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I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that military service is mandatory for all, with a few exceptions.
The ultra religious communities are exempt, which has become increasingly unpopular over time.
Also, the head of Israel's domestic police force, Itmar Ben Givir was rejected for mandatory service in his teens because of his extremism.
Generally, though, leaders children serve.
That's a great insight into Israeli society.
The answer to your question is a resounding "yes".
In fact, among the 4 members of war cabinet, at least one other has children in active combat units, and ALL cabinet members served in a combat unit as well as had at least one child in active combat duty.
Most children of Israeli politicians are absolutely conscripted to the army, and the public would look very badly on a "fortunate son" type situation.
Furthermore, there's an unwritten rule the ultra-orthodox parties do not involve themselves or even voice an opinion on military matters because, and this something often said in Israel, "they don't risk their children's life in the army" (the ultra-orthodox are essentially exempt from conscription).
The Israeli Jewish public doesn't see the Israeli combatants as poor or uneducated "others", but as their children, brothers and fathers.
I think that's a more ethical way of looking at it. However, this also helps explain the seeming lack of consideration for Palestinian life. Take a random person and ask him to choose between risking the life of his kid, who is in active service, in a military operation or throwing bombs and risking harming other civilians. Most people will choose to risk others. And among those who'll choose to risk their kid, most would either be lying or didn't really think about the question.
The assumption that direct familial involvement would make people more peaceful or make them take more ethical decisions is flat out incorrect. If anything it will make them more ruthless and dehumanizing against the “other” and seek even faster ways of total annihilation rather than difficult nuanced and diplomatic peaceful solutions. The military mindset is a very rigid one, with only rights and wrongs, blind obedience, the only nuance allowed is tactical nuance, the only complexity allowed is logistic complexity. Morally and ethically it's always down to I'd rather the other die than me. The IDF once traded 1000 prisoners for 1 IDF soldier, what makes you think they will not kill 10000 children if it means it saves 1 soldier?
The IDF once traded 1000 prisoners for 1 IDF soldier, what makes you think they will not kill 10000 children if it means it saves 1 soldier?
Because... the moral considerations in both cases are completely different...? How is this even a question?
That's like saying "He once bought a car for $50,000, what makes you think he won't steal $500,000 if it meant getting a Tesla?"
I’m not familiar enough with this to answer your question. But I know for sure that Bibi’s brother, Yoni, was a war hero. He died in the line of duty. So it isn’t like they are completely disconnected from war.
And I think a ministers kid was killed in Gaza today.
That's what I was referencing. Not that I want to say Israel is blameless or the West Bank expansion shit isn't straight up evil colonialism shit, but its harder to write them off if they're putting their own children in harms way in the furtherance of what I would otherwise dismiss as plain geopolitical thieving.
Yeah, I mean just because they have something staked on the outcome doesn’t mean that the state of Israel isn’t an apartheid state. I don’t think any state is good, but separating citizens based on race or religion seems pretty fucking evil. And it is worse when you take an indigenous peoples land. As an American, I feel this deeply since we followed this same path dispossessing indigenous people while enslaving Africans. Not great… and I hope we start to rectify those evils sometime soon.
But jews lived next to non Jewish Arabs in Palestine for generations peacefully. And Jewish Arabs lived peacefully all over the Middle East. But the nekba changed those dynamics. Arab Jews are discriminated against in Israel and a lot have been ejected from their old Arab countries. The whole thing of boiling a person down to their ethnicity or religion just is not a great thing.
There needs to be a political settlement soon. Palestinians deserve better and Israelis deserve peace.
How do most Israelis feel about the West Bank or are they aware of it?
Is the West Bank the foundational issue/disagreement?
Every Israeli is aware of the West Bank (it's a huge chunk of land right at the center of the country, kinda hard not to be aware of it).
Almost nobody in Israel seriously considers "returning" the jewish parts of the WB, the are de-facto annexed.
I'd say Israelis are more concerned about Gaza than the WB.
Is that because Gaza is proving harder to annex and pacify than the WB?
Gaza was controlled and settled by Isrealis. In 2005 Israel, by mean of law and force, disengaged from the gaza strip unilaterally. In the process, relocated all the settlers. I don't think there's any will, national or political, to annex gaza, not realistically.
I will admit that I am not totally aware of the value of the land of the West Bank vs Gaza. But from what I've been reading and watching these few months on the history of the conflict, it seems that at some point the PLO stopped being violent after the second Infatada and Hamas took over Gaza and pushed them out to the West Bank. And ever since then the West Bank has been slowly carved up more and more by Jewish settlements, effectively making the Palestinian land in the WB never able to be contiguous, and thus making it impossible for there to be a Palestinian state to be formed there.
So if the WB land is valuable to the Israelis, I cannot see how Gaza wouldn't be even more valuable. As Gaza has access to the sea, and there's all the recently found offshore gas fields that would fall into Gaza's EEZ if it ever were to be recognized as the Palestinian state.
So I don't get why they'd disengage and leave Gaza alone when it's valuable land, but they will also for obvious reasons never stop the blockade of Gaza. As an outsider that leans to the left, it seems like Gaza is purposefully put into the state that it's in, to keep a threat around, so the conservatives running Israel can stay in power.
Israel just wants peace, and will settle for stability.
Gaza is a pain point on both fronts.
Jews are indigenous to Israel too (backed by genetics and history). Also why are you so sure all Palestinians are indigenous to Israel? Studies have shown that there is a very good possibility that there has also been a large migration of Arabs into Palestine from the surrounding regions, as a consequence of conditions rapidly improving there.
Israel doesn't separate people based on race and religion, there are Muslim Arab judges, cops, doctors, programmers, etc. A few years ago a bunch of programmers from Gaza got permission to work in Israel due to shortages - these guys are literally Arab, Muslim and come from enemy territory.
Arab Jews are discriminated against in Israel? You mean Mizrahi Jews which are the largest Jewish group in Israel and have the exact same rights as other people in Israel?
Or did you mean Arab Israelis who have the pleasure of living in (relative) freedom, when compared to Arabs elsewhere in the middle east (and as I stated before, also aren't discriminated against)?
Israelis deserve peace, and Palestinians definitely deserve better - but it is their responsibility as a people to make their situation better. Israeli leadership currently sucks but the Israeli population in general has gone above and beyond in filling the void the government left. The same can be done by the Palestinians if they really wanted to, but it seems many of them really just want us dead at all costs.
Israelis deserve peace, and Palestinians definitely deserve better
Absolutely with you!
But it is their responsibility as a people to make their situation better.
Ok, hang on...
What do you mean by this? Whose responsibility? Palestinians? They have a responsibility to improve their situation....
Israel is an occupying force. Surely Israeli forces and settlers should leave occupied West Bank to start with. Then there can be a discussion about how Palestinians can improve their situation.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/6/who-are-israeli-settlers-and-why-do-they-live-on-palestinian-lands
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/09/1141572
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/18/these-are-biblical-lands-promised-to-us-jewish-settlers-in-west-bank-hope-gaza-conflict-will-help-their-cause
When the British occupiers left Israel, Israelis built a country, and Palestinians went to war.
When the Israeli occupiers left Gaza, Palestinians started building rockets.
When the British Occupiers left the East Coast we, the Americans, started to build a nation while the shiftless Indians just tried to fight it. We killed them and dispossessed them of their land and civilized them.
Thank goodness we destroyed their ways of life (destruction of the buffalo (olives)). And removing them from their wealth sure made it easy for us to give out our settlers land for free (bought with Indian blood). It also had the side effect of forcing the Indian into our colonial system and they were cheap labor!
There are literally zero parallels here to Israel. I don’t know why I even thought of any of this.
Keep on bombing those children in Gaza!
If your main question is if it leads to more morally correct decisions, then that would be a very hard no.
Most people do believe they are doing the right thing. The Americans are, the Russians are and the Chinese are. They DO believe what they do is correct. Same with religion.
But does that make any of the above groups more correct than the other? The answer is: No, it's their actions that shows that.
My point is, Israel will always think what they do is morally correct, no matter if it is or not. And when you act in that belief, you can justify almost anything in the world. Because you really think it's the right thing to do.
Mabe morally correct isn't quite the right notion. Maybe I was more getting at good faith plus worth the potential loss of a beloved member of their family for yhe greater good.
Its very easy to make abstract bloody decisions and send strangers children to war if it never hits close to home so I was playing with that notion as a nexus to getting a better understanding of why Israel would engage in Hydra-busting (West Bank expansion etc) if they were on the hook (in terms of their offsprings lives) for the collateral damage likely to result from such controversial and perilous efforts
Sounds like what you are trying to articulate is the idea of ethical relativism.
Descriptive moral relativism holds only that people do, in fact, disagree fundamentally about what is moral, with no judgment being expressed on the desirability of this.
Everybody is mandatory drafted in Israel except ultra orthodox jews and arabs. Being a politician’s family isn't on that list. And also its very common. All politicians at some point either serve or served at the army, including their children. It just so happened that someone who died is also the son of the one who calls the shots about the war.
I'm not Israeli - but I grew up in a disturbingly similar political environment, Apartheid-era South Africa. In theory, conscription applied to all white males of "military age" (ie, a kid that's physically capable but still too dumb to resist the brainwashing). However, in reality, the children of the rich and powerful could buy their way out of it through various means (such as Phony Stark famously skipping South Africa right before his 18th birthday despite the fact that he wasn't as allergic to white supremacism as he claimed to be), while working class whites couldn't. I'm willing to bet that it pretty much works the same way in Israel.
There are lots of reasons why the children of the rich and powerful could end up on the front lines in wars that are still mostly foisted onto the children of the poor - an abusive father might gaslight their children into it, or it may simply be a case that not participating in all the jingoism might have an effect on careers later on (which might be the case in Israel, considering that militarism is so entwined in politics over there that it would have seemed insane even in Apartheid-era South Africa). It could just be that Snot's head has been filled with militarism and wouldn't dream of not participating. But the rich do get a choice in whether their children will be "boots on the ground" or not.
And no... the Israeli political establishment is no more making "ethically and morally correct decisions" than Apartheid-era South Africa's was - it is, after all, a white supremacist settler-colonialist state. The only way to make "ethically and morally correct decisions" is to not serve the Israeli war machine in any way whatsoever.
As a South African i couldn't have said it better myself. Israelis and israeli apologists i notice get very offended when you compare israel to Apartheid South Africa, i mean the parallels are so clear to see.
No, I take offense to comparing Israel to Apartheid South Africa because it's dumb. Not even saying it's wrong, it's just a dumb comparison.
Read again what the person you replied to said - it's basically "I don't have any information about Israel that's relevant to the question, but I'll just go ahead and assume Israel and Apartheid South Africa are the same thing and reply based on that. This will show Israel and Apartheid South Africa have a lot in common".
The rich and powerful can buy their way out of stuff anywhere...
I don't understand why you wrote so much about Israel when you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Calling middle eastern jews white supremacists is fucking insane, for example. I bet you wouldn't even be able to distinguish between an average Israeli Jew and Arab.
Yet, when they (black Jews) arrived in Israel, these distinctive people faced appalling discrimination, racism and a lack of empathy for their hardships in Ethiopia and during their journey to Israel.
So did my parents (and many others) which emigrated from a soviet state after the fall of the soviet union. And they're very white.
Israelis are just xenophobic, this isn't white supremacy. There is a famous old Israeli skit about how every single group which arrived faced these issues. You guys are unknowingly spewing the same bullshit extreme right wing politicians are saying in Israel about Mizrahi Jews.
Good point about "white supremacy" being the wrong term used here. I agree that calling it xenophobia/racism is more correct in this case.
Calling middle eastern jews white supremacists is fucking insane
Are you talking about the European Jewish people who dominate Israel's political and economic establishments? Have you noticed that Netanyahu doesn't look Ethiopian, perhaps?
No, Clyde... it's perfectly obvious who it is that doesn't know what it is they are talking about, and it's the people doing apologetics for white supremacism. Ie, you.
Yeah sure, you, a South African, know more than me, an Israeli, about Israel...
It's no surprise that European Jews dominate many parts of Israeli society when you consider the fact that most Jews who came to Israel before 1948 were European (the Jewish population rapidky expanded post-1948 as Jews were driven out of Arab countries), and rich European Jews with Zionist aspirations also invested a lot of money in Israel during this period.
know more than me
I know you better than you think, Clyde... we were pretty much raised drenched in the same kind of propaganda. After all... Apartheid-South Africa and Israel were besties, weren't they? And despite the fact that the National Party took their white supremacism (and their antisemitism) straight from the nazis, too - imagine that?
It’s no surprise
Of course it isn't! For sure! You have that in common with every other white supremacist colonialist project out of sheer coincidence... totally not because the people sitting at the top of Israel's political and economic establishments learned their white supremacism from the best in the business - ie, the west.
You know... the west? The people who invented antisemitism right before they invented white supremacism?
we were pretty much raised drenched in the same kind of propaganda
"pretty much" being the key words, since the white people who colonised SA had never set foot there before nor had any history or claim to the land, while that absolutely isn't the case for Jewish people returning to their homeland.
In theory. In practice, I doubt it.
The Israeli parliament consists of 120 politicians. Their children would need:
Chances are only a few of them answer this criteria (even less considering the extremist portion of this specific government which didn't serve, and their children likely don't serve either), and even they are likely not above pulling strings to get them out of danger. Except for that politician you talked about, apparently.
That is absolute bullshit about the Heredi. Its like, ok you can live in this unlrotected/untaxed area and be self-governing. Best of luck, let the Lord ur God fight off your/his enemies 🙄
They are gonna have to form their own army and I suspect they're way to freaking soft and parasitic to be able to do so unilaterally or even on Easy mode
Edit: do they at least pay taxes or are they basically a completely mooching cancer on Israeli society that just fucks and prays and creates sewage they dont bear the cost of?
