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The Military as a Split Labor Market: The Case of Women and Religious Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces

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Abstract

A conflict between religious male soldiers and secular female soldiers has emerged since the 2000s within the Israel Defense Forces. This clash has gradually taken the form of religious rhetoric, articulated by rabbis and other religious activists, that has moved from refraining from publicly questioning the fitness of women as combatants to discourse that gradually delegitimized women’s service. Based on the theoretical theme of the split labor market, I will argue that there is a link between the extent to which the growing introduction of women into field units threatens to devalue the religious youth’s symbolic rewards and the escalation in anti-feminist rhetoric, whose ultimate goal is to exclude women from the military.

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  1. Israeli Knesset, Knesset Reports, Volume 174, p. 3425. 1999

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Acknowledgments

This article was first presented at the Biennial Conference of the European Research Group on Military and Society (ERGOMAS) in 2011. I would like to thank the participants for their valuable comments. For incisive suggestions at various stages of this project, I am indebted to Eyal Ben-Ari, Reuven Gal, Zeev Lerer, Tamir Libel, Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy. I would like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments. I am particularly grateful to the Research Institute for the study of Policy, Political Economy, and Society of the Open University of Israel for its support.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Political Science & Communication, The Open University of Israel, P.O. Box 808, Raanana, 43107, Israel

    Yagil Levy

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Levy, Y. The Military as a Split Labor Market: The Case of Women and Religious Soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. Int J Polit Cult Soc 26, 393–414 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9146-7

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