As the Plesner Committee seeks to hammer out the nation’s new draft law things are somewhat turbulent in the IDF as officials in the Manpower Branch are not in agreement regarding the induction of thousands of chareidim.
Some feel the obvious move it to expand on the already existing Nachal Chareidi while others feel the chareidim should be mainstreamed into the existing brigades. This would entail establishing platoons and/or companies within the existing military framework rather than establishing an exclusive chareidi brigade, a reality that viewed as unacceptable by many. At present, Nachal Chareidi, (officially Netzach Yehuda) is part of the Kfir Brigade.
The IDF is seeking to unify its ranks and to eliminate as many gaps in service as possible to facilitate addressing the needs of soldiers, their units and commanders alike. For example, a Nachal Chareidi soldier leaves the battlefield after two years. Hesder soldiers serve for 18 months, new immigrants may have other terms and regular combatants serve for three years. Commanders have expressed difficulties in scheduling and maintain a homogenous unit with soldiers constantly coming and going.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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6 Responses
If you integrate groups who can’t get along culturally, you lose unit cohesion. If you segregate a group under terms that imply inferiority (such as when the officers come from a different group) you at best have some very unhappy soldiers and at worst have created a recipe for a mutiny. So either way Israel gets a dysfunctional armed forces.
Anyone consider if Hamas has been slipping money to the hilonim to get them to weaken the Israeli military to a point where the Arabs might have a chance of winning militarily.
How about this kind of segregation: frum yidden to the yeshivos, goyim and RZs to the army, erev rav to the airport?
This sort of planning debates by the IDF shows its typical “management by crises” mentality. Such a short term view. If population trends continue the way they are going the religious community will eventualy make up the majority of the IDF’s ranks and the planning debate should be whether the Chilonim should be kept mainstream or segregated into their own units.
‘loyal jew’ your words are despicable. you should join your brethren in lebanon…
#3- If they were willing to accept that Israel would eventually become a Jewish state, and that hilonim would need to be “accomodated”, there wouldn’t be a problem. The whole problem arises from the desire of Israel’s ruling class to establish place where their sort of Jews can be free from the yoke of Torah. That Yiddishkeit didn’t die out 60 years, as planned, really upset them.
Akuperma — I’m sorry (not) to disappoint you. The IDF has almost no history of mutiny and dysfunction. For more than 60 years Israelis of all kinds have been serving in it and maintaining unit cohesion by consciously leaving their tribal beliefs and ways at home and remaining true to the goal of defending Eretz Yisrael. No one has difficulty in serving under officers who come from a “different group”; officers are drawn from the ranks on the basis of merit.