The key battle in the war for Israel’s future and the Zionist left
President Rivlin on a 2016 visit to the Bnei David mekhina
Nitsan Machlis writes in Haaretz on 13 September 2024:
“We’ve come to raise a generation of lions and lionesses.” This declaration opens the promotional video released a few months ago by the organization Habithonistim (Israel Defense and Security Forum). The clip shows the right-wing movement’s leaders, including Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, launching the organization’s first mekhina, or pre-military leadership academy.
“We realized that in order to create true influence, we must cultivate a generation of future leaders… both in the military and later on in civilian life,” explains Lt. Col (res.) Yaron Buskila, another of the leaders of the movement, which advocates for the annexation of the West Bank territories.
Avivi – the movement’s founder – has grasped what the leaders of the Israeli center-left long ago forgot. The first mekhinot – voluntary gap-year leadership programs for Israeli youth – were established by right-wing religious Zionists with a strategic political goal in mind. To be sure, these academies are a unique educational phenomenon that today offer a spectrum of programs catering to religious, secular and mixed groups of Israeli Jews. Yet during the three decades since the first mekhina was founded, the initiative has been remarkably successful in cultivating a new right-wing religious elite.
Today, graduates of the first generation of religious mekhinot hold a wide range of prominent public positions: within Israel’s security establishment, in the government and in the media ecosystem. A partial list includes: the newly appointed head of the Israel Defense Forces Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, and Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter; Itay Hershkowitz and Eden Bizman, both former directors of the Prime Minister’s Office, directors general of government ministries Eli Groner, Asaf Yazdi, and Netanel Izak; the West Bank Yesha Council Secretary General Shilo Adler; and the editor-in-chief of the right-wing daily Israel Hayom, Omer Lachmanovitch.
This success is primarily due to religious Zionism’s strategic long-term investment in political education and in particular, its support for the systematic “privatization” of pre-military education. Over the past year, since the Israel-Hamas war, the dual problems of the IDF’s severe personnel shortage and the growing challenge of integrating Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) into the military have become critical.
In light of these issues, it is increasingly urgent for the center-left to grasp the dynamics that have led to this startling fact: Last year, over 41 percent of combat cadets in the IDF’s officers training school were religiously observant – a marked increase from 2018, when the percentage was 34.8 percent. Many of these cadets are alumni of religious mekhinot. With thousands of young people graduating from more than 80 such institutions each year, the time has come to acknowledge the formative political role played by Israel’s pre-military academies.
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In 1987, the then-head of the IDF Central Command, Gen. Amram Mitzna, reprimanded a reservist deputy battalion commander, Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, in one of his tank units. During a meeting, Mitzna harshly criticized the young rabbi and his religious Zionist peers for not serving in the career army. According to Mitzna, unlike their secular counterparts, most religious Zionists did not take their military service seriously. Instead, they viewed it as a temporary break from their religious lives and rarely took on the responsibility of command and officer positions.
That conversation became a pivotal moment, according to Rabbi Eli Sadan. In a 2007 pamphlet titled “A Direction for Religious Zionism,” Sadan, who together with Levinstein founded the Bnei David pre-military academy in the West Bank settlement of Eli, wrote: “When we examined the data, we realized he was right. You could count on one hand the number of career officers from the religious Zionist community serving in combat units.”
The Bnei David mekhina was established in 1987 to change that reality. There, religious Zionism’s best and brightest young men were offered a year of religious studies, which was combined with nationalist political education and intensive physical preparation for their military service.
In establishing Bnei David, Levinstein and Sadan saw themselves as ideological successors to Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Thau, one of the founding fathers of the Hardali (nationalist ultra-Orthodox) movement. Religious Zionist leaders gave their blessing. The IDF, too, desperate for high-quality personnel, also embraced the academy. Within less than a decade, the model was replicated: Four additional religious mekhinot were established, mainly in West Bank settlements.
The fulfillment of Sadan and Levinstein’s vision was made possible by the dogmatic pedagogic approach developed at their academy. In his 2022 book “The Third Revolution” (in Hebrew), attorney and writer Yair Nehorai analyzed thousands of hours of lectures at Bnei David in an effort to document the mekhina’s educational approach. According to Nehorai, who is sharply critical of Bnei David, the academy’s rabbis saw the promotion of right-wing religious Zionists to influential positions – both within and outside the military – as not only a political goal but also as a path toward hastening the messianic redemption.
Sadan himself was quite open about this in his lectures: “I want to see 1,000 to 2,000 graduates filled with Torah and with fear of the Lord… scattered across the country in key positions… and who operate based on the Torah’s power.” While the messianic redemption has yet to materialize, Sadan’s approach has undoubtedly succeeded. According to Bnei David’s data, more than 40 percent of some 6,000 academy graduates went on to serve as career and reserve officers – the majority in IDF infantry units.
What is it about the Bnei David model that led to its being replicated nationwide? Since the state’s founding, military preparation in Israel was always perceived as a public service to be provided by the government and the IDF. In 1950, this responsibility was transferred to the school system and added to the list of mandatory subjects. As a result, five hours of weekly military preparation were incorporated into the senior year of high school, including physical education and classes designed, according to the Education Ministry, to “prepare the youth for defense in accordance with the needs of the state.”
During its early years, however, the Bnei David mekhina was not supported by the state. Rather, it relied predominantly on private donations and tuition fees. Only 67 students enrolled in its inaugural year, yet even at this early stage, concerns were raised about the privatization inherent in this new model.
In a letter to then-Education Minister Yitzhak Navon in 1989, MK Ran Cohen, of the Ratz party, expressed apprehension about the rise of private organizations undertaking army preparation for young men and creating an uneven playing field. Navon acknowledged these concerns but stopped short of advocating for regulation: “I share your concerns regarding private [military] preparation and its implications,” he wrote, “but as long as these activities remain legal, we have no grounds to prevent them.”
This marked the beginning of the privatization of Israel’s pre-military education. Gradually, the government began recognizing the mekhinot, regulating their establishment and providing support to the private NGOs running them. Today, under the terms of the 2008 Pre-Military Academies Law, both secular and religious academies receive funding from the Ministry of Settlements and National Missions.
Yet the day-to-day operation of these institutions remain in the hands of private entities, with minimal government pedagogic oversight. (The 2018 Nahal Tzafit disaster, in which 10 students from the secular Bnei Zion mekhina drowned in a flash flood while on a hike, prompted greater supervision only of safety regulations).
The budget of the National Missions Ministry does not fully cover the annual operating costs of these programs, and there is a wide revenue disparity among the academies, depending on the scope of their fundraising efforts. Meanwhile, the “military preparation” offered by the mekhinot has become a social commodity in high demand to help young people quickly integrate and advance within the military system. The result: a public educational service has been outsourced, and over time, has become primarily accessible to the more affluent sectors of Israeli society.
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In the 1990s, following the success of the religious pre-military academies, pressure mounted to establish a similar model for secular youth. The motivation was partly elitist and partly value-driven. According to the Council for Pre-Military Academies’ website, the founders of the secular mekhinot aimed to fill what they saw as a “significant void in the level of principled Zionist leadership among secular youth.” However, education researcher Prof. Ayman Agbaria suggests that the academies were also established in an attempt to restore the power and prestige of the secular hegemony amid the rise of the new religious Zionist elite.
These were the years of the Oslo Accords (1993) and the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1995), and the founders of the new non-religious academies were divided over the political role these programs should play. Mekhinat Rabin, the first one to be established, promoted explicitly left-wing political education and has remained the flagship institution of the secular left. However, most other secular academies didn’t advocate for a specific political ideology, instead favoring a broader curriculum exploring social engagement and Jewish identity.
Similarly, the mixed secular-religious academies chose to abandon any political education, instead focusing on building bridges between religious and secular Israeli Jews – although they have never fully succeeded in attracting students from the mainstream religious-Zionist public. The mission statements of these pluralistic academies feature vague and benign catchphrases such as “cultivating social leadership,” “connecting different segments of Israeli society” and “strengthening solidarity.”
Today, more than 4,500 students are admitted annually to Israel’s various mekhinot. For children of well-off families in cities like Modi’in and Ra’anana, postponing military service for a year in favor of a pre-military program has become the norm. Despite efforts by the Council for Pre-Military Academies to diversify participation in these programs, youth from lower middle-class families, which generally lack the disposable income to pay monthly tuition fees, remains largely excluded from the mekhinot.
The privatization process initiated by Levinstein and Sadan in the late 1980s has transformed military preparation from a state-controlled public educational domain to a competitive arena in which secular and religious elites vie for resources, influence and the values they wish to inculcate.
Few educators in the secular pre-military academy movement acknowledge the elitist nature of their institutions. But what is the formative content shaping these elites? At best, the non-political academies are producing a leading generation of “general” centrists: a public filled with good intentions – devoid of political agendas, but rich in privilege.
This dynamic has led to a fundamental educational asymmetry in the world of pre-military academies. On the one hand, the institutions of the religious right instill a systematic, practical and anti-democratic political worldview. This hard-line pedagogy is exemplified by former Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz, founder of the Otzem Mekhina: “I most definitely am not a pluralist. And I also won’t have pluralism in my mekhina… I will not present seven different approaches for students to choose from.”
On the other hand, the non-religious academies – even the most left-leaning ones – adhere to a pluralistic pedagogy, exposing their students to a variety of opinions while often avoiding clear appeals for political action. This approach was demonstrated last May, when extreme-right MK Zvi Sukkot (Religious Zionism) was invited to speak at the Rabin academy.
While much of the center-left focuses on building bridges with a religious Zionist public that has never truly been interested in joining their efforts, the religious settler right is continuing to cultivate ideological leaders and a political power elite. This, too, is a by-product of the pre-military privatization process: the unregulated vacuum in which these academies operate enables a degree of ideological and pedagogical flexibility that could never exist in the public education system.
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In recent years, public figures on the Israeli left have increasingly called to shut down such religious right-wing mekhinot as Bnei David, Yatir and Otzem. According to clause 9(b) of the Pre-Military Academies Bill, state-recognized academies must educate their students to be “loyal to the State of Israel and to identify with it as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state.” The numerous anti-democratic statements made, for example, by the rabbis of the Bnei David academy clearly contradict this requirement.
Yet despite the disturbing rhetoric of its leaders, closing the Bnei David academy is not a viable option. And in the current political climate, such efforts are unlikely to succeed. But even without the current overwhelming government support for these institutions, closing the right-wing mekhinot, whose values resonate with many religious Zionists, would be a strategic mistake unlikely to achieve any intended results.
The privatization of pre-military education in Israel is a done deed. Today, young people who participate in programs – whether in academies, combat fitness training programs or preparatory courses for pre-army psychometric exams – enjoy a clear advantage over their peers at every stage of military service.
Those who ignore this reality risk ceding this arena of elite competition to right-wing leaders such as Habithonistim’s Amir Avivi or Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, founder of the Tavor Mekhina, who stated, “We need secular versions of Eliraz Peretz and Roi Klein” – referring to two alumni of religious mekhinot who served as officers and are regarded as heroes after falling in battle. These leaders are well aware of the power of right-wing political education of young elites.
Moreover, the importance of investing in political education within the pre-military academies has been further heightened by ongoing efforts to draft the Haredim. Civil-military relations expert Prof. Udi Lebel argues that the long-term goal of the religious Zionist community was to lead the military, while in the short term, it sought to change the IDF’s character from within. Should the Haredi draft proceed, we’ll probably see a similar process, in which the military framework is forced to adapt to their extreme sectarian values.
These developments should serve as a wake-up call for the center-left. It’s time to recognize that the pre-military academies are a formative political arena in Israeli society. Explicitly left-wing mekhinot, such as those bearing the names of Yitzhak Rabin, Berl Katznelson (Be’eri) and Haviva Reik would do well to adopt a pedagogical approach that is slightly more principled than pluralistic. This type of education will help motivate the young left-wing elite toward clear political goals and prepare them for their role in the ongoing struggle over the State of Israel’s character.
And what about the apolitical mixed and secular academies? Their directors must understand that in today’s reality, this public no longer has the luxury of clinging to neutrality. Students at the Nahshon, Aderet and Beit Yisrael academies are the sons and daughters of a politically distinct community with shared interests: values such as democracy and equality.
These past two years have seen a remarkable civic awakening among the camp that upholds these values. While protests are undoubtedly important, if the country’s democratic movement aims to drive profound change in Israeli society, it must convert its momentum into long-term investment in the political leadership of tomorrow. The pre-military academies are an excellent place to begin.
Nitsan Machlis is a master’s student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, researching the economics of education and processes of democratic backsliding.
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