Israel’s conscripts present a real barrier to peace

With news of budget cuts in the IDF, Orlando Crowcroft examines the role played by the conscription of young Israelis.

With all that has been happening in Israel in the past few weeks, it would have been easy to miss a small item in the local media about the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) claiming it was coming very close to running out of cash.

The claims by an unnamed official to the Times of Israel that the IDF needed billions of dollars in order to keep afloat comes at a difficult time for the Israeli military. The IDF has already seen its budget slashed and has laid off some 1,000 people, with further cuts likely to lead to more jobs lost before the year is out.

It is often said that the IDF is sacred in Israeli politics, but in recent years voices on both the left and the right have called into question the system of voluntary conscription that sees all Israelis serve three years minimum in the military.

Conscription is hugely expensive, with the IDF having to train and feed hundreds of teenage recruits every year. Many people have argued that Israel would be better served having a professional army and doing away with conscription or, like Denmark, training conscripts in civil defence rather than in combat.

But the financial burden is not the most compelling reason for taking a long, hard look at the need for conscription in Israel in 2014 – it is the effect that military service is having on the attitudes of a generation of young Israelis.

Strike up a conversation with most Israelis over the age of 25 and the subject of conscription can’t help but come up. Most often, it is when talking peace, and what is holding back a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

“How can I make peace with someone who wants me dead?” is a common refrain among young Israelis who have served either in Israel’s recent foreign wars in Lebanon or in the regular assaults on the Gaza Strip. Equally, it is an attitude held by those young men and women who have served on the checkpoints and barricades in Hebron or outside Nablus and Ramallah.

It is the system of conscription that fosters this attitude. Take an 18-year-old fresh from school, give him a gun and send him into Hebron and it is unlikely he will come away with a sense of compromise that is so essential for peace. Rather, faced with hostility and, sometimes, violence, ex-soldiers leave the army convinced that peace with Palestinians is little more than a pipe dream.

The reality is, of course, that most Palestinians in the West Bank do not want to kill Israeli soldiers, and are just sick of the continuing political quagmire.

Palestinians want an end to the occupation, of course, but they don’t want a return to violence any more than a 22-year-old high school graduate manning a checkpoint in the middle of the West Bank does.

As it stands, most of the exposure that young Israelis have to Palestinians is as heavily armed soldiers patrolling occupied Palestinian territory. In light of that, how could they not finish their military service with a siege mentality that only plays into the hands of politicians?

Conscription serves one major purpose in Israel – it ensures a compliant population that is unlikely to speak out against the actions of its government. A government that has demonstrated time and again that it would prefer the continuing stalemate to any real effort at securing peace.

There was a time when conscription in Israel may have seemed inevitable, with hostile neighbours in the form of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. But the Middle East is not the same as it was in 1967, 1973, or indeed 2004. The argument that there are Arab armies waiting to overrun Israel is not a plausible one, and the last serious flare up in violence in the West Bank – the second intifada – ended almost a decade ago.

The recent case of David Adamov, the Israeli soldier filmed pointing a loaded gun at Palestinian children in Hebron, is a case in point. While his actions were indefensible, it could be argued that young conscripts have no place in volatile cities such as Hebron. The inexperience and youth of many IDF soldiers in the West Bank only intensifies the anger and animosity between Israelis and Palestinians.

If true and lasting peace is going to come to Israel and Palestine – if two states really are to live alongside one another – the end of the occupation of the West Bank is only the first step. The second will be changing hearts and minds in order to make neighbours out of enemies. It will require the ending of the us against them, siege mentality that has been used and manipulated by right-wing Israeli politicians for decades.

Military service, and the attitudes that it embeds in young Israelis during the most formative years of their lives, is one of the biggest obstacles to that.

Orlando Crowcroft is a freelance journalist based in Jerusalem

On Twitter: @ocrowcroft