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Sunday, November 9, 2014

The holy war being waged within the Israeli army


The holy war being waged within the Israeli army


Last summer’s war in Gaza was the clearest indication yet of how the IDF has been moving from the secular to the religious, with former chief of staff and current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon at the heart of the change. What are the long-term implications?






“It was astonishing. Soldiers from the Military Rabbinate were waiting for us the moment we arrived at the base,” says A., a former moshavnik living in Tel Aviv. “It happened in 2010 on a base in the north, when the team of reservists I serve with was sent to a sector on the Golan Heights. As we were entering the base, the soldiers from the Military Rabbinate were stringing an eruv [a symbolic enclosure around a community allowing those within it to carry items from one place to another on Shabbat] so that the religious soldiers wouldn’t have to break Shabbat. No supply of ammunitions or food got to the base, but the eruv was already up.”

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