Summary

Join War on the Rocks and gain access to content trusted by policymakers, military leaders, and strategic thinkers worldwide. In late June, cadets at the Israeli military’s officer training school sat through a lecture by Ofer Winter, a retired brigadier general and a polarizing figure in the Israel Defense Forces. According to Haaretz, Winter told the future officers that “there are no uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and accused two former chiefs of staff of politically blocking his career. Regulations prohibit political activity in training programs, and the Israeli military later called the episode a failure. The cadets who spoke to Haaretz, however, described this politically charged lecture as part of a pattern of guest speakers drawn overwhelmingly from the right-wing ideological camp associated with religious Zionism. Three months earlier, a CNN crew filmed Israeli settlers establishing an illegal outpost in a West Bank village and assaulting some of its Palestinian residents. The Israeli soldiers who were present guarded the settlers, rather than the villagers, and subsequently detained and assaulted the journalists. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the army’s chief of staff, promptly suspended the entire battalion, Netzah Yehuda, whose reservists are deeply committed to the settlement movement. One of the soldiers, acknowledging on camera that the outpost was illegal under Israeli law, expressed confidence that eventually “this will be a legal settlement.” These incidents reflect a deep structural transformation two decades in the making that the Gaza War has accelerated. The heavy casualties borne by religious Zionists since Oct. 7, 2023, have given the community a moral standing that makes criticism of its conduct politically costly. No one can say how the army would respond to an order to evacuate West Bank settlements. Israeli politicians, however, increasingly behave as though such an order would fracture the army, an expectation that has narrowed the range of territorial outcomes they are willing to consider. Netzah Yehuda sits at the seam between two religious communities with opposite relationships to military service. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Haredim, have historically kept their distance from state institutions and from the army in particular, and the battalion was created in 1999 specifically to bring ultra-Orthodox men into uniform. The national religious camp treats army service as a religious obligation and sends its sons into combat units at rates far above its share of the population. Netzah Yehuda draws heavily from the hardal — a portmanteau for Haredi Le’umi — sector, a minority within religious Zionism that combines strict religious observance with fervent nationalism. Though small, the hardal camp wields disproportionate influence in the pre-military academies and aspires to reshape the military itself. The Israeli military was long dominated by Israel’s secular, largely Ashkenazi middle class, the social base of Labor Zionism. As Israeli military sociologist Yagil Levy has shown, that began to change after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the traditional elite increasingly pursued careers in the private sector, especially high-technology industries. Today, roughly 40 percent of infantry officer school graduates come from the national religious community, which makes up just 12 to 14 percent of Jewish Israeli society. The proportion of religious settler officers has grown at every level, from platoon commanders to generals. Two processes produced this demographic shift. As the secular middle class left the combat track, the ranks were filled by those from marginalized communities, in particular the burgeoning and highly motivated religious Zionist community. Their leaders also worked deliberately to steer their youth into those ranks, primarily through two institutions. Hesder yeshivot, five-year programs combining Torah study with 18 months of military service, send roughly 85 percent of their students into combat units. The mechinot, pre-army academies founded to produce religious officers, send graduates into the officers’ course at three times the national rate. A study published in Maarachot, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s journal, found a tenfold increase in the share of national-religious infantry officer cadets between 1990 and 2008. Many of these institutions transmit hardline nationalist ideology alongside religious instruction, rooted in the messianic teachings of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook — the settlement movement’s ideological godfather, who viewed territorial compromise as violating God’s promise. The turning point came in August 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon evacuated all 8,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza. For religious Zionists, only 15 percent of whom supported the plan, the disengagement was experienced as a betrayal by the state itself. The army carried out the evacuation smoothly, in part by deliberately excluding units with high concentrations of religious conscripts, and only about 60 soldiers refused orders. The community drew a strategic lesson from its defeat. Rabbi Eli Sadan, founder of the most influential pre-army academy, Bnei David, declared that religious Zionists needed to “enter the existing systems of the military, the Israel Security Agency, Mossad, and police” to exert influence from within. Over the next two decades, it did. When past defense ministers tried to rein in such institutions, they failed. One removed a yeshiva from the hesder program after its head rabbi endorsed insubordination, only to see his successor reinstate it. Oct. 7 greatly enhanced the community’s political influence. “People are afraid to confront these incidents because they’d be labeled as leftists and attacked in social media,” Tamir Hayman, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, told me. “In the context of Oct. 7, they’re being supported by the mass feelings of hatred and revenge.” Beyond the political mood surrounding the war, Hayman was describing a broader shift in the relationship between military service and political influence. Although the Israeli military does not officially track casualties by religious affiliation, the disproportionate number of national-religious soldiers among the fallen is widely recognized in Israel. As reserve call-ups exhausted the country, turnout among religious Zionists remained high while secular participation declined. That sacrifice has become a form of moral authority, and criticism of the community’s conduct or its political agenda now carries a political price. This theme surfaced repeatedly in interviews I conducted in late 2025 and early 2026 with former security officials and scholars. Elisheva Rosman-Stollman, a scholar of religion and the military at Bar-Ilan University, traced it back to the 2005 Gaza disengagement. Religious Zionists believed they had “made the ultimate sacrifice” by complying with the evacuation, she told me, only to see that sacrifice “completely brushed aside” by Israel’s political leadership. The Gaza War, she said, “reinforced everything that the right-wing in Israel holds dear.” Military sacrifice has translated into a form of political legitimacy that increasingly shapes what Israeli politicians believe is possible. The obvious objection is that Israel’s ultra-Orthodox wield enormous political influence despite largely avoiding military service. But that influence comes from coalition politics, not the battlefield. The disproportionate role of religious Zionists in the fighting and the casualties, by contrast, has given them a moral standing that politicians are increasingly reluctant to challenge. In the battle over the Haredi draft exemption, some of the strongest criticism of the ultra-Orthodox demands has come from the religious Zionist community, which believes it has borne the greatest burden of the war. Two appointments made in the summer of 2024 illustrated this shift in practice. Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, a Bnei David graduate, took command of the division controlling Gaza’s Netzarim corridor. A Haaretz investigation found that Vach opposed facilitating humanitarian aid, declared that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” and moved on his own initiative to clear northern Gaza, leading Haaretz to describe his command as “a kind of army within an army.” Tomer Persico, a scholar of religion who has studied the movement closely, told me that religious Zionist-led units enjoyed unusual autonomy and that commanders “would basically do whatever they wanted.” Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, another Bnei David alumnus, became head of Central Command in the West Bank, where he established formal coordination with settlers building illegal outposts, the very activity his troops nominally police. Lower down the ranks, the war produced a steady stream of documented misconduct with an unmistakable religious-nationalist inflection. Soldiers erected makeshift synagogues in Palestinian homes, broadcast Jewish prayers from a Jenin mosque, and burned Palestinian houses on their commanders’ orders. When nine soldiers were detained over allegations of severe detainee abuse at the Sde Teiman detention facility, far-right activists stormed the base, joined by a cabinet minister and members of Knesset. One accused guard defended himself in a video by quoting that week’s Torah portion, invoking Jewish religious law rather than military regulations. Reuven Gal, a former Israeli military chief psychologist, told me that many religious soldiers saw the Gaza campaign as a “holy war.” The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces, the army’s ethical code, has become a battleground between rabbinic and military authority. Its “Purity of Arms” tenet, which requires soldiers to use force only as necessary and to protect civilians and prisoners, was once described by a former Israeli military chief of staff as “the compass and the conscience of the Israeli military.” Today it is under open assault. Prominent rabbis have circulated the claim that there are no innocents in Gaza, and dozens signed a letter declaring no religious barrier to bombing hospitals where the enemy shelters. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, 65 percent of Israelis now believe the Purity of Arms doctrine prevents the army from fulfilling its mission, roughly double the share of a decade ago. The New York Times reported that hours after the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel’s military leadership authorized officers to strike low-ranking Hamas fighters even where doing so risked killing up to 20 civilians, a threshold previously reserved for high-value targets, and the military tightened those rules the following month. To be sure, the high command has not given up on the code. Zamir suspended an entire battalion over the outpost incident. The army labeled the Winter lecture a failure and pledged to keep politics out of its training programs. Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevi, Zamir’s predecessor, defended disciplining soldiers over the Jenin mosque episode against attacks from the far right. Whether those efforts will ultimately succeed remains an open question. Two factors point in the opposite direction. First, the generals now enforcing these norms were shaped by an earlier Israeli military, while the cadets now sitting through lectures like Winter’s will be commanding brigades within the next decade. As a growing share of combat officers comes to question the military’s traditional doctrine, those future commanders are likely to carry different assumptions into senior leadership. Second, when the military has disciplined soldiers for crossing the line, cabinet members have repeatedly sided with the disciplined rather than with the commanders who imposed the discipline. Within weeks of Oct. 7, settler organizations began campaigning to rebuild the Gush Katif settlements dismantled in 2005, holding conferences that drew cabinet ministers as speakers. At one gathering in Jerusalem in January 2024, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, “God willing, together we will settle and be victorious,” and the assembled speakers signed a “Victory Pact” committing to Gaza’s resettlement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the idea as unrealistic, yet pressure on him remains sustained and comes from inside his own coalition, and increasingly from inside the army. In one widely circulated video, a soldier in Gaza addressed the prime minister directly: “We are occupying, deporting and settling. Do you hear that, Bibi?” Polls now show nearly 40 percent of Israelis supporting Gaza’s annexation, three times the size of the religious Zionist community that traditionally championed it. The stakes are higher in the West Bank, where any future territorial agreement would require evacuating settlements. The settler population there exceeds half a million, living on land religious Zionists regard as the biblical heartland. The officer corps has grown more religious since 2005, and the army can no longer simply assign such a mission to secular units, because its combat core is now drawn disproportionately from the very community that would be evacuated. The rhetoric of refusal, meanwhile, has become increasingly normalized. An officer quoted in an International Crisis Group report vowed to resist any withdrawal order “by all legitimate means, and if that isn’t enough, by illegitimate means.” Whether the Israeli military would fracture under such an order is unknowable. Yet the possibility alone has changed Israeli politics. Any leader contemplating territorial concessions must now reckon with a military whose combat core may be unwilling to carry them out and with a community that has buried its sons in Gaza and would be asked to surrender the cause for which they fell. The Israeli military has long been Israel’s chief integrating institution, bringing together citizens from every corner of society in service of a common state. As the composition of its combat ranks changes, military service is becoming a source of political authority. Whether that authority is ever tested by an actual evacuation order matters less than the fact that Israeli politicians already treat it as a constraint. Guy Ziv is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at American University’s School of International Service and associate director of American University’s Meltzer Schwartzberg Center for Israel Studies, where he studies Israeli civil-military relations. He is the author of Netanyahu vs The Generals: The Battle for Israel’s Future (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Image: ISM Palestine via Wikimedia Commons