Israeli army is more divided than ever

If ever there has been a national institution that is revered in Israel and has the power to unite the country, at least its Jewish population, it is the Israeli army.
Nevertheless, no one and nothing is sacred in the eyes of the corruption case defendant, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his allies in their desperation to cling to power — and perhaps, for some of them, to ensure they avoid a jail sentence.
Not even the Israeli army can avoid the damage and destruction that government officials are inflicting on their own people, because to them, and particularly to Netanyahu, the end justifies the means, and this includes sowing the seeds of division among security forces in the middle of a war.
This is particularly disturbing in a country whose army comprises mostly conscripts and reservists who face unprecedented challenges and should therefore be prevented from becoming embroiled in divisive political squabbles.
Since Israel gained independence, the Israeli army has essentially been regarded not only as a defense force but also a great social equalizer, a melting pot of Israeli society where people of differing backgrounds and gender were united in the objective of defending their country. The practice of this has not always matched the theory but, despite the cracks that have shown through the years, the ethos has prevailed.
It is now under a severe threat, which manifests in at least two phenomena. The first is a moral deterioration, much of which is the result of nearly 57 years of occupation that increasingly has turned the Israeli army into a tool for oppressing the Palestinian people, and eroded the moral fabric of the military, from the rank and file all the way up to its commanders. It has also caused deep divisions between those who support the occupation and its repressive measures, and those who oppose it yet will not refuse to be part of it.
This moral erosion, accompanied by the deterioration of operational discipline, is even more evident in the way in which the war against Hamas is being conducted, and the behavior of some Israeli troops in Gaza since the conflict began.
The second development, which started before the Oct. 7 attacks and is once again gathering momentum, is the protest movement. It includes letters signed by thousands of retired, reservist, and volunteer soldiers and officers, including those in the highest ranks, who oppose the government’s policies but still stop just short of announcing they will refuse to serve.
An army whose soldiers no longer believe in its mission or trust the intentions of their politicians is in real danger of decline.
Certainly, an army with a backbone of conscripts, but particularly reservists, brings with it certain advantages in terms of motivation and a sharing of the burden of serving in defense of one’s country.

However, those who serve in this way bring with them widely differing opinions and attitudes, and even moral values, and at a time of deep crisis and prolonged war this surfaces in terms of readiness to serve and behavior during the conflict.
In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 it was apparent, though completely unjustifiable, that the anger among Israelis could only lead to a war in which military objectives were mixed up with the dark, primordial instincts for revenge. Furthermore, these feelings were directed not only against those who perpetrated that terrible massacre but against the entire Gazan population.
The country’s most senior politicians cultivated this permissive environment; for some of them it was a means to deflect attention from their own failure to defend Israel against the Hamas attack.

The murder of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers should have shaken Israeli society.

Yossi Mekelberg

In the past year-and-a-half there have been so many devastating cases of the killing of civilians in Gaza, including an estimated 15,000 children, and the killing and the maiming continues.
The apparent murder of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, including at least one UN employee, committed last month by an Israeli army unit, and the burial of their bodies in a mass grave should have shaken Israeli society and made it crystal clear what is taking place on its behalf. Newly released postmortem results reveal that several of those who were killed had close-range gunshot wounds to the head and chest, and their hands or legs were tied.
Even among the endless litany of atrocities this war has produced, this incident stands out, because the slain victims posed no risk, they were simply there to help the victims of war. Attempts to cover up the nature of the deaths by burying the victims and claiming that their convoy of ambulances had been moving without headlights or flashing emergency lights before coming under fire were proved false.
Such an act, carried out by soldiers in a brigade whose commander was once reported as saying that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” can no longer be viewed as a mere one-off aberration, but instead reflects something that runs much deeper in terms of discipline and morality.
At the other end of the spectrum in Israeli society there are those who had volunteered to serve in the military, many of them in elite units, including air force pilots, and who extended their service beyond the legal requirement. These Israelis had already, before Oct. 7, warned that they would not serve a government and a prime minister that was leading the country down the path of authoritarianism. Yet still, in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack they showed up for service and carried out the missions they were tasked with.
But a year-and-a-half later, they are, in increasing numbers, no longer showing up when called to serve. This might be for a number of reasons, including the toll it takes on their family and professional lives when they have to serve for hundreds of days at a time. But one of the reasons is because more and more of them no longer believe that the current Israeli government has the best interests of the country and its people at heart.
It is all-too apparent that the war is being continued simply to preserve the governing coalition and its prime minister, while abandoning the remaining 59 hostages to their fate. Letters to this effect from almost all branches of the military, and from former Mossad operatives as well, calling for prioritization of efforts to bring the hostages home over prolonging the war, are becoming a regular occurrence.
In an act of cynical folly, Netanyahu, instead of constructively engaging with those who criticize the way in which he is conducting the war, has dismissed them and hurled insults. He has accused them of being “a small, noisy, anarchistic and disconnected group of pensioners, a large group of whom have not served for years,” and claimed they were “encouraging our enemy to harm us.”
None of the letters suggested any refusal to answer the call to duty, but such claims serve the Netanyahu narrative of a prime minister standing against the elite, against the deep state, against the world to ensure Israel’s victory and survival.
In reality, Netanyahu is standing against his own people, against the hostages, and against ending the war, all in an attempt to ensure his own survival.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg