Violating the Mores, Seizing the Guards: The Riot of the 'Youth of Perestroika' in an Israeli Military Jail

Abstract

This article focuses on the most extensive mutiny in the history of the IDF, which broke out in Atlite Military Prison No. 6 on 9 August 1997. The central role of the army in Israeli political culture accounts for the fact that a mutiny of such extent has never taken place in the IDF military units and prisons. Israel's political culture, which emphasizes the importance of the state and is characterized by weak liberalism, is not a good breeding ground for civil disobedience, even in circumstances where one would expect such behaviour. In the case under discussion, the mutiny was led by soldiers belonging to peripheral ethnic groups of the IDF recruit population; specifically, it was organized by new immigrants from the former Soviet Union and a number of Druze soldiers. Some military police officials and Israeli politicians of Russian origin clamed that there was no connection between the ethnicity of the prisoners and the riot. I would like to argue, however, that it was the prisoners' unique socialization in the USSR in the Perestroika period, when the attitude towards state and the army swayed from scepticism to hostility, that made this riot possible. I argue that what gave rise to the rebellion was not maltreatment by jail officials (as the mutineers themselves argued), but rather a different civic culture as it had developed among Soviet youngsters who were socialized in the atmosphere of 'liberal nihilism' of the early 1990s - a time when the majority of them emigrated to Israel.