Israel and its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion

by Stuart A. Cohen

The Israel Defense Force (IDF) plays a key role in Israeli society, and has traditionally been perceived not only as the guardian of national survival, but also as a 'people's army' responsible for the custody of national values. This volume analyses the circumstances currently undermining these perceptions, and explores both the changes occurring in Israel’s military framework, and their potential implications. The book highlights the influence exerted by massive shifts in both Israel's external strategic landscape and in the country's domestic and cultural environments, which have compelled the IDF to undertake major programmes of structural reform, technological adaptation and doctrinal revision. This book argues that these changes have lead the public to subject the armed forces and their conduct to unprecedented critical scrutiny. The way in which Israelis and their army resolve these tensions is of crucial importance not only for Israel, but for the Middle East as a whole.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Stuart Cohen is a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, where he also chairs the academic council of BESA, the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He was born in London, England in 1946 and received all his degrees from Oxford University in England, where he specialized in modern diplomatic history. He has taught at Bar-Ilan since immigrating to Israel in 1972. Cohen’s areas of academic specialization include Jewish political theory and practice, diplomatic history; military history; and civil-military relations. He has published widely in each of these fields in Israel and abroad. His publications include: 1. The Formulation of British Policy towards Mesopotamia, 1903-1914 (Ithaca,1979) 2. English Zionists and British Jews: The Communal Politics of Anglo-Jewry (PUP: Princeton, 1982); 3. The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present (with. D.J. Elazar: Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1985). 4. The Three Crowns: Structures of Communal Government in Early Rabbinic Jewry (CUP: Cambridge, 1992); 5. Diplomatic History of the Twentieth Century (Hebrew), 3 vols. The Open University, Israel 1996-1997. 6. The Scroll or the Sword? Dilemmas of Religion and Military Service in Israel (Harwood Academic Press, London, 1997). 7. editor: Democratic Societies and their Armed Forces: Israel in Comparative Context (Frank Cass, London, 2000). 8. Editor (with Milton Shain), Israel: Culture, Religion and Society (University of Cape Town, 2004).