Military, state and society in Israel: An introductory essay

This collection deals with the relations between the military, the state, and society in Israel. The past decade has seen the publication of a number of volumes devoted to issues centering on the place of war, security or military service in Israeli society. Yet these books have usually tended to focus on specific aspects of this triangle such as the social construction of war and national service (Lomsky-Feder and Ben-Ari 1999), the grand narratives of defense underlying Is­ raeli views of security (Ezrahi 1997), or the role and place of the national-religious camp in the Israeli army (Cohen 1997). This vol­ ume, however, provides a broader perspective and makes three key contributions-theoretical, empirical and polemical-related both to the Israeli case and to wider debates about the place of war and the military in contemporary industrialized societies. In this intro­ duction, we undertake the following tasks: to explain the contribu­ tions of this volume, to place it in its wider scholarly and intellec­ tual context, and to introduce the specific papers.