Israel and its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion by Stuart A. Cohen

Show description

The right-wing Revisionist movement tended to be more explicit. At the 1938 convention of Beitar (the Revisionist youth movement) held in Poland, Menachem Begin, then a rising firebrand, convinced delegates to revise the wording of the oath that had been drafted just four years previously by the movement’s founder, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. As before, Clause 4 was to commence: ‘I will train to fight in the defense of my people’, but the original continuation (‘and I will only use my strength for defense’) was replaced with a more bellicose undertaking ‘to conquer the homeland’ (Shindler 2006: 207).

One was the persistence of an external security environment that demanded the retention of universal conscription and hence of the service arrangements that gave the IDF the character of a ‘people’s army’ rather than a segmented, professional force. The other was the continuation of a domestic climate almost entirely uncritical of the IDF’s conduct and values. As the next two chapters will demonstrate, by the dawn of the twentyfirst century neither condition still applied. 3 The changing operational landscape Even in the heyday of its status as a ‘people’s army’, the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) primary functions were always military in the conventional sense.

Popular’ militarism and its expressions A further flaw in the depiction of Israel’s early ‘militarism’ as a deliberately crafted disincentive to ‘praetorianism’ lies in its suggestion that this socalled trade-off was somehow imposed on an otherwise passive population by the elites who had most to gain from the deal. But that, surely, is to Forging a relationship 25 misconstrue the depth of feeling that military associations aroused during the early years of statehood amongst wide sections of the Jewish population.