How Long Will We Go On Militarizing the Civil Sphere?: A Response to the Panel Discussion on Israel's Women Soldiers

The panel discussion held at the Schechter Institute on "The Experiences of Israel's Women Soldiers over the Generations" presents perspectives on military service by women who have served in Israel's defense forces (including the pre-state Palmach) in various periods and frameworks. For the purpose of analysis, I would like to invoke two opposing approaches that have accompanied feminist discourse from the outset of modernity. The first, "republican" approach, drawing upon the republican ethos, constructs military service as an expression of good citizenship, by which those who serve acquire the right to participate in determining the "common good." Its proponents might thus incline toward the belief that serving in the military is a necessary condition for women to gain a civil status equaling that of men; that is, women must fulfill identical obligations to those fulfilled by men if they are to be entitled to the same rights. The "alternative" approach, by contrast, utterly rejects this linking of military service to women's civil status. Its basic presumption is that the army is an inherently masculine organization that represses women and femininity and impugns the values represented and cherished by women.¹ As Orna Sasson-Levy has emphasized,² the army, seen from this perspective, replicates and enhances gender inequality by posing military masculinity as a universal, normative paradigm. Proponents of this approach might therefore incline toward the belief that women must aspire to detach themselves from the military and everything it stands for.

In the following brief assessment, I shall analyze the panel discussion on the basis of the two approaches presented above. I hope, by means of this dual, dialectic reading, to elucidate the varied feminist implications of the discussion. Thereafter, I shall suggest a synthesis of the two approaches as a basis for an operative feminist position in twenty-first century Israel. I shall argue that in the contradictory reality in which we live, a dialectical conjunction of two opposing schools of thought may contribute to the coalescence of a feminist plan of action for influencing how we define our collective situation.

Women's Military Service: A Republican Approach

The panel discussion unmistakably displays the classic parameters of the republican feminist approach. To cite the categories enunciated by Bat-Sheva Margalit Stern in her opening words to the panel, the discussion focuses on the motivations, experiences and personal conclusions that, in the eyes of the participants, made their military service indispensable to the achievement of civil equality. In Israel today, as in the immediate pre-state period, participating in the defense of the nation is conceived as a prerequisite to advancing the status of women. This attitude may be heard most clearly in the words of the representative of the Palmach generation, but it is also evident in the statements of the other participants, who are more representative of the women serving in the IDF today. The panelists, each in her own way, describe an active demonstration of that "good citizenship" that entitles them, in accordance with republican convention, to membership by right in the national collective. The voicing of republican claims of this kind by women coming from what were once considered peripheral areas of Israeli society, such as development towns or the religious Zionist sector, sheds a gendered light on the transformation undergone by the IDF in relation to its social composition and indicates a strengthening of the republican ethos within Jewish society in Israel.³

It is interesting to note that the questions taken from the audience stay within the bounds of this normative discursive space. They relate to the more egalitarian integration of women into the army or to feminist issues that have become legitimate within the discourse of the military, such as that of sexual harassment.⁴ We may thus conclude that the approach that comes to expression here is the classic historical approach characterizing the discourse on women in the army in Israel, as well summed up by Yifat Sela in her presentation of Alumah, the organization she heads: sherut: .ovah...