Instead of going on at length about patriotic feelings or bringing up lofty values from the national lexicon like “the legacy of our fathers” or “our enemies who rose up against us to destroy us,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted to talk business.
In a meeting with members of the IDF General Staff, he gave it to them straight: “You’re an army that costs the country 70 billion shekels [$19 billion] a year, but you’ve gone on strike against the government.” Excuse me, but that’s how you talk to mercenaries, not the commanders of the people’s army.
How did it happen that Netanyahu traded in all his lofty values for money, which, to quote an Arabic saying, “pollutes the hands”? If Mr. Big Words is replacing values with money, that says something about the man’s distress.
The question is whether there is any basis for Netanyahu’s remark. And in fact, one could say that the honored generals sitting across from him in the General Staff meeting earned his reprimand fairly.
After all, some people still remember how the defense establishment, then headed by Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, launched a war of Gog and Magog to get their already fat pensions increased during the previous government’s term. One got the feeling that if their pensions weren’t increased, the state would cease to exist.
Career officers have arranged dream salaries and pensions for themselves, and every civil service bureaucrat gazes incredulously at the rivers of “defense” money flowing into the pockets of their military counterparts. Is this an army, they wonder, or a gold mine? Moreover, an army officer is entitled to retire with a fat pension at age 45 and then begin a second career, whereas an ordinary bureaucrat must wait another 22 years and then retire with a pension so small you could cry.
A decade ago, Haaretz editor-in-chief Aluf Benn wrote an article about an off-the-record meeting with then-Chief of Staff Benny Gantz. Having nothing else to say, he described the female major in Gantz’s office who served him a large cup of black coffee.
And then, evidently out of sheer boredom, he wrote that his “wicked brain ... couldn’t restrain itself and began doing actuarial calculations – how much are the major’s pension rights worth? Four million shekels? Eight million? All this money to serve the commander a large Turkish coffee?”
Indeed, that was evil for its own sake, because the army officers will tell you that they, unlike their colleagues in the civilian world, risk their lives. Is that true? I don’t know. But the fact is that at least in recent decades, the army has largely become a policing agency whose job is to protect the security of settlers in the occupied territories.
This burden is imposed on soldiers doing their compulsory military service. And the people who pay the price for it are mainly the Palestinians, alongside Israeli civilians – both groups that can be harmed more easily than an army officer armed from head to toe.
Moreover – and here, regrettably, I must agree with the right’s mouthpieces – when rightists say that army officers have profited greatly through their military service, they are right. After all, high-quality high-tech brains emerge from the elite intelligence Unit 8200; the army also produces a multitude of security experts and arms dealers. And let’s not even talk about the Pegasus spyware program.
If army officers are now the salvation of the masses taking to the streets to defend democracy, it’s worth thinking about these issues, because ultimately, they are people umbilically connected to that money pipeline known as the defense budget. It’s true that they want a democracy tailored to their measure, but in the end, this bunch will have to fall in line with the one who pays the piper, since he is the one who calls the tune.
Even without the overturning of the system and the battle against it, it’s easy to see that the army has now acquired a messianist, ultranationalist hue. Does that have any connection to those 70 billion shekels? Absolutely. Over the last 15 years, during which Netanyahu was almost continuously in power, the dam burst and the army allowed the “hilltop youth” and “price tag” gangs to do whatever they pleased, with no law and no justice.
According to Amos Harel, one of the major generals tried to dispute Netanyahu’s accusations but was quickly silenced. Can you understand why?
Israel's Protesting Army Officers Will Have to Look Into Their Addiction to Gov't Money
9
0
10.04.2023
Instead of going on at length about patriotic feelings or bringing up lofty values from the national lexicon like “the legacy of our fathers” or “our enemies who rose up against us to destroy us,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opted to talk business.
In a meeting with members of the IDF General Staff, he gave it to them straight: “You’re an army that costs the country 70 billion shekels [$19 billion] a year, but you’ve gone on strike against the government.” Excuse me, but that’s how you talk to mercenaries, not the commanders of the people’s army.
How did it happen that Netanyahu traded in all his lofty values for money, which, to quote an Arabic saying, “pollutes the hands”? If Mr. Big Words is replacing values with money, that says something about the man’s distress.
The question is whether there is any basis for Netanyahu’s remark. And in fact, one could say that the honored generals sitting across from him in the General Staff meeting earned his reprimand fairly.
After all, some people still remember how the defense establishment, then headed by Chief of Staff Aviv........
© Haaretz
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Andrew Mitrovica
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Marwan Bishara
Timotej Milanov
Tafi Mhaka
Grant Arthur Gochin
Ahmadi Ali
