My nephew will be called up some time in the next few weeks to begin his three-year stint in the Israeli army.
He is not my first nephew to reach draft age. My brother’s four oldest sons have all passed that age, but they are part of the ultra Orthodox community and do not consider army service part of their lot in life or duty. My eldest sister lives on a kibbutz and her four sons have all served in the army. But my kibbutz sister made aliya in 1982 and her sons (and daughter) were raised speaking Hebrew as their first language and though I love them dearly I cannot deny the existence of a language and culture barrier. My second sister made aliya in 1995 and lives in Ra’anana, a suburb of Tel Aviv that has a large English speaking community and so I am quite close to her family including the nephew who is about to be drafted.
I almost served in the army myself. I first arrived in Israel in February 1972 and studied in the occupied territories at the yeshiva in Gush Etzion. (renowned in this blog for its sewage.) Yeshivat Har Etzion was less than four years old at the time and had less than a dozen Americans and about 150 Israeli students. The Israelis split their time between their studies and their army service. They would serve in the army six months at a time for three different periods spread out over a four year period, with the rest of the time spent studying in the yeshiva.
The oldest students in the yeshiva had served as paratroopers, but the army decided to channel the younger students into the tank corps instead. This was quite a disappointment to those who had their hearts set on becoming members of the elitist paratroopers.
In October of 73, the Yom Kippur War broke out and six Gush Etzion students plus two alumni were among the 2,521 (or 2,800) Israelis killed during the 19 days of that war. Before the war my plans were to return to the US at the end of the school year, but the war influenced me to stay in Israel and join the four year army/yeshiva program. But my parents’ permission was needed to sign up and they vetoed the idea and thus in July of ’74 my first stay in Israel came to an end and I returned to college in the US of A.
My politics in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War were right wing particularly on the question of settling the West Bank. But three years later in the aftermath of Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the resulting Camp David accords I was supportive of the peace accords including the plans for autonomy for the West Bank and Gaza. Further I felt that negotiations with the PLO were inevitable and necessary, a point of view that was not mainstream at the time.
Last weekend I spent Shabbat at my sister’s and I couldn’t help but be discouraged by the right wing views expressed by my nephew. I tried to remind myself of the evolution of my own thinking: “I thought the same when I was his age,” I reassured myself. But in fact, I never got a chance to serve, whereas he will serve. Although there are those like Micha Kurz who become more dovish as a result of their service, there are many who instead become hardened.
And those are only the dangers to his soul and the danger he will present to others. What about the dangers to his life and limb? Do I trust the army and the prime minister to do the most for peace and to think things through before going to war? Hardly.
I am practically struck dumb when considering these dangers. So I am thrown onto my final line of defense: the Psalms (91:11) “For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.”
