Cohen's book examines trends leading up to current transformations of Israeli civil-military and societal-military relations. While Cohen does not set out to detail the errors made during the second Lebanon War of 2006, his analysis does explain the underlying military-bureaucratic causes. The general tone of the book is that while Israel's society is undergoing unprecedented changes, particularly in the assertiveness of the religiously observant segment of the population, this has not yet had a debilitating impact on the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) as a people's army.
In chapter 2 Cohen examines the legacy of Israel's medieval culture of non-militarism, how spiritual explanations of Jewish history were refashioned, and how these contributed to David Ben-Gurion's essentially pragmatic creation of Israel's three-part people's army, consisting of the professional core, the conscripts and the reservists. Chapter 2 also treats the transformation of threats to Israel from “basic” (or conventional) to “current” (counterinsurgency), and how these stresses have produced a compromised transformation.
This reviewer found the new societal setting discussed in chapter 3 comprehensive. It surveys, on the one hand, the liberalization of the Israeli military produced by employment competition, the influence of parental, gender and homosexual rights, watchdogs groups, and the media and its implications for divisive issues such as service in the occupied territories. A complement to threat issues in chapter 2 is chapter 5's detailed examination of the resulting doctrinal and organizational changes in the IDF. The most important of these is the impact of high technology on the bifurcation of the armies into professionals and conscripts, and the impact this has on a people's army such as Israel's. The practical effect of this has been a dramatic rise in selective conscription that has shifted about 70 per cent of the defense burden to 30 per cent of the eligible population.
A complement to chapter 3's focus on new social developments affecting the IDF is chapter 6, which uses a step-level framework to examine the full spectrum of how the IDF did and did not help integrate Israel society. Cohen is critical of the IDF's success in social integration when he should be much clearer that he is attacking the ideal type. In comparison to the armies of other states, the IDF has achieved much (though this reviewer has not read Ron Krebs cited by the author). This chapter has a lengthy discussion of the recruiting and deployment patterns of observant and non-observant Jews, and the consequent political effects. The religious fissure is often exaggerated, but it is nevertheless likely to have enormous implications in the future on Israel's ability to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians on the West Bank. This is the most detailed and thought-provoking narrative of the book. Chapter 7 is a historical survey of the religious and political evolution of rules of engagement in the IDF. The book's overall tone is that there have been dramatic changes in Israeli society, but that evidence of “willingness to serve” before the second Lebanon War in 2006 has shown that these changes have not undermined Israelis' commitment to serve in what is still widely viewed as a people's army.
This reviewer has three issues with the book. First, while it draws heavily on political science taxonomies of militarized states and societies (elaborated primarily in chapter 1 but raised throughout the book), the book is primarily a history (albeit an interesting one) with tangential thought-provoking insights for theory. Furthermore, Cohen accepts uncritically Israel's supposed chronic decision-making process, citing Zeev Maoz twice, as well as a number of other authors, on their view that Israel is hard-wired to seek military rather than diplomatic instruments to address challenges (thus producing the failures of the first and second Lebanon Wars, 1982 and 2006 respectively). He does not examine the alternative explanation that Israel has simply adapted to its local environment where there is little evidence of diplomatic opportunities for success. Consequently, like many historians of Israel's domestic political and social history, he does not differentiate between Israel's public perceptions of its military operations and actual performance. Whereas the popular history is that a weak Israel prevailed in 1948, 1967 was a divinely inspired victory and 1973 the result of hubris, the military histories argue that in 1948 Israel was the stronger, the magnitude of the 1967 victory was the result of Egypt's ill-advised retreat, and 1973 was Israel's finest example of military professionalism. So, while the first and second Lebanon Wars were perhaps poorly executed and achieved less than what was publicly expected, they were nevertheless battlefield victories. Consequently the rise in public criticism of the Israeli military is better explained by the volatile domestic debate in Israel than any objective measure of the IDF's performance.
Despite these issues, Cohen's book makes a valuable and fascinating examination of the social dimension of the civil-military relationship within Israel. Cohen's detailed grasp of the depth and breadth of the issues makes Israel and Its Army an important scholarly contribution.
