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‘IT’S A DARK DAY IN ISRAELI HISTORY AND I DON’T SEE A WAY BACK’
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IDF TAKE NOTE: MIDDLE EASTERN MILITARIES THAT SIDE WITH PROTESTERS BECOME THE
'PEOPLE'S ARMY'
In Israel, the question of the IDF’s operational fitness is generating more
concern than its role in defending democracy. But the Arab Spring revolutions
showed that only in destroyed countries does the army derive its power from the
leader
Zvi Bar'el
Jul 28, 2023 6:00 am IDT
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Jul 28, 2023 6:00 am IDT
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Demonstrators in Tahrir Square. Credit: Getty Images
Zvi Bar'el
Jul 28, 2023 6:00 am IDT
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Jul 28, 2023 6:00 am IDT
“Army forces must grant their patronage to the public’s legitimate demands and
work to achieve them ... until a peaceful transition of power has taken place,
for the sake of securing the free democratic community the citizenry seeks ...
We stress that there will be no pursuit of honest people who rejected the
corruption and demand reforms. We warn against undermining the nation’s security
and the people’s security.”
The above statement wasn’t issued by the Israel Defense Forces, and certainly
not by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was part of a circular disseminated
by Egypt’s Supreme Military Council on February 11, 2011, the day after
President Hosni Mubarak was ousted by the Arab Spring revolution that began in
Egypt two weeks earlier.
'IT'S A DARK DAY IN ISRAELI HISTORY AND I DON'T SEE A WAY BACK,' SAYS FORMER
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But it resonates nicely in Israel today, where the main concern is the IDF’s
“operational fitness” rather than its role in preserving democracy. Will its
pilots be able, or even want, to attack Iran on orders from a government that
seeks to become a dictatorship? Will intelligence units whose reserve officers
have announced that they will no longer serve be able to identify the enemy,
collect intel, combat cyberattacks or locate wanted men? These questions that
have become the hallmarks of the current relationship between the army and the
government.
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“Refusal to serve” is the brush with which the government tars all opponents of
its legal overhaul from the ranks of the security services. It appears to be
furious over its failure to predict how reservists would behave, and it still
believes the regular army is immune to their influence.
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That’s because in the Israeli narrative, inscribed in our consciousness over
generations, the army isn’t part of politics. Rather, it was created to be
ideologically and morally autonomous, a bubble that mustn’t be allowed to wander
through the minefields of our political, religious and national disputes. Not
only does logic stop at the gates of the army base, as the saying every soldier
learns on his first day goes, but independent thought is also denied entry.
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The heated and dangerous confrontation between “the army” and the government
sparked by the battle to preserve democracy cries out for an examination of how
armies in other Middle Eastern countries responded to the Arab Spring
revolutions. For instance, the question of the Egyptian army’s contribution to
the revolution – at least in its initial phase, when the protests morphed into
civil disobedience – remains controversial to this day, as do the reasons why
the army acted as it did.
It was only many days after the outbreak of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square,
during which demonstrators clashed with the police and other security services
subordinate to the Interior Ministry and around 850 people were killed, that the
army seized power and positioned itself on the demonstrators’ side. As in
Israel, in Egypt, too, the army is “the people’s army,” with mandatory service
that lasts 12 to 36 months followed by at least nine years of reserve duty.
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Anti-coup protesters in Tel Aviv earlier this month.Credit: Moti Milrod
Admittedly, the president is supreme commander of the armed forces, but for
decades, and to this day, the army functions as a semi-independent autonomous
zone. It runs civilian businesses that have no connection to security, including
infrastructure and residential construction, oil and gas industries, factories
that make mineral water and pita bakeries. Its budget isn’t supervised by
parliament, and neither are its revenues from and investments in civilian
industries.
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The “covenant” between the army and the government – which has been headed since
1952 by a senior army officer, the army’s “flesh and blood” – created mutual
dependence and a “familial relationship” between the two institutions. The
government always made sure to provide for all the army’s needs, including
indulging senior officers with especially high salaries and providing it with
the best arms the national budget could afford to buy.
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In exchange, the government got an insurance policy not just for defense of the
homeland, but for its own stability. Ostensibly, this strong relationship should
have been sufficient to protect the regime even against the hundreds of
thousands of demonstrators who demanded the president’s ouster in 2011.
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Numerous studies about the army’s involvement in the Arab Spring offer several
explanations for why the Egyptian army abandoned the government. One is that
senior officers feared the presidency would be inherited by Mubarak’s son Gamal,
who advocated a neoliberal economic agenda that could have harmed the army’s
economic monopolies. Another relates to the economic gaps between senior
officers, on one hand, and ordinary soldiers and junior officers on the other,
and the consequent fear that a revolt within the army would ensue if soldiers
were ordered to shoot the demonstrators.
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But most of the studies agree that the army’s leadership was primarily concerned
about the loss of its own public legitimacy. This had been rebuilt with a lot of
hard work following its defeat by Israel in 1967 and was largely restored by
what Egypt calls the October War of 1973, which it presented as a huge military
victory over Israel. An army like that can’t shoot civilians who send their sons
to its ranks.
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When the order arrived to deploy tanks around Tahrir Square, the tank drivers
stopped driving and the junior officers got out and flashed the victory sign to
the demonstrators. “The people and the army are a single hand,” the
demonstrators chanted as they stuck flowers into the tank’s gun barrel.
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An Egyptian man taking a photograph of his daughter next to an army tank in
Tahrir Square in 2011.Credit: AP
This was refusal to serve in the full sense of the word. But the chanted slogan
shaped the narrative that the army – not the government and not the police,
which rained blows on the demonstrators and was responsible for most of the
deaths – was an agency that the revolution could trust. In creating this
narrative, the demonstrators sought to depict the army as a pure, uncorrupt
institution, the antithesis of the rotten, oppressive regime, even though the
army is an inseparable part of the regime.
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Here lies a fascinating paradox. The army, a governmental agency that holds part
of the monopoly over legitimate violence and is undemocratic by its very nature,
understood that its legitimacy depended on the stance it took toward the
revolution. It needed the demonstrators’ support to continue being “the people’s
army” while at the same time maintaining its elite status. In Israeli terms, the
army understood where the “broad consensus” lay, and that acting against it
could sabotage its existence.
AN ARMY WITHOUT ASSETS
In Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began even before it erupted in Egypt, the
president was forced to resign and flee the country together with his family the
moment the army made it clear that it wouldn’t support him by joining the police
in suppressing the demonstrators.
In Tunis, unlike in Cairo, the army has traditionally and deliberately been
distanced from politics. During the reign of President Habib Bourguiba, from
1957 to 1987, officers and soldiers were forbidden to join the ruling party. His
successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, also made sure to keep the army out of
politics. He entrusted internal security – and the brutal oppression he
instituted – to the Interior Ministry, which controls the police and the
specialized security agencies.
Open gallery view
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan gestures as he addresses his supporters
following early exit poll results for the second round of the presidential
election in Istanbul, Turkey May 28, 2023.Credit: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Tunisia was a terrifying police state. The Interior Ministry’s budget was almost
double that of the army. Due to the lack of external enemies, the latter focused
mainly on border controls and catching infiltrators. And in contrast to the
Egyptian army, which built a civilian economic empire alongside the one
controlled by the government in Cairo, Tunisian officers and soldiers were
supported only by the meager budget they got from the state.
Thus when the revolution arrived, the army had no independent interest in
protecting the regime or the few assets it controlled. Chief of Staff Rachid
Ammar decided to resign, refused to order his soldiers to shoot demonstrators
and even advised the president to resign and flee the country, telling him he
had “finished his career.”
Turkey, which wasn’t part of the Arab Spring, is the only country where the army
was de facto the supreme ruler, until its political position was destroyed by
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under the authority granted it by Turkish
republic’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the army was responsible for
upholding the new constitution and preventing any harm, political or otherwise,
to its key elements. These included principles espoused by Ataturk such as
secularism and democracy.
The Turkish army perpetrated three coups during the years of the republic’s
existence. It ousted governments it perceived as “acting in violation of the
constitution,” even as it didn’t manage to suppress terrorism or unrest in the
streets and thereby failed to fulfill its duty to the citizens as interpreted by
the army’s own leadership. But immediately after these coups, the army appointed
civilian governments, which it continued to monitor closely and intimidatingly.
Another coup, which didn’t involve physical intervention by the military, took
place in 1997. The army issued an ultimatum to the Islamist prime minister,
Necmettin Erbakan. Its 14 provisions demanded that he abandon policies which, in
the view of senior officers, could have undermined turkey’s secular foundations.
Erbakan, who couldn’t comply with the ultimatum’s demands, resigned; he was
later arrested and tried.
Erdogan sought to sever the army from politics and reduce its control over the
civilian sector. He did this by severely undermining the military leadership’s
public legitimacy. After he first took power in 2003, he creatively accused the
army of planning a coup through attacks on mosques and foreign embassies to
“prove” the government’s inability to govern.
In 2012, in a dramatic and unprecedented step, Erdogan ordered officers and
soldiers arrested, investigated and tried in civilian courts. He thereby
undermined the army’s judicial monopoly over its own personnel. The chief of
staff and the heads of the army’s branches resigned in protest, and this merely
played into Erdogan’s hands. It enabled him to immediately replace them with his
cronies and supporters, thereby freeing himself of the threat of military
domination.
The pretexts for the arrests later proved false, and the courts freed the
arrested soldiers. But by then, it was too late for the army to regain its
power. The new pyramid of power had already been entrenched by Erdogan.
Open gallery view
Soliders involved in the coup attempt surrender on Bosphorus bridge on July 16,
2016 in Istanbul, Turkey.Credit: Gokhan Tan / Getty Images
His takeover of the army posed a dilemma even for his opponents, both in Turkey
and in the West. On one hand, the army was a barrier against Turkey becoming
either a state governed by religious law or a civilian dictatorship. It was also
able to block Erdogan’s foreign policy, which his opponents disliked. But on the
other hand, the army’s control over politics was patently undemocratic.
The European Union had demanded that Erdogan end the army’s dominance as one of
its conditions for Turkey joining the union. Erdogan’s victory in this battle
was complete, but Ankara still hasn’t joined the EU for many other reasons,
including its severe violations of civil rights.
The differences between the IDF and the armies of Arab countries or Turkey are
numerous and substantial. The army’s relationship with the government is
different in each of these countries, to the point that it’s hard to compare
them.
But each of these models shares one unassailable foundation – the army’s
legitimacy is based on the public’s support. In countries where the army sided
with the protesters, it significantly increased its legitimacy. Only in
countries that have been destroyed, like Libya, Yemen, Syria or Iraq before the
2003 Iraq War, did the army derive its power from a single leader.
CLICK THE ALERT ICON TO FOLLOW TOPICS:
* IDF
* Judicial Coup
* Israel protest
* Middle East
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