Sabras and Gahalniks in the Israel Defence Forces

Abstract

Looking back from the perspective of almost half a century, General Avraham Adan described his encounter with the immigrant Holocaust survivor-soldiers in the Israel Defence Forces:

It was my first meeting with the Gahal soldiers. They were speaking Yiddish … I gave them the plans for the following week and suggested they ask any questions they wanted. Their response was surprising: first of all they complimented me — they’d been in the country two weeks and I was the first person to bring them together for a talk. I told them in detail what was going on and what the plans were for them. Until then, they had been given no chance to express themselves and no one had asked them how they were feeling, what their opinions were on their training and about attitudes towards them. They then went on to complain, and there was plenty to complain about: they reckoned they had been humiliated by the lower-ranking officers who had been training them. The young sergeants habitually shouted at them and even threw stones at them. Some of them said specifically that the treatment they received at the hands of their officers was the same as what they had suffered at the hands of the Germans.¹