ABSTRACT
Rallying around the flag can serve as a metaphor for the creation of a national army, and successful state-building. These are projects with which the Palestinians should have been intimately involved. It has been suggested, at least until the recent past, that healthy levels of voluntarism and a high degree of consensus over collective objectives could facilitate statebuilding within a society. The building of an integrated army, whether professional or conscript, has been considered to be one of the key prerequisites for healthy state-building. The salience of the quest for national armies rose with the growth of post-independence ethnic conflict, the horrors of ethnic cleansing, failed states, and “new wars.” In short, the many situations in which the absence of a national army helped to facilitate these excesses coincided with receding historical memory of the wrath unleashed by the centralized armies of fascist and Nazi regimes. With the end of the Cold War and the relative geopolitical stability it provided, the normative attractiveness of possessing centralized and integrated armed forces is likely to continue to increase.
