A critical look at Israeli militarism

[Jefferson23]

In a fascinating and ground-breaking study, Yagil Levy suggests that there's no clear contradiction between the civilian echelon playing a larger role as watchdog of the army and the growing dominance of a militaristic ethos in Israeli society.

By Michael Sfard

Mi Sholet al Hatsava?: Bein Pikuah al Hatsava Leshlita Betsvaiyut (Who Governs the Military? Between Control of the Military and Control of Militarism ), by Yagil Levy Magnes Press, 289 pages, NIS 94

Ensconced at home, the armchair sociologist and media consumer who is trying to identify the trends in military-society relations in Israel is liable to become confused. On the one hand, the popularity of Carmela Menashe, the military correspondent of Israel Radio for the past 23 years, is due to her numberless exposures of irregularities, scandals and blunders in the management of the army. The public is apparently grateful for her uncompromising critique of the army's institutions. On the other hand, we have the equally popular military correspondent and analyst of Channel 2 television news for the past 18 years, Roni Daniel. Known for his militant stance and his unflagging advocacy of the use of massive power, Daniel is almost a parody of militaristic macho. So much so, indeed, that his take on bellicose situations is often more extreme than that of military commanders - many of whom he tongue-lashes for what he perceives as their lame attitude.

Chief of Staff Benny Gantz reviews army maneuvers in the Jordan valley, June 2011.

Photo by: IDF Spokesman's Office

Seemingly, Menashe and Daniel, the leading military correspondents of the two leading electronic-media outlets in Israel, represent contrasting processes in terms of the relations between civil society and the military. Whereas Menashe represents an orientation toward tightening civilian (and female? ) supervision of the army, Daniel stands for a growing militarization of civil society. Whereas she embodies a skeptical approach to the army's performance, he views the army as the central instrument for ensuring that Israel will achieve its goals. On the surface, this is another case of conflicting tendencies developing in parallel in Israeli society, perhaps reflecting societal polarization and the implosion of the "melting pot" concept. That is a logical explanation - simple; but also simplistic.

Yagil Levy, a professor at the Open University, propounds a lucid theoretical framework that explains Menashe and Daniel not as contrasting phenomena but as embodying mutually complementary processes. He puts forward one thesis, under which he subsumes dozens of processes and hundreds of phenomena relating to the complex relations between the army, on the one hand, and civil society and government in Israel, on the other - which at first glance appear to be contrasting, perhaps even on a collision course. From the viewpoint of the sociological study of the military in Israel, this is a meta-theory, a kind of sociological-political version of the "theory of everything" for which physicists have been searching for many years: a single formula that will explain all the physical forces known to science. The book is a tremendous achievement and its readers can look forward to a riveting experience of proceeding from one insight to the next, until a wholeness emerges that imposes order on a seemingly chaotic social universe.

Balance between scales

Levy's central hypothesis is that army-politics relations in Israel derive from a balance between the scale of civil supervision over the army - that is, over the army as an organization, over its administration, including who controls it and who has the power to send it into action; and the scale of civil supervision of militarism, meaning the mechanisms of legitimizing the use of force in international relations. Levy's cogent argument is that in recent years, while civil supervision of the army has intensified, supervision of militarism has grown more lax, and that this is how the balance in the army-politics parallelogram of forces is being preserved. The freedom that was appropriated from the generals as a direct result of greater supervision over the army is returned to them in the form of the militarization of Israeli society, the heightened legitimization of the use of force as a means to solve the country's problems and, consequently, a more central role for the generals in policy making.

in full: http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/a-critical-look-at-israeli-militarism-1.371978