Beyond the Conventional Civil–Military “Gap”: Cleavages and Convergences in Israel

This article modifies the framework for the analysis of civil–military “gaps” proposed in Armed Forces & Society (Vol. 38, 2012) by Rahbek-Clemmensen, Archer, Barr, Belkin, Guerro, Hall, and Swain, who depicted a continuum of four binary fissures (“gap dimensions”) dividing two hypothetically homogeneous communities: civilians versus military personnel. Extrapolating from Israel’s experience, this article instead visualizes a more dynamic and fissured landscape, inhabited by several heterogeneous clusters of population groups, each comprising impromptu coalitions drawn from both the armed forces and civilian society. That environment, we argue, although certainly influenced by the traditional penetrability of Israel’s civil–military boundaries, more directly reflects current technological and cultural processes, which are transforming encounters between civilians and military personnel in other countries too. We therefore suggest replacing the predominantly dichotomous taxonomies that generally characterize studies of civil–military relations in contemporary democratic societies with the fractured format observed in the Israeli case.