The West Bank: Mission Critical

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By all accounts, the religious Zionists are brave, well disciplined and tough fighters. As kids, they also grew up seeing the menace of terror first hand; settlers were often targets of Palestinian snipers and bombers. But these settlers' sons bring their ideology with them into the army, and may prove resistant to any future withdrawal of settlers. They believe that Israel should not cede a single stone of Biblical land to the Palestinians.

Without the army, the Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory could not exist. The IDF guards the roads leading to the settlements. The senior army commanders consult on a weekly basis with the settlers' council on possible security risks coming from Palestinian militants. In Hebron, where over 500 troops protect the city's settler families, the boundaries between soldier and settler are even more blurred than elsewhere. Six settler families actually live inside a Hebron army outpost, and their illegal presence is tolerated. Officers routinely arrange for a settler to lecture troops on the significance of Hebron to Jewish history, advocating a large influx of more settlers.

Often, senior officers excuse soldiers if they object to evicting settlers, assigning them instead to, say, sentry duty. One Lieut. Colonel recalls that during the Gaza eviction he had a mid-ranking officer whose family was among those being moved out. "I let him go back and help his family," he says. Many religious Zionist soldiers were never disciplined when they called in sick during the February 2006 operation to remove nine families from a bleak hilltop known as Amona.

The profile of the Israeli army is changing. Increasingly, today's soldier wears a yarmulke, the skullcap of the religious conservative. In the past, a majority of Israel's fighting officers came from agricultural communes, known as kibbutzim, and from villages. Over the past 15 years or so, kibbutz members have traded socialism for the materialistic individualism so prevalent in Israeli society. Nowadays, dynamic Israeli youngsters want to cash in on the country's high-tech boom and not spend their lives in uniform. The pool of potential recruits is also shrinking for other reasons: 11% of the nation's men are ultra-orthodox and excused from military service, 4% of draft-age Israelis have moved abroad, 5% are rejected for physical reasons and an estimated 5% dodge military service, according to Stuart Cohen, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University. In addition, about 18% of Israeli men drop out before finishing their three-year duty.

This manpower shortage led Defense Minister Ehud Barak to complain recently that the IDF was no longer "the army of the people but of half the people." That leaves new Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, along with religious Zionists, to fill the ranks. Meanwhile, to ensure that the IDF remains a melting pot, some generals say that special units, comprised of religious Zionists who spend two-thirds of their time in religious studies, should be more integrated into the regular army.

Support for Olmert's plans to remove settlers has ebbed. So far, his government has failed to find homes and jobs for many of the 8,500 embittered settlers evicted from Gaza in 2005. Nor has the handover of Gaza to Palestinians brought any calm: Palestinian militants continue to shower southern Israel with erratic homemade rockets fired from Gaza. Olmert must first win back popular support for his disengagement plans before he can bring the military on board.

Given the Israelis' displeasure with Olmert's policy of disengagement from the Palestinian territories, it was not surprising that a poll taken by Ha'aretz after the Hebron skirmish found that 32% of Israelis think the refuseniks were justified in disobeying orders. For Olmert the answer is thus not just a simple equation of troops versus settlers. He must also factor in the rising numbers within the army ranks who are in no mood to evict fellow Jews from Arab territories and the sizable portion of the public that supports that sentiment. Any way you look at it, it adds up to a daunting political dilemma.