Gender Is What States Make of It Gender, Nation-building and War in Katharine Brooks, DPhil Candidate in International Relations, University of Oxford

Many Feminist scholars and policymakers have long assumed a relationship between gender and war, most commonly premised upon the theory that conflict is rooted in the oppression of women. Initially, these ideas were embedded in a reductionist understanding of gender; in which women were biologically conditioned to be passive and men to be violent.1 Under this paradigm, men necessarily conducted world affairs in a violent and competitive manner and the exclusion of women meant the marginalisation of feminine traits of compromise and pacifism in global politics.

The constructivist revolution in gender theory exposed gender as a socially constructed phenomenon, overturning the consensus on men’s biological predilection for violence and their dominance of power structures as the explanation for conflict. Nevertheless, a belief that a relationship exists between gender and conflict has persisted. This belief has also, in recent years, finally been buttressed by empirical findings. Recent work by second-wave, positivist Feminist scholars such as Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, Rose McDermott and Chad Emmet aimed to demonstrate that the greatest indicator of a state’s likelihood to engage in violent warfare is its treatment of women.2 In ‘The Heart of the Matter’ and Sex and World Peace, Hudson et al sought to establish that the correlation between violence against women and incidence of violent conflict is more pronounced than that observed between incidence of conflict and other previously accepted indicators such as poverty.3 These conclusions are supported by other scholars in the field: A body of quantitative empirical work spearheaded by Mary Caprioli links measures of gender inequality to levels of conflict and insecurity.4 As a result, Caprioli is able to demonstrate that states with higher levels of social, economic, and political gender equality are less likely to rely on military force to settle disputes. Similarly, In Gender, Violence and International Crisis, Caprioli and Boyer show that states displaying high levels of gender equality, measured by the percentage of female leaders, demonstrate lower levels of violence in international disputes.5 Thus, the claims of the Feminist scholars

1 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Women and the Evolution of World Politics’, Foreign Affairs 77:5, pp24-40 (1998). 2 Valerie Hudson, Mary Caprioli, Bonnie Ballif-Sapnvill, Rose McDermott & Chad F. Emmet, ‘The Heart of the Matter’, International Security 33:3, pp. 7-45( 2009). Also, Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli & Chad Emmet, Sex and World Peace, New York: Columbia University Press (2012). 3 It must be noted, however, that ‘violence against women’ is not necessarily the best measure of women’s inequality as in situations of conflict a woman is always more at risk of violence. Therefore, there is a concerning level of variable overlap in this study. 4 Mary Caprioli, “Gendered Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 37, No. 1 (January 2000), pp.51–68. 5 Boyer & Caprioli, ‘Gender, Violence and International Crisis’. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. who subscribe to the belief that exclusion and oppression of women lead to conflict appear to have finally been empirically verified.

However, this paper would contend that the contemporary positivist Feminist scholars such as Hudson and Caprioli have too often ignored those cases that appear unexplained by their hypotheses, seemingly rogue outliers upon an otherwise regular pattern. As a result, they often fail to take account of the nuances in the relationship between gender and war. While, in most cases, it is true that gender inequality and conflict are correlated, this has not been the case at all times and in all places. For example, in Sex and World Peace, Hudson et al persuasively demonstrated correlation between the belligerence of states and the domestic oppression of women. However, they were unable to account for the actions of states whose behaviour does not conform to the predictions of this theory. In failing to consider those cases that diverge from the norm, or arguing that they conform to the standard model more than they really do, these scholars are guilty of minimising difference and overplaying similarity. This paper identifies such an outlier in Israel, a relatively gender-equal yet belligerent state, and seeks to examine possible reasons behind its non-correspondence with the predictions of the claims of the second-wave positivist Feminist theory. Such theoretical testing is essential since no theory that so explicitly relies on quantitative methods can be considered plausible when it cannot offer at least some explanation for the existence of outliers.

This paper first justifies its claim that Israel can be considered both a relatively gender-equal and a belligerent state. It then goes on to trace the process of gender construction within Israel in conjunction with the processes of militarisation and securitization in order to identify the precise relationship between gender and state aggression in the case of Israel. Within such an investigation, this paper hopes to highlight the complexity of the relationship between security and women’s empowerment. It argues that the relationship between the status of women and belligerence of societies is more complex than first appears and rejects the argument that the oppression of women in itself is a causal factor in explaining conflict. Rather, this paper contends that it is the nature of the construction of gender hierarchies within the state that determines that states level of belligerency; specifically the propagation of societal norms that promote masculine characteristics of aggression in one or both genders. In most states this does manifest as oppression of women but to see the latter as a cause in itself is to mistake the origin of the phenomenon. This paper argues that the explanation for Israel’s deviation is thus to be found in Israel’s unusual construction of gender. Moreover, this paper contests that notions of security and gender are co-constitutive and states or groups adopt specific gender norms at least partially in response to their security situation, which can then have a reciprocal impact upon the latter in a mutually reinforcing, reflexive method.

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. The Challenge Posed By Israel.

Measuring gender inequality has proven both problematic and controversial. There are, however, a few key indexes that have gained relative acceptance. One is the Gender Inequality Index (GII), first introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report 20th anniversary edition by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).6 Although it must be acknowledged that the GII cannot cover all aspects of inequality, it does give a fairly good representation of the level of inequality in a country, without being able to identify the specific nature of that inequality. Under the GII, Israel ranked number 25 out of 186 countries with a score of 0.144 (with 0 representing perfect equality and 1 representing perfect inequality).7 Israel’s diverse ethnic and religious make-up obviously complicates any attempt to generalise regarding women’s status in Israel and there is frequently a ‘sharp contrast between legislation on women’s equality and reality, between formal regulation and daily life’ for many women. 8 These observations notwithstanding, this paper would contend that Israel should be considered a relatively gender-equal state. On the vast majority of indicators of women’s equality it scores well or very well. are generally well protected by laws guaranteeing equality and they have access to the labour market and political power on a par with the European average. They also have higher levels of women in higher education and lower rates of violence against women than many Western European nations. This does not reflect the universal picture for women in Israel but this observation remains true for even the most gender-equal countries. Overall, Israel may be considered at least as gender-equal as the European

6 According to the UNDP, this index is a composite measure which captures the loss of achievement within a country due to gender inequality, and uses three dimensions to do so: reproductive health, empowerment, and labour market participation. Reproductive health is measured by maternal mortality and adolescent fertility rates; empowerment is measured by the share of parliamentary seats held by each gender and attainment at secondary and higher education by each gender; and economic activity is measured by the labour market participation rate for each gender. 7 The world average score on the GII is 0.463, reflecting a percentage loss in achievement across the three dimensions due to gender inequality of 46.3%. Regional averages range from 28.0% in Europe and Central Asia, to nearly 58% in Sub-Saharan Africa. At the country level losses due to gender inequality range from 4.5% in the Netherlands (the lowest value), to 74.7% in Yemen (the highest value). Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the Arab States suffer the largest losses due to gender inequality (57.7%, 56.8% and 55.5% respectively). Deconstructing Israel’s GII score, it is clear that it scores very well on maternal mortality rates, at only 7 per 100,000, on a par with Norway and Australia and far better than the US at 21 per 100,000. It has an adolescent fertility rate of 14 per 1,000, about twice as high as the best scoring European countries but half that of the U.S. rate. Another area where Israel does well is the percentage of women with at least a secondary school education (82.7%) compared to the 85.5% for men. There is also only a ten-percentage point differential between the male and female labour force participation (62.4 and 52.5 respectively), a differential similar to the highest-ranking countries on the GII.7 In regard to female participation in politics, only 20% of members in 2012 were women7, compared to around 40% of the parliaments of Sweden and Norway, but this is still above that of the US Congress which currently has only 17% women. An alternative index is the Global Gender Gap index, which ranks Israel 56 out of 135 states.7 This difference stems from the greater weight accorded to women’s participation in politics by the Global Gender Gap formula. While Israel scores near parity in education, health and many aspects of economic participation, low levels of female participation in politics substantially reduce its positioning in this index. Even so, however, it ranks far higher than any other states within the region. It also ranks higher than many relatively gender equal countries such as France, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Italy and Greece. 8 Yishai, Between the Flag and the Banner, p.18. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. average - a sufficient level of equality to render Israel one of the world’s ‘relatively gender-equal’ states.

In regard to the justification for defining Israel as a ‘belligerent’ state, that Israel is a state with a high level of conflict is generally an accepted statement. Since its establishment in 1948, it has fought seven recognized wars, two Palestinian intifadas, and a series of armed conflicts in the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, meaning it has fought more wars than any other state since 1945.9 In the Global Peace Index10 2012 Israel was ranked 150 out of 158 countries, making it the 9th most conflict-ridden place in the world. 11 At the time, this placed Israel as more violent than Pakistan and Syria. This position was also the result of improvements in its ranking over three successive years from a lowest rank of 141 out of 144 countries in 2009.12

Though Israel has frequently portrayed itself as ‘peace loving’ and a ‘victim of a hostile environment’13 to the international community, this façade belies a belligerent reality. Out of the 7 wars Israel has fought since its birth, 5 were initiated by Israel.14 Moreover, the asymmetric casualty rate also demonstrates that Israel is willing to use force far in excess of the force used against it.15 Similarly, Israel scores the highest rank on the Sates of Concern to the International Community Index which measures the extent of non-compliance with international norms, showing that Israel is highly non- compliant with prevailing international norms regarding restraint.16 This is also demonstrated by the observation that the Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than it has all other states combined.17 In particular, Israel has been found to be guilty of violating the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding population transfers into occupied territories in its pursuit of its settlement programme in the West Bank. It has also been found to use weapons prohibited for use in civilian areas on civilian targets.18

9 Richard Ned Lebow Aggressive Democracies; Dan Horowitz & Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel, Albany: State University of New York Press (1989) p.195. 10 The Global Peace Index is composed of 23 indicators, ranging from a nation’s level of military expenditure to its relations with neighbouring countries and the level of respect for human rights. 11 Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Peace Index Rankings 2012, available at http://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/2012-GPI-Map-with-Rankings-and-Scores.pdf 12 Institute for Economics and Peace, Global Peace Index Report 2009, available at http://economicsandpeace.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/09/2009-GPI-Results-Report-.pdf 13 Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, London: Penguin (2008). 14 Lebow, Aggressive Democracies. 15 The number of casualties incurred in Israel’s wars is disputed. According to official Israeli records, the death toll for the Israel-Palestine conflict is 7978 Arabs and 1503 Jews. However, other Israeli source put the casualty count of the total Arab-Israeli conflict, including its wars with the other Arab states, at 24,526 Jewish deaths and 90,785 Arab deaths. Conversely, Gunnar Heinsohn puts the total casualty list at 50,000 for the Arab-Israeli conflict with 35,000 of the dead Arabs and 16,000 16 States of Concern to the International Community Index, available at http://vmrhudson.org/socic.html 17 However, it must be noted that many of these resolutions are politically motivated and the Human Rights Council has come under repeated reprimand for its over-concentration upon the Israel-Palestine conflict in neglect of other injustices. 18 Amnesty International, ‘Israel used white phosphorous in Gaza civilian areas’, (2009) available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/israeli-armys-use-white-phosphorus-gaza-clear-undeniable- 20090119 Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Prevalent claims of special pleading for Israel on the basis that its aggression is justified given the hostility of the rest of the region are mitigated by Israel’s clear and unprecedented level of protection by the US and NATO19 and, although Israel has successfully constructed a narrative of itself as ‘David against Goliath’, this does not withstand scrutiny: Israel is a nuclear armed power which receives 1.8 billion worth of military aid annually from the U.S20 and has an army far larger and better equipped than any of its neighbours. Israel may therefore be considered a belligerent nation by a host of applicable standards. However, given its level of democracy and gender equality, such an observation does not correlate with current Feminist theories of conflict. The extent of the deviation is demonstrated when one compares Peace Index Values to GII scores:

GII against Peace Index For all Countries with Available Data 3.5 Iraq Afghanistan P 3 Russia Israel e Yemen a 2.5 Libya c V y = 1.4556e0.7695x e a 2 R² = 0.444 l 1.5 Series1 I u Qatar n e Expon. (Series1) d 1 Iceland e x 0.5

0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 Gender Inequality Index Value

As demonstrated by the graph above, there is an obvious correlation between higher values for gender inequality and higher values for conflict, with Israel depicted as a noticeable outlier (the most gender-equal of the belligerent outliers). It is evident that the higher end of the x-axis becomes more dispersed than the lower end. Upon examination the cluster of countries found below the line of best fit above a GII score of 0.4 were found to be predominantly small LEDC nations. This means that the lack of conflict they demonstrate – compared to the predicted values – is arguably better explained by their very limited capabilities. Therefore, the following graphs display the

19 Walt & Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby. 20 Jeremy Sharp, Congressional Research Service, ‘U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel’, March 12, 2012 Available at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. same dataset but, in the first, only those countries with above 4 million citizens and, in the second, only those countries with more than 4 million citizens and excluding sub- Saharan Africa.21 It is in the third graph that the relationship between conflict and gender inequality is most convincingly demonstrated. Once the majority of states with very low capabilities have been removed, the R2 value of the data improves to 0.5195.

Peace Index Values Against GII Values for all countries with population over 4 million 3.5 P e 3 a V 2.5 c a e 2 l u Series1 I 1.5 e n Expon. (Series1) s 1 d e 0.5 x 0 y = 1.4617e0.7875x 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 R² = 0.4628 GII Values

21 Again, this is justified on the basis that low levels of belligerence from these states may partly be explained by low ability to project violence. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Peace Index Values Against GII for all Countires over 4 million excluding Sub- Saharan Africa 3.5 P e 3 a V 2.5 c a e 2 l Series1 u 1.5 I e Linear (Series1) n 1 s d 0.5 e x 0 y = 1.9044x + 1.3719 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 R² = 0.5195 GII Values

Israel’s non-correlation is important because Hudson et al.’s account of the relationship between the oppression of women and conflict is, by definition, a universal theory. If oppression of women is necessary to permit conflict, this should be the case for all societies at all periods of time. This is because if it is indeed the oppression of women that causes conflict then, while some variation may be anticipated due to geopolitical factors, major deviations from the pattern are problematic. This is also the case for other theories that explain war. For example, if two functioning democracies were to go to war it would call into question aspects of democratic peace theory. While it would not render the theory irrelevant it would certainly require modification in light of a disproving case study. The challenge for this paper, then, is to explain this discrepancy.

Explaining Israel: A Constructivist Understanding of the Relationship between Security and Gender.

When attempting to explain how it is possible that Israel is both ‘relatively gender equal’ and ‘aggressive’, it is essential to return to the idea of gender. The understanding that gender is socially and culturally constructed necessitates the question of whom it has been constructed by. This is a question that has unfortunately often been ignored by many scholars of gender who frequently appear to assume that the process of gender construction is agentless. However, this paper would argue that, like other cultural norms, ideas regarding gender do not simply arise from nowhere; they are conceived, developed, propagated and dispersed by individuals and groups within a community. Moreover, this paper would contend that this activity is usually

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. undertaken by individuals in positions of power within communities, nations and states and the elites engaged in the creation and maintenance of gender hierarchies have agendas, motivations and interests that are served by the ideas they promote.

Acknowledging that the agents of gender construction have specific motivations in mind, then it is necessary to examine what these motivations are and in particular which factors (political, ideological and personal) have been most influential. The nature of our modern constructions of gender would indicate some similarities between disparate motivations. The construction of a gender hierarchy in which women are subordinate and patriarchy is seen as legitimate, for example, serves to reinforce the power and privilege of male elites.22 This much has been previously articulated by other feminist scholars.23 This paper is not, however, concerned with the full range of motivations acting upon the agents of cultural creation. Rather, it is concerned specifically with the motivations related to security, a previously neglected factor in gender construction. Where scholars have considered the role of agents in the construction of gender, they have tended to focus their analysis of the motivations of these actors upon the self-serving desire to dominate of the male elite. Scholars have therefore overlooked the role of competing agendas in different social and political settings, leading them once again to argue that gender constructions across different cultures has been more homogenous than is really the case.

In virtually ‘every human culture, war exists in some form, as an ever-present potential that is realized at least occasionally.’24 Consequently, it is frequently contested that the primary purpose of the state is to provide security - to enable individuals to escape the ‘state of nature’ in which all persons are under constant threat of violence. The division of the world into nation states, however, created its own security dilemma, which, in the absence of world government, is inescapable. The modern state was born through war as leaders of nascent states consolidated their power through the coercive extraction of resources and the conquest of ever-larger territories.25 The ever- present fear of war throughout history, therefore, has meant security has always been a primary, if not the primary interest of nations and states. Some Feminist theories of the international system, such as articulated by Laura Sjoberg, concur with this analysis. If it is true that ‘in patriarchal social structures, equality and coexistence are undesirable, and dominance is the measure of success’ then, in a system characterized by political units seeking dominance, all units must exist in fear of attack by the other. While they too seek to dominate, existence itself is a pre-requisite for this aim. Security, therefore, is paramount in a gender hierarchical world. However, the role of security considerations in the construction of gender within nations and states has been almost entirely overlooked by the discipline as a whole.

22 Richard Wrangham & Dale Peterson, Demonic Male: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, London: Bloomsbury (1997) p.125. 23 Sjoberg, ‘Gender, Structure and War’, Goldstein, War and Gender, p.7. 24 Goldstein, War and Gender, p.22. 25 Charles Tilley, Coercion, Capital and European States, Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell (1990). Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

The importance of security to gender construction is readily demonstrated by the extent to which war and militarism are gendered – a fact already acknowledged by many non-positivist Feminist scholars. For example, Enloe recognizes that states require large numbers of men to make the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ for their country and that, in order to do this, states have perpetuated norms of masculinity which include honour, valour and aggression, but fails to explain that security is the driver of this desire. Similarly, Yuval-Davis explains the importance attached to the maternal duties of women in nationalist projects but fails to explain that the desire for a large population is rooted within structures of insecurity and thus that this gendering is, at least indirectly, a result of security concerns.

Including security considerations into the motivations of agents of gender construction enables one to reconcile many of the similarities in gender construction in various societies with their differences. Most states have experienced similar security concerns of threat of invasion by neighbours and the resultant need to defend their territory. In order to achieve security, therefore, states have required large populations and the ability to mobilise a substantial part of that population for war. Men and women’s few biologically determined differences were key in determining the gendered division of labour in achieving these goals. Women were the sex able to bear children and men, on average, were stronger than women.26 They were also unencumbered by pregnancy and breastfeeding. Women were therefore accorded the role of birthing the nation and men of defending it. States were then faced with the task of constructing an understanding of gender that would mould men into the warriors they required them to be. Since killing in war ‘does not come naturally for either gender, (…) to help overcome soldiers’ reluctance to fight, cultures developed gender roles that equated “manhood” with toughness under fire.’27

The frequent exclusion of women from many armies, in spite of their ability to fight, may be explained by the function women played in motivating men to fight. In characterising women as vulnerable and in need of protection, some states found they were better able to mobilise men for war.28 Across cultures and through time, therefore, ‘the selection of men as potential combatants (and women for feminine war support roles) has helped shape the war system. In turn, the pervasiveness of war has influenced gender profoundly.’29 However, the exclusion of women from war has been far from universal and there are many instances in which states have felt acute or unusual security threats that have meant they have had to break with traditional gender roles for war. There are also many cultures that did not adopt such strict gender segregation in war as a result of other reasons, be they cultural or ideological. This has

26 Goldstein, War and Gender. 27 Ibid: 9 28 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley: University of California Press (2000). 29 Goldstein, War and Gender, p.9. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. meant that states have mobilised women for war more often than conventional wisdom would suggest.30

If one looks back to ancient times, the participation of women in warfare was even more common. Indeed, it was asserted disparagingly by the Roman army that Boadicea, Queen of the Britons, had more women in her army than men. According to Ehrenreich, gravesites recently excavated in Russia contain the remains of women warriors from the second millennium B.C.—female skeletons buried with weapons and bearing wounds inflicted by similar weapons.’31 Similarly, according to Goldstein, there is evidence that women participated in war in the nomadic steppe societies’ meaning ‘they were in some sense present at the creation of civilizational war, yet they disappeared from cavalry as larger-scale military units formed and empires arose’32 The most well documented case of long-term mobilisation of female fighter was in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa33 Estimates for the number of women warriors in Dahomey vary substantially over the years but at times they were believed to comprise a third of the standing army.34

The need to mobilise women for war at specific times has meant that states or groups have then had to reconstruct or revise gender roles. In the Soviet Union, for example, ‘playing up the contributions of women helped the formidable Soviet propaganda machine to raise morale in a dispirited population and spur greater sacrifices by the male soldiers.’35 This contrasts with the traditional approach underscored in the literature that argues that states emphasized women’s vulnerability in order to encourage men to fight. Even states which did not mobilise women for war, but only to fill spaces in the labour market left by men who had gone to the front, had to encourage women to conceive of themselves differently. Women brandishing muscles and wearing overalls replaced previous images of slim, petite, meek women, in both state propaganda and advertising. These gender images were designed by individuals acting in the interests of the state with the intent of manipulating and altering gender roles within society.

Perhaps the most outstanding case of gender reconstruction was Dahomey, probably because it was the only recorded case where women were mobilised for considerable lengths of time.36 Indeed, some scholars claim that the female warriors of Dahomey even believed their gender to have been changed. Visitors at the time

30 The most substantial participation of women in combat was in the Red Army of the Soviet Union during World War Two when manpower shortages led to the drafting of women. Official figures record that 800,000 women served in the army during World War Two, 500,000 of them at the front30. Women also fought in World War One, notably for Russia and there were all-female units recorded in the Taiping rebellion in China. Similarly, women have participated in guerrilla wars and revolutionary movements across the globe, in Vietnam, South Africa, Argentina, Cyprus, Iran, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Nicaragua,30 to name but a few. 31 Ehrenreich, Men Hate War Too, p.119. 32 Goldstein, War and Gender, p.15. 33 Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta, p.11. 34 Goldstein, War and Gender, p.21. 35 Goldstein, War and Gender, p.65. 36 Elshtain, Women and War, p. 243 Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. reported that the female warriors sung songs celebrating their transition from women to men: ‘As the blacksmith takes an iron bar and by fire changes its fashion, so we have changed our nature. We are no longer women, we are men.’37 Similarly, according to Herodotus, Sauromatian women participated in war along with men and had a marriage law that forbade any girl from marrying until she killed a member of the enemy in battle.38 If this was true, this demonstrates that some states were capable of creating violent rites of passage into adulthood for women as well as men. These examples, therefore, are not simply the case of individual integration but the result of campaigns of manipulation and propaganda wherein the state or the nation deliberately reconceived its gender norms in order to facilitate its security requirements.

The constructions of gender are therefore at least partially the result of the security considerations of the society in question. While there has undoubtedly been similarity in construction of gender roles within varying national contexts this is as a result of their security concerns being broadly similar. However, in states that have experienced unusual security situations, particularly those where security threats have been acute, there are noticeable differences in the way that gender has been created. In response to their security situations, therefore, gender has been what states have made of it. It is now time to turn to the discussion of Israel’s security situation and its construction of gender.

The state of Israel was born into a region deeply hostile to its conception.39 By the time of the creation of Israel, ‘30 years of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict had left a heritage of enmity and mistrust in its wake.’40 Although the State of Israel won its war of Independence, victory was reached at the cost of the lives of one in every hundred citizens. Israel was thus created in blood and violence. This, combined with the psychological legacy of the holocaust on the Jewish people meant that the new state believed that further attacks were inevitable.41 This fear was exacerbated by their demographic disadvantage; the Jews were heavily outnumbered by the Palestinians. At the beginning of the British mandate in 1919, Jews constituted approximately ten per cent of the population of Palestine, and by 1939-40, they were still only 30 per cent; 467,000 out of 1.528 million.42 At the end of 1946, there were an estimated 1.269 million Arabs in Palestine, as opposed to only 608,000 Jews, a two-to-one ratio.43 Israel’s leaders also believed it lacked adequate strategic depth to be sufficiently secure. Although the Israeli army had managed to seize 78 per cent of the territory of the Palestine in the War of Independence, ‘the slender reed of Israel the country – merely

37 Alpern, Amazons of Black Sparta, p.117. 38 Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 13 39 Horowitz & Lissak, The Overburdened Polity of Israel, p.198. 40 Levy, ‘Structured Bellicosity’, p.40. 41 Yishai Between the Flag and the Banner, p.7. 42 Charles Smith, Palestine and the Arab Israeli Conflict, 4th edition, Basingstoke: Macmillan (2000) p.149. 43 Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, p.191. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. nine miles wide just north of Tel Aviv – was far less than what Ben Gurion believed was needed to support a modern state.’44

A great deal of the security threat identified by the early leaders of Israel was, in fact, based in perception. The real security dilemmas faced by the emerging state were magnified in the minds of the leaders as a result of the psychological legacy of the holocaust and the historic vulnerability of the Jews. This meant that security threats were often perceived as existential when in reality they were not, resulting also in an intensification of the response.

Responding to the security situation they found themselves in, the leaders of Israel developed a three-layered security plan. Firstly, it was decided that the state of Israel would become a military power, which would negotiate with the Arabs only from a position of strength, the so-called ‘Iron Wall’ strategy.45 This necessitated securing the greatest possible amount of territory and maintaining a population mobilised for war. Accordingly, ‘in addition to a massive military build-up based on mass conscription, Israel established a chain of border settlements as a means to fix and seal its new borders.’46

Secondly, the Israeli elite knew they needed to ensure high population growth if they were to maintain this position of strength, believing that ‘a nation conquers its land in two ways: a military conquest and a population conquest.’47 In addition, maximising the number of Jews was required to create and maintain a Jewish majority that was the ‘essential precondition for the formal squaring of the Jewish and democratic state’ circle.’48 They thus sought to increase their population through encouraging immigration and persuading Israeli citizens to have large families.

Thirdly, Israel sought to secure the support of the Great Powers. This built on the legacy of the Zionist movement. From the beginning, ‘the unstated assumption of Herzl and his successors was that the Zionist movement would achieve its goal not through an alliance with the local Palestinians but through an alliance with the dominant Great Power of the day.’49 Prior to the establishment of Israel, the Great Power had been Britain, whose approval and assistance they sought in the form of the Balfour Declaration. After World War Two and the creation of Israel, the world’s dominant power was the United States. Israel therefore set about constructing a friendship with that nation strong enough to ensure sufficient military, financial and diplomatic assistance to propel Israel into a military power.

44 Tyler, Fortress Israel, p.25. 45 Steinfeld, War of the Wombs, p.13. 46 Levy, ‘Structured Bellicosity’, p.422. 47 Ephrath members to PM Levi Eshkol, 7 July 1967, G/43/6404/34, ISA. 48 Ibid: 13. 49 Shlaim, The Iron Wall, p. 5. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. This paper contends that gender was constructed in Israel, along with many other social norms and values, to facilitate these three security goals. As required by its violent and extraordinary beginnings, the Israeli state constructed a nationalist ideology within which masculinities were constructed in much the same way as they have been in other militarised, nationalist states – as warrior citizens and defenders of the nation. However, this paper also argues that although femininity has usually been constructed within similar national contexts as passive, dependent and maternal, in Israel a tripartite understanding of femininity was constructed.

This tripartite construction was based upon the following pillars; the first, the traditional role, of the ‘womb of the nation;’50 the second, of the woman as Israeli soldier-citizen, charged with defending the nation; the third, for international consumption, of the free, independent Israeli woman. This tripartite construction, it is asserted, served the particular security interests of the state. The first construction of the Israeli woman was necessary in order to encourage Israeli women to outbreed the Palestinian threat; the second serves both as a method of compensating for low manpower numbers in armed combat; and the third was instrumental in constructing an ideological and cultural alliance with its Western allies.

Masculinities: Sabras and the ‘New Jew’

In most aspects the construction of Israeli masculinities mirrors the ideal- typical militarised masculinity detailed within the literature. Israeli men have been characterised within both state propaganda and popular culture as possessing the masculine characteristics of strength, power, autonomy, public life, rationality, bravery, and aggression51 which Tickner argues are central to militarised manhood. The ‘cult of toughness’, that represents both the Israeli nation and Jewish men,52 thus mirrors the construction of masculinities within nationalist discourses around the world.

Zionism, from its origins, was an ideology rooted in ideas about masculinities and their relationship to the nation-building project. The ideology emerged in an international context where Jews were exiled, living as foreigners in every land. The portrayal of Jewish men in their host communities was often as weak victims, men who had become feminised through their experience as outsiders:53 ‘In a sense Jewish men felt relegated to being metaphorical women, subjected to degradation by other men of dominant cultures.’54

50 Ayalet Shachar, “, State and the problem of Gender”, McGill Law Journal 50 (2005) p.30.

51 See Tickner, Gender in International Relations. 52 Mayer, Gender Ironies of Nationalism, p.11 53 Ibid: 15. 54 Katz, ‘Women and Gender in Early Jewish and Palestinian Nationalism’, p.70. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. The legacy of the holocaust was to cement this understanding as ideas of the New Jew were perceived as necessary to fulfil the ‘never again’ dogma of the Zionists.55 Moreover, the European ideas of the New Jew mixed well with pre-existing identities of Palestinian Jews. Native Palestinian Jews termed themselves Sabras, after the cactus plants in Palestine, an allegory for their tough exterior, developed in the harsh conditions of Arab-dominated Palestine. As European-born Jews migrated to Palestine, the myths of national imaginings suggested that they too became Sabras. Thus, in fighting for national emancipation, many Jews felt they had also finally become men.

This notion of Jewish masculinity has perpetuated and has become intricately linked with the military in Israel. According to Sharoni, ‘military service constitutes a necessary rite of passage, for a man to earn his place in Israeli society and to be considered a loyal citizen.’56 Indeed, ‘for many Israeli Jewish men (…) the military has become the only rite of passage into manhood.’57 This conception of renewed Jewish masculinity was central to the nationalist project. The State media took an active role in the propagation of the idea of the New Jews of Israel, arguing that the first generation of Israelis were the antithesis of the weak, persecuted, and helpless Jews most commonly associated with collective traumatic memories of the Holocaust. This is in part because the ‘militarised’ vision of Jewish manhood contributed to the image that the state of Israel wished to portray to their international benefactors, of Israel as a state under siege. The image of the sabra as the antithesis of the Diaspora Jew was thus ‘used to reinforce the notion that Israel's offensive operations and military campaigns are a matter of national survival.’58

Femininities: The Tripartite Construction Mothers of the Nation The first pillar of the tripartite construction of the Israeli woman is certainly the most traditional construction of the feminine gender by a security-minded state, that of the ‘mother of the nation.’ Throughout history, states have sought control over the wombs of their female citizens, a control that was essential to ensure expansion of their populations, a plentiful supply of recruits to their armies and, often, the maintenance of the racial purity of their nation. Israel has been no exception to this aspect of nation- building; both in pre-state Palestine and later in the state of Israel, motherhood has defined women’s citizenship, and has been considered, in many ways, their most important contribution to the national collective.59

From the years of the , the new Israelis were aware of their demographic weakness. However, the extent of the demographic anxiety within Israel fluctuated

55 Sharoni, ‘Homefront as Battlefield’, p.8. 56 Ibid: 44 57 Mayer, Gender Ironies of Nationalism, p.284. 58 Sharoni, ‘Homefront as Battlefield’, p.8. 59 Hirsch, ‘Gender and Ethnicity in the Zionist Nation-building Project’, p.276. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. over time. Although it was a primary concern at the creation of the state of Israel, demographic anxiety was momentarily alleviated by the dramatic changes brought about by the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The war witnessed the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, whose return was barred, as well as a flood of Jewish immigration in 1948-51, from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. As a result, the Palestinian population became a minority inside the new state. However, ‘the volume and rates of Jewish immigration continued to fluctuate, and the natural growth of the Palestinian minority inside Israel remained high. Consequently, the fear of demographic danger persisted’60 and got considerably worse at times of low immigration.

Later, the June War of 1967 renewed demographic anxiety by bringing roughly one million Palestinians under Israeli control, which had implications for the preservation of the Jewish majority within Israel’s green line.61 This led to a new urgency in the campaign to increase the Jewish population. Arab leaders like Yasser Arafat also stoked the demographic anxiety by referring to the wombs of the Palestinian women as their greatest weapon.62 This led many of Israel’s leaders to fear the prospect of a Palestinian population surge. Golda Meir famously confided in the early 1970s that ‘she was afraid of having to wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies had been born during the night.’63 From 1960-64, ‘the total fertility rate (TFR) of Jews was only 3.39, whereas the Muslim TFR was more than double that at 9.23. Similarly, in 1990-1994, the Jewish TFR was 2.62 whereas the Muslim TFR was 4.67, again nearly double.’64 This, combined with limits imposed on Jewish immigration, meant that Israel felt the need to increase its population through encouraging childbirth.

The state launched a number of practical policies in order to increase fertility rates. The first official fertility policy enacted by the state of Israel was the Birth Prizes scheme, or prasei yeludah, which was set up by Ben-Gurion on 19 July 1949.65 The programme was attached to the Prime Minister’s Office and awarded 100 liras, together with a letter signed by Ben-Gurion, to every woman on the birth of her tenth child.66 Other policies included maternity insurance which covered the costs of hospitalisation during childbirth and large families insurance, which gave state benefits to families on the basis of the number of children they had; emphasising that the role of the financial assistance was directly to encourage childbirth rather than to alleviate poverty. The state also restricted access to contraception.

60 Steinfeld, War of the Womebs, p.40. 61 Loc.cit. 62 Loc.cit. 63 Ibid: 171 64 Ibid: 14 65 Government Resolution Number 7, 19 July 1949. 66 Steinfeld, War of the Wombs, p.98. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. While many scholars on the subject detail these practical policies, one of the most important mechanisms by which the state sought to increase fertility within the Jewish populations is often overlooked. That is the normative messages the state sent to women about the value of motherhood and their role as Israeli women. Very early on in Israel’s history, it became clear that maternity was defined by the state ‘as women’s primary responsibility to the common good.’67 This message was disseminated through numerous propaganda organisations. In the pre-state years, parenting manuals were distributed by the Committee for Childbirth Problems which stated;

‘For our safety in the future we need to have a large population. These periods of war have taken valuable people from us. Our human reservoir in the Diaspora has declined, and if childbearing is always a crucial necessity, it is now even more crucial (…) A woman’s duty is different from a man’s in this war.’68

Abortion in Israel, like in many nationalist projects, has also been a key issue of contention. In the early years of the state, the law criminalised all and both the person procuring an and the aborting woman were liable to imprisonment. In January 1975 a vote was held on proposals to liberalize the abortion laws. A former member of the Knesset, Marcia Freedman recalled Members of the Knesset shouting statements like ‘tens of millions of Arabs, who are fruitful and multiply, surround our border,’ ‘they destroy foetuses, souls, spirits of Israel’s children which they are still in the mother’s womb,’ ‘I want to ask you something. Has Arafat given his consent to this law?’ and ‘the Jewish people are being annihilated’69 during the debate. The connections made between abortion and the security threat posed by the Arabs demonstrates that opposition to abortion was not merely moral; it was based upon considerations of national security. Even now, Israel has abortion laws that are considered restrictive by Western standards. By contrast, it has more fertility clinics per head of population than anywhere else in the world.70

Many of these normative messages were tied in to memories of the holocaust. The Israeli government was keen to remind women of the number of Jews who had died in the holocaust; and that it was their ‘duty’ to replenish the stock of the Jewish race.71 Women who failed in this duty were often painted as traitors to the state and the Jewish race. For example, during the early 1980s Haim Sadan, the Minister of Health, proposed compelling all Jewish women considering abortion to watch a slide show of images of dead foetuses alongside murdered Jewish children in Nazi camps.72

67 Ibid:19. 68 Dr Miriam Aharonova, ‘The Hygiene of Woman’s Life’. (Fourth edition, Tel Aviv: Kupat Holim (1957) in Sachlav Stoler-Liss: ‘Mother’s Birth the Nation: The Social Construction of Zionist Motherhood in Wartime in Israeli Parent’s Manuals’, NASHIM: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (2003) p.114. 69 Marcia Freedman, Exile in the Promised Land: A Memoir, London: Firebrand Books (1990) p93. 70 Susan Martha Kahn, Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Contraception in Israel, Durham: Duke University Press (2000). 71 Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘The Jewish Collectivity in Khamsin, Special Issue on Women in the Middle East. Ed. Magida Salman, London: Zed Books (1987) p.80. 72 Yuval-Davis, ‘The Jewish Collectivity’, p.84. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Women were also led to understand that their duty to procreate was not only a national one, but a military one. According to Baumel,

‘the extent to which the image of a mother as an instrument of national continuity entered the collective public consciousness may be seen by the common phrase used by midwives during the 1950's and 60's in order to inform new mothers of their child's sex (“congratulations, you have a ‘chayal’ (male soldier)”; “congratulations, you have a ‘chayelet’ (female soldier)”.’73

Iconography of war memorials also frequently reifies the image of the mother bidding her son farewell as he heads to war, reminding women that this too is part of their national duty.74

Women’s conscription to solving the ‘demographic problem’ has therefore ‘constituted a centrepiece of Israeli gendered discourse from the first years of the state and underpins a great many social norms, beliefs and conventions.’75 This entailed that what it meant to be a woman in early Israel was intimately bound with maternity. The state’s accumulated propaganda ‘maternalised’ women’s roles within society, portraying them as ‘mothers of the nation’. Women who deviated from this expectation, especially by trying to control their fertility were thereby portrayed as traitors to the state. As demonstrated by the Knesset debates, women who had abortions were often thought of as colluding with the Arab enemy – putting the state in danger by failing in their duties to protect the nation’s security.

Soldier-Citizens The second pillar of the tripartite construction of the Israeli woman is that of the soldier-citizen. Israel is currently the only country in the world where military service is obligatory for both men and women,76 albeit in a gendered manner as women are very rarely on the front lines. The relationship of women with the armed forces in Israel has undergone a dramatic evolution in the short history of the state, from a position of relative equality and direct combat experience in the pre-state revolutionary combat units such as the Haganah and the Irgun, to one of very gendered and unequal participation through the fifties, sixties and seventies, before once again returning to a position of greater equality and access. This evolution has occurred in conjunction with the evolving security needs of the state and the corresponding evolving norms surroundings women’s contributions to the nation.

73 Judith Tydor Baumel, ‘Teacher, Tiller, Soldier, Spy? Women's Representations in Israeli Military Memorials’, Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 21: 1-2, pp. 93-117 (2002). 74 Baumel, ‘Teacher, Tiller, Soldier, Spy?’, p.115. 75 Susan Sered, ‘What Makes Women Sick? Maternity, Modesty and Militarism in Israeli Society’, Hanover, N.H. University Press of New England, (2000), p.23. 76 Other states which practice a limited form of conscription for women are Benin, Chad, Cuba, Eritrea, Libya, Malaysia, North Korea, Taiwan and Tunisia. However, in practice very few women are ever conscripted in these countries and none into combat roles. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Women’s role as soldier-citizens was initiated prior even to the birth of the state. The number of women who took part in armed combat in the years prior to the declaration of independence is disputed; however no scholar denies they formed a substantial part of all organisations. In the Haganah, the largest and most concentrated military organisation of the Yishuv, women played a considerable role. In its very principles, the Haganah stated that it was open to, ‘every Jewish male or female who is prepared and trained to fulfil the obligation of national defence.’ Although the proportion of women in the earliest years of the Haganah (during the twenties) is believed to have been as low as five per cent, by the later years it is suggested that women formed thirty per cent of the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah. Some have even argued that ‘by 1944 Palmach men and women represented equal numbers in each core group.’77 It has been noted that ‘women were also members of underground resistance groups such as the Irgun (…) as well as Lechi, the smallest and most militant group.’78 Furthermore, it would appear that women’s contributions during this time were not as gendered as one might expect. According to Amos Lev:

‘In the period of the Hagana there were joint units of men and women. In the expeditions to the Negev and Massada girls participated like men (...) more than one girl appeared in an actual fighting role, in the ranks of the regular army or in the trenches of the beleaguered settlements’79

Leading up to the Declaration of Independence, the Yishuv began to make preparations for war. On 5 December 1947, conscription was instituted for all men and women aged between 17 and 25. Less than two weeks after Israel's declaration as an independent state on May 14th, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion officially set up the IDF as the country's defence army. In the early months of the War of Independence, a considerable number of women fought as soldiers. According to Creveld, in 1948, 10.6% of the armed forces were women, but they died in far fewer numbers than men because they were not often on the front lines.80 Altogether, according to Baumel, during the War of Independence 137 women soldiers were killed.81

Feminist Israeli scholars, seeking to refute the gender equality myth, have tended to focus on women’s marginalization in and their exclusion both from central fields of national activity and from collective memory.82 This is unfortunate because it overlooks both the substantial contributions of women and the diversity of their experiences. For, ‘as emerges from other studies on women in colonial situations, the fact that in the colonies women sometimes operated outside established systems opened up new opportunities for them (…) immigration to Palestine allowed them to

77 Jacoby, Women in Zones of Conflict, p. 45. 78 Jacoby, Women in Zones of Conflict, 45/6 79 Amos Lev, With Ploughshare and Sword: Life in the Army of Israel, New York: Herzl Press (1961) p.143. 80 Martin Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive: A Critical History of the Israeli Defence Force, New York: Public Affairs (1999), p.99. 81 Baumel, ‘Teacher, Tiller, Soldier, Spy’, p.96. 82 Hirsch, ‘Gender and Ethnicity in the Zionist Nation-building Project’ p.277. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. eschew the regular course of marriage, motherhood and homemaking, and engage in meaningful national work.’83 This is not to say that the Zionist project was in every way equal or in no way repressive for women but ‘if we want to understand why such projects could be a source of attraction for women, or for certain groups of women, we cannot consider only their repressive aspects.’84

The War of Independence was the last war in which women actively participated in battle according to the Palmach tradition.85 After a female soldier's body was mutilated by Arabs near Gevulot early in the war, the Israeli High Command decided to remove women soldiers from the front lines and forbade them from participating in future battles. Following this incident, therefore, women were immediately removed from combat units and sent to rear units, serving primarily as clerical personnel, providing medical assistance, and other auxiliary functions.86 There were also many tasks besides fighting which the army was responsible for and which it was convenient to divert to the women’s corps, such as managing the large-scale Jewish immigration. Women were therefore ‘encouraged to undertake social work among immigrants, to settle them into their new surroundings, and to accustom them to their new environment.’87 It is clear, therefore, that the IDF began to redefine women’s role away from combat and into more traditional caregiving roles from this point.

This process in many ways mirrors the historical accounts of many nationalist movements in which women actively participated and were welcomed as equals when manpower was short and numbers mattered only to have been sent back home once the fighting stopped, leaving the men to organise the new society as they saw fit. However, Israel, contrary to much of the literature, did not completely mirror this trend. Rather, ‘for several decades collective public memory retained the original image of the fighting woman soldier.’88 It is also important to note that studies on the memorials for fallen soldiers in the War of Independence were unusual in that, not only were many built to commemorate fallen women but those that were often bore a representation of a woman.89 This breaks an international trend of war memorialisation that almost universally omits representations of female fighters.90 In Western war memorials the only woman usually depicted is the one who symbolises the ‘feminised’ nation. This presence of the female figure in war memorials is more important than it first appears since, ‘in the deepest sense, the choice of who gets remembered and what gets memorialised is in every culture, inevitably, ideological, and is crucial to the nationalism that gets constructed.’91

83 Ibid: 288 84 Loc.cit. 85 Ibid: 99 86 Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, ‘The Lives and Deaths of Female Military Casualties in Israel during the 1950s’, Israel Studies 14:2, pp.134-157 (2009) p.139. 87 Yishai Between the Flag and the Banner, p.12. 88 Baumel, ‘Teacher, Tiller, Soldier, Spy’, p.100. 89 Ibid: 4 90 Again, there are noticeable exceptions such as the USSR. 91 Mayer, Gender Ironies of Nationalism, p.295. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

Most importantly, while women’s role certainly became secondary within the armed forces, the decision was nonetheless made to maintain compulsory conscription for women as well as men. On September 8, 1949, several months after the War of Independence had finished, the Knesset passed the National Defence Law which stated that any person of military age (in the case of a male person, any age from eighteen to forty-nine years inclusive; in the case of a female person, any age from eighteen to thirty-four years inclusive) may be called upon to serve in the armed forces. Initially women and men were to serve the same length of time, although women were to be barred from combat status.92

The decision to mandate the conscription of women in law, often underplayed, was revolutionary for its time and was all the more radical given the resistance encountered. Examinations of recently declassified documents in the Israeli State Archives indicate that the plan to enlist women met with substantial resistance from the Orthodox and more traditional communities. The Knesset debates on the subject were also unusually fierce and pitted the religious conservatives against the more secular elements.

From the evidence available, it would appear that there were several reasons that this decision was taken. When justifying the decision to his opponents, Ben- Gurion argued that;

‘The army is the supreme symbol of duty and as long as women are not equal to men in performing this duty, they have not yet obtained true equality. If the daughters of Israel are absent from the army, then the character of the Yishuv will be distorted.’ 93

In his justification for the decision, therefore, Ben-Gurion first cites the importance of gender equality to the ideological nature of the State. There are reasons to believe this sentiment may be genuine. Ben-Gurion’s kibbutzian upbringing, where women participated in a collective in a manner that was nominally equal to men, undoubtedly influenced him. Similarly, women’s prior contributions to the pre-state militaries had established a precedent for women’s military participation. However, if the decision was taken entirely from the standpoint of an ideological commitment to equality then it becomes more difficult to justify the gendered nature of the division of duties or the exception for married women given that married men were not exempt.

Moreover, given the extent of the resistance to the law, it is reasonable to believe that there were more important considerations dominating the decision,

92 Pregnant and married women were exempt as were Orthodox women – the latter being a concession to the Orthodox communities which were deeply opposed to the law. Also exempt were Orthodox Yehuda students. 93 Letter from Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog 15th February 1952, ISA/RG/P2053/32 Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. namely, the security needs of the state. Ben-Gurion’s personal correspondence corroborates this theory. In his justification to Rabbi Herzog, one of the leaders of the Orthodox community who protested against the policy, he states,

‘Since you rightly believe that the security of the state must be pursued night and day, I want you to know that that security will not exist if our nation’s women do not know how to fight. We are few – and our enemies are many. If, heaven forbid, a war falls upon us, the men will go to fight the enemy, and if, heaven forbid, the women who are protecting their children at home do not know how to use a weapon – what will be their end if the enemy falls upon them?’94

It is also possible that another consideration weighed heavily on Ben-Gurion’s mind. At the time of the passing of the National Service Law, the leaders of the newly established State of Israel were of the mind that the IDF would serve purposes additional to the defence needs of the state. It would also be an important part of the integration process for Israeli citizens, a vehicle by which Israelis could be made into one nation: The IDF was to be the ‘melting pot’ of the new Israeli society.95 It is entirely possible that leaders like Ben-Gurion thought that women needed to be involved in this project as well. As argued by Kimmerling, within the framework of compulsory conscription ‘the new Israeli man and women were to be created.’96

The decision to include women in mandatory conscription had huge implications both for women in Israel and for the state of Israel as a whole. The importance of women’s military service is often played down by both Israeli and feminist scholars who argue that the gendered nature of the service means that it does not represent a real break with traditional gender dynamics. This represents a failure to understand how revolutionary the conscription of women for any defence role was and a failure to view the situation in Israel in comparative perspective. For example, Sharoni quotes Geula Cohen, a former female member of the Irgun, as saying; ‘the Israeli woman is a wife and mother in Israel, and therefore it is in her nature to be a soldier, the wife of a soldier, the sister of a soldier. This is her reserve duty. She is continually in military service.’97 Yet, Sharoni interprets this as meaning the role of women is defined by their relationship to male soldiers alone. This misreads the statement. In it, Cohen states that the nature of the Israeli women is to be a soldier (herself), then the wife of a soldier and the sister of a soldier.

In conscripting women for any defence role, the state of Israel sent out an incredibly powerful message to women; that they had additional roles to play in the

94 Letter from Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog 15th February 1952, ISA/RG/P2053/32 95 Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military, Berkeley: University of California Press (2005) p.6. 96Loc.cit. 97 Sharoni, ‘Homefront as Battlefield’, p.44. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. defence of the country other than bearing children and that these were contributing to the defence of the country through their own labour. The continued salience of the idea of the female soldier in both collective memory and visual remembrance also contributed to the diffusion of this norm. It appears that over time this message permeated into the culture of Israeli society. When interviewing several female soldiers of the IDF I was surprised to discover that many women believed that it was equally important for a woman to serve in the IDF as a man and that this was also the view of their parents. One former female IDF soldier stated:

‘In my family, it was always considered essential to do military service. That was the same for me and my brothers (…) there was no difference, my father is still disappointed I never became an officer.’

This inclusion of the role of soldiering in the construction of Israeli femininities was necessary in order to maintain the policy of conscripting women into the army. When a state conscripts individuals to an army this constitutes an enormous deprivation of freedom and imposition on that individual. Even for women in Israel, who were very rarely called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, they were still compelled to sacrifice a great deal of personal freedom and autonomy. Such a policy is only sustainable when a state successfully creates a narrative of citizenship that includes a duty to fight for or serve your country.98

Image of the Nation The last pillar of the state’s construction of the ‘Israeli Woman’ was the one meant for external consumption: the sole liberated woman of the Middle East. From very early on in the Zionist project, it was clear to the Zionist leaders that the success of their campaign would depend upon the support of foreign powers, in particular, the rising superpower, the U.S. This was because, as previously stated, they required the support of the international community in order to create the state of Israel within Palestine, against the wishes of the Arab majority. After this, they required the financial and military support of the international community to ensure their security against the Arabs and the moral support to allow them to maintain occupations of large parts of Arab territory for prolonged lengths of time.

The leaders of Israel therefore set out to manufacture a social, cultural and ideological affinity with the U.S and a mutual identity, to be pitted against their mutual other; the Arabs. The impression of itself that Israel sought to cultivate has been overwhelmingly that of a new, pioneer, free and equal nation - a bastion of hope in an otherwise dark and violent region. They therefore sought to create the impression within the U.S. that the U.S. experience of a ‘moral’ settler nation mirrored their own and that they too were a pioneering people embodying an entrepreneurial spirit.

98 Enloe, Maneuvers. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Furthermore, Israel also portrayed itself as ‘an underdog David facing the Goliath of Nasserite Arab Nationalism’99 and a peace-loving democracy. All these descriptors served to re-enforce the image of Israel as a ‘kindred nation’ which embodied the attributes underpinning the American experience.

Women were an important part of constructing this overall edifice, demonstrated by the number of female images in pro-Israeli propaganda both within the U.S. and elsewhere. According to Sharoni, two popular images have shaped the way women in Israel are viewed. One is ‘the tough, powerful, and exceedingly unfeminine Golda Meir, the former Israeli Prime Minister.’100 According to Thompson, ‘cartoons depicting a muscle-clad Golda Meir trampling on the Arab neighbours during the Yom Kippur War served to re-ignite a faith in American power, paralleled by her ‘kindred nation’ in the Holy Land.’101

The other is the ‘exotic woman soldier, in military fatigues with a machine gun slung over her shoulder, ready to fight for her country.’102 Images of the Israeli female soldier continued to be widely disseminated abroad even when women’s roles in the IDF were sharply curtailed and at a time when the state was attempting to redefine women’s roles away from that of the ‘fighter’ and towards being ‘wombs of the nation’. These images served two functions abroad:

‘On the one hand, the public display of Israeli women soldiers was intended to emphasize that Israel was fighting for its very existence and therefore women had to contribute to the national effort. (…) Images of attractive, exotic, young Israeli women in military uniform with machine guns slung over their shoulders have been systematically deployed in Israeli public relations campaigns to emphasize the seriousness of the continual threat to Israel’s national security and the extent to which the nation is prepared to sacrifice to meet this threat.’103

On the other hand,

‘women’s participation in the military was also presented as proof of the modern and democratic character of Israel. This image of the allegedly liberated, modern Israeli woman soldier was then contrasted with images of veiled, powerless Arab women in order to depict the neighbouring Arab countries as undemocratic and culturally backward, thus demonstrating Israel’s role as an outpost of the West.’104

99 Max Thompson, The Unbreakable Bond: Constructing the US-Israel Special Relationship, Paper: University of Oxford (2011), p.55. 100 Sharoni, Gender and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p.90. 101 Thompson, The Unbreakable Bond, p.84. 102 Sharoni, Gender and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, p.90. 103 Sharoni, ‘Homefront as Battlefield’, p.44. 104 Sharoni Gender and The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: p.90-91. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

Another important image was of the Israeli woman clad in Western clothing in the desert, exemplifying the impression of Israel as a Western outpost of the Middle East, a lone star of freedom in an otherwise oppressive desert. In contrast, The West perceived Middle Eastern women as ‘symbols of backwardness.’105

It would be wrong to think that the use of these images abroad played no part in domestic politics as some scholars appear to suggest. Israel’s politicians were aware that in order to ensure that such propaganda was believable it was important to back it up with real demonstrations of commitment to women’s equality at home. It is at least partly for this reason that Israel has, on paper, some of the most progressive legislation on women in the world, particularly in regard to sexual harassment and . Similarly, the state has launched various programmes to encourage women’s equality such as instituting the Committee on the Status of Women in 1992 and the reforms of women’s IDF service mentioned earlier. Therefore, the need to portray Israeli women as equal and emancipated to the international community has contributed to their equality within the state of Israel. Having demonstrated their commitment to equality, the state of Israel has then been able to compare the favourable situation of women in Israel with the situation of women in the Palestinian territories in order to bolster their claims to greater moral legitimacy and undermine the Arabs in the eyes of the international community.

The Impact of Gender Construction on State Belligerence

Altogether, it would appear that the picture of the relationship between gender and Israel, as in many other contexts, is considerably more complex than most scholars allow. While women’s role as ‘mothers of the nation’ has undoubtedly been fundamental, this has not been their only role within society. They have also been called upon to be soldier-citizens and to display the necessary characteristics of toughness, resilience and courage when the security needs of the state demanded it. In addition, a particular idea of the Israeli woman, as free and liberated, was utilized by the state in order to create and maintain alliances with its most important partners. Women’s role within the nation of Israel has therefore been a convoluted and sometimes confusing one, wherein women were encouraged to adopt multiple identities in order to further the state’s goals.

In many instances, the different elements of gender construction have served to undermine each other. For instance, while Ben-Gurion initially declared women’s full military participation to be imperative to the security of the state and the success of the national project, this concern was undermined by later demography-based security

105 Katz, ‘Women and Gender in Early Palestinian and Jewish Nationalism’, p.69. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. considerations. As Israel’s military strength grew over the 1950s and 1960s, the foremost security threat slowly morphed from one of military defeat to one of population swamping. Women were therefore perceived as needed more for their reproductive abilities than for their military participation. This meant a refocusing on their role from that of soldier-citizen to ‘mother of the nation’ occurred, entailing a propagation of more traditionally feminine and maternal ideas for Israeli women and a curtailing of their public role. The most obvious facet of women’s inequality in Israel is a result of this policy: Women’s comparative exclusion from politics is substantially the result of a political culture which rewards combat service. Many women in Israel have recognized this and, as a result, ‘the Israeli military has been a primary target in women’s struggles for advancement, promotion, and equality with men.’106

However, women’s continual participation in the military, albeit in a gendered manner, meant that the ‘maternalisation’ project was never quite fulfilled. Through their continued participation in the military, women maintained a key element of their public role. This meant that the process by which women have been re-domesticised in the wake of national revolutions or emancipation projects in so many other contexts never fully succeeded in Israel.107 Women maintained the most important foot in the door for equality. Moreover, Israeli women’s campaign for equality was encouraged by a state wishing to propagate its enlightened credentials to its allies. Women in Israel were thus able to reap the dividends of these policies over the course of the succeeding decades, ensuring that now women in Israel have a level of equality in many ways on a par with women in Western democracies, despite the level of militarism and conflict within the state. Israel has succeeded therefore in ensuring women’s equality while maintaining a policy of militarism by including other, competing roles for women in the construction of their national duty and identity.

This sheds light upon discussions of the implications of gender hierarchies in influencing societal aggression. Scholars such as Sjoberg characterise gender hierarchy as a ‘socio-political ordering principle rather than an innate property of being human,’108 In states which adopt rigid gender hierarchies where masculine characteristics are heavily dominant, societal structures are maintained that legitimise and valorise aggression. As argued by Enloe, processes of militarisation enable states to perpetuate narratives which incline that state toward aggression – by reifying it as a masculine characteristic and therefore positing aggression as an aspect to be admired both within individuals and the state. However, the place of specific individuals upon that hierarchy is in many ways extrinsic to the social construct of the hierarchy itself. This paper would posit that in the case of Israel, the state has constructed a highly masculinised gender hierarchy but placed the role of the Israeli woman closer towards the masculine end of the hierarchy than other comparable states.

106 Jacoby, Women in Zones of Conflict, p.112. 107 It may also be argued that there were other cases where this process was less than complete. 108 Sjoberg, ‘Gender, Structure and War’, p.11. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. A good way of testing this hypothesis is through attitudinal surveys of the two genders regarding support for aggressive policies. The existing literature conclude that surveys of public opinion in the vast majority of national contexts find a significant gender gap in support for wars or other aggressive policies, which varies according to the state and the war in question, but which Tickner argues is usually around 7-9%.109 Fukuyama details the uniformity of the existence of this gender gap and the size it can reach:

‘In a 1995 Roper survey conducted for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, men favoured U.S. intervention in Korea in the event of a North Korean attack by a margin of 49 to 40 per cent, while women were opposed by a margin of 30 to 54 per cent. Similarly, U.S. military action against Iraq in the event it invaded Saudi Arabia was supported by men by a margin of 62 to 31 per cent and opposed by women by 43 to 45 per cent. While 54 per cent of men felt it important to maintain superior world-wide military power, only 45 per cent of women agreed.’110

However, opinion surveys in Israel do not demonstrate the kind of gender gap in support for war evident in other countries. The Peace Index is an on-going public opinion survey project directed by Professor Ephraim Ya'ar of Tel Aviv University, and Professor Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute. The Index aims to systematically follow the common public opinion trends in Israel concerning the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict and its impact on Israeli society.111 This paper utilised the data from these surveys over multiple years in order to ascertain whether a gender gap may be detected in support for aggressive state policies. This paper selected a sample of 5 years from the main Peace Index in order to search for a gender gap in support for the peace process. It also looked for a gender gap in support for the 2006 Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead in 2006 and Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012.

The data thus examines three areas, support for wars, support for the peace process and flexibility in negotiations. When asked whether they supported Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012, 81.7% of women said they did, compared to 81.1% of men. In 2006, when asked if they supported Operation Cast Lead, 80.9% of women said they did, as did 82.9% of men. When asked if the air attack on Gaza was justified or not justified, in light of the fact that it caused damage to the infrastructure and suffering to the civilian population of the strip, 61.7% of women said it was ‘very justified’, as did 63.7% of men. This demonstrates a very low gender gap with regard to aggressive policies towards Gaza. More of a gender gap was noticeable in 2006

109 Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p.61. 110 Fukuyama, Women and the Evolution of World Politics, p.35. 111 The Peace Index Website: http://www.peaceindex.org/innerEng.aspx?page=5

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. regarding the attack on Lebanon wherein 81.1% of women argued that it was justified compared to 86.9% of men.

When examining the responses to questions on support for the peace process over the years, it is clear that, when a gender gap arises, it is small, hovering between 1 and 3 per cent, and in some cases does not exist at all. In some of the surveys women are more opposed to the peace process than men. Taking the average over the 5 years; 20.7% of women say they oppose the peace process along with 21.8% of men. Women’s opinions also correlated with those of men regarding the erection of the security wall with 63.2% of women saying they supported the idea ‘a lot’ and 63.3% of men saying the same. Women also appear similarly inflexible in negotiations; when asked in 2003 about their level of support in regards to signing a full peace agreement with Syria in exchange for full withdrawal from the Golan Heights; overall 56.9% of women said they did not support this deal along with 55.4% of men. Women also expressed similar views to men regarding the release of prisoners who were believed to be members of terrorist organisations, with 41.8% of women not prepared for Israel to release prisoners associated with Islamic organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad in order to maintain the hudna (armistice), along with 38.3% of men.

Altogether, therefore, while a small gender gap can be seen occasionally, in the majority of cases there is no significant gender gap in regard to policies of belligerence and in some cases women express views that are more inflexible than men. This lack of a gender gap for Israel’s wars is, however, explicable when one understands the culturally constructed nature of gender. If women are encouraged to be peaceful and compromising while men are encouraged to be aggressive and think in terms of honour and valour, it is unsurprising that the varying genders will adopt a slightly different approach to policies of war. If, however, women are also, through undergoing the process of socialisation within the military, encouraged to conceive of war in a ‘masculinised’ way, it is foreseeable that their opinions regarding war will show greater similarity with those of men. It appears, therefore, that the importance of women’s conscription into the armed forces has been woefully underestimated by gender scholars. Even if their participation has, for most of the history of the IDF, been highly gendered, it would appear that this still has had a profound socialisation effect, particularly in regard to women’s attitude to war.

The lack of a gender gap in support for wars may therefore shed further light on Israel’s outlier status. In countries which are gender equal and democratic and in which there exists a gender gap for war, women’s equality serves to increase the number of pacifist voices in the electorate. If women were excluded, the position of the electorate would thus be moderately more belligerent. In Israel, however, the lack of a significant gender gap means that women’s participation in politics has far less of a pacifying effect upon overall policy. By conscripting women into the IDF, encouraging their militarization and endowing them with the role of soldier citizens, Israel has therefore included women within the militarization project and thereby ‘masculinized’ their politics. This phenomenon has been observed elsewhere. In particular, women

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. who work in the State department of the U.S. were found to be equally supportive of aggressive foreign policies as their male colleagues,112 demonstrating that women’s inclusion in militarized realms on the public sphere ‘masculinizes’ their political beliefs in other contexts. Indeed, in any situation where women enter previously masculine roles, it may be expected that they conform more to the masculine qualities demanded of such roles.

Conclusions

The first conclusion that must be drawn from an analysis of the construction of gender in Israel is that security considerations played a large part, both directly and indirectly, in determining the contours of masculinities and femininities. Not only do the constructions of gender within Israel correspond to the security needs of the state, there is concrete evidence that the state’s involvement in the creation and manipulation of gender was based upon these security needs. The case of Israel therefore demonstrates that security is an important factor in deciding the contours of gender construction within states. This understanding has previously been missing from feminist scholarship meaning that many of the motivations of agents of gender construction within states have been neglected.

The second conclusion is that existing scholarship has often emphasized women's exclusion from nation-building project and their roles as ‘wombs of the nation’ while ignoring the diversity of women’s experience and their other contributions to the nation-building project. The case of Israel also demonstrates that ‘state making is a dialectical – rather than uniform – process’113 in which competing voices struggle to ensure the dominance of their vision of the nation. This struggle was very visible in the early years of Israel’s existence between the Orthodox communities and the secular Zionists who had very different conceptions of the kind of nation Israel should be and what kind of role women and men should play in it. Women too were a fundamental part of this struggle, evidenced by their fight to be included in the nation-building project in particular ways both before and after the creation of Israel. Consequently, the position of women within Israel calls into question scholarship that argues that the nation-building project has almost universally excluded women.

The third conclusion is that the particular construction of gender in Israel has permitted the state to deviate from the prediction of second-wave, positivist Feminist theory regarding the relationship between conflict and oppression of women. By including women within the militarising project as soldiers as well as mothers, Israel

112 Boyer & Caprioli, ‘Gender, Violence and International Crisis’, p.508.

113 V.Spike Peterson, “Introduction” in V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers (1992) p.4. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. succeeded in ‘masculinising’ many aspects of Israeli femininity. This meant that equality of women did not take place within a framework of ‘feminised’ politics of pacifism and compromise, but in a framework of ‘masculinised’ politics of aggression and belligerence. Israel thus demonstrates that, while there is observed correlation between the oppression of women and outward state belligerence, the causal mechanism is not necessarily the oppression of women but the elevation of masculine norms of aggression. In most cases, the promotion of ‘masculine’ ideals causes both oppression of women and state belligerence. In Israel, however, the promotion of ‘masculine’ ideals has indeed caused state belligerence but the impact upon women’s equality was substantially reduced as a result of the position women were accorded within the gender hierarchy: Women in Israel were lifted up several notches on the gender hierarchy through the ‘masculinisation’ of their roles. Moreover, this phenomenon is not unique to Israel. As demonstrated earlier in the paper, many other states throughout history have “masculinised” aspects of the female gender when the security situation of the state entailed it was necessary to do so.

This observation has serious implications for the literature. It does not invalidate any theories that seek to explain the relationship between oppression of women and conflict. Theories which hypothsise that women’s oppression could influence conflict through the resultant structural and cultural violence within society or the impact that women’s oppression has on democracy remain useful and valid in many contexts. However, it does suggest that the argument that ‘the roots of conflict and insecurity for states [are] the treatment of females within society’114 is flawed and requires nuance.

Conflict is not necessarily rooted in the oppression of women but in how gender and gender hierarchies are constructed within the state. When a state adopts ‘masculine’ modes of thinking and acting, said state will act aggressively. This is correlated to, but not dependent upon the oppression of women as it is possible for some states to ‘masculinise’ while maintaining relative gender equality. The flexibility of gender means that both individuals and groups are capable of moving within the gender spectrum. Gender hierarchies are therefore a mechanism of ordering society and a way of understanding the world. Individuals and groups are capable of moving along the hierarchy in both directions. This understanding impacts on how we conceive of the relationship between masculine politics of belligerence and women’s oppression. In societies where masculinity is emulated this results in subordination of certain kinds of femininity but does not necessarily result in subordination of women - if they are not seen as possessing those particular characteristics of femininity. For example, in a militarised society where weakness is seen as something to be looked down upon, women will only be looked down upon to the extent they are perceived as weak. If women have been constructed as strong, a denigration of weakness will not result in their oppression. Therefore, it is possible for a society to be both belligerent and not oppressive of women.

114 Hudson et al, The Heart of the Matter, p.7. Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

This understanding entails that many policy prescriptions should be revised if they are to be effective. Many international organizations currently articulate beliefs that women’s equality will further the interests of peace. While this will often be true, it will only be so in a context where the socially constructed “feminine” characteristics of compromise and passivity are welcomed into the public sphere. If women are merely elevated within structures that promote masculine characteristics, their inclusion will have little impact upon possibilities for peace. This observation is bolstered by examination of women who have succeeded within male-dominated, masculine institutions such as Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi or Golda Meir. No-one could accuse these women of pursuing ‘feminine’ foreign policies. Rather, in many ways, these women came to see themselves as ‘honorary men’.115 Therefore, while it is true that countries with more women in power are more peaceful, that is not because of the influence of pacific women per se, but because both the inclusion of women and policies of peace have been promoted by specific ideologies and constructions of gender within those states. It is, therefore, ideas all the way down.116

115 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens: The Legends and Lives of the Women Who Have Led Their Nations to War, London: Anchor Publishing (1990). 116 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1999). Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

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Wilford, Rick., “Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Surveying the Ground” in Women, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Politics of Transition med. Rick Wilford and Robert L.Miller, London Routlegde (1998).

Wrangham, Richard & Peterson, Dale, Demonic Male: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, London: Bloomsbury (1997).

Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas, New York: Harcourt, Brace (1938).

Yishai, Yael, Between the Flag and the Banner: Women in Israeli Politics, New York. State University of New York Press (1997).

Yuval-Davis, Nira, ‘The Jewish Collectivity in Khamsin, Special Issue on Women in the Middle East. Ed. Magida Salman, London: Zed Books (1987).

Yuval-Davis, Nira, Gender and Nation, London: Sage Publications (1997).

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission. Zalewski, Marysia, ‘Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?’ International Affairs 71:2 (1995)

Speeches

Annan, Kofi, ‘No Policy for Progress More Effective Than Empowerment of Women, Secretary-General Says in Remarks to Woman’s Day Observance,’ United Nations press conference, March 8, 2006, http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/sgsm10370.doc.htm.

Websites

UNDP, ‘Gender Inequality Index’, available at http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/gii/

World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2012, pp. 210-211 Available at: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2012.pdf,

United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime statistics, available at: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and- analysis/statistics/crime/CTS12_Sexual_violence.xls

European Commission, ‘Fertility Statistics’ – Data October 2012, available at; http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Fertility_statistics

The Peace Index Website: http://www.peaceindex.org/innerEng.aspx?page=5

Archive Documents

Ephrath members to PM Levi Eshkol, 7 July 1967, G/43/6404/34, ISA.

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

“Many Children – Much Joy,” Haaretz, 26 March 1969, GL/105/3541/1, ISA.

Report – In preparation for the Acting Committee’s First Meeting that will take place on 23 November, 1976, Centre for Demography, PMO, 10 November 1976, GL/143/2649/3/ISA

Letter from Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, Jerusalem, to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem; 15 July 1953, ISA/RG 72.102/P4247/21

Letter from Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog 15th February 1952, ISA/RG/72.102/P2053/32

Exchange of letters between Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, Jerusalem, and Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, Jerusalem; 29 December 1953, 14 February 1954 ISA/RG 72.102/P4251/8

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.

Appendix: Public Opinion Surveys on support for the Peace Process, the 2006 Invasion of Lebanon, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Defence and compromise policies.

The data was provided by the Guttman Center under the auspices of the Israel Democracy Institute (R.A.).

Draft – not for distribution. Please to not cite without permission.