I want to take a brief repose from looking at the U.S. military and focus a little bit on Israel and its attitude towards its own female soldiers. Like in the U.S., there is a debate going on in Israel about whether or not women should be fighting in combat positions alongside men. An article I found written by Dina Shiloh when I was recently surfing Google contained some interesting information and opinions about this problem. The Israeli Defense Force had not used women in combat positions since the war of Independence in 1948, but since the 90’s has started to allow some women into combat positions. The Shiloh article states that many Israeli women enter the army intending to be able to occupy these important, valued combat positions but instead end up with menial jobs that their fellow soldiers and fellow Israelis do not respect. As the head of the Women’s Corp iterated, “…girls come into the army and they want to be fighters, then they find themselves in an office making coffee…The effects of women having bad jobs are, first of all, on self image. You take a woman and say this is all that she is worth.”

Not only does not serving in a combat position mean that a women will have fewer options in the future, but it also means that the Israeli government is failing to obtain its goal of treating all of its citizens as equals. David Ben Gurion has stated: “The Army is the supreme symbol of duty, and as long as women are not equal to men in performing this duty, they have not yet obtained true equality. If the daughters of Israel are absent from the army, then the character of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Israel) will be distorted.” A glass ceiling seems to be hanging over female soldiers in the Israeli army specifically because they are not allowed to serve in the highly revered positions.

Just from this quotation, we can as Americans, understand how the Israeli government, or at least the ideals upon which it stands, differs from our country’s own conception of what equality means. Of course, speech is very different from actuality, and this quotation certainly does contradict some of the information in Shiloh’s article. However, I think that it would be difficult to find many people in the United States who believed that the integrity of our country would suffer if women did not fight in the army. Perhaps that is because we in America do not believe that “the army is the supreme symbol of duty”, or maybe it is because we believe that a woman’s duty takes on a different form than military service.