Yagil Levy

Women Breaking the Silence Military Service, Gender, and Antiwar Protest

This paper analyzes how military service can be a source of women’s antiwar voices, using the Israeli case of “Women Breaking the Silence” (WBS). WBS is a collection of testimonies from Israeli women ex-soldiers who have served in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The WBS testimonies change the nature of women’s antiwar protest by offering a new, paradoxical source of symbolic legitimacy for women’s antiwar discourse from the gendered marginalized position of “outsiders within” the military. From this contradictory standpoint, the women soldiers offer a critical gendered voice, which focuses on criticism of the combat masculinity and gendered identification with the Palestinian “other.” While they reaffirm the republican ethos that grants political dominance to male soldiers, they also deconstruct the image of hegemonic masculinity as the emblem of the nation and undermine gendered militarized norms.

The Theocratization of the Israeli Military

This article portrays the theocratization of 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 intraorganizational autonomy vis-à-vis the religious sector, and paving the road to (4) restricting the Israel Defense Forces autonomy in deploying forces in politically disputable missions.

Is There a Motivation Crisis in Military Recruitment in Israel

During the summer of 2007, public opinion in Israel was inflamed over figures released by the IDF (Israel Defence Forces), according to which 25 percent of potential Jewish male draftees do not take part in military service, while the numbers among women are even higher (about 40 percent). Furthermore, if one adds those men who do not complete their service, the figure climbs to more than 40 percent. These figures were at odds with the public and the military command’s expectations that the efforts to rehabilitate the army following the weakness it had displayed in the Second Lebanon War (in the summer of 2006) would increase the motivation for recruitment. Most attention was directed to two numbers: those related to the Haredim (the ultra-Orthodox), whose rate of exemption rose from about 2.5 percent during the 1970s to 11 percent in 2007 (as a percentage of the total cohort), and those exempted for ‘psychological incompatibility’, which rose from 3–4 percent in the 1980s to 5 percent in 2007. While the Haredim’s exemption is considered to be a ‘political problem’ because it is part of a deal constructed between the government and the Haredi political parties, the psychological exemption has been attributed to what is publically portrayed as the ‘motivation crisis’ in military recruitment (the numbers for those exempted for poor health and low levels of education have remained stable over time). As the IDF has been considered ‘the people’s army’, a crucial institution both for the defence of the state and the self-image of the nation, and a Gordian knot established between citizenship and soldiering in Israeli society, a significant drop in the level of recruitment signalled a crisis. A public campaign was launched criticizing entertainers and other celebrity role models who did not complete their military service. To what extent do these figures really testify to the

The Right to Fight A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of Recruitment Policy toward Gays and Lesbians

The worldwide demand by gays and lesbians that they be allowed to openly participate in military service and the ways in which this demand have been handled reveal discrepancies between political culture and actual recruitment practices. This article offers a model drawn from a multiple-case study for explaining recruitment policies toward homosexuals. Arguably, to the extent that the military is used to perform civilian-social roles that determine the social hierarchy beyond the purely professional aspects of the military repertoire, the military command is compelled to modify its professional code— a code that is originally and normatively exclusionist in regard to homosexuals. Owing to those societally prescribed modifications, the resulting inclusionist-exclusionist recruitment policies might be at odds with prominent pillars of the host political culture.

What is Controlled by Civilian Control of the Military? Control of the Military vs. Control of Militarization

This article addresses a gap in the scholarly literature. Students of militarism do not link the propensity to use force to the broader issue of what type of civilian control may restrain the use of force. Similarly, even students of civilian control who acknowledge that civilian control and military restraint do not necessarily go hand in hand have not questioned the extent to which we should decouple the two different processes as different modes of control rather than different effects of control. A revised conceptualization of civilian control is therefore offered that distinguishes between two modes of civilian control over military affairs: control of the military, which concerns itself primarily with the military organization, and control of militarization, which draws on the political discourse in which the citizenry plays an active and autonomous role aimed at subjecting the decision to use force to a deliberative process that addresses its legitimacy.

The Tradeoff between Force and Casualties

The Gaza War between Israel and Hamas in winter 2009, in which excessive use of lethal force caused the deaths of many Gazan non-combatants, shed light on how casualty shyness leads democracies to use excessive force to reduce the risk to which soldiers are exposed at the expense of the opponent’s non-combatant fatalities. This can be termed the force/casualty tradeoff (FCT). Because this tradeoff is only one manifestation of state action, a more thorough analysis is required to recognize variances in the state’s space of action. Arguably, and by drawing on the case of Gaza, the FCT reflects the interplay between two sets of legitimacies: legitimacy of sacrifice and the legitimacy to use force. The relations between these two legitimacies determine the state’s space of action in the military domain: low legitimacy of sacrifice coupled with high legitimacy to use force yields the FCT, while other variations in the profile of these legitimacies produce other results.

From Republican to Market Control over the Armed Forces: A Conceptual Framework

This article claims that types of reward systems that form the mechanism of military recruitment affect types of civilian control over the military. Specifically, the alteration of the reward system from institution/symbolic to occupation/material modes has changed the mode of civilian control from republican to market control. Market control has supplanted the historical citizen-soldier model of civilian control, by which the political community supervised the military through the social groups serving in it and their social networks. Market control is characterized by the market-oriented monitoring of military activity, which is mainly focused on the military resources and the commodification of military service, which produced the market regulation of recruitment. This has a contradictory effect on the armys freedom of action: while the military is given greater leeway in administering belligerent policies, it has fewer resources with which to fund them.

Israel's violated republican equation

Historically, Israels ability to sustain a situation of armed conflict for a long time was predicated on the republican equation in which the dominant group – the secular Ashkenazim – exchanged military sacrifice for social dominance. Nonetheless, an imbalance between military burden and social rewards, which emerged during the 1970s and1980s, led the middle-class Ashkenazim to undertake collective action aimed at reducing the burden of military service through protest and peace movements, along with more individual tactics. These modes of action, together with the attenuated status of the military, spurred on national-religious and Mizrachi groups to integrate themselves into the traditional equation, or to formulate an alternative one (the Gush Emunim and the Orthodox route). Arguably, the status of each group in the military, which itself saw an erosion in its social status, played a major part in shaping the nature, scope and strategy of each groups collective actions. The groups capitalized on the opportunities that the military offered them in accordance with their capacity to utilize the resources they had at their disposal.

A Revised Model of Civilian Control of the Military The Interaction between the Republican Exchange and the Control Exchange

What determines the subordination of the military to civilian control? Existing scholarship has neglected the power structure within which relations between the military and civilians are embedded. Addressing this oversight, this article theorizes that civilian control of the military is influenced by two relations of exchange: (1) the republican exchange, wherein the state provides its citizens with rights in exchange for their military sacrifice; and (2) the control exchange, in which the military subordinates itself to civilian rulers in exchange for resources the state provides. If both relations of exchange are in equilibrium, civilian institutions can establish firm supremacy over the military. This article examines the causes and consequences of disequilibrium. It concludes that disequilibrium in the republican exchange can undermine the control exchange and civilian supremacy over the military. Applications and implications of the theory are developed through examples from the United States and Israel.

The Second Lebanon War: Examining "Democratization of War" Theory

Israel’s Second Lebanon War (2006) is a typical manifestation of a flawed war fought by a democratic society. As such, it represents an important opportunity to provide significant evidence regarding the validity of theories that deal with the “democratization of war” syndrome, that is, the limitations imposed on the way democracies wage war and how they cope with these limitations. This article argues that the events of the war exhibit four theoretical propositions, all of which are drawn from the U.S. post-Vietnam experience: speedy decision making to avert public disputes, a weak “civilian” government that struggles to restrain the military, the proclivity to shorten the war and reduce its costs, and the setting of overly ambitious war goals as a means of mobilizing public support. In short, the imperatives derived from the democratization of war syndrome produce mechanisms that work to heighten belligerence rather than temper it.