Introduction

Although "security" is probably the most central issue pertaining to the lives of all Israeli citizens, usually it is dealt with through the use of "traditional" theoretical and analytical tools. Thus, the study of the various aspects of this issue tends to focus on the more formal facets of the relations between Israeli "civil" and "military/security" spheres.

In order to critically and systematically reexamine this major subject, in 2003 we established at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute an interdisciplinary Workshop on Israeli Security and Society under the provocative title "An Army who has a State?" Since its establishment, about thirty members of the Workshop, who include young and veteran scholars and practitioners with vast experience in both academic and practical matters pertaining to security in Israel, have participated in its various activities—studies, internal seminars, public discussions, and publications.

The overarching purpose of the Workshop was to establish a forum for critical in-depth discussions and innovative analyses of the questions pertaining to Israeli security, society, and politics, and to expose the general public, politicians, and professionals to the resultant new views and perspectives in this sphere.

The focus of the studies presented in the Workshop's meetings and the resultant discussions conducted by its members has been on the informal relations between Israel's security/military sector, on the one hand, and the civilian sector, on the other.

More specifically, the workshop has examined the concept of "security" in Israel, the various components of the country's security sector, the roles and influence of serving and retired security officials, and the impact of security policies on the state's political, social, economic, and cultural spheres.

This Special Issue of Israel Studies presents studies and findings discussed by the participants in the Workshop. This Special Issue brings together nine articles that offer new innovative and critical perspectives on the changing role of the politically and bureaucratically dominant security sector. This sector includes serving and retired officials and officers of Israeli Ministry of Defense, of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), of the secret services, of the police force, and of the military industries.

After nearly 60 years of sovereign statehood and the formal existence of the various organizations of Israel's security sector, the contributors to this Special Issue have felt that it is high time to reconsider the old analytical and normative notions of "what ought to be?" and focus instead on "what is there?" What has emerged from this inquiry is a very complex and fluid reality that is under constant change, but at the same time manifests certain continuity, such as in the continuous non-separation and overlapping of civilian and military realms.

In order to capture a significant part of this very complex reality in an interdisciplinary fashion, the contributors deal not only with the role of the security sector in politics, which has been the traditional focus of previous studies, but with some of the other issues of military-civilian relations in Israel: civil society, bureaucracy, economics, education, territory, and the media. Thus, the goal is not only to provide a broader and more nuanced understanding of this interface but also to suggest how it could be further explored both theoretically and empirically. Following are some of our suggestions in this respect.

Theoretically, we contend that "conventional—that is Western—civil-military relations theories are more or less inapplicable to the Israeli case. These may be valid theories, but they do not fully apply to the Israeli case, and possibly also to some other smaller democratic and democratizing states that face continuous real or imagined existential threats. Hence, there is a need to theorize more about the Israeli case and also to expand the scope of inquiry to include not only Western patterns of civil-military relations but such patterns in the non-Western world.

Empirically, we propose that studies on Israel's security sector should be expanded beyond the IDF and its relations with the civilian spheres. Among other things, some of the contributors to this Special Issue deal with areas in which the IDF is dominant but which are on the...