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07/06/2009: "Nationalist religious Jews see military service as a "holy war""

His fears are not as far-fetched as they may appear to those who still view the IDF as a broadly secular state institution. During Operation Cast Lead, soldiers were issued with pamphlets from IDF chaplains that attempted to paint the conflict as no less than a holy war being waged on behalf of world Jewry. A friend of mine who was deployed to the Gaza border showed me one such leaflet, in which troops were told they were "fighting a war for the Jewish people", rather than on behalf of all Israel's citizens.

"I thought 'what would a Bedouin soldier make of such statements?'," he said. "The Bedouin soldier would be there to stop rockets falling [on his homeland], not to fight God's war." The jihadist bent of such propaganda is another sign of the "army's shift to the right", he explained. Statistics bear out his assertion, with 20% of officers hailing from national religious backgrounds, proportionally much higher than the make-up of the general population.

While most ultra-orthodox Israelis still refuse to send their children to the army, those from the national religious camp have no problem with their offspring serving the state in such a fashion; in fact, such a display of commitment to the country is endemic to the nationalist element of their communal politics.

[ This is comparable to how it would be if western armies were full of adherents of the Creativity Movement. ]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/06/israel-army-religion

Replies: 1 Comment

on Monday, July 6th, Ninety Nine said

It goes back to the whole liberal argument of "we're all just people!" Well, I, for one, want to be MORE than something so lame and generic! What the hell is the point of Israel, an ostensibly Jewish state, if not a country for the Jews, with whoever else there as guests, contingent upon the approval of the Jewish government. Same thing with any of the White countries. Now, "Germany for Germans" is seen as the most evil thing you can say there.

And I'm sure that if Israel was the Bedouin-ish state, the Muslim Bedouins would probably consider the war the same way.

Who needs limp-dicked modern hand-wringing?