Chutzpah by Inbal Arieli

Author:Inbal Arieli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

A Melting Pot

So central is the IDF’s emphasis on camaraderie and morale that its application is grounded in actual policies that have their roots in the 1950s and ’60s. During the first two decades of its independence, Israel’s leaders sought to create for the young Israeli society a uniform identity. They therefore adopted a melting-pot policy. With this policy the state hoped to be able to assimilate the overwhelming waves of immigrants who arrived from many different countries, often with extremely different cultural backgrounds. By doing so, the state hoped to carve out a new and differentiated Israeli identity.

The melting-pot policy, however, was problematic. It intentionally ignored the multiculturalism that the newcomers brought with them, often forcing entire communities to forfeit their identity for the sake of unification. In time, this policy was revoked and more tolerant approaches were taken. But regardless of its problems and difficulties, the melting-pot policy has achieved a great deal. The young country managed to absorb thousands upon thousands of immigrants and to harness their abilities and motivations for the sake of a common goal, which has always been to build Israel.

The army, of course, was and continues to be the ultimate melting pot. Not only does it place people from all ethnic and cultural backgrounds together in close quarters, it also strips them of their cultural and social signifiers and provides them with new grounds upon which to form an identity. Being a melting pot is a necessary requirement for any military organization, particularly one that follows a flat-hierarchy model, as does the IDF (we’ll get back to this in the next chapter). If you want soldiers to trust their peers and their commanders, you cannot have them feeling superior in any way due to their social, ethnic, or economic background. Soldiers must be secure in their sense of camaraderie, viewing their world as consisting of the friendships, experiences, and skills they have acquired in their service.

In Israel, though, the armed forces’ sense of camaraderie goes beyond that of soldiers on active duty. Since they are an integral part of society, both by virtue of their physical presence in the streets and by the fact that soldiers (relatively) quickly return to civilian life and civilians frequently become soldiers again in reserves, it’s not hard to imagine how the soldiers’ sense of camaraderie extends throughout most of Israeli society. Israeli society as a whole has a shared experience of military service upon which national camaraderie is built.

As the political scientist Ronald Krebs describes, the power of the military to create social cohesion is well documented throughout history. “President Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Progressives hoped that universal military training would ‘Americanize’ the mass of newcomers who had recently landed on America’s shores, and Leonid Brezhnev, a Soviet politician, similarly believed that widespread service in the Red Army would forge a united Soviet citizenry.”3 As characteristic of great world leaders, Roosevelt and Brezhnev chose to deal with their country’s multinationalism situation by turning to the armed forces and applying military draft policies to help instill a sense of national unity and community.

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