Every few days, a senior IDF officer is dispatched to alarm Israelis: the army is short 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 combat soldiers. The analyst of the moment fires off the number of the moment into the microphone of the moment, while the panel around him, all certified patriots, cries out in anguish. “An entire division,” our commentator says in a broken voice. “A division and a half.”
I have been hearing these numbers from senior officers since the war began. I do not understand you, I told one of them. How can a sensible officer like you lend a hand to this whiny campaign?
"What do you mean?" he asked. First, I said, you know that as long as the ultra-Orthodox parties control the coalition and the rabbis control the parties, the ultra-Orthodox will not enlist. The struggle over conscription is political, ideological, social and economic. It is a purely civilian battle.
The debates in the Knesset revolve around fateful questions: who in Israel is more religious and who less so, what obligation an ultra-Orthodox Jew has to the Jewish state, what connection the ultra-Orthodox community has to a state that supports it financially.
On the practical level, the Bismuth level — named for Likud lawmaker Boaz Bismuth and shorthand for political maneuvering — the challenge is how to legitimize mass draft evasion without losing voters or collapsing the coalition; which bluff will work and which will not. The IDF has nothing to contribute here. The officer sitting there in uniform is a mistake.
Second, I said, the army is not trying hard enough to find manpower in more promising places. Let us start with the obvious: reduce draft evasion enabled by military mental health officers; get rid of civilian responsibilities the army has taken upon itself, including Army Radio; shrink rear units; expand outsourcing. Move on to shortened service, granted as a political payoff in hesder yeshivas, which combine religious study and military service; to non-Jewish youth, in Arab society, among migrant workers, in the Bedouin community, Bedouins in the north enlist, those in the south less so.
And where are your daughters?
Most of all: women soldiers. The ease with which the army waives young women who seek exemptions on false claims of religious observance is intolerable. More than that: to this day, I have not heard a single public figure turn to religious Zionist society and ask, where are your daughters? We praise your enlistment daily, mourn your fallen, embrace your wounded — well done. But why is there not a single religious fighter, a single religious politician, let alone a rabbi, who says: maybe it is time to cancel the exemption for our daughters. Naftali Bennett, for example? Even religious young women are tired of the exemption. The best of them choose to enlist.
The ease with which the army waives young women who seek exemptions on false claims of religious observance is intolerable. To this day, I have not heard a single public figure turn to religious Zionist society and ask, where are your daughters?
But what will the hardline religious cadets at the officers’ training school say — graduates of the Eli pre-military academy — the officer shot back. They are not willing to be taught weapons by a female instructor; they are not willing to listen to a female singer.
If you cannot overcome a few brainwashed youths from the Eli circle, I asked, how will you overcome ultra-Orthodox autonomy?
Third, I said — and this is the main point — the army must internalize that manpower is a limited resource. If there is a shortage of personnel, you reduce missions. During the war, a kind of Israeli bluff developed in the reserves. Soldiers called up for duty told their commanders they could not go on like this — the family was falling apart, the business was closing, the employer was firing them. With no choice, commanders rotated them informally: one week on, one week off. They were paid for the entire period at a high rate, as required by law under emergency call-up orders. This arrangement cost the state a great deal of money. In my view, the money was justified — if anyone deserves it, they did — but it was corrupt, and corruption is a contagious disease.
In the meantime, the war ended, more or less. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted more. Among other things, he wanted to conquer Gaza City, down to the last Gazan. IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir rightly said: enough. The mission does not justify the price. In that battle, he won.
Nahum BarneaPhoto: Avigail UziOne more step was required: to make clear to the political leadership, and perhaps also to the public, the limits of force — a shortage of soldiers has a cost. Instead of wailing about absent soldiers, the army must adapt to what it has. This week, the IDF announced that, due to the shortage of combat troops, it will cut back training in regular brigades. If anyone in the army thought this threat would frighten the prime minister and his Cabinet, they were wrong. Netanyahu leaves tedious matters like manpower, cost-benefit analysis, budgets and operational readiness to others. He is too big to deal with such small details. The price of reduced training will become apparent later.
Rain will fall today, cold and wet. Snow is expected in the Golan Heights. On days like these, I hum to myself, like many others, Arik Einstein’s song “And how miserable the soldiers are.” The soldiers will cope with the rain. They are not miserable. But their numbers are limited. That is reality. Those who refuse to acknowledge it are burying their heads in the sand. Worse than that, they are burying their heads in the Knesset.