A new model ‘People’s Army’

At last the IDF may be about to get a new manpower model that really suits its needs.

The introduction of “differential service” will not undermine the “people’s army” in that all able-bodied Israelis will still be liable for conscription. But it will enable the IDF to grant early discharges to those soldiers it can do without, while retaining and rewarding financially the more highly-trained conscripts it needs to keep on.

The early release of relatively large numbers of recruits will be important not only for them, but for Israeli society as a whole – especially the economy to which they will be able to contribute that much earlier.

But there is still a long way to go. First, we need to reexamine existing special service tracks – for example, Nahal, the “Fighting Pioneer Youth,” which combines military service with work on agricultural settlements or in social welfare programs, and the yeshivot hesder, the religious Zionist seminaries whose students combine military service and Torah study.

As for Nahal, in my view, it is totally anachronistic and should be consigned with sincere thanks for its historic contribution to the IDF museum. This would be good news for reservists, because with more soldiers doing full service, they would be called up less.

The yeshivot hesder track, though, still has an important role to play. But the numbers must be drastically reduced, and those who remain should serve for several months more.

Make no mistake. I am in favor of the hesder model. But it needs radical change. Otherwise, it will destroy itself or lead to a kind of sacrilege. Indeed, if as religious Zionists we want to be honest with ourselves, and fair to the Haredim and, most of all, fair to the reservists, the necessary changes should come from the heads of the yeshivot themselves.

If, however, 1,400 and not 800 recruits were to enlist on the hesder track at every intake, the debate over lengthening their service could become redundant. Clearly, the manpower shortage in the conscript army can be ameliorated either by extending the duration of hesder service or by recruiting more hesder students; i n other words, by reducing the number of exemptions granted hesder students for fulltime Torah study.

It is an open secret in the religious Zionist movement that many hesder students, who profit from army exemptions, enter civilian life with psychometric and other diplomas gained not through Torah study, but study of subjects eons away from the yeshiva world.

Indeed, the accepted norms in the yeshivot hesder today are yet another expression of the way religious Zionism has adopted Haredi values and modes of conduct. If the state exempts so easily, why not exploit it to the hilt they say. Like the Haredim, they employ the “Torah is our vocation” principle, even when they know full well that several thousands of their exempted students are not devoting themselves full-time to Torah study. And like the Haredim, they register as many students as possible for their yeshivot even when they are clearly not people for whom the hesder track was created.

There are other problems too. Wholesale shortening of military service will create costs for the IDF in specific areas where there are shortages or where training is long and expensive, and the results only kick in later, for example technological units, intelligence and combat officers.

We should also bear in mind that we were well on the way to differential service and would probably already have been there were it not for the alarm bells set off by the 2006 Second Lebanon War. It revealed a shortfall in training and a need for more combat battalions.

In other words, geopolitical conditions in the Middle East could force us to change our plans once again.

But if we succeed, and in five years IDF conscripts begin to benefit from service shortened by four months, that could be just the beginning. We could go on shortening various forms of service until we are able to discharge some of our soldiers after just two years, rather than the current three. And that would really make a difference. 

Hatnua Knesset Member Maj.-Gen. (res.) Elazar Stern is a former head of manpower in the IDF.

A new model ‘People’s Army’

If we succeed, and in five years IDF conscripts begin to benefit from service shortened by four months, that could be just the beginning