Materialist Militarism
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Written by Yagil Levy
Yagil Levy teaches political science at the Open University and is a visiting lecturer at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His books include Trial and Error, Israel’s Route from War to De-Escalation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) and A Different Army for Israel: Materialistic Militarism in Israel (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth, 2003; in Hebrew).
This article was originally published in News from Within, Vol. XXII, No. 6, July 2006.
For a long time, it seemed that the Israeli military had lost its political influence. It appeared Israel was beginning to exhibit openness to political options rather than military ones, a process that reached its peak with the Oslo agreements. Since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in 2001, however, this process has halted. There has been a significant return in the influence of the military in managing the Palestinian front for the Israeli state.
For those who identify the state of Israel as a “fortress society,” the status of the military is a natural outcome of the situation. On the other hand, those observers and researchers who are worried about the omnipotence of the military focus on its decisive importance in politics: the cooperation of the organization in national decision-making processes, the mobility of retired officers into positions of governmental power, the institutional monopoly of the military in the strategic assessment of national security, etc. Those who adopt this approach fail to consider that the military cannot take positions of power without the civilian elites allowing it to do so. In fact, because the Israeli military conducts itself according to clear-cut formal boundaries of subordination to political authority, we must explore the non-formal political mechanisms that allow the military to garner such a dominant position in Israeli society and to maintain it over time.
Thus, it is not possible to understand the status of the military without understanding its role in establishing and strengthening the social order in Israel. Without entering into a detailed historical structural discussion, the point of origin is the establishment of the state in 1948 and the formation of an unequal ethnic- and class-based society, whose foundations were already laid during the pre-state period. Alongside the peripheralization of the Palestinian citizens of Israel through military means, the state granted preeminence to the secular Western (“Ashkenazi”) social group, and determined the peripheral social status of Mizrahi immigrants (who originally hailed from the Muslim world). This was done via a policy of settling immigrants in outlying areas of the country, unequal allocation of lands, formation of a differential employment structure, a weak infrastructure of social services, and state patronage of an ideology that legitimated unequal relations of power.
The manner in which Mizrahi Jews were absorbed spurred the economic development of the Ashkenazi middle class. This class structure has remained, to a large extent, throughout the years of the state. The essential change is the game of “musical chairs” for filling the rungs of the lower classes: a limited mobility of some Mizrahim to the middle class has created a vacuum in which less mobile immigrants from the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union), and Ethiopia, as well as migrant workers, have entered in the 1990s.
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