Israeli Society and Its Defense Establishment

The Social and Political Impact of a Protracted Violent Conflict

Moshe Lissak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138992726
• eBook ISBN: 9781135171858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

First Published in 1984. In this volume, the reader will find seven papers which deal with a broad spectrum of issues not necessarily confined to civil-military relations in their more limited and narrow definition. One will also find reference to the broader issues of the social, economic and political impact of the protracted violent conflict on Israeli society. The volume focuses more on the consequence of the actual management of the war rather than on the decision-making process proper.

Making Conflict a Routine: Cumulative Effects of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Upon Israeli Society*

Baruch Kimmerling

Even those who tend to perceive war as a common and natural phenomenon,¹ whether implicitly or explicitly, accept that war and conflict are somewhat extraordinary,² primarily because (a) they usually demand extensive mobilization of human and material resources, tending to disrupt the routine social system and societal processes significantly and (b) the ultimate consequences of war or conflict for a society and its members may be far-reaching or even (in the case of defeat) fatal for the system – bringing about the collapse of the entire social order and heavy casualties and death among its members.

In the present case study, we must differentiate substantially between war and conflict. The former is defined as (a) all periods of active combat between Israel and one or more Arab states or (b) all times when a majority of Israel’s reserve forces are mobilized. All other periods – that is, those during which the Arab-Israeli war is dormant and Israel is not engaged in full scale military operations, yet at least one Arab state refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and carries on warfare by other means (e.g. economic, political or diplomatic measures) – are defined as a state of conflict for Israeli society.³ Thus the conflict situation includes warfare, although not all periods of conflict are necessarily accompanied by war. On the contrary, most of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not characterized by war, but rather by routine operation of the social system.

The term ‘routine’ was not selected coincidentally; rather, it is derived from the central hypothesis of this paper – that is, that the Israeli social system has undergone a process of adaptation to the external conflict through partial routinization. Routinization, in this respect, refers to the following:

(1) The development of a mentality which perceives the conflict as a permanent condition or destiny of society. Consider, for example, the words of Moshe Dayan, eulogizing a soldier in May 1956:

We are a generation of settlers; without a helmet or a gun we will be unable to plant a tree or build a house. Let us not fear to perceive the enmity which consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs around us. Let us not avert our gaze, lest it weaken our hand. This is the destiny of our generation. The only choice we have is to be armed, strong and resolute, else the sword will fall from our hands and the thread of our lives will be severed.⁴

(2) The creation of built-in social mechanisms and institutional arrangements for coping with conflict at maximum efficiency and minimum cost. This derives from the basic dilemma of the Israeli social system, as defined by Eliezer Schweid:

In order to exist we must mobilize all the forces of existence. But if all forces are to be mobilized for the defense of mere existence, then we can not exist. How can we deal with the struggle for life without the war destroying life and economically, socially and spiritually enslaving all creative activity to it … pioneering Zionism can be proud of the fact that it withstood this dilemma. It found ways of social and political organization which allowed for continued creativity and the continued existence of a meaningful and purposeful life in a situation demanding constant alertness.⁵

Social Interruption⁶

One of the major mechanisms for coping with conflict developed in the Israeli social system – one which contributed to its partial routinization – was the mental and institutional ability to interrupt the system. I posit that Israeli society is divided into two completely different yet substantially interconnected phases of activity: the first may be called ‘routine’ and the second ‘interrupted’. During the interruption phase, the main societal processes are suspended and a moratorium is declared upon the many and varied major – and sometimes conflicting – goals and interests which characterize a modern and diversified Western social system. The system’s institutional arrangements are reorganized to focus upon implementation of a predominant goal, together with a complementary goal. The predominant societal goal is to ensure the very existence of the society in question from a perceived actual or potential threat. This may be achieved only through optimal mobilization of virtually all available human and material resources of the system, which occurs if and when Israel calls up its reserves (about half a million men and women) – a substantial part of its manpower – and transfers to the disposition of the armed forces almost the entire civilian transportation complement, heavy trucks and a considerable number of buses, most of the hospital beds, etc. In this respect, the feasibility of swift achievement is a primary importance: Israel can mobilize its entire military capacity within approximately 72 hours. This has not only military but also far reaching social consequences, one of which is obligatory compartmentalization between routine life and social processes at the phase when society as a whole must cope with the conflict. This, however, does not mean that the conflict cannot be a salient issue in collective consciousness – i.e. domestic politics and resource allocation – even during the routine phase of societal organization, at which time the issue of conflict constitutes but one societal goal among many other competing goals.

When interruption occurs, coping with the conflict becomes the predominant societal goal. However, as mentioned above, there is an additional complementary goal, an integral part of the notion of social interruption, namely maintenance of the system in a condition enabling expedient reversion to the pre-interruption state of affairs once the predominant goal is attained. From this point of view, the term ‘social interruption’ is utterly antithetical to the notion of social change. The system will not be different in any way following – or because of – the interruption, at least in the short run.

Another important characteristic of interruption is its temporary nature: the entire process of mobilization of society – military and civilian alike – is accomplished under an assumption of tentativeness. Although there are other socio-political systems which mobilize a considerable percentage of their population in the name of ‘lofty ideals’ (such as social revolution or national renaissance), none of them conform to our overall definition of ‘interrupted’ as such mobilization is an integral part of routine activities and the ‘rules of the game’, even if it is to be terminated in a utopian future. Historically speaking, other systems which approximated the Israeli interrupted system pattern were those of the Soviet Union and Great Britain during World War II. In a more limited sense, certain societies struck by catastrophe acted as interrupted systems.

A further significant feature of this phenomenon is that war itself is not identical to social interruption: the system could be interrupted without being involved in an actual war (as in Israel during late May and early June 1967) and could be involved in war without being interrupted (as in 1965 and 1982).

There are some preconditions to maintaining the system in a condition enabling its reversion to routine immediately after a threat is perceived to have passed. On the macro-societal level, the society must be able to allocate certain resources to the complementary goal, even if they are demanded for fulfillment of the predominant one. This would include, for example, not drafting key personnel whose absence would cause institutional bottlenecks, such as public transportion (bus and truck) drivers, industrial experts and service workers who cannot be replaced. Readiness for such allocation of resources is by no means a foregone conclusion: rather, it is the subject of constant struggle between advocates of the respective goals within the society in question. A further precondition for ‘successful interruption’ is maintenance of a minimal amount of ‘normal’ social role playing.

On the other hand, there are three contradictory types of demands exerted by the interrupted system upon the home front:

(a)	Postponement of most expectations from society;
(b)	Fulfillment of routine social roles insofar as institutional constraints permit;
(c)	Fulfillment of new roles; replacing people occupied with implementation of the predominant societal goal (i.e. those drafted into military service) who hold key positions when the system functions normally.^7 A dramatic example arose during the 1973 war; women learned to drive buses and fulfilled drivers’ roles in public transportation. Other demands imposed upon these actors are to fulfill or even initiate new roles which derive from social interruption. For example, several groups instituted voluntary psychological counseling to help people cope with war.

The most central institutionalized body created to cope with the material aspects of social interruption was the so-called Emergency Economy (EE). The EE is now an elaborate organization with a small permanent headquarters and staff, functioning even during routine periods, just like the military reserves. Its task is to prepare society for long periods of shortages in basic consumer goods, primarily food and fuel, as well as to regulate and control distribution of essential needs to the civilian population during time of emergency. When an interruption commences, the EE is supposed to subsume the entire system: the entire public bureaucracy (both central and municipal) automatically becomes an integral part of the EE. The assumption is that everyone within the bureaucratic network (who is not drafted) must know how to transform and adapt his job to the altered needs of the interrupted society. This is the ‘philosophy’ of the EE; in practice, however, affairs are conducted in a far more cumbersome and inefficient manner. The most important factor is apparently the system’s awareness of these needs and its attempts to fulfill them.

While every state develops some kind of wartime institutional arrangements and social adjustments, there is some justification in considering Israeli patterns as unique, in light of their aforementioned dual nature (that is, capability of rapid transition and strong orientation towards temporariness of the interrupted system). Our main assumption in this respect is that this rapid societal reorganizational ability – affecting both the military and civilian sectors – together with an orientation towards temporariness – are the major (although not the only) factors which enable routinization of the conflict. The capacity for rapid reorganization avoids permanent military and civilian mobilization, while the orientation towards temporariness ensures that even when the system is mobilized, there are built-in ‘antibodies’ which prevent institutionalization of social mobilization. Nevertheless, routinization of the conflict is only partial, as perception of ‘business as usual’ is valid only in cases of non-active warfare or in a non-interrupted situation. War and interruption are still perceived as extraordinary.

Individual Risks and Common Danger

In any war – be it major or minor – there are casualties: the wounded and dead. From the time that the relationship between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine turned into one of a political conflict – at first one between two nationalist movements, and later between the Arab states and the state of Israel – there were constantly casualties on both sides.⁸ In this paper, we will only deal with the period beginning with the war of 1947–8, which included the achievement of Jewish sovereignty over part of the territory of Palestine, and we will only...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Paradoxes of Israeli Civil–Military Relations: An Introduction
• Making Conflict a Routine: Cumulative Effects of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Upon Israeli Society
• Party–Military Relations in a Pluralist System
• The Six-Day War, Israel 1967: Decisions, Coalitions, Consequences: A Sociological View
• Israel’s War in Lebanon: New Patterns of Strategic Thinking and Civilian–Military Relations
• The Military–Industrial Complex: The Israeli Case
• New Immigrants as a Special Group in the Israeli Armed Forces
• Selected Bibliography