Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State by Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State by Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levi Rachel Harris Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levi. Women Soldiers and Citizenship in Israel: Gendered Encounters with the State. New York: Routledge, 2017, 2019. Pp. 187. Hardback $155, paper $49.95, ebook $27.48. ISBN 9780415788946, ISBN 9780367264772, ISBN 0415788943. For Jewish women the formative experience of mandatory conscription into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shapes women’s engagement with citizenship. The formal institutional structures of military service provide an opportunity to consider women’s relationship to the state, and at the same time the patriarchal and highly masculine environment inculcates them into a gendered experience. It is this experience, argue the sociologists Edna Lomsky-Feder and Orna Sasson-Levy, that shapes women’s understanding of masculinity and its operation within Israeli society. It teaches women gendered responses that may serve to inform the rest of their adult lives. Through in-depth interviews with 109 women, 10 to 15 years after their discharge, as well as the analysis of the testimony of 20 women who contributed their experiences to the group “Breaking the Silence” (which were compiled into a book), Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy provide a detailed analysis of the ways in which women’s service is a multi-level social contract with the military “that shapes women’s expectations from the state.” (157) What their research shows is that women’s expectations and experiences are shaped not only by the roles and duties they perform, but also their social class, ethnic origins, and religious observance levels. Thus their analysis provides an intersectional reading of women’s service that challenges many of the previous dominant narratives about women in the IDF. In their analysis they identified five groups, across two axes; traditional and non-traditional military roles, and prestigious and non-prestigious duties. What emerges from their analysis are divisions between traditionally female roles of nurturing and serving as helpmate to male soldiers—such as the low-prestige assignments as secretaries and clerks, or more prestigious positions such as education and welfare officers—in which women perform femininity. And by contrast, since the opening up of combat and field positions in the past twenty years, women who serve in less traditionally female roles—including high-prestige roles as border patrol guards and [End Page 227] pilots, or lower prestige roles as technical staff, such as mechanics in highly male environments—have described themselves performing masculinity. In addition the authors noted that fields such as intelligence have a neutral gendered tradition, and their importance in contemporary warfare places these duties among the highest prestige roles. Yet within these different groups, what Lomsky-Feder and Sasson-Levy observed was the importance that ethno-social class played in framing women’s experiences. For example, women from the country’s periphery, who typically come from lower-income, more traditional, and often ethnic communities, were likely to be the first generation of women to go into the army. They viewed serving as an opportunity to leave home and see the world, granting them a degree of independence and social movement that provided both respectability and the opportunity to translate the capital they gained in the army into subsequent professional success. By contrast, women from the country’s center who were generally middle or upper-middle class, from an Ashkenazi and more secular background, whose parents both male and female had served in the military, experienced low-prestige jobs such as secretary negatively, finding the role to be humiliating and beneath their dignity. It would prove to be an aberration in their lives and was forgotten afterwards, as one woman reported she was not even sure her husband knew what she had done while in the IDF. While the women in these traditionally female roles identified ethnic differences between other females serving (often in prejudiced ways) and among other males serving (who they tended to view as needier), those who served in intelligence appeared color-blind, viewing the military as a melting-pot of social difference. In fact, from their research, the scholars show that those who serve in intelligence were mostly serving...