The military is threatened by apathy, progress and a shortage of bogeymen, says igal sarna
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At the start of this winter I interviewed a number of Israeli teenagers - boys and girls - for an investigative report for my newspaper. One of them, my son, is due to be conscripted into the army in seven months' time.
Currently he is working at a pizzeria called Tomato because there has been a secondary school teachers' strike for a month and a half now. He is also playing bass guitar in a rock group called Trademark and he is reading the latest Harry Potter with an eagerness that he shows for no other book.
"I'd like," he said to me, "to keep on living this way. To work with dough, to play music, to launch a record and to go to Berlin with my friends in the spring." What he does not want is to go back to school for the matriculation exams, nor be conscripted.
He is not the only one. Many of those with whom I spoke, young Israelis awaiting their |
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The Israeli army has lost much of its charm and now it has also lost its Satan, Iran |
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compulsory military service, saw the army as a barrier in their path to fulfilling their personal aspirations and realising their fantasies.
The military ethos is waning and the army is constantly warning of increasing draft evasion. The military challenge is being replaced by the internet with the wealth of possibilities it embodies, lead by high-tech, which for a generation now has captured the hearts of young Israelis. As a result, the country has become one of the most advanced technological research laboratories in the world.
The army remains as the challenge of new immigrants, young people from the weaker social strata and religious youth, whose aim is that when the day comes for the decree that their families' settlements in the West Bank must withdraw to the territories of the Israel of 1967, prior to the Six Day War, they will have a strong enough foothold in the army to prevent this move.
The Israeli army has lost much of its charm and now, it seems, it has also lost its Satan. The American National Intelligence  |
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