Yet even as haredi men who don’t serve in the army are criticized for their failure to defend Israel, religious soldiers who risk their lines in dangerous units are criticized for being disloyal to the state.
A few weeks ago in The Jerusalem Report, Hirsch Goodman wrote: “Some 30 percent of the officers’ corps of the ground forces and a similar number of front-line soldiers are either from the settlements or have a national religious background, and have grown up in the ideological bubble of Greater Israel…
“Civil war is what we are faced with, and better for all of us to recognize the danger before it becomes a reality. If civil war breaks out, the Israeli army will find itself fighting its own elite troops, some of the best-trained officers and men in the world, armed with ideology versus confusion.”
Two weeks ago in the Forward, Leonard Fein echoed Goodman’s argument, writing: “It is [the settlers], together with their allies in the national religious movement, who today provide some 30% of the officers’ corps of Israel’s ground forces and 30% of Israel’s front-line troops.”