Summary
Uri Ben-Eliezer’s model of the military-politics relationship, set by Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine against the dichotomy or civilianisation paradigm: it stresses the close connections between the civil and military spheres, and Ben-Eliezer concludes Israel is indeed a nation in arms (PDF p.75-76).
Details
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Ben-Eliezer’s four characteristics: the existence of a state army; close cooperation between military and political elites based on a commonly shared ideology; obscure boundaries between the two spheres; and the self-image of the national army as apolitical and non-partisan, representing the values of the nation (PDF p.76).
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David Ben-Gurion popularised the maxim of Mamlachtijut (“statehood”), which resulted in a professional mass army legally anchored by the Military Service Act enacted in 1949 (PDF p.76).
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Shimon Peres in David’s Sling (1970) propagates the model from the establishment side: a military coup is “purely fanciful”, and the danger to democracy would be “from perverted civilians and not from a misguided soldiery” (PDF p.74-75).
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In part 3 of Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine, Ben-Eliezer’s related term “state-spawned praetorianism” names the government-sponsored concentration of power in the army, and the historically emerged “Jewish democracy” is described as the product of a political order corresponding to the model of a “Jewish-Israeli nation in arms”, of which war is an integral part (PDF p.99-100).
Related pages
Mamlachtiut, Shimon Peres, David Ben-Gurion, Zionist Israel and the Question of Palestine