Israel's Materialist Militarism examines the decade of fluctuations in Israel's military policies, from the peace period of the Oslo Accords to the al-Aqsa Intifada, when the military's use of excessive force led to the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and on to the Second Lebanon War of 2006, which reversed the moderating tendencies of the withdrawal from Gaza a year earlier. These dynamics of escalation and deescalation are explained in terms of materialist militarism, the exchange between social groups' military sacrifice and their social rewards, which in turn increases or decreases the level of militarism in society. Levy thus lays down a theoretical framework vital to tracing the fluctuating levels of militarism in Israel and elsewhere. Israel's Materialist Militarism is recommended for those interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict and military-society relations in general.

2012 Winner of the Shapiro Award for the Best Book in Israel Studies, presented by the Association for Israel Studies Whose life is worth more? That is the question that states inevitably face during wartime. Which troops are thrown to the first lines of battle and which ones remain relatively intact? How can various categories of civilian populations be protected? And when front and rear are porous, whose life should receive priority, those of soldiers or those of civilians? In Israel’s Death Hierarchy, Yagil Levy uses Israel as a compelling case study to explore the global dynamics and security implications of casualty sensitivity. Israel, Levy argues, originally chose to risk soldiers mobilized from privileged classes, more than civilians and other soldiers. However, with the mounting of casualty sensitivity, the state gradually restructured what Levy calls its “death hierarchy” to favor privileged soldiers over soldiers drawn from lower classes and civilians, and later to place enemy civilians at the bottom of the hierarchy by the use of heavy firepower. The state thus shifted risk from soldiers to civilians. As the Gaza offensive of 2009 demonstrates, this new death hierarchy has opened Israel to global criticism.

This book suggests a general framework for the analysis of formative factors in military thought and offers an account of the Israel Defense Force’s state of intellectualism and modernity. This account is followed by an attempt to trace the factors that have shaped Israeli military thought. The explanations are a mixture of realist and non-realist factors, which can be found at both the systemic and the state level of analysis. At the systemic level, realist evaluations focus on factors such as the dominance of the technological dimension and the pervasiveness of asymmetrical, low-intensity conflict; whereas at the state level one can find realist explanations, cultural factors, and societal influences. Moral and legal constraints also factor into both the systemic and state levels.

Challenging the established view that the civilian sector in Israel has been predominant over its security sector since the state's independence in 1948, this volume critically and systematically reexamines the relationship between these sectors and provides a deeper, more nuanced view of their interactions. Individual chapters cast light on the formal and informal arrangements, connections, and dynamic relations that closely tie Israel's security sector to the country's culture, civil society, political system, economy, educational system, gender relations, and the media. Among the issues and events discussed are Israel's separation barrier, the impact of Israel's military confrontations with the Palestinians and other Middle Eastern states -- especially Lebanon -- and the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli case offers insights about the role of the military and security in democratic nations in contemporary times.

This book examines Israel’s civil-military relations (CMR) in order to explore alternatives to orthodox Western models of security sector reform (SSR) in post-conflict societies. This book argues that the guidelines of SSR have always tended to draw on theoretical work in the field of CMR and focus too heavily on Western, liberal democratic models of governance. Consequently, reform programs based on these guidelines, and intended for use in post-conflict and conflict-affected states, have had, at best, mixed results. The book challenges the necessity for this over-reliance on traditional Western liberal democratic solutions and instead advocates an alternative approach. It proposes that by drawing on an unconventional CMR model, that in turn references the specific context and cultural background of the particular state being subject to reform, there is a significantly higher chance of success. Drawing on a case study of Israel's CMR, the author seeks to provide practical assistance to those working in this area and considers the question of how this unorthodox CMR model might usefully inform post-conflict and conflict-affected SSR programmes. This book will be of interest to students of military studies, security studies, Israeli politics, and International Relations.

Delegitimation has become the new battleground for Israel and the critics of Israeli military operations. But the Israeli experience reveals a more general engagement where all states act strategically to build legitimacy for their policies and all resist attempts at delegitimation. To understand these processes it is necessary to see how politicized moral and legal judgments shape both the use of force by states and our judgments about the means and the outcomes. This is a book about legitimacy, military lawyers, and security. More particularly, it is about how the legitimacy of Israel’s asymmetric military operations cannot be detached from the politics of law and ethics. Sometimes it is enough that states respect the laws of armed conflict, but at other times they may be held to a higher standard. This does not happen in a vacuum. Rather it is the product of political engagement in the murky politics of international legitimacy where standards are negotiable and some states get a harder time than others. There is a strong theoretical analysis underpinning a discussion that constantly returns to the practical problems of modern armed conflict where combatants hide among civilians and states complain about the unrealistic expectations of human rights NGOs. Here, the law is unclear and there are choices to be made. The book presents new research into the involvement of Israeli military lawyers in operational targeting decision making that has life and death consequences. The case studies concern targeted killing during the Second Intifada, Israel’s 2006 Lebanon War, the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza and, finally, the 2010 Israeli maritime interception of the ‘Turkish Flotilla’ to Gaza. The investigation identifies a struggle between the proponents of human rights in war and those who promote the rights of states to deploy military force for the security of their citizens. But not all parties to a military conflict are held to the same standards. In fact, the analysis maps a complex political deployment of law and ethics in the strategic calculation of legitimacy costs and the diplomatic processes whereby they are contested, with policy implications for those in charge of the design and execution of military operations.

2012 Winner of the Shapiro Award for the Best Book in Israel Studies, presented by the Association for Israel Studies Whose life is worth more? That is the question that states inevitably face during wartime. Which troops are thrown to the first lines of battle and which ones remain relatively intact? How can various categories of civilian populations be protected? And when front and rear are porous, whose life should receive priority, those of soldiers or those of civilians? In Israel’s Death Hierarchy, Yagil Levy uses Israel as a compelling case study to explore the global dynamics and security implications of casualty sensitivity. Israel, Levy argues, originally chose to risk soldiers mobilized from privileged classes, more than civilians and other soldiers. However, with the mounting of casualty sensitivity, the state gradually restructured what Levy calls its “death hierarchy” to favor privileged soldiers over soldiers drawn from lower classes and civilians, and later to place enemy civilians at the bottom of the hierarchy by the use of heavy firepower. The state thus shifted risk from soldiers to civilians. As the Gaza offensive of 2009 demonstrates, this new death hierarchy has opened Israel to global criticism.

This detailed examination of Israeli foreign policy towards the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) between the 1967 war and the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip focuses on the impact and process of globalisation on the Israeli state's politics, economy, society and culture. In order to determine how interfacing developed between foreign policy and globalisation a theoretical framework is presented that brings together two established approaches that hitherto have advanced in parallel: foreign policy analysis and globalisation theory. This is the first attempt within the discipline of International Relations to theorise the relationships between foreign policy and globalisation. Causal relationships underpinning Israeli foreign policy -- involving government, the state, the economy, social stratification, and the media -- are linked to globalisation by specific example. Conventional accounts of this relationship strip military and political factors of any significance in terms of the conceptualisation of globalisation and its causes, in favour of spatio-temporal and economic dimensions. The state is viewed as being compelled to transform in response to the pressures of globalisation. But in the case of Israel the state acted proactively by using foreign policy towards the PLO as a key site of action to capture the opportunities and cope with the challenges presented by globalisation. To date there have been only partial historical accounts of Israeli foreign policy towards the PLO in the context of globalisation. It is generally understood that foreign policy towards the PLO became entangled with globalisation due to the socio-economic and cultural globalisation of Israel in the mid-1980s, but this study shows that the increasing impact of military and political globalisation during the Cold War on the Arab-Israeli conflict resulted in Israeli foreign policy towards the PLO, and globalisation effects in Israel, becoming entwined from the early 1970s.

The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, by Dalia Gavriely-Nuri opens a window to how Israelis talk, write, and think about war. In the post-World War II period, Israel has taken part in eight wars, more than almost any other western democracy. In addition to "official" wars, Israel has experienced two Intifadas and repetitive long periods of bombings of its border-settlements. This book argues that such an intensive involvement in military actions provides a natural arena for a uniquely fertile war discourse. Gavriely-Nuri identifies a special war discourse: a "war-normalizing discourse" (WND). WND as a set of linguistic, discursive, and cultural devices aims at blurring the anomalous character of war by transforming it into an event perceived as "natural"-- a "normal" part of life. Moreover, the WND is served as a unique rhetorical compass and illuminates one basic organizing principle underlying the Israeli war discourse. WND has been in use throughout Israel's history, in periods of war as well as in periods of relative peace. It has become a fundamental part of the Israeli public discourse concerning both peace and war and an integral part of Israeli identity. The Normalization of War in Israeli Discourse, 1967-2008, is an essential investigation into how nations use rhetoric and tactical discourse to normalize their conflicts.

This edited book constitutes the first detailed attempt at a comparative international analysis of the transformations that are currently affecting the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and their place in Israeli society. Focusing primarily on deviations from the traditional norm of universal military service, the book compares the emergence of a new type of "citizen army" in Israel with the formats that have in recent decades become evident in other western democracies. In addition, these essays correct the conventional tendency to concentrate almost exclusively on the influences stimulating military institutional change in the West, and thereby to overlook the equally important factors that retard its momentum. By contrast, this volume deliberately highlights the brakes as well as the accelerators in current processes, thereby presenting a far more faithful picture of their complexity. This book will be of much interest to students of Israeli politics, military studies, Middle Eastern politics, security studies and IR in general. Stuart Cohen is a senior research associate of the BESA (Begin-Sadat) Center for Strategic Studies and also teaches political studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. His most recent book is Israel and its Army: From Cohesion to Confusion (Routledge, 2008).