ABSTRACT
Considerable attention, both academic and popular, has been lav ished on what Horowitz and Lissak designated the “religious-secu lar cleavage” in Israeli public life and-more specifically-on the relations between national religious Jewry and other segments of Israeli society (Horowitz and Lissak 1989). Nevertheless, the avail able literature for long virtually ignored the possibility that the ten sion which religion engenders in Israel might spill over into the military domain. In part, that neglect was justified by the overarching consensus on national security affairs which generally pervaded all sectors of Zionist Israeli society, religious and secular alike, and which seemed to ensure the IDF’s immunization to the sort of ideo logical rifts which otherwise characterize so much of Israeli public life. More specifically, it reflected a perception that there was noth ing particularly distinctive about the military service patterns of conscripts drawn from what is termed the “national religious” seg ment of Israel’s Jewish population.1
