The developed civilian consciousness of the fighters of the 69th Squadron is welcome, but the squadron was not entrusted to them as a hostage to impose their positions on the democratic regime. The chief of staff and the commander of the air force exceeded their duties by allowing them to do so. To understand why, it's worth going back to basics.
On May 15, 1949, at the end of the fighting, Ben-Gurion laid out his view of the army in a lecture to the young IDF officers' course. The army was relatively huge, and Ben-Gurion was preparing to reduce it considerably in order to allow for a large increase.
One might have expected Ben-Gurion to provide his audience with a professional-military explanation as to why he was almost "shutting down" the IDF, but he devoted most of his long lecture to a distinctly "civilian" discussion. "The security of the State of Israel will not rest solely on the army," he said, expanding on the security necessity of "a great increase at a rapid pace and on a wide and expanding scale." In his eyes, a "chain of frontier settlements" is also "a fundamental condition for the security of the state" and "an important factor in the defense establishment will serve as our industrial and technical strength," as well as scientific research.
Absorbing the immigrants and nurturing the settlements were indeed tasks that were also assigned to the weakened IDF, both budgetarily and organizationally, to the point of severely damaging its operational capability. Ben-Gurion signaled to the IDF that despite the cuts and professionalization, it would not be an "ordinary army" but a "people's army," in the moral sense of the word – an army committed to the values and missions of the state of the Jewish people.
This concept was the Zionist and Israeli version of the term "army of citizens," which came to the stage of history with the American and French revolutions: an army committed to national and democratic values, and thus its advantage over the armies of tyrannical kings. Aliyah and settlement are our unique national values even today.
The idea of a people's army also aroused opposition. When the IDF came to the aid of the tent dwellers and the Bedouins in the transit camps of the winter of 1950, for example, the young politician Avraham Ofer feared that this would lead to a militaristic regime in which everything was solved by the army, and that eventually the army would become the source of political authority. Ofer feared all the modern phenomena that had taken off the French precedent: a general in the "army of citizens," one named Napoleon, became a tyrannical emperor by virtue of the advantage of that "army of citizens," into which all the values of the nation are drained.
But in contrast to the Napoleon precedent, there is the Washington precedent, another general who headed a liberating "civilian army" and became president-elect, commander-in-chief of the army, but not emperor. A later example, important for our purposes, is found in another general - the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk. He made the Turkish army the subject of state values, and therefore the army regained power in the country whenever the elected politicians deviated, in his opinion, from these values.
This was also the pattern of the military tyranny established by General Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. In Turkey (until Erdogan) and Egypt (today), the fear of a religious takeover has led to military tyranny. Here, too, there are calls for the IDF to defend against so-called religious tyranny. The manipulation is also built out of all of our bitterness over the evasion of the ultra-Orthodox, but is it because of it that we will dismantle the Ben-Gurion People's Army?
Ben-Gurion chose a "civilian army," that is, the people's army, but in Washington's version. What distinguishes it from the version of Napoleon, Atatürk and Nasser? Ben-Gurion's answer is clear: absolute and unquestioned subordination to the elected echelon, that is, to the elected Knesset and the government it appoints.
The IDF is the "people's army," committed to national values and therefore to democratic values. Without a democratic regime, the claim that the state belongs to a nation is empty speech. But who will determine what democratic values require? How will the army choose between Justice Esther Hayut's opinion on this issue and Justice Minister Yariv Levin's or the opinion of the entire government?
The obvious Ben-Gurion answer is that the army must not choose and that this is not its business, otherwise we will soon slip into Nasserism. The government is his commander.
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