Abstract
In recent years, Israel has witnessed two significant processes that challenge the dominant republican discourse that prioritizes military over national-civic service (known as The Israeli national-civilian service—NCS)in terms of contributing the constitution of citizenship and of the material and symbolic convertibility offered to service candidates. The first is related to the expanding range of roles offered in the NCS. The second, related process, which is our current focus, occurs among young religious women from the urban upper-middle class who respond to this expansion by seeking to serve in technological roles, given their high qualifications. Combined, these processes transform the status of the NCS and accelerate the de-monopolization of military service. To examine the contribution of religious young women to the change in the status of service in Israel, we conducted a narrative analysis of interviews with service candidates. Our analysis revealed their strategic use of four different discourses: the neo-liberal economic discourse, the liberal rights and self-realization discourse, the ethnonational discourse, and the religious gender discourse. The way the participants negotiated the four discourses to justify their selection of either military or national-civic service structured their agency as actors transforming the power equation between the two types of service.
Highlights
Given the perceived security threat in Israel, the military has a monopoly on mandatory conscription and an almost absolute priority in selecting and assigning service candidates, including women
Women from the religious sector, are entitled to decide whether to join the military, as well as to select between military and national-civic service (NCS). This privilege granted to religious women has not challenged the primary military service over NCS in Israel
National-religious Jewish women service candidates seeking a future technological career are exposed to and maneuver between four distinct discourses when required to choose between the IDF and NCS
Summary
Given the perceived security threat in Israel, the military has a monopoly on mandatory conscription and an almost absolute priority in selecting and assigning service candidates, including women. This article examines the discursive practices through which young Jewish upper-middle class women from the national-religious sector challenge the perception of national-civic service (NCS) as secondary to military service in Israel, in the sense that the IDF has absolute priority in enlisting candidates and assigning them to various units. This question is highly relevant, as over the past few years, two significant processes have combined to undermine the assumption that NCS is less important than military service in terms of its contribution to constituting citizenship and in terms of its material and symbolic convertibility for graduates in their civilian lives. Try to refer to the following aspects and to any others that seem important to you: age, residential area, occupation, general family background, school—majors/tracks and type of institution, participation in religious youth movements and settings, hobbies
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