For God and Country? Religious Student-Soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces

Abstract

While Elisheva Rosman-Stollman’s study of the experiences of religious soldiers focuses in the main on Orthodox Jews (or Religious Zionism) in the Israeli armed forces, it also provides comparative examinations of other armed forces such as those of the US, India, Turkey and Iran, even if these other case studies are covered rather briefly. In all of these examples, the book under review stresses the tension between the military, the state, and religion – between some soldiers’ religious loyalties and the total demand of the military for citizen soldiers’ unquestioning obedience. The loyalty of religious Israeli soldiers during the 2005 disengagement from Gaza when Jewish settlers had to be removed obviously piqued Rosman-Stollman’s interest: why was there not more dissent from Orthodox Jewish soldiers? Her thesis is that Jewish religious pre-service and service programmes designed to help religious soldiers – schemes such as Hesder Yeshivot, Shiluv, Mekhinot and Gar’inim – worked as ‘mediating’ institutions in Israel against the ‘greedy’ institution of the military, creating a relatively functional military, and one tempered by civil society, creating on the way a symbiotic relationship between the two.