"You're taken from school, from your friends, from your family--I'm making it a bit dramatic, but still--it's a whole other system, a whole other way of life," says Lieutenant Omri Ram, who went through the process himself only three years ago, at 18, and is now showing me around Bakum. "You get orders; you need to wear a uniform."
In other words, you've been drafted. You're going to learn how to shoot a gun and throw a grenade, and if you're unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could get killed. President George Bush in the second debate was happy to deny "rumors on the Internets" about a renewed draft, and Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry says he doesn't want a draft either. But who thought, a few years ago, that we would now be in grinding wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, against enemies we can barely find, with new enemy recruits signing up daily? Who can say what will happen with North Korea or Iran, or a nation-less enemy like al Qaeda, in the next few years? "Bring back the draft" is never going to be anyone's campaign slogan, but that doesn't mean it might not become necessary. That's why the Selective Service System, which requires American men between 18 and 25 to register for a potential draft, still exists.
A new draft would probably be more sweeping than the last one, eliminating the student deferments and other loopholes that caused such resentment during Vietnam. Women could be drafted too, into either the military or a civilian service system. The draft could end up being one of those things, like world wars, that happen even though everyone insists they shouldn't. The whole experience of being an 18-25 year-old in the United States, or being the parent, sibling, or friend of one, would change.
Young Israelis, meanwhile, can't imagine their lives without a draft. Everything that would be new to most Americans--dead high-school classmates, an utter loss of autonomy right when many teenagers crave it most, prison or exile for those who refuse--is familiar to Israelis; their present could be our future, when it comes to accepting the realities of compulsory military service. Every war and every military is unique, but if you substitute the occupation of Baghdad for that of Gaza, and the U.S. Army's Reception Battalion for Bakum, young Americans could learn a lot from Israelis about what it's like to live with a draft: what's difficult and what's simply annoying; how to stay sane without privacy; how to get out of it if you want to, and why many choose not to get out, even if they could.
Israel has had a draft for its entire existence, more than 50 years. It's the only country in the world that drafts women as well as men. Compulsory military service is a given for everyone in the country except Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel (Palestinians who didn't flee during the war that followed the country's creation in 1948).
As a result, the army is central to Israeli culture in a way that's unimaginable in the United States. There are TV shows about being in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Popular bands come out of the IDF. Army slang is mainstream: Everyone knows a jobnik is a soldier who does paperwork rather than combat. There's a national radio show on Fridays called Voice of Mother where mothers call in and talk about their sons and daughters who are in the army. Soldiers who are killed are not abstractions, even to the richest and most powerful people in the country; they are everyone's son, brother, nephew, uncle, father and sometimes, daughter or sister.
When I first started talking to young Israelis about the draft, I kept asking them at what moment, growing up, they'd realized they would have to serve in the IDF. No one understood the question. There is no realization; military service, for most Israelis, is something that just happens when you're old enough, like menstruation, wet dreams, or a bar or bat mitzvah.
Everyone starts at Bakum, the IDF's central processing base. Bakum takes a rip-the-Band-Aid-off approach to turning teenagers into soldiers. Young Israeli men and women enter a pale yellow building dressed as civilians and emerge, a few hours later, as soldiers. They start the transformation process in a spotless, all-white room where two soldiers set up bank accounts for the new recruits so the army can directly deposit the approximately $77 per month (noncombat salary) to $177 (combat) they'll be getting for the next three years, if they're men, or two years, if they're women. Next, the recruits head down a white hall to get haircuts and vaccinations, and give the dental impressions, fingerprints, and blood for a DNA sample that will be used to identify them if they're killed. At the end, they get their uniform and boots. No guns until they're a week into basic training, which they'll start tomorrow morning.
"Most accept the situation," says Omri, the lieutenant, who is small-boned and serious, with a light beard and oval glasses that say "Magic" in white lettering on the sides. "They get in line; they straighten up. This is how the system works. I don't know if it's good or bad. But it's an army."
Stop or I'll Shoot The first time Israelis officially encounter the army is at 16 and 1/2, when they get a letter telling them to go to their local recruitment center (there are five around the country). When they go in, the army does a medical check-up and an interview, lasting 10 minutes to an hour, to get a sense of their brains, interests, and sanity, and to ask them what they want to do in the military. Six months later, at 17 years old, they go to Bakum for the first time, where they meet with representatives from all the different units, check out the latest equipment--new tanks, jeeps, massive bulldozers--and get instructions on how to fill out the questionnaire where they'll list their top three choices of units. A year later, they're drafted.
At 16, A. K. (who asked me not to use his full name) fled his strict Orthodox family to get away from his abusive father. By 17, he was supporting himself as a computer expert and getting his high-school equivalency. He dreaded being drafted.
"I was always scared of going to the army," he says, sitting at an outdoor cafe near Jerusalem's Hebrew University, where he's now studying accounting. "I was afraid I'd shoot someone. I was afraid I'd shoot myself by accident. I wouldn't call myself a brave person."
A. K. is 24 years old, with a charmingly crooked smile, glasses, and thick brown hair that goes a little fuzzy over his forehead. It's hard to picture him doing some of the things he did in an attempt to get out of his military service. He tried to fake Attention Deficit Disorder for an army neurologist by being aggressive and hyper during an examination: He jiggled his legs, compulsively clicked a pen and made noises under his breath while the doctor examined him. He told anyone who would listen about migraines and knee problems, and listened to friends discuss breaking their own arms to avoid service.
When nothing else worked, he threw himself down on the ground in the middle of a training run with his tank unit and, with everyone screaming at him to get up, he screamed back that if they didn't leave him alone he was going to shoot everybody. He watched himself do this. He egged himself on.
"I was deliberately being more extreme so they'd let me see a psychiatrist," he says. "But I was in a really bad mental situation."
It seems the more his fake mental illnesses failed to get him out of his military service, the more acute his real mental distress became, until finally he had some sort of odd, hybridized real/fake breakdown. I ask A. K. if anything good came out of his army service at all.
"I've been in hell; I'm not afraid of it anymore," he says.
More and more Israeli men are trying to do what A. K. did and get out of their service by claiming a mental problem, says Stuart Cohen, a professor of Political Studies at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies, who's been studying the relationship between the IDF and Israeli society for years.
"I think you'll find a significant number are discharged before serving three full years, either for psychological reasons or because the army says, 'We don't need you,'" says Cohen.
The IDF would not release figures on how many draftees are getting out for mental reasons, or on how many men don't serve the full three years. But Lieutenant Omri Ram, from Bakum, offered this explanation for the increase in attempts to get out of serving:
"We've been in a state of war for the last three and a half years, with the Palestinians and other sectors, and it's not easy, as a civilian, to see that before you get drafted and know what you're going to [face in the army]," he told me.
A draft in the United States, if the mess in Iraq gets a lot worse, would force many Americans to do the same calculus: how far am I willing to go to avoid this nightmare I see on TV every night? Already, some Americans in uniform are asking this question. More than a third of the 3,900 former soldiers who were supposed to report for a yearlong assignment have instead sought delays or exemptions. A National Guard soldier from Sacramento has filed a federal lawsuit saying the military is acting illegally by deploying him, involantarily, to Iraq, beyond the length of his enlistment.
Bazamnik Every man who is physically and mentally able in Israel is required by law to serve in a combat unit. Every Israeli I talked to who was in a combat unit is still sifting through the experience, years or even decades later, whether there was a war going on when they served or not.
At a bar called Marble, with Guns N' Roses playing in the background, I found a table of three guys, all 25 years old, drinking Tuborg drafts on a Sunday night. Alon Ganany and Itamar Galili had served in a combat engineering unit together, mostly defusing landmines. Asaf Ben-Gal had worked in an intelligence unit, specifics confidential. The current intifada had not yet started when they served. They spoke about the army the way teenagers talk about their parents: as a frustrating force that has some good points but is often bad, and either way cannot be ignored.
Army life, as Alon and Itamar lived it, consisted of sleeping four or five to a room in bunk beds in the Negev desert, eating canned meat called loof, and occasionally dating the few girls in the unit.
"We had not so many [girls] and not so beautiful," says Alon, who has long fingers, sharp cheekbones, and pale hair shaved close. "But when you become bazamnik, you get better girls."
"Bazamnik" means you've been in the IDF long enough to have a fridge in your room and more time to shower.
"You look better," says Alon. "You have more to offer."
I ask what you do for privacy on an army base, if you're dating.
"Oh no, you don't date in the base," says Alon. "I mean, you do, but it's disgusting. You don't have places to go."
So, what do you do? I ask.
"You don't 'do,'" says Alon. "You drink soda and the soda calms you down. This is a legend in the army: that they put baking soda in the drink and it turns you off. I believe that. It's necessary when you're a soldier."
Alon gets more animated as we talk. He jokes. He rants. He seems the most conflicted about his service.
"The hard thing in the army is that it's three years, sorry for this--three fucking years. I mean, after a year and a half, it's too long," he says. "It's not the American army where you go and you get paid and this is your profession. For example, I didn't want to be in the army. It wasn't my dream. I went because I felt I had to." A few minutes later, he says, "The army is really important for the society in Israel. The army is good for society, because you take the rich, you take the poor, you mix everyone together, and everyone is equal."
And less than a minute later: "Every day I thought of getting out because... I hated the system."
He hated the army, he says. Everything seemed absurd, especially himself.
"I was a bad soldier, so they thought, 'Maybe he's a bad soldier because he wants to take charge,' so they sent me to be commander," he says. "Okay, and then I was a bad commander so they sent me to be an instructor."
Alon seems to regret being a bad commander, though it doesn't sound like he did anything more unpleasant than make his soldiers run a lot and call them lazy and stupid while they were doing it. I say that I thought that's what commanders were supposed to do.
Asaf tells about a commander who sounds a lot worse. Asaf says he was the only secular person in his unit, and the commander singled him out for overtime and unpleasant chores--how about you rearrange the warehouse tonight?--because he wasn't religious.
Asaf had had great expectations for his military service, like a lot of Israeli boys. He'd wanted to be a pilot, because almost all the men in his family had been pilots. The story he tells about why he didn't become a pilot is so weird and sad it's like some magical-realist epic. His mother's brother had been named Ehud and was killed in combat in 1956. Five subsequent relatives named Ehud also died in the army. When Asaf, whose middle name was Ehud, was about to enter the army, he passed all the pilots' tests but he needed his parents permission to go into a combat unit, because he was an only child. His father refused to sign the paper.
"When the last Ehud fell, [my father] went to the Ministry of the Interior and changed my name from Asaf Ehud to Asaf Chai [which means life] and he tore up the paper and didn't let me," he says.
I ask Asaf if he argued with his father about this.
"No, because he was sick and I didn't want to upset him," says Asaf. "I did whatever he thought was good for me. Today maybe I have a little resentment about that. But I think what was, was, and I can't do anything about it now."
The only thing all three agree was good about the army was the basic training. In fact almost everyone I talked to was glad they'd gone through basic training.
"They make you proud of yourself," says Alon. "They make you step over your limit. We had a 55-kilometer (34-mile) journey at the end of the first basic training. And five kilometers (three miles) before the end, they take out three or four stretchers and they take the biggest guys and they put them on the stretchers and you have to carry them to the end."
"Uphill," adds Itamar.
"It's hard and after you're finished, all your muscles hurt in your body, and you feel you did something," says Alon. "You feel good."
Alone in a Crowd One result of a universal draft is that Israelis in their 20s are often eerily poised. I've sweated while being grilled at Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli women who do not have smile lines on their faces not only because they're too young for them but also because they rarely smile. This is IDF training, still in effect years later. The army expects a lot from young people; it gives them serious responsibilities.
Reli Cohen is a 23-year-old, pale, freckled redhead who was a lieutenant in the IDF. By the age of 20, she had three soldiers working under her and was traveling around the country dealing with personnel problems in various units. She wasn't participating in combat, but then, the vast majority of those in the IDF don't serve in combat units. Most of the army is a giant network of office jobs, technical and maintenance work, kitchen staffs, and endless operations to move people and equipment. This network is run by people in their late teens and early 20s.
Reli says she could handle her job fine. She even went through officer training so she could take on more responsibility. What she couldn't take was the showers.
"Almost from when I was born, I took a shower alone," she says, giving the problem some context. "Suddenly I need to take a shower with 20 people I don't know, and I don't want them to see my body. And I asked my friend what do you do about it and she said, you know, you're so tired at the end of day, you don't care, you just want to take a shower and go to sleep."
I ask Reli if her friend had been right.
"No," she says.
Finding ways to be alone in the army, or at least to feel alone, becomes an art. Reli bought her own plastic curtain for the shower. Other people escape by reading all the time. One woman told me she taught herself French in the army, just so she could create a separate, private world for herself. For a lot of Israelis, their military service is a matter of gritting their teeth and just getting through it. This requires managing--often downsizing--expectations.
For instance, Reli knew going into the army that there was no way she would be able to do the coolest job in the IDF, or even the second or third coolest job. Only combat is cool in the army, and women rarely get into combat units. But since Reli accepted that limitation, she liked her army experience. It matured her and gave her confidence, she says. She never imagined her military service would be glamorous or heroic, but figured it would be, in fact, service.
Hebron Many Israelis don't agree with the political positions they're expected to enforce as soldiers. A few refuse to be drafted, and go to prison. Some do their compulsory service, then refuse to serve in the occupied territories as reservists. Increasing numbers of Israelis within the military--including some very senior members--are speaking out against the occupation. But most Israelis, however conflicted they are, still serve. They're drafted at 18 years old and most are not willing to break the law by refusing. Also, many feel personally obligated: I talked to young men who said, If I don't go, someone else will have to go in my, place, and every time I'd hear a soldier's been killed, I would hate myself and I couldn't live with that. Some American draft-dodgers are still struggling with similar feelings thirty years after Vietnam.
Snir Varshavsky, a left-leaning kibbutznik, did his army service for all the above reasons, and also because he believes it's important that the IDF not just consist of people who are gung-ho about the military. Soldiers who have serious doubts and questions about what they're doing can be a brake on the excesses of others, he said. They're also witnesses who are much harder to discredit than antiwar activists who have never served.
Most of the Israelis I spoke to about their military service had been out for a few years. Varshavsky had been out for two weeks. He sat in flip flops and shorts on the couch next to the futon in his tiny apartment on kibbutz Ma'ale Hahamisha, where he grew up, and smoked while he told me through a translator what it was like to serve in Hebron, in the West Bank, for eight months.
"I would sometimes come back [to the kibbutz] and be talking to people here and I'd say, 'You have no idea what's really going on there,'" he said. "I think when it comes down to it, mothers are sending their sons to serve in circumstances they can't even grasp, that they know nothing about."
In Hebron, about 500 Israeli settlers have occupied an area in the midst of 130,000 Palestinians. IDF soldiers are sent to Hebron to protect the Israelis. The city is tense all the time. Palestinian militants try to shoot Israelis and occasionally succeed: A baby girl was shot three years ago while sitting in her stroller. The settlers got violent. The father of the baby who was shot was later arrested by Israeli authorities and found to have explosives, stolen from the IDF, in his car. He and other area settlers were investigated in connection with several still- unsolved shootings of Palestinians in Hebron, as well as a failed bombing attempt at a Palestinian elementary school.
Snir went into this mess at 19 years old.
"When I first got there as a soldier, I was sent to guard a point that's an area of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis--about who it belongs to and who's allowed to enter," he said. "So the army keeps that area as a closed military zone and doesn't let either side go in. And I got there and I was guarding, and pretty quickly a Palestinian father and daughter entered the area, and before I knew it I heard screaming. Israeli adult settlers had thrown a rock at this father and daughter and had hit the girl. And that was my welcome to town."
The girl, he said, was about 3 years old. He and other soldiers called an ambulance and an army doctor came and treated her. Nothing happened to the person who threw the rock, he said.
"He was questioned but it's all kind of a polite fiction," said Snir. "Sometimes the security forces decide to detain a guy who's an instigator but that's rare."
I asked him if there were moments when he was afraid.
"Are there ever moments when you're not?" he asked. "There was not one day I was there when there wasn't shooting going on. We would sleep at night in this building and hear bullets banging up against the side of the building. After a month you stop hearing it. You stop paying attention to it."
Snir and another soldier were at the end of an eight-hour patrol one night--"you're just waiting for someone to replace you"--when a Palestinian man approached, fired 10 shots at them, and ran off. They never caught the guy. Later, when Snir returned to Hebron as a commander, a friend of his was shot in the leg, and during the same round of fighting, another soldier in his unit was shot dead as soon as he pulled up in a jeep.
"Service in the territories is very hard on a person," said Snir. "You carry around this feeling about the suffering or damage that you impose on people's lives... I don't want to get into who's to blame here, but it's a difficult thing you carry with you."
Americans returning from Iraq--members of the all-volunteer military serving now and, if it comes to that, draftees returning at some point in the future--might tell you something very similar.
Ghosts The Israeli writer Etgar Keret has a comic short story called "The Nimrod Flip-Out," in which three friends freak out, one after the other, and then decide they're all being possessed by another friend, who committed suicide in the army. Keret, who is Israel's most popular young writer, has written several stories, all comic, in which characters commit suicide or die in the army but then, somehow, are still around afterward: not alive but not dead either. If the United States brings back a draft, especially for the continued occupation of Iraq, a generation of Americans will face these kinds of ghosts.
While people in the U.S. wonder if the draft will come back, Israelis are discussing the possibility of adopting U.S.-style volunteer army. Not everyone welcomes the idea, though, in part because many young Israelis--even ones like Alon, who didn't want to be drafted--still believe in the value of everyone being thrown together, at 18, to serve their country. When it comes to the draft, most Israelis view their military service as a defining experience. Even a volunteer army in Israel, if that change were made, would probably draw a greater percentage of the country's young people than the U.S. military does.
"If you walk into a classroom [in Israel]--I've done this a number of times--and ask eighth graders who would serve even if it was voluntary, it's extraordinary: over 80 percent raise their hands," says Stuart Cohen. "If you go to the U.S. and Britain, you'd never get 80 percent."
Israelis have learned to stop worrying and love the draft. Can Americans?
