-nation and the nation-in-arms model. The first turning point was the Lebanon war of 1982. The Israeli public was increasingly disaffected with the war and its goals, not least because of the invocation, for the first time, of the term “war of choice.”²³

A few years later, at the end of 1987, the first Intifada—the Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories—broke out. The IDF was seen to be powerless to suppress the popular insurgence, and the fact that it was fighting stone-throwing women and children, who were waging a national-liberation struggle, did little to boost its stock.²⁴ Another turning point that affected army–society relations was the Gulf War of 1991. This case drew its impact precisely from the fact that the Israeli army did not see action; for the first time in its history, the military found itself in the bizarre situation of being involved in a “war that never was.” The Gulf War lacked the normal features of previous wars: general mobilization, adulation of warrior-heroes, and afterward the cult of the fallen. Perhaps more than any previous war, the Gulf War showed the Israeli public that it was possible to organize the country's life without putting military solutions at the center of activity and that Israel's fate did not depend solely on its armed forces.²⁵

One manifestation of the societal pressures on the army, which began in the Lebanon War and became more pronounced during the Intifada, was the refusal by soldiers, particularly reservists, to take part in the organized violence. Although such cases were relatively few, conscientious objection became a social phenomenon: it was discussed and debated; people took sides. The conscientious objectors challenged the Israeli axiom that military service is performed at any price and is unconditionally a civic virtue and an informal confirmation of citizenship.²⁶

Parents whose sons were killed during their army service also became active politically. This phenomenon had its beginnings when parents of soldiers who were killed in the Lebanon war organized to protest what they considered an unnecessary war.²⁷

Others organized against the phenomenon of training accidents in the IDF. The bereaved parents were outraged at the army's tendency to play down the severity of the accidents and to establish internal investigative commissions, which often whitewashed the incidents. The parents' militant tactics generated wide reverberations. In one case, for example, a bereaved mother, Shula Melet, demand that the army engrave on her son's headstone the inscription, “Murdered by his commanding officers.” She smashed to pieces the headstone placed on the grave by the army and replaced it with a rock bearing an inscription that reflected her grief. Like her colleagues in the Committee to Prevent Accidents in the IDF, Melet attended every judicial hearing about such accidents, creating an informal mechanism of social control over the army. Melet killed herself in September 1993. A note she left behind made it plain that she considered her suicide an act of martyrdom and a warning against the army's blunders.²⁸

Of the repeated demands put forward by these bereaved parents, perhaps the most significant was their unequivocal insistence, which they voiced throughout the 1990s, to have outside bodies, rather than the IDF, investigate training and combat accidents. More than a loss of trust, this was a striking manifestation of the societal pressures on the army. It was also a proof of the decline of the nation-state-in-arms, which enabled the army routinely to interrogate and judge itself.²⁹

Another relentless battle waged by parents involved the inscriptions on the headstones of their fallen sons. This should be seen as part of a vast challenge to the myth of heroism and the culture of bereavement that is gathering momentum in Israel. In the modern era, the cult of those who fell in the service of the state was integral to the territorial ethos of the nation-state. As George Mosse has shown, by the beginning of the 20th century, Wilhelm II had instructed the Prussian minister of war to maintain the character of military cemeteries with “soldierly simplicity,” not to distinguish among the ranks, and to build small, uniform graves for the sake of a larger-than-life goal.³⁰

In the 1990s, Israeli parents no longer felt comfortable with the uniform style of marking the headstones in military cemeteries and with the expropriation of mourning from the individual domain. Many of them tried to force the IDF to permit personal inscriptions on the headstones.³¹

The new patterns of mourning were accompanied by the voicing of comments critical of the state and the army. Thus, a bereaved mother whose son was killed in Lebanon in 1988 explained, “Very slowly it trickled into our awareness that the army is not a sacred concept but a prosaic operational body…. For years [the military censors] covered up the negligence and blunders with false claims about the security of the state…. Those dark days … have gone forever…. A powerful public feeling exists that not only is everything justiciable but that everything is subject to criticism. The last sacred cows are marching toward the slaughterhouse.”³²

The woman, Manuela Dviri, caused a public stir a year earlier when she gave a revealing interview in which she scoffed at what she called “the sanctimonious pose of a bereaved mother,” exposed lies and platitudes about bereavement, rebutted self-righteous cliches, declared her refusal to adopt the national role that she was expected to assume, and mocked its message that “we are one family and these are the children of us all and everyone's heart weeps for them.”³³

One of the major manifestations of the societal pressures on the army in Israel was the establishment of peace movements. One of these, which sprang up during the Lebanon war, was Parents against Silence. The movement urged parents to break their silence about the war, launched organized protest against those who were responsible for its prosecution, and continued their struggle until the soldiers came home. This was a clear challenge to the long-standing “Quiet, we're shooting” ethos, that existed in Israel until the Lebanon war.³⁴

During the Intifada, week in and week out, activists in the ‘Women in Black’ movement stood at important intersections to demonstrate against the occupation and in favor of peace. The innovation was the direct challenge to the patriarchal violent order and the unraveling of the Gordian knot that binds masculinity to militarism.³⁵ Women's organizing in peace movements did not abate with the end of the Intifada. In the second half of the 1990s, the Four Mothers movement called for a unilateral and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. This group, too, presented itself as the voice of all mothers while rebuffing attempts to delegitimize it by men who told the women not to intervene in security affairs of which they understood nothing.³⁶

Public discontent with the army was reflected in part through the press. This also represented a change. In the era of the nation-in-arms, the press cooperated with the hegemonic state conception and basically viewed itself as its mouthpiece. Military correspondents voluntarily submitted articles for vetting by the IDF spokesman. Such practices underwent a radical change in the wake of the Intifada. An alternative way of writing about military affairs developed, which did not identify completely with the official version. This in turn generated public criticism of the army for its security doctrine, its mistakes, and its invocation of security arguments to prevent publication of reports it found inconvenient. As one newspaper put it, “The more deeply entrenched the defense establishment in Israel has become, and the more the open, democratic culture that characterizes Israel develops, the greater the change that occurs on the boundary line between what is barred for publication and what is not only permitted but is obligatory to publish.”³⁷

Such examples show the fracture that has appeared between army and society in recent years in Israel.

TOWARD A POST-MODERN ARMY

The late-1980s Intifada illustrated the ineffectiveness of the military might of a mass army in the face of a popular uprising and guerrilla warfare. It also demonstrated how difficult it is for the army of a nation-in-arms, which consists of a diversity of population groups holding a range of political views, to act as a police force. The Gulf War adumbrated the form of future wars, which will be based on technological skill and remote-control operations carried out by specialists. Thus, as different as the Intifada and the Gulf War were, they both produced meaningful lessons and brought about a drastic shift in Israel's military strategy. The army launched a process that can be termed “role extraction.”³⁸

This took the form of a policy that deliberately discarded many features of the mass army-nation and the nation-state-in-arms of the past. In this period, especially under Chief of Staff Ehud Barak (1991–95), the army began to exempt large numbers of young people from compulsory service. Among them were new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and draft-age men and women from weak socio-economic sectors.³⁹ In practice, the army adopted a policy of selective recruitment, under the rubric of “not useful.”⁴⁰ In 1994, for example, thousands of male soldiers were discharged without completing the mandatory three years of service.⁴¹ There was also a technical reason for the wholesale exemptions: a large increase in the annual call-ups. But the extensive publicity that accompanied the discharges, in a society that for decades had been based on the myth of universal participation in the security burden, was evidence of a fundamental conceptual shift. The IDF labeled the phenomenon “discharge for reasons of economizing,” underscoring the fact that the post-modern army was in large measure based on an economic calculation of investment and return per draftee, like a business concern dealing in warfare.

The selective draft constituted one link in a chain of reforms that Barak introduced in the IDF. On his installation as chief of staff in January 1991, he declared, “Those who do not shoot will be cut.” Barak eliminated units, headquarters, and positions; brought about the dismissal of 4,000 personnel from the career army and more 1,000 civilians who worked for the army; placed limitations on travel abroad by senior officers; reduced the number of days of reserve duty; and even slashed the personnel complement and the budget of his own office. He also closed many army journals and declared his intention to eliminate many of the army's traditional “social-welfare functions,” which did not conform with his slogan of a “Small, Smart Army.”⁴²

As part of the separatist trend, Barak bolstered IDF professionalism. He cultivated the Staff and Command course; set up a program to encourage top company commanders; expedited the preparation of an ethical code for the army (a distinctly professional act); fostered excellence; and upgraded the quality of the officer corps. Barak's slogan was “Quality at the Expense of Quantity.” To improve its quality, the IDF adopted the method of TQM (total quality management).⁴³

For a time, the name of this fundamentally client-oriented managerial approach became a mantra in the army, emphasizing the idea of service as befitting a full-fledged profession.

To some observers, these steps were proof that the IDF was gradually becoming a peace army, less of an “institution” and more of an “occupation” (to use Moskos's famous terms), an army that shunned the broad society and internalized its values. Indeed, the IDF was influenced by neo-liberal managerial-business-marketing ideology, but it did not become an occupation like any other. In fact, the reforms were geared toward adapting the IDF to engage in post-modern wars.⁴⁴

As Barak told the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, his aim was to fashion an army that would serve only the needs of war, and he was determined to eliminate whatever did not meet that end; the essence of the army's mission, he stated, was to prepare for the battlefield of the future.⁴⁵

Specific steps were taken in this direction during Barak's tenure. Projects undertaken to deploy the IDF for the high-tech wars of the future and for low-intensity conflicts included the continued development of the Ofek spy satellite, the ‘Homa' (Wall) program for defense against ballistic missiles, the utilization of attack helicopters that can do the work of the infantry, the development of an RPV (remote-piloted vehicle, a pilotless plane), and more. There was also talk of relying less on the reserves—as Syrian short-range surface-to-surface missiles and chemical-warfare capability could disrupt a mass call-up of the reserves—on whom the IDF had depended in the era of mass warfare.

Here and there, some ideas were raised concerning the preparation of the army for a period of peace.⁴⁶

However, these ideas did not find comprehensive expression in the army's plans. The last one, “Era 2000,” was described by Israel's senior military analyst, Ze'ev Schiff, as a plan that was not based on a scenario of future peace but on the introduction of new technology and on adaptating the army for the battlefield of the future.⁴⁷

That post-modern innovations were not, in fact, turning the IDF into a peace army and did not reflect a defeatist attitude—as, for example, the settlers in the territories insisted throughout the Intifada—was demonstrated by Barak's development of a special means of combating terrorism by undercover army units known as “Duvdevan” and “Shimshon,” whose members disguised themselves as Arabs to achieve the element of surprise. In a move that caused public furor, Barak, in June 1991, made public the units' existence and disclosed some of their operational methods. Barak's critics claimed that the publicity was likely to endanger the soldiers' lives. But the gambit worked: it was a channel to convey and dramatize the message of the “Small, Smart Army” ready for new types of wars, including guerrilla warfare.⁴⁸

Publicizing the undercover units was meant to enhance the army's prestige, which had been badly tarnished by its failure to suppress the Intifada. In May 1992, B'Tselem, an Israeli organization focused on human rights in the Occupied Territories, noted that “the atmosphere is one that justified lethal firing by the undercover units … even in circumstances that do not constitute self-defense.” The B'Tselem report found that between 1988 and April 1992 these units had killed eighty-six Palestinians, only twenty-eight of whom were on the army's “wanted” list; only twenty-seven had been armed at the time, and only twenty-one had been trying to escape when shot. Most of these Palestinians were hit by several bullets from close range in the upper body, demonstrating a policy of “liquidating” suspects.⁴⁹

In this way, the army showed in practice what it thought about the idea of a peace-seeking force.

Another significant station on the road to forging a post-modern army involved the army's handling of the decline in motivation to serve, which in the 1990s had spread to both inductees and reservists. At first, the army chiefs were not worried by the phenomenon, perhaps viewing it as appropriate for the “Small, Smart Army.” Not until the summer of 1996 did they reach the conclusion that by continuing to accept the falloff in motivation tacitly they might contribute to a dangerous erosion of the army's status in the society. Policy was recast.⁵⁰

Knowing that it is never possible to return to the status quo ante, the Israeli high command did not contemplate a possible reversion to the nation-in-arms arrangements, which were based—if not practically, at least symbolically—on universal participation and high motivation. Instead, they chose a different tactic, based on the idea of marketing the army as though it were a commercial product. The idea of basing army service and recruitment on individual motivation and choice suited the new values of the young generation, which believed in self-fulfillment and personal success. In this spirit, the army began sending pre-draft young men a list of service options in which it marketed itself and especially the combat corps.⁵¹

The campaign was accompanied by elements of cultural militarism, as befits professional soldiering, such as “Come Taste a Tank”—the slogan on a leaflet that was circulated among high-school students urging them to attend IDF-sponsored summer courses and day camps where they could engage in war games: exercises in navigation, firing a tank, sharp-shooting, hand-to-hand combat techniques, and more.⁵² The leaflets and stickers, together with rhyming commercials with which the IDF sold itself, proved attractive. And even if they involved a denial of the condition of peace toward which Israel was moving, this did not deter many young Israelis age 16 to 18, who were suddenly given an opportunity to prove their manhood. By emphasizing the individual and his ability to succeed in the army, the IDF adjusted itself to the non-collectivistic new Israeli culture using its tools, transforming a social development that might have taken on an anti-militaristic coloration into a type of motivation to serve.

The new policy reflected privatization and professionalization of the draft and army service, as Major-General Gideon Shefer, the commander of the Human Resources Branch, explained in October 1996: “[t]he soldier will be our client. He will be recompensed financially by means of tax breaks … [and] credits for combat soldiers in the psychometric [university admission] tests, and the like.”⁵³

The idea took on shape and form when the IDF began to reward young men who served in combat units. They received higher monthly pay than non-combat soldiers during their regular service; were awarded discharge grants three times as large as those for non-combatants; and were eligible for additional benefits when they presented the “fighter's certificate” they received after their tour of duty.⁵⁴

The incentives for combat personnel were one means by which the army rehabilitated itself from the ruins of the Intifada, even reconstructing the ethos of the combat soldier. Indeed, so successful was this approach that the worst fear of the combat troops who were involved in various revolts by soldiers in the 1990s—usually to protest the behavior of their commanding officer—was that they would be expelled from their unit and made rear-echelon service and administrative personnel. With the army's encouragement, a distinction began to be drawn in these years between “shirkers” (mishtamtim), who do not want to do military service or who do it reluctantly, and “fanatics” (muralim, lit. “poisoned”), who are patriotic, devoted, highly motivated soldiers. No such distinction existed in the era of the all-embracing nation-in-arms, when each individual contributed according to his ability but “everyone” was considered an equal partner.⁵⁵

The new approach worked. In the call-up of March 1998, 86.4 percent of the inductees requested field service, an increase of 11 percent over May 1996.⁵⁶

Gradually, it emerged that motivation for combat service had stabilized following the ongoing decline between the start of the Intifada until 1996. At the same time, there was a decline in the proportion of draftees: only 79 percent of the men obliged to do army service and 62 percent of the women were actually inducted. In the era of the nation-state-in-arms, the figure had been close to 90 percent.⁵⁷ Here, then, is one of the striking traits of the IDF in its new professional form: a falloff in the number of inductees combined with a rise in their motivation.

As for the reservists, the IDF chose not to deal with the problem of low motivation among them. In fact, Shefer, of the Human Resources Branch, admitted that this problem would be overcome by calling up reservists for fewer days of annual service.⁵⁸

Overall, indeed, as part of its new approach the IDF sharpened the difference between the reserve army and the regular and career forces. Reservists, for example, were not posted to Lebanon. The same situation existed in the territories still occupied by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza, where operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad were conducted almost exclusively by units of the regular and career armies. In the era of the mass war, the concept in Israel was to send the regular army into battle first, until the reservists were mobilized. The emerging doctrine now calls for the army to rely on professional forces, with the reservists remaining at home in the initial stage. The reason is that reservists may be loath to take part in a future conflict if it has a political character and involves military missions carried out against a civilian population, with terrorist methods used to counter enemy terrorism.

Summing up, the IDF shows signs of becoming a post-modern army, though not necessarily a peace-keeping army functioning according to societal needs and demands. The next two sections describe how Israel's “new professionalists” tried to influence reality to preserve their high position and importance in society.⁵⁹

POST-MODERN ARMY AND DOMESTIC POLITICS

The involvement of senior army officers in the Oslo process gave rise to the view that the IDF had become a peace army. Yet by the same token, it could be construed differently: as a reflection of the view that the army must be involved in—and, indeed, be at the center of—every important policy arrangement and agreement. Baruch Kimmerling, then, is right when he says that in a militaristic society, even peace-making is a matter for the army.⁶⁰

Moreover, Israel's new officer corps is motivated by a desire to prove its professional qualifications. It is not driven by a belief in the sanctity of the land. Therefore, it found no difficulty in agreeing to Israeli concessions in areas of Palestinian population concentration in the Gaza Strip and even in the West Bank. In any case, taking an active role in Oslo was an indication not of a peace army but of a political one.

One of the most effective mechanisms for ensuring the army's political influence in Israel, without the need for a military coup, is the “parachuting” of senior officers into politics. As the metaphor suggests, these officers do not climb the party-political ladder in the usual step-by-step way, from the “bottom” to the “top”; instead, they move directly from the summit of one pyramid to the other without a meaningful cooling-off period. This is a long-standing pattern in Israel, and through it the view that political problems should be resolved by military means very often did not remain confined to the barracks but became an integral element of the political realm.⁶¹

The post-modern army's professionals also made use of this mechanism to exert political influence. Barak, for example—the archetype of the new professional officer—moved with record speed into politics when he completed his term as chief of staff. He served as interior minister and foreign minister, became head of the Labor Party, was chosen as its candidate for prime minister, and was elected to that post in 1999, all within four years of leaving the army. Like many of his colleagues, he accomplished this by means of a somewhat simplistic attitude toward the issue of army leaders who enter politics, their values, and, no less important, what distinguishes him from the average politician. Barak himself provided a succinct description of the process in January 1995, after he had been appointed a cabinet minister. “[There is] a groundless legend,” he said, “that the only way to achieve an important position is through the party mechanism … the circuitous path of the smiling betrayal, the knife-in-the-back embrace. As though without this it is impossible to crystallize either understanding or belief. My appointment proves that this is not so.”⁶²

Such statements illustrate how in the new times, the professional officer corps exploits the weakness of the mass parties and their machines. In the past, the political institutions absorbed the generals and exploited their prestige for the greater glory of the party. In the 1990s, the “parachuting” took on a new form. Barak's television commercials during the election campaign included image-building spots in which he was portrayed as a fighter and a soldier. Military ranks and bellicose imagery filled the screen. In one case, Barak was shown, pistol in hand, with a dead fighter lying at his feet.⁶³

Barak's qualifications as a politician were identical to the qualifications of Barak the warrior and commander. And Barak did not enter politics alone: many other senior officers came with him. He appointed a retired major-general to head the party's organizational headquarters. Party officials complained that the former officer was operating independently and using “military methods” that were inappropriate for a political campaign, but Barak, of course, paid them no heed.⁶⁴ Barak also surrounded himself with former “comrades” from Sayeret Matkal, an elite army reconnaissance unit that he had once commanded.⁶⁵ If the main idea in the old-style “parachuting” was integration, the goal of the new-style approach was separation and domination.

The controversy over the political role of the Israeli officer corps took concrete form following the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister in 1996. Underlying the dispute—at least, initially—was the question of the IDF's budget. In the 1950s, when Israel was a nation-in-arms, senior officers were not paid high salaries. However, over the years a huge wage disparity developed between them and most of the population. Barak, as chief of staff, slashed the army's budget but zealously guarded the salaries of the career army personnel and extended their already substantial benefits: personal cars, large discounts in buying homes, below-market prices for leisure-time and consumer products, and more. Within a little more than a decade, between 1983 and the mid-1990s, the proportion of the defense budget that was earmarked for wages and conditions of service nearly doubled, from 27 percent to 50 percent.⁶⁶

Netanyahu, with the support of Treasury officials, tried to change this situation.

The Treasury published figures showing the high standard of living of the officers.⁶⁷

The public was stunned. Officers' salaries and retirement plans drew special attention. Career officers can retire from the army around age 40 and receive a pension and other benefits that are unequaled in any other sector. The army chiefs denied the Treasury's figures and presented counter-arguments but jealously guarded the “security secret” of the officers' salaries and conditions of service.⁶⁸ One of the most militant participants in this dispute was General Shefer. The man-in-uniform did not hesitate to launch a frontal attack on civil servants—the Treasury officials—claiming they had “targeted” the officers' salaries because they found it difficult to argue against the IDF's munitions build-up. This classic argument, designed to create a schism between the army and the civilian population, was something Israel had scarcely known in the past. And as if to demonstrate that the professional carriers of the post-modern army did not see themselves as moving from an institution to an occupation, along the expected peace-making army lines, Shefer observed that the Treasury wanted to turn the personnel of the career army into civil servants, but that the two had nothing in common: the army man works irregular hours, and the risk he takes is different.⁶⁹

Lieutenant-General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, the chief of staff during Netanayahu's term, also publicly assailed the intention to cut the defense budget. Speaking at a meeting of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he warned of a potentially serious crisis of confidence.⁷⁰

In the era of the nation-state-in-arms, effectively until the mid-1980s, the defense establishment was a sacred cow: no one dared question its demands, conditions of service, and salaries. Now the Treasury was doing just that. But the army deployed for a counter-offensive. This was another unprecedented development, as the army permitted senior officers to fight the Treasury on the battleground of the daily papers. Israel had truly moved a long way from its past, when such conflicts were resolved behind the scenes.⁷¹

As part of their campaign against the prime minister and the Treasury, the professional officer corps did not balk at using “intimidation tactics” to block a reduction of the IDF budget. In 1996, the IDF cited Syrian army maneuvers to obtain a budget hike; in 1997, it was the Iraqi threat; and in 1998 came the long-range capability of the Iranians' Shihab ballistic missile. But the Treasury was unfazed. Revise your order of priorities, the officials told the army's representatives in one meeting; in another, they asked how it came about that the IDF's weaponry had become outdated so quickly. A high point in the civilian–military confrontation occurred on 9 August 1997, during a discussion in the security cabinet. Afterward, one of the ministers said, “It is a scandal, a whole group of generals arrives and tries to impose its opinion.”⁷²

The crisis ended only when Netanyahu yielded to the pressures of the military. Indeed, in September 1998 his government decided to increase the defense budget by $100 million—the first such increase since 1985 (apart from 1991, the year of the Gulf War). Clearly, the “new professionalists” had, as it were, won the political battle.⁷³

The budget struggle reflected Netanyahu's attempts to distance senior officers from the decision-making process. Another major incident in this regard involved the ouster from the army of Major-General Oren Shahor, the coordinator of government activities in the Occupied Territories. In October 1996, an alert news photographer snapped Shahor as he left the home of the leader of the opposition, Shimon Peres. It turned out that Shahor had met several times with Peres without obtaining permission or reporting the meetings. Netanyahu decided to get rid of him, and Shahor was forced to resign, though not before he accused the prime minister of painting IDF generals in political hues. “We have to be trusted,” he said, alluding to his being a member of the professional officers corps, which was untainted by political affiliation.⁷⁴

Shahor said his meeting with Peres was formally a technical hitch. However, two years later he gave an interview that exposed a very different reality and contradicted the image of the a-political, strictly professional officer that underlay his resignation statements. “Already as an army man I understood that Netanyahu was dangerous for Israel,” he explained in the interview. He had met with Peres, he said, to report on and describe the sense of danger and frustration that IDF officers felt at Netanyahu's policy and at the rapid decline in the army's status. Shahor said he told Peres, “I feel as though someone has broken into our coffers and has scattered everything we had stored up.” Shahor admitted that he had found it unpleasant to bypass Netanyahu, but that as an officer he had felt it was imperative to issue a warning. There were certain things that had to be said, including his concern over “the hands holding the wheel.”⁷⁵

This is a particularly striking instance of the effort by the new professional officer corps in Israel to acquire political influence. True, Shahor was forced out, but the army did everything it could to ensure that Netanyahu would not be re-elected. After Chief of Staff Lipkin-Shahak retired, he established a new political party, which included a large number of senior officers in the reserves, his comrades-in-arms. This centrist party, which was declaredly neither right nor left, sought to ride the wave of the ‘new times’ and capitalize on the broad public discontent with established party politics, though its principal message, constantly voiced by Lipkin-Shahak, was, “Netanyahu is dangerous for Israel.” Shortly before the elections, the party got a new recruit in the form of another retired major-general, Yitzhak Mordechai, the minister of defense, who enjoyed wide support in the Likud, the party he bolted from to fight Netanyahu.⁷⁶

(Mordechai eventually became the head of the party.) Israel thus had a professional officer corps with a clear-cut picture of reality and a status that, in the army's view, gave it the right to be involved in internal politics. A full expression of this world-view was given in the battlefield, as well.

POST-MODERNISM AND MILITARISM

When the bulk of the IDF withdrew from Lebanon in 1985, Israel retained control of a self-styled “security zone” abutting its border. Earlier, it had established a Lebanese militia known as the South Lebanon Army (SLA). The struggle in Lebanon was mainly against Hezbollah (‘Party of God’), a militant Islamic organization that operates under the auspices of Syria and Iran and conducted effective guerrilla warfare against the IDF. Following repeated casualties inflicted by Hezbollah on Israeli soldiers and the SLA in the security zone, and the firing of Katyusha rockets at the town of Kiryat Shmona and other Israeli locales near the border with Lebanon, the IDF launched two major military operations: “Operation Accountability” in 1993 and “Operation Grapes of Wrath” three years later. Both operations reflected the deep-seated cultural belief that still prevailed in the Israeli military elite, holding that military force had a decisive role to play in solving the “Lebanon problem.” And if some cabinet ministers urged a different resolution for the problem—after all, in 1992 the newly elected government of Yitzhak Rabin made an effort to achieve peace agreements with various Arab states and with the Palestinians—the professional army chiefs consistently pressed the political level to react forcefully, because force, they maintained, was the only language Hezbollah understood.

In both operations in Lebanon, the army's involvement in politics was expressed through a typical pattern of behavior. First, senior officers appeared before the cabinet and stated their concern about the enemy's intentions. At the informal level, where politics is usually conducted, the chief of staff and other senior officers exerted pressure on the politicians, urging an extensive operation in reaction to Hezbollah attacks. In this case, no putsch is required, and no conspiracies need to be hatched.⁷⁷

Often, the pressure campaign is tendentiously leaked to the media, with the aim of influencing the politicians through publicity.⁷⁸ The next step was to mass troops along the enemy's lines. In both operations the idea was to provoke Hezbollah into a war as well as to persuade the government that “the engine is already running” and no other alternative existed.⁷⁹

Both operations were geared to force as many southern Lebanese Shi'its as possible to flee northward and to force the local residents to bring pressure on the government in Beirut, which in turn would implore the Syrians to put an end to Hezbollah activity. This was to be accomplished by means of bombing by the air force, shelling by tanks and artillery, and warnings broadcast over radio stations. In the first days of the campaign, tens of thousands shells landed on more than seventy Lebanese villages. When this failed to achieve the desired results in both operations, the IDF—following a kind of militaristic natural law saying that if force does not effect a solution, then greater force will—intensified its attacks until a few hundred thousands residents of southern Lebanon had fled to the north.⁸⁰

Both operations were terminated by international intervention, followed by “new understandings” that were signed by the parties and solved nothing, of course.

The two operations showed that for the professional officer corps, war is a continuation of culture (not policy, pace Clausewitz) by other means. This was even more blatant, given that one of the central goals posited by the officers was “to put Hezbollah in its place” and demonstrate Israel's military prowess. In 1993, the army chiefs told the politicians that it was crucial to mount a response to the boast by Hezbollah's deputy commander, Shaykh Na

im Kassem, that “it has been proved that the IDF is a paper tiger.” In 1996, too, the army explained that Hezbollah's behavior showed it was “drunk with power.” The very fact that the guerrilla organization believed Israel was weak, the IDF high command maintained, was sufficient reason to show Hezbollah that it was mistaken.

⁸¹

The operations also showed that Israel had no compunctions about making use of Lebanese civilians, most of them villagers, in a manner one can call “instrumental rationality”: an emphasis on means and total disregard of the price likely to be exacted.⁸²

Thus, large numbers of Lebanese civilians—men, women, and children, young and old, healthy and ill—were “mobilized” on behalf of the Israeli war effort. It was a move that turned out to be problematic not only morally but also politically. The upshot was that Lebanese public opinion, instead of turning against Hezbollah and playing the role assigned to it in the Israeli scenario, was united in its hatred of and opposition to Israel. Similarly, the idea that the refugees would be able to press their government—or that the Syrian ruler who pulls the strings in Lebanon would be upset by the mass flight of civilians—turned out to be a totally misbegotten domino theory, exposing above all what the historian Barbara Tuchman has called “cultural ignorance.”⁸³

That war is the continuation of culture by other means was also shown by the nature of the IDF's military tactics. Undoubtedly influenced by the Gulf War, the IDF made use of “over the horizon” munitions to avoid getting the army “bogged down” in Lebanon again and to ensure that Israeli troops suffered no casualties. In addition, the operations would be mounted swiftly and effectively to avert criticism by the Israeli society, whose attitude toward the IDF had, as explained, undergone a radical transformation, and to ensure that the troops, particularly reservists, showed no inclination to refuse to serve.

The operations thus signaled that they bore the character of a post-modern war: conducted by “remote control,” with “smart bombs” and “guided missiles,” with the “Apache, the best helicopter of its type in the world” and the “sophisticated, lethal F-16 warplane,” and a new weapon, an artillery piece that fires on the move. So in post-modern armies, too—perhaps even more than in traditional armies—one finds an element of militarism as a game and the dominance of instrumentality.⁸⁴

Thus, the army chiefs let it be known that the operations bore a “controlled,” “elegant” character in which “surgical strikes” that were “pinhead accurate” were the norm. In fact, the army created the image of a sterile war in which, metaphorically, Lebanon was a sick country and the IDF had come to heal it. It was an image made possible by the distance that exists in post-modern wars between those who wield the weapons and those who are hurt by them. Another contributing factor was the technology of real-time photography: a camera mounted in the attacking plane monitors the vehicles on the road below. The missile is fired; the camera follows it; the vehicle goes up in flames and explodes. Who is inside? The photograph does not show that. The plane proceeds on its way. No blood is seen; no screaming is heard; casualties are faceless.

Every evening during the operations, the army and the politicians held a joint press conference at which the day's “war movies” were shown and transmitted to every home in Israel via television. The film clips were meant to dramatize the army's efficiency and its superiority over Hezbollah, technologically as well as militarily. In an era of estrangement between army and society, some wanted to restore public sympathy for the army. The public, though, was not overly impressed: those days were past. Certainly, the tragic event at Kafr Kana, in which Israeli shells killed more than a hundred civilians, including women and children, who had taken refuge at a United Nations base demonstrated that concepts such as “clean war” are as distinctly cultural and political as they are military and expose a gap between the army and major segments of Israeli society.

One indication of this break could be seen, perhaps, in a speech delivered by Chief of Staff Lipkin-Shahak in October 1998, at a public assembly in Tel Aviv marking the third anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Ostensibly addressing the murdered prime minister, Lipkin-Shahak said, “The unmediated bond between the IDF and the civilian society, which was the heart and soul of the army, has become oppressive, not always substantive, a bit suffocating. Polarization, hedonism, a sectional approach, indifference, opportunism, and manipulation have thrust themselves into the heart of the consensus, and there, in the center of the arena, they found a punching bag to pummel…. Soldiers and officers, in the regular, career, and reserve armies, walk among us wearing a near-apologetic expression. Either we are suckers or we are millionaires…. Nowadays, many people consider the successful Israeli to be one who has succeeded in the stock market, has invested in real estate, whose passport is stamped with skiing, shopping, and vacation trips abroad. The definition is changing, the [old] values are being replaced by others…. Evading service in the IDF is no longer a stain on the shirker, and giving voluntarily, consciously, out of a desire to contribute no longer gets the appreciation it deserves.”⁸⁵

It was not the first time in Israel's history that military personnel demonstrated for all to see that they do not regard themselves as being in an a-political profession, as a “yes sir–no sir” army. Since Israel became a nation-state-in-arms and its army became an army-nation, the officers believed that they had a social mission and were naturally involved in the state's political activity.⁸⁶

The difference was that, this time, the chief of staff's comments revealed a situation in which society was not behind the army. Now a gulf divided army and society, the sense of marching shoulder to shoulder with the society had vanished.

Around the same time, the public struggle for the IDF to withdraw from Lebanon gained momentum. As we saw, bereaved parents organized, and social movements such as Four Mothers were established, with their members wondering aloud after every “roadside bomb,” every fatality, every attack, whether it was essential for Israel's security that the IDF remain in Lebanon. In reaction, combat officers rejected even the legitimacy of the public debate. It was proof of defeatism, they said; it would demoralize the troops and perhaps even lead to disaster on the field of battle. The officers also insisted that the IDF could easily overcome Hezbollah were it not for restraints imposed at the civilian level by political considerations, understandings, and agreements.

There were abundant examples of the high command's disinclination to respond to societal pressures. In June 1997, for example, a battalion commander in the paratroops with the rank of lieutenant-colonel had the following to say about parents who put pressure on their sons not to serve in Lebanon: “I have serious problems with the home front. The nation is weak, it cannot take much. All the hype around every military funeral is exaggerated. On the television news I see soldiers weeping on graves and that infuriates me. I tell my soldiers: Cry in closed rooms; in the face of the nation, be strong.”⁸⁷

One of the leading professional soldiers in southern Lebanon was Brigadier-General Erez Gerstein, whose controversial statements expressed the views of many of his comrades (who preferred to remain silent). Gerstein, who was killed in Lebanon in March 1999, had a reputation as a courageous, blunt-spoken commander, a wild-man type, an officer “holding a knife in his teeth.” In the post-modern army, Gerstein was destined for great things, and even his public statements on contentious issues did not seem to affect his advancement. For example, in 1996, at a meeting of senior officers, Gerstein attacked the high command for acting with restraint and limitations in Lebanon.⁸⁸

Again in June 1998, in a briefing to military correspondents, he launched a bitter attack on organizations such as Four Mothers, which were calling for a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. “It is possible,” he said, “that demonstrations of one kind or another help Hezbollah. They create a threat to IDF soldiers in the security zone … and to my life personally.”⁸⁹

The professional officer corps seemed to be placing on the scales what it regarded as Israel's security needs against the country's democratic character. The officers had no doubt about the direction in which the scales should tip. Repeatedly they drew a distinction between those who sat at home and discussed the Lebanon issue as though it were pure politics, unattached and remote, and those who did the hard, day-to-day work on the ground and thus earned the right to express their opinions and to silence the others.

Such opinions were voiced, for example, immediately after Gerstein's funeral, when the officers serving in southern Lebanon encountered Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz. The commander of the South Lebanon Brigade, Colonel Noam (his surname is classified), told Mofaz that it was urgent for the IDF to deal with the media's treatment of events in which soldiers were killed and to prevent outbursts of national mourning and unwarranted parental intervention. In reaction, Four Mothers issued a statement saying that the problem was the dead soldiers, not the talk about them.⁹⁰

The officers were not convinced. “We must not become intoxicated by the atmosphere of a ‘New Middle East,’ not now and not in another thirty years,” said Colonel Gadi Eizenkot, the commander of an infantry brigade. “Unfortunately,” I discern in the IDF a growing phenomenon of prettified popular statements that conform to what the Israeli public wants to hear from us. We have to draw a line over that.”⁹¹ On the same path of drawing a line, the commander of the tough Golani infantry brigade, Colonel Shmuel Zakai, made headlines when, in the course of giving his men a pep talk, he labeled the Four Mothers organization the “four dishrags.” “Leave all these prattlers who are talking against our remaining in Lebanon,” Zakai was quoted as telling his unit, “forget the ‘four dishrags’—we are soldiers of Golani. I don't want cowards…. [P]ay no attention to them; what do they actually know?”⁹²

The more the casualties mounted—by the beginning of 2000, more than 1,500 soldiers had been killed in Lebanon since 1982, nearly 350 of them since the pullback to the security zone in 1985—the sharper the conflict became between the officer corps and the society. The officers were indeed anxious to “draw a line” between themselves and the society. Yet this is not professionalism per se—of the kind described, for example, by Samuel Huntington forty years ago—in which separation from the society constitutes an effective mechanism of civilian supervision.⁹³

Instead, the separation advocated by the Israeli officer corps is suffused with political meaning and related to crucial questions of peace and war. Indeed, through separation these officers are forging a connection. It is a connection between technical-managerial activity and political activity, and by it the masters of violence want to prevent a public discussion, for without such discussion their skill appears as the one and only truth and they arrogate the right to speak, judge, and decide by virtue of their expertise.

After I completed this article, it became clear that the final threads holding the Oslo process together had unraveled, and the sides entered another cycle of violence and death. The second Intifada, which erupted in late 2000 between Israelis and Palestinians, underscored anew some of the shaping features of the professional officer corps within the post-modern army. They were apparent both in the character of the IDF's operations—which frequently involved guerrilla-type “liquidations,” “closures,” and “encirclements” that constituted a continuous painful blow to the Palestinian civilian population, compounded by a policy of collective punishment—and in the army's political posture. The high command, and especially Chief of Staff Mofaz, issued military-situation appraisals concerning the Palestinians' readiness for compromises, which were in no way distinguishable from a political position. Moreover, they demanded that the Palestinian Authority be formally defined as an enemy; urged that its leaders not be trusted; and relentlessly pressed the politicians to grant it freedom of action to carry out more aggressive strikes. Indeed, the politicians, particularly under the leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, frequently authorized such operations retroactively. Thus, the violence was moved from one arena (Lebanon) to another (the Palestinian Authority), and the enemy changed. Only the IDF's professional officer corps, equipped with its special brand of bellicose ethic, remained as it had been.