The birth of the State of Israel was the direct result of its victory over the Palestinian and the Arab states in the 1947–9 War of Independence. Its continued existence in the turbulent Middle East, surrounded by hostile Arab states, has been made possible, among other things, by its military successes in the wars of 1956, 1967, 1970 and 1973. The performance of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), both during these wars and in inter-war periods (e.g. the Entebbe operation), have made a forceful impression on public opinion throughout the world.
This state of affairs begs the following question: how is it that the Jewish People, which during its millennia of dispersion and persecution had become a synonym of weakness and helplessness, has managed to produce, in less than one generation, one of the finest and most modern armies on earth?
True, during their early history Jews gained substantial military experience, from numerous revolts against their Roman and Byzantine occupiers, to participation in the Muslim occupation of Palestine from the Byzantine Empire (638 AD). Yet, as Europe constituted the cradle of the Jewish national renaissance, the IDF's military ethos has been rooted in modern European Jewry, with European Jewish immigrants laying the foundations of the first Jewish underground defence organizations, on which the IDF later developed, in the early twentieth century.1
Unlike the neighbouring Arab armies, the IDF did not spring from a colonial military legacy; nor was it created and shaped by non-Jewish outsiders. Rather, it grew out of the people, and was forged and tempered in the crucible of trial and error. As such, the IDF was the fruit of the Israeli experience. To comprehend it, therefore, one must trace its roots and its background in the long past of the Jewish people, but principally in the last hundred years of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.2 As Gunther Rothenberg put it: ‘It is necessary to look back at the evolution of the modern Jewish settlement in Palestine because there was an inseparable connection between the political, social, and economic aspects of the Jewish community and the development of military strength’.3
The idea of establishing some form of a military-defence force as an integral part of the movement of return to the Land of Israel, and of the national idea, was firmly held by many during the First Aliya (1882–1904). With the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire and the achievements of the national movements in Europe and the Balkans, it was only natural that the young nationalists going to Palestine would cherish thoughts, dreams and hopes of the revival of the Jewish people in its ancestral homeland and the restoration of independence.4
This idea was also influenced by the cultural-national belief in the necessity of creating a new type of a Jew and new Jewish life. This trend was represented by the philosopher-writer, Micah Joseph Berdichevski (1865–1921) who wrote:
For all the yearning for a revival, which has begun to awaken in the hearts of the remaining few, we feel that such a revival must encompass both the inner and the outer life. It cannot arise by other than a total overturn, that is, by a transformation of the values which guided our lives in the past. Our hearts, ardent for life, sense that the resurrection of Israel depends on a revolution – the Jew must come first, before Judaism – the living man before the legacy of his ancestors.5
Yet, while the First Aliya witnessed not a few moments of heroism and courage on the part of both individuals and villages; and while during this period the interest in military training and the establishment of a military force spread across the nascent nation, this Aliya failed by and large to advance this vision in any real way or to create lasting structures. The creation of military defence as a national enterprise was thus left to members of the Second Aliya (1904–18), particularly to the Bar-Giora and Ha-shomer organizations.
This essay does not deal with the structure, strategy or philosophy of the IDF, nor does it discuss the wars led by this army. Instead it examines the IDF's historical-sociological-political background, a surprisingly neglected facet in the professional literature on this force.
The underground organization Bar-Giora was established on 28 September 1907 in Jaffa by members of the Marxist-Borochovist party, Poalei-Zion, and was headed by Israel Shohat and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the future second president of the State of Israel).6 Two years later, on 12 April 1909, members of this organization created the Ha-shomer, an overt organization formed to meet the difficult security situation that had developed in Palestine following the Young Turks Revolution of July 1908.7
For the first time in the history of Zionism and modern Jewish settlement in Palestine, both groups set up permanent defence frameworks with national objectives. Bar-Giora's goal was to protect the national enterprise in Eretz Israel. Ha-shomer inherited the same goal, but as a legal organization its declared purpose was limited to the shift of defence in the Jewish villages to Jewish hands. Both organizations held that the national activity must be accompanied by a military-defence organization that would provide a security umbrella.
Since the two organizations were primarily composed of members of Poalei-Zion, whose leaders included Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion, it is arguable that the idea of military self-defence was one of the central contributions of the Zionist-socialist current to the Zionist ethos. I do not accept the view that this notion was exclusively the input of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the right-wing Revisionist Party, from which sprang Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel, or Fighters for Israel's Freedom) during the mandate period, and, following Israel's establishment, the Herut Party (the basis of present-day Likud) under the leadership of Menahem Begin, Jabotinsky's disciple. Supporters of this notion maintain that Jabotinsky introduced the concept of armed defence to the Zionist ethos when he elaborated and helped implement the idea of the Jewish Battalions, which fought side by side with the British during the First World War. As indicated above, reality was quite different. The idea of military self-defence as part of the national ethos dates back as far back as the pre-Zionist period, or at least the First Aliya: before the advent of Theodor Herzl on the Jewish national arena and the formulation of political Zionism. Yet only the socialist-Zionist stream managed to realize this concept through the foundation of Bar-Giora and Ha-shomer, which were permanent structures with national defence goals. All this occurred eight or ten years before the formation of the Jewish Battalions in the First World War.
It is important to note that it was a workers' party which developed active defence and gave rise to the first defence organization. The socialist-Zionist movement constituted the matrix within which influence of nationalist ideology, the political culture of the Russian revolutionary parties, and Jewish self-defence that arose in Russia during the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 and subsequently, became interwoven. These factors resulted in the workers being the first to implement the concept of self-defence, thus adding an important tier to the Zionist ethos.
Bar-Giora and Ha-shomer were elitist and avant-guard organizations. Their founders believed in a selective, high-quality body of members, hand-picked for their motivation and readiness for absolute self-sacrifice and discipline. Only that way could it serve as the avant-guard of the working class and the people. Such an organization could mobilize the masses and urge them towards realization of the social and national goals.
In this, the two groups were faithful descendants of the Russian revolutionary political culture whence their members came. Again, contrary to the conventional wisdom, it should be emphasized that the leaders of the above organizations sought to establish parallel and widely popular frameworks that would be led and directed by the elite avant-guard element until the attainment of the national aims.8
The Palestine workers' movement was, and still is, unique in many respects, including that of defence, in comparison with world-wide workers' movements. It was precisely the Marxist current within the movement that was notable for its activism, contributing the concept of armed defence, both ideologically and practically, to the Zionist ethos. Bar-Giora was to serve as the fighting arm of the class and the nation together. It was taken for granted that there was no contradiction – indeed, there was perfect conformity – between the interests of the class and the nation. This ideology was rooted in the Eretz Israel workers' movement as a whole, which believed that the interests of the working class rather than the interests of the rest of the classes, were identical with the national interests.
In keeping with a similar process that was taking place in the Poalei-Zion Party, Ha-shomer, Bar-Giora's heir in ideology and composition, tended more towards the national direction; hence it sought recognition as a national defence organization from both the Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel and from the Zionist Movement. This is attested by its links with the Odessa Committee of Hovevei-Zion (Lovers of Zion), as well as by the efforts invested by Israel Shohat at the Eleventh Zionist Congress in Vienna in 1913 to acquire legitimacy – and in consequence, moral, political, and material support. Despite the fact that it was organically attached to the working class in general and to Poalei-Zion in particular, these nationalist tendencies strengthened Ha-shomer's inclination to appear as a non-partisan organization.9
In May 1920, with the start of the British mandate in Palestine, Ha-shomer was disbanded and the responsibility for national defence was handed over the to Ahdut Ha-avoda, a new party established in March 1919 through the merger of Poalei-Zion and several non-party political groupings. Seven months later, in December 1920, after the creation of the General Federation of Labour (Histadrut), the area of defence was transferred to this all-class body, including the Hagana – the new major Jewish underground defence organization replacing Ha-shomer.
This state of affairs prevailed during the 1920s. Following a resolution of the Histadrut's Founding Conference, its first Council appointed the Central Committee of the Hagana on 13 March 1921. From then to the end of the 1920s, the Hagana was, in practice, subject to the will of the Histadrut,10 which provided its slender annual budget of L2000,11 though it served national goals and accepted the authority of the Zionist leadership as a whole. In the summer of 1930, following the 1929 disturbances in Palestine, the supervision over the Hagana was transferred to the Vaad Leumi (National Committee), as the representative of the entire Yishuv, and subsequently to the Jewish Agency. Consequently, a Supreme National Command was established on a parity basis: half its members represented the Histadrut and half the various bourgeois – religious and rightist – groups. Only in 1938 did the Jewish Agency add another member, who held a neutral position.12
Already in the early 1920s, Israel Shohat and his comrades found reinforcement and vindication of their ideology in the actual circumstances they witnessed in Germany. The German army, rehabilitated by the Versailles treaties and subject to the limitations imposed by the Allies built itself exactly according to the plan envisaged by Ha-shomer people and their successors. It comprised a small regular professional army of commanders and instructors, with a trained reserve echelon that could be integrated, in a very short time, into a far larger military framework. The process was practicable because the skeletal framework, the commands and the commanders were in place. The arms for the large army were bought, stored and available, and the reserves were trained by a uniform method and were allocated in advance to the specific units of the skeleton force. This structure, which the Germans produced solely through lack of alternative and the constraints of Versailles, heralded a modern military concept tailored to the needs of small societies with limited means, not least those in difficult political conditions such as the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. Eventually the Hagana adopted this model.
Furthermore, the concept of Ha-shomer people and their successors was that the commanders of the defence organization must be appointed by active members of this body and not by elements external to it. At the same time, they proposed that the sovereignty, authority and control by the civilian echelon over the defence arm would be ensured by (a) the creation of a civilian supervisory committee that would oversee the defence organization; and (b) the appointment of a civilian representative who would take part in meetings of the defence organization's command and would liaise between the civilian institutions and the Hagana leadership. This in fact was the line of development of the Hagana from the 1930s onwards. The civilian parity committee served as a supervisory body over the operational command of the Hagana, which in the future was to become the IDF general staff.
It was the socialist-Zionist stream that adopted and implemented the concept of armed defence and introduced it to the Zionist ethos. For many years this current, in particular the Marxist element within it, was almost the only carrier of the defence issue. The Hagana organization arose out of this stream, drawing from it most of its strength and support. This was so despite the fact that the Hagana's aims were national, and therefore it was recognized and sustained by the Zionist Movement as a whole. Yet notwithstanding its national backing, the Hagana continued throughout the entire mandate period to be based primarily upon the Histadrut, through its institutions and political and economic organs. It was, therefore, not by chance that the Palmach – the elite units of the Hagana – based its operations on the kibbutz movement and established its basis in kibbutzim, drawing most of its manpower from the workers’ ranks. Nor was it accidental that the army created after the establishment of the State of Israel grew out of the Hagana-Palmach, the Jewish battalions of the First World War, and the Jewish Brigade of the Second World War.13 Many of its high officers were associated with the Hagana or sympathetic with the workers' parties.
Furthermore, there exists a continuity between the Hagana and the IDF (established in 1948), not only in terms of the background of a considerable portion of the senior officer class and of the Chiefs of Staff until 1977, but also in terms of ideological concepts and values. In several crucial respects the IDF has inherited the precepts of the Hagana. First, its democratic character, founded not only on the unquestioned supreme authority of the civilian bodies but also on the ideological currents that inform the army, the high degree of flexibility and the absence of imposed formality. Second, the army acts both as a melting pot and as a flux for those coming from various parts of the diaspora. Third, the connection with agricultural settlements continues, as expressed in the problematic existence of the Nahal formation.14 Fourth, there is the principle of activism that is at the same time anti-militaristic. Finally, the army is seen to be the people, that is, the nation, fighting as it does through the system of nation-wide reserves.
In conclusion, it may be stated that the concept of armed defence that has become an integral part of the Zionist ethos was elaborated and realized through the socialist-Zionist stream, which created and led the various defence frameworks prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, thus moulding the character and ideology of the IDF.
1. History of the Hagana, Tel Aviv: Ma'arachot, 1954 (Hebrew); Yigal Elam, The Zionist Path to Power, Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, Modan, 1979 (Hebrew); David Niv, The Battles of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, Tel Aviv: Klozner Institute, 1965 (Hebrew).
2. Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz, The Israeli Army, London: Allen Lane, 1974, p.xi; Zeev Schiff, A History of the Israeli Army (1870–1974), San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1974, p.1.
3. Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Anatomy of the Israeli Army, London: Batsford, 1979, p. 14. See also p.1, note 1.
4. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background, New York: Macmillan, 1944; idem, Nationalism: its Meaning and History, Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1965; Carlton J. H. Hayes, The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism, New York: Macmillan, 1951; Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, London, 1960.
5. Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea, New York: Atheneum, 1959, p.294.
6. Ber (Dov) Borochov was the ideological-political leader of the Poalei Zion Party from its establishment in 1905–6 until his death in 1917. His greatest contribution was the ideological merge between Marxism and Zionism.
7. David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971, Vol. I (Hebrew); Zvi Nadav, This Is How We Began, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1957 (Hebrew); idem, The Days of the Guarding and Defence, Tel Aviv: Ma'arachot, 1954 (Hebrew).
8. The priority given by those youngsters to the national goal was also expressed by the influence which the heroic past (First and Second Temple times) had over them. See Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism, New York: Schocken Books, 1989, p.279.
9. About the connections between Ha-shomer and the Poalei-Zion Party see Labour Archives 104/IV, Israel Giladi, file 78; 403/IV/29; file 104/IV/3; Central Zionist Archives, file J15-6479; file L2, 103, II; file J15-6478; David Tsalevich, ‘From My Diary That Remain As a Remnant’, Hagana Historical Archives 277 and 2276, 2287.
10. Meir Pail, The Emergence of the IDF, Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, Modan, 1979 (Hebrew).
11. See Rothenberg, Anatomy (note 3) p. 14; Luttwak and Horowitz, The Israeli Army (note 2) p.xi; Schiff, A History (note 2) p.1.
12. Pail, The Emergence (note 10) p.25.
13. Yoav Gelber, The Emergence of a Jewish Army – the Veterans of the British Army in the IDF, Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben Zvi, 1986 (Hebrew); idem, Why was the Palmach Disbanded? The Jewish Military Force in the Transition from a Yishuv to a State 1947–1949, Tel Aviv: Schocken Books, 1986 (Hebrew).
14. Nahal – an army brigade combining military service and work in agricultural settlements. As a consequence of the crisis in the kibbutz movement and its affiliated youth movements, plans appeared in favour of liquidation of this formation.
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Yaacov N. Goldstein is Professor of History at the University of Haifa.