Growing Jewish Nationalism in Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the pushback

Scholars have been warning about the rising influence of the religious nationalists in the IDF. Not only the number of religious nationalists (or national-religious or religious Zionists as they are called in Israel) is rising in the IDF but they are also serving in more combat roles and rising in ranks. Conversely, the secular Israelis that had been the backbone of the IDF since the 1940s have been reluctant to serve after their mandatory military service in the IDF. Yagil Levy, in his 2014 article in Armed Forces and Society Journal, wrote about the theocratization of the IDF. He gives four reasons why there has been a significant increase in religious influence in the Israeli military:

At the center of this process stands the national-religious sector, which has significantly upgraded its presence in the ranks since the late 1970s. It is argued that four integrated and cumulative processes gradually generated this shift toward the theocratization of the Israeli military: (1) the crafting of institutional arrangements that enable the service of religious soldiers, thereby (2) creating a critical mass of religious soldiers in many combat units, consequently (3) restricting the military command’s Intra-organizational autonomy visa`- vis the religious sector, and paving the road to (4) restricting the Israel Defense Forces autonomy in deploying forces in politically disputable missions.

A Christian Science Monitor report by Christa Bryant in 2015 highlighted the same issue. 

In the early 1990s,...Orthodox men accounted for 2.5 percent of graduates of infantry officer training courses; since then, it’s grown to more than 25 percent, according to a 2013 book. In some combat units, they make up as much as 50 percent of new officers – roughly quadruple their share of Israel’s population. The upward trend, coupled with a parallel decline in the number of combat soldiers and officers coming from secular families, is dramatically changing the face of the IDF. Many Israelis respect religious Zionists like Fund – Orthodox Jews who see the state as playing a part in the prophesied redemption of Israel ­– for their willingness to defend the nation.

But some worry that their worldview could change the character not only of the army – traditionally a secular “people’s army,” where youngsters of all stripes forged lasting bonds during their mandatory two- to three-year service – but the state of Israel itself. One of the most cited concerns is that if Israel agreed to a peace deal with Palestinians, the outsized influence of religious soldiers could complicate the IDF’s evacuation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

An investigative report by Reuters in April 2016 also points towards the same phenomenon and argues that religious nationalists have now reached the highest echelons of Israel's powerful security sector:

The community, sometimes referred to as the ‘national religious’, has increased its presence in both government and the civil service. This year, for the first time ever, the heads of the national police, the Mossad spy agency and the Shin Bet domestic security service are all Religious-Zionists.

Nowhere, though, has the shift been more pronounced than in the military. Most soldiers in the Israeli army are secular or observant Jews, though Druze and Bedouin Arab citizens serve as well. But over the past two decades, academic studies show, the number of Religious-Zionist officers in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has seen a huge increase. The military has also felt the growing influence of rabbis who have introduced matters of faith and politics to the battlefield.

Source: Reuter's Report

The author of the Reuter's report, Maayan Lubell, however, argues that there are signs of pushback from the secular decision-makers that are still a majority in both civilian and security sectors of Israel. Their criticisms are mainly focused on the power of the Military Rabbinate and it's Jewish Awareness Branch that have tried relentlessly, according to many secular Jews, to promote a right-wing, ideological, and religious agenda and to make the IDF an army with a religious mission, instead of a national mission. In 2012, the State Comptroller of Israel criticized the pamphlets circulated among soldiers by the Rabbinate during the 2008-09 Gaza war in which it was written that 'not one millimeter' of land should be ceded to the Palestinians and cruelty to the Palestinians was sometimes necessary. In January 2016, the IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot announced he would remove the Jewish Awareness Branch from the Military Rabbinate. In his letter to the IDF officers, he argued that a military divided over religion and politics could hardly fulfill its mission:

The IDF is the people’s army and includes a wide spectrum of Israeli society...A change is needed with the aim of keeping the IDF a stately army in a democratic country, nurturing that which unites its soldiers.

His decision was severely criticized by the religious nationalists, who are a majority in the current ruling coalition, and they planned to reverse it. More recently, Israel's deputy military chief Major-General Yair Golan’s Holocaust memorial speech touched a nerve when compared behavior of some of the Israelis to the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s:

If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then - 70, 80 and 90 years ago - and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.

This was in reference to the killing of an incapacitated Palestinian by an Israeli soldier in cold blood in Hebron in March 2016. However, General Yair was castigated for making this comparison and in the end, because of the political power of the religious nationalists, the IDF had to issue a clarification.

Can the secular Israelis stop the growing Judaization/theocratization of the IDF? The jury is still out but this will surely be the last stand of the secular Israelis.