this is media gold

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXu71uVGwI8

This report gets a lot of things right, but also spews lots of bullshit. I'm not gonna start separating fact from fiction right now. Maybe tomorrow, when I'm a bit more lucid.

All I can say right now, after viewing it once, is that the reporter started out with a premise, and then went to find facts to support it.

^
Thanks for commenting. I can see how the BBC could be both justified in their public worrying but also overly eager in their searching / presentation of relevant stories. Two questions come to mind: how widespread is this program? How much of a departure is it from the past?

I think there is enough overtly Christian activity in the US Military that a very similar news piece could be constructed on us.

http://dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Ash0126.htm

Alright. Let's start with a few facts:

- Israel doesn't have the separation of church and state the US has. We study bible since elementary school, we learn a lot about Jewish history and so on.
- There have always been Rabbi in the IDF. Just like there are priests in the US army, the UK army and so on.
- Some Jews pray every morning (Sha'harit, or prayer of dawn) and every evening (Ar'vit, or prayer of evening). Some will put on a Ta'lit and T'filin during that prayer. Those prayers can be performed alone, but when possible, they would prefer to pray in groups of 10 or more, to have what's called a Min'yan.

Now that the scary Jews wrapped in weird shawls rocking back and forth look less intimidating with the cannons in the background, I'll concede a few points:

- Israel is a racist society. There are many ways this is expressed, but it's usually vs Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, which many Israelis regard as the same group.
- There are many "factions" in Judaism, not unlike the differences between Catholics, Protestants, Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons and any other faith that can still call itself Christian. Some of these factions in Judaism will take the bible very literally.
- The population in the settlements is extremely Jewish. They sort of have to be, to want to move to a place you have to hold by force, with the constant threat of being removed from your home by a government treaty. For those who already forgot, read a bit about the Disengagement plan of 2005, where the Israeli Army forcibly removed residents of Jewish settlements in Gaza.

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Now that that's all out of the way, let's move on to the video at hand.

The video says the army is (or, was) "proudly secular". That's quite simply false. Every soldier who wants to can go to prayer every morning, even if it disrupts the normal schedule. Every base has a Rabbi and a synagogue. It's been that way since the IDF came to existence.

The video then goes on to show Rabbi going through a lecture during an officer training course. The video goes as far as calling them an "elite unit" within the IDF. By that logic, since I went through basic training and fired a rifle on about 5 separate occasions, I'm now a part of an elite commando team trained to fix computers behind enemy lines.
There are many courses at the officer training school (called Bahad 1). These men are going through a standard non-combatant officer training. It is required to get any form of officer rank.

The video loves showing you clips where the guys are either handling their rifle, or where the rifle is very visible. That doesn't mean anything regarding the training they receive. I had a rifle for the entire duration of my army training. I took it home every weekend, had to think of where it was all the time, and my greatest worry was "what if someone steals it". If I ever had to shoot it in a real situation, I'd probably drop the clip, get it jammed and throw it at someone before I actually managed to use it to shoot at them. Even if I had, I wouldn't hit anything.

The story of Masada isn't very proud, as far as I'm concerned. Read about it yourself, and make sure you notice the part where they commit mass suicide at the end. Masada in an army context is usually a site where a training course comes near the end of the training. The climb up from one of the sides is physically challenging, and there's a story of a small bunch of Jews standing up to the Roman army at the top. The ending is usually glossed over.

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Now, Cast Lead. The one-year-old atrocity.
I wasn't in the Army at the time, and I don't know anyone who was called for reserve duty for it, so I can't speak from experience on that one. It is surprising to me that the army Rabbi actually went with the combat units into action, and I find it very hard to believe that it was the case with every combat unit. It would simply disrupt their combat operation too greatly to have someone with that little training there. It seems more likely that they went together during the initial entry to Gaza, which was mostly logistical, with very little resistance, and then stayed behind at the actual fighting. Again, though, this is pure speculation on my part.

As for more and more religious Jews joining the army, that's actually a stated goal, not "something the army is ashamed of and is making headlines in Israel". There's a law in place (known as the Tal law) that gave religious Jews an exemption from the three year mandatory army service. This created a great deal of resentment among the secular population, since they're now "carrying the load" for the religious ones.

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That's basically it. The video gets lots of facts right, but some of the contexts wrong. It starts out with the premise that the army wasn't Jewish before, and is becoming Jewish now, and mixes irrelevant pieces of data to "prove" that. I'm just left wondering where the "Shocking news: Hamas is becoming more Islamic, if that was even possible" video.

Disclaimer: I'm an Atheist Jew living in Israel. I served for 3 years in the IDF as a non-combatant.

^ That's some interesting background. Good point about the spin on the "elite" Rabbis and images of assault rifles. It is easy to invoke fear in the audience by focusing on assault rifles and the differences in material culture and ritual. So maybe there is a flawed argument presented here but I think it came from a larger interest to question Israel's judgment in light of the injustices that are inflicted on the Palestinians.

I wish I knew where to look to find polls in the UK on this, it seems like there is a PR problem there.