ABSTRACT

Israeli society has long been debating the possible shift from a mass army based on compulsory recruitment to a professional military. Shmuel Gordon started this debate in 1993 with the publication of an article in Ma’arachot (the IDF journal) that called for selective recruitment (Gordon 1993). Two years later, Cohen and Suleiman argued in the same journal (1995) that, given the significant changes in the nature of the geo-political threat, and faced with a lack of consensus surrounding the army’s activities, a professional army that was not subjected to social pressures from the right and left wings might be preferable. In his influential book, Ofer Shelach (2003) deploys a discourse of exhortation to call for the establishment of a professional army. Conversely, Yagil Levy staunchly opposes any such transformation, which he predicts will have negative social and political consequences (Levy 2007: especially 334–7). Most authors, including those who oppose the shift to a professional army, assert that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is no longer a people’s army in the classic sense, and that the transition to a professional military has already commenced (Cohen 2008; Gordon 1993; Levy 2007; Shelach 2003). As Stuart Cohen argues, the notion of a “people’s army” is still too highly regarded to countenance a shift to the Israeli military’s formal “professionalization.” Nevertheless, the debate over the IDF’s status is now part of the Israeli consciousness (Cohen 2008: 166, 171).