ABSTRACT
From its inception, the Nahal Corps – ‘Nahal’ is the Hebrew acronym for Pioneering Fighting Youth (Noar Halutzi Lohem)– was designated as an army unit that would combine military service with preparation for agricultural settlement and train its draftees for a life marked by volunteer activity. In retrospect, its birth was riveted in hard reality, in the dire shortage of combatant manpower during the first weeks of the State. In a diary notation dated 16 May 1948, BenGurion wrote: ‘People must be taken from the agricultural settlements.’ Within a week, with the clear knowledge that this could severely harm morale, the productive capacity of the economy and the population’s food supply (the very reasons that people from these sectors had not been not mobilized up to this time), he ordered the army to induct new immigrants and industrial workers.1 When that proved insufficient, a Government session of 6 June 1948 decided to turn to an additional source: it ordered the mobilization of 17-year-olds, those born in 1931, with instructions to give them army training for two months and prepare them as reserve forces. At this same session, the Government decided that enlisting them for the military campaign would only be done on the basis of a special Government decision.2
