Land versus State: Israel and its Army after the Disengagement

In the summer of 2005 the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out one of its largest military campaigns in many years. Fifty thousand soldiers were sent to confront an adversary numbering ten thousand. But unlike the past, the adversary was not an external enemy. It was a section of the Israeli population. Only once before had an Israeli government ordered soldiers to bring Israeli citizens to heel. That was in 1951, three years after the establishment of the state, when the IDF broke a seamen's strike in the port of Haifa. The traumatic effect of this step on the young society was so profound that no subsequent government ventured to use the military in internal disputes among Jews. Never—until the summer of 2005.