army.doc

Total Quality Management and power/knowledge dialectics in the Israeli army

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev

Since its offspring in the Middle-East, violence has not been for Israeli society only a precondition for fulfilling the Zionist idea but, one of her essential dimensions. As any national existence, this is the precondition for the development of collective identity and the existence of the new Jewish being in opposition to historic Judaism, the Arab identity, and within the ruins of her villages, memories and aspirations of the Palestinians who became "the Jews" for the secular Israelis.

Zionist-Jewish violence has many revelations: historical memory, devotion, funding, international support and a caring Diaspora and a prosperous economy. These have been translated to military force too.

Since the beginning of Zionism and through the outgrowth of the Jewish state, the Israeli army has not been only a defense instrument, a military organization that undertakes orders and realizes them automatically with no general considerations and with no social obligations. On the one hand, social dedication and national consciousness did not make the Israeli army into a threatening organization which directly influences the nation's establishment in a praetorian tradition. It was not an organization which interferes concurrently and extensively in political life and from time to time makes a putsch. “The military has no incentive to intervene in political and social matters in a manner pernicious to democratic norms”. Yet, on the other hand, traditionally, the Israeli army was never neutral towards the grand national tasks;[1] it was one of the essential components in realizing the hegemony Zionist ideology, shaping the Israeli society and educating its members. While being a reflection of the process of the militarisation of the Israeli society it was a component of the nation building. Uri Ben-Eliezer calls this fenomena “a non praetorian militarism”[2] and even suggests that it was the states army who constituted the Israeli nation.[3]

Presenting knowledge as symbolic violence,[4] We would like to show the changing status of knowledge in the West at the end of the 20th century by using the Israeli example. We will present the images and functions of military knowledge in the Israeli "defense" forces since the beginning of the century until the recent acceptance of the T.Q.M. in the Israeli army as an organizational system that will also be the base for producing new images of collective identity, military knowledge, new educational ideology and a foundation for the new Israeli subject.

The production of the new Israeli subject and the new images of relevant knowledge as the manifestation of the victory of instrumental rationality over objective reason in the Israeli realm is only a test case for a global evolution. Examining the implementation of the T.Q.M. in the Israeli army (I.D.F.) will enable us to evaluate the violent co-existence of modernistic and postmodernistic knowledge. The educational force of the new images of knowledge in the army will enable us to reconsider the dialectics of knowledge and power in a specific test case.

The specific case we are studying here is to be understood in light of a general theory of knowledge. We would suggest[5] that what was traditionally called Spirit is manifesting itself as co-existence between any question and all (possible) answers in all discourses. Spirit polarized constitutes different realms of common self-evidence to different speech communities that are empowered and at the same time manipulated by systems that dwell in every realm of common self-evidence. Each realm of common self-evidence is able to produce more than one system and its related ideologies.[6]

It is possible for women and men to replace one ideology with another: aggressive symbolic exchange is part and parcel of their existence. At the same time this aggressive symbolic exchange is also a struggle that has its social, economic national and military representations. The polemos is immanent to the ideological struggle. This is true between the inhabitants of a certain system and between representatives of different systems and their related ideologies. But as changes are possible in this battle to life and death, it is impossible to depart from one realm of common self-evidence to another. This is so since realms of common self-evidence are closed and totally strange to each other. In other words, their battle is indirect and human consciousness does not fight in their service against their enemies as it does in the struggle between rival systems. Realms of common self-evidence do not have battalions of educators and armies, and that is one of the manifestations of the power of their violence, since they are creating the preconditions for the aggression that is playing with men and women who are fighting in the name of "their" systems.

While human beings are creations of the educational power of "their" systems, they are also the ones who re-produce, reform and destroy the systems that govern them, restraining them and enriching their potentials of self-realization. Man as a subject and object of human violence, as an ideal and enemy to raise against, is manipulated by Spirits cunning,[7] which manifests itself through the creative violence of the systems that manipulate their servants who struggle against each other and against themselves, their Zionist self included. Systems develop, grow old and die from senility or are destroyed by aggressive young systems that collide with them. A system's death is a rare moment of revelation of the realm of common self-evidence. The disintegration of the realm of common self-evidence into the nothingness is not an unproductive death: This power is rather a cessation of Spirit's hiding, which exploits the violence of the fertility and creativity of the human death economy in the service of improving its hiding beyond the orisons of the present system.

Conceptually and historically, it turned out that a self-constitution like that of the Zionist project promised was not possible except through the fertilization of a Palestinian national identity and the collision with it. This collision was a vital element in the determination of the special character of the Palestinian uprising and its development in the last hundred years. In the service of Spirits cunning, the two antagonists manifest and orchestrate their ideologies, each being nothing but a necessary secretion of their common death economy.

This is a struggle on an arena that is common but not mutual for the adversaries that activate their violence against each other as part of the way to create, present and sophisticate their own consciousness, identities and collective symbolic, and other power apparatus. This ideological effort also includes securing control on the orison, as for the cultural, social, economic and political potentials. Using this apparatus and potentials enables the reproduction and advancement of the Israeli system against its Arab rival. These possibilities are orchestrated through the struggle against the constitution of the "other's" collective self-conscious and identity, and even against the very existence of the other as "other". This otherness determines the orison's identity and negates the selfhood of the national consciousness that demands the correlation between collective self-consciousness and the borders and identity of "her" orison from a geographic point of view as well as from the symbolic point of view. This logic is enforced by the categorical imperative of the self-constitution of each collective identity as a national, cultural and social entity through the elimination of the "other's" power in all its manifestations: destroying the "other's" potential to reveal and manifest its special interests, historical memory and other cultural, social and military dimensions of power. The determined blindness of the rivalry parties is very productive and constitutes their conception of the service they are obliged to give to "their" systems. The Ideologies are a deviant of the system and are not to be simply reduced to an outcome of economic-social conditions. As such, they are manifesting the realm of common self-evidence.

In Western modernistic tradition the struggle against the "exterior" "other" is parallel to a combat against the "internal" "other": a struggle over the control of the borders of the speech community, over governing the interests, educational practices and the legitimacy of the maintenance and reproduction of the private and social body. This discursive play includes symbolic and practical violence, violence that is concerned with the constitution of the legitimate goals of the system's inhabitancy. This play contains also an inhabitable conflict over the ability to control and operate the focuses of social and cultural capital, over the capability to determine the dominant collective identity and the ability to marginalize deviating identities, as it includes the appropriating of the social and cultural capital and determining its borders. In each system the determining power in this struggle is manifested in the ability to construct the legitimate interpretation apparatus of socially relevant knowledge for each speech community; this is a life and death fight over the character of the educator as an executioner, judge, healer, interpreter, hero and a sophisticated producer-consumer (or a certain combination of these). This struggle is not to be limited to the orisons of legitimating the judgment of the "other" and producing practices for the continuation of the "external" fight against him: we are dealing here with a total war about the birth, recollection and murdering of knowledge which produces/eliminates human beings, their emotions, identities and enemies.

This struggle has an "internal" social face: a struggle over self-identity and collective consciousness of each speech community, a struggle over dominance in one's speech community, its enemies, ways of their representation and practical treatment. This is a struggle over open possibilities of appropriating the reconstruction, interpretation and facing of the "other's" "voice and his history. This power/knowledge dialectics is the battle over the "other's" locus which is at the same token a struggle over his identity's place, symbolically and therefore also practically.

This process, which formulates the specific attributes of the system's ideologies, is fertilized through its contact with agents of rival ideologies; from its side, this process fertilizes its agent's internal world, their jargon, the images of their "enemies", and the required violence that is accepted as relevant and legitimate in a specific historical stage.

We will try to show the Israeli-Palestinian case as a reflection of a general social-cultural development that transforms the present coexistence between the rival systems of modernity. We will try to present the context of the transformation that modernity is suffering in this historical stage. Our interest is to present how advanced capitalism's transformation (which is one of the central representations of instrumental reason) reflects new constructs of the link between Spirit, the traditional Western realm of common self-evidence and local social-cultural systems. We will show how the present development of modernity and the evolution of a postmodernistic condition brings about the consciousness that will see itself as obliged to new military and educational theories and to new forms and practices of violence: this is in accordance with current technological and administrative needs. This general problematic will be evaluated in a specific context, that of the national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and in an even more specific context, in the context of the current revolution in the Philosophy of education in the I.D.F.

There is no essential difference between the violence of the educators and the violence of the military. Especially since the French revolution, the army is totally impotent without sufficient power of its constitutive ideology in the system it serves and manifests. The reproduction of knowledge and images of knowledge is therefore vital to the livelihood of the tyranny of the system over its servants. This is principally clear in times of a braking realm of common self-evidence. The history of education in the Israeli army reflects it with a special clarity. This is so since the violent coexistence with its Arab neighbors re-vitalized the modernistic dimensions of the Zionist ideology, while the Israeli economy as a Western developed economy reflects the gathering forces of a postmodernistic social and cultural condition. In this paper we will concern ourselves with the violent dialectic that is being manifested in the implementation of the T.Q.M. In the Israeli army and the constitution of a totally new representation of knowledge in the process of the current production of the new Zionist subject.

This is an article on violence in the educational theory of the I.D.F., but this is also an article that concerns a central part of a general theory of knowledge of which the I.D.F. will be just an example.

In his book, Samson[8] Ze'ev Zabotinsky presented the ideal of the new Jew in the Zionist revisionism in light of the spiritual while of Samson: "Tell them in my name two things, the first one is this: Iron. Let them in-build in the iron everything they have: their money and Sinn, their oil and flocks, wives and daughters. Everything should be in-builded in the iron. there is nothing more precious then iron... and the second thing they would not understand, but they have to harry and understand it. The second thing is a king”.

Aba Hahimeir, the leader of "Brit. Habirionim" ("the covenant of the outlaws") and one of the great admirers of Zabotinsky, was concerned with the educational aim of "Beitar" (1928): "Tel Hai! - the leaflet of Beitar's central headquarters in Erez Israel - will striped the vegetarian thoughts of the Buberianism and the Borochovism and will show them naked - we will present the nakedness of the defeatism that is inbuilt in the foundation of Zionist policy. Tell Hai will try to bring to the youth the ideas that were preached in the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century by Yalag in "between the lion's teeth" and "Zidkijah in the prison", Berdizevski in "in front of Apollo's statue", Shneor in "in the eve of", and Jacob Hacohen, the poet of the "Birionim". The thoughts on the healthy nationalism, namely, the views on Jewish policy as they were presented by the greatest of our cultural renaissance - not just for mere talking were presented. Tell Hai of Beitar will strive to give the Hebrew youth a gentleman's and citizen's education. Instead of the mob will appear the public, instead of the hachsternick the knight, instead of the 'comrade' - the citizen, instead of dust-man - the battalion".[9]

In the first appearance of Habirion (17.4.1932), it is explicitly declared that the Hebrew soldier is the new educator for the people, and the educators are selected from the history of Jewish military heroism: our teachers and educators will be Johanan from Gush Halav, Elahazar Ben Yair from Mezada, David Harehuveni and Sarah Haronson". Special attention is devoted to self-sacrificing heroes; heroes that are internalizing the violence they intend to execute against the "other". This acceptance of violence is explicit in Hachimeir's "the third stage" (18.10.1935): "Zionism, he writes in his article, "is not a matter of self well-being. Zionism is an altar that one should climb into it and there one should be a burnt-offering".[10]

He demands "Zionism of self-sacrifice"[11] that will constitute the future Jewish state. In that state Ahimeir dreams to see a spiritual army: "the future Israeli army will have to be a conscious army, like the caliph Omar's Muslim army, that overtook the Near East and the north of Africa. Our Ideal have to be Cromwell's army in the days of the English revolution. In this army, the hands did not abandon the gun nor the bible. The more the army will know what he is struggling for, the more will rise his enthusiasm and fanaticism. Our army will not be a mechanical army nor an army of automates".[12]

From a positivist point of view, these are marginal tendencies in the Israeli public of the 1930s and the 1940s. Such a view is regularly conceptualized into a popular claim according to which one should divide between the Israeli "right" and "left" conceptions of violence as essentially different. The protagonists of the claim for the fundamental different conception of violence in the Zionist left and right could point to central moments of general national violent ecstasy in the Israeli public, such as the 1982 war in Lebanon, "the peace for Galilee war", as it is generally called in Israel. We do not look for such argumentation and We prefer argumentation, that are centered in a general theory of knowledge. We are interested in the daily appearance of ecstasy, in the good willed nursing of violence and its production and re-production as a regulative idea in the Israeli collective consciousness.

The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 introduced a new setting to the internal disagreement concerning the status and the orientation of the army in the rapidly forming Israeli society and culture. The controversies between Socialist Zionism headed by Ben-Gurion and anti-Socialist Zionism headed by Zabotinsky's epigons had developed considerably within the framework of the national consensus.

What in the Israeli epos is called "the war of independence" had offered a clear presentation of the Ben-Gurionist conception of violence. In a conference of his party "mapaii" in 6.1.1948, he declared that "in these days hochmat Israel (Israel's wisdom, Jewish Philosophy) is the wisdom of war" and that "the war is not only the supreme examination of power, but also of the will to life". This was put forth not as part of the Jewish conception of the stand of (Jewish) man in the world, as part of a militaristic Philosophy of history but vice versa, as its conscious negation: "This Philosophy is abomination for Judaism as we understand and, as I conceive, the wise man of Israel and its prophets had. We need the craft of war since we do not have any other choice - since it was forced on us... it is a must that we will undertake the burden of war and manifest a will to win. And we will undertake it precisely because war for us is not a goal for its sake, and we see in war a terrible and damned thing. We are obliged to war only because of a compulsory situation - and war and victory are but an apparatus to something else, and this "something" is what will give us the advantage our enemies and the adorers of immortality are lacking: a vision of life, vision of independence, liberty, equality and freedom - to the Jewish nation and to all the world's people".[13] The prophetic jargon does not reflect a one-dimensional utopia in Ben-Gurion and in the other Israeli socialist leaders of the time. This is to be seen in Ben-Gurion’s militaristic politics and thinking. This dialectic has special transparence in the thinking of Izhak Tabenkin, one of the leders of an important socialist fraction and Israeli kibbutzim. Tabenkin preached for militaristic solutions for all of Israelies challenges in an anti-militaristic jargon that had a long standing educational furtility: “education for war - means fighting for something that is the opposite of war” and in enother place: “education for war infront of pacifism is a war for a world without wars”.[14]

In this light was formed on 31.5.1948 the declaration of the transit government, announcing the formation of zva hahagana leisrael (the Israeli Defense Force - I.D.F.). Explicitly, the declaration of establishing the I.D.F. is grounded on an antithesis to the Zabotinscian conception of violence. The constitution of the I.D.F. is presented in the constitutive text as part of an evolutionary realization of the prophet's spirit to a totally peaceful reality.[15] Noticeable in this vision is a moral commitment and a broad anti-functionalism conception of the duties and aims of the Jewish soldier. In this respect there is a common ground between the Philosophy of Ben-Gurion, Zabotinsky and Aba Ahimeir. This attitude stands in severe contradiction to the current I.D.F military Philosophy.

In his farewell letter to the I. D. F (7.11.1953), the educational duties of the army are introduced "to be a melting pot the Jews coming from all Diaspora, gathering together at the homeland from all the world's corners, being the formative force for an united nation, uprooted in her rich heritage from her past and the vision of her prophetic future".[16] And this, in the face of a reality where "most of our people are from a Jewish point of view nothing but dust". The traditional modernistic educational ethos of forming an ideal, alternative collective through styled and well-disciplined organizational violence, is not to be reduced to melting pot ideology. Implicitly, here we are confronted with the conception of the realization of the idea of the Sabra and the production of the new Jewish subject as an anti-militarist pioneer-warrior Who turns his power in order to master and fertilize the space that will became Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. This creative aggression will constitute the new reality while creating the new Jew as a halutz in such a strength that will unsuitable him to be purified of any remnants of the Diaspora.

Those who are interested in dividing between "leftist Zionism" and "right-oriented Zionism" will probably denote this Ben-Gurionist orientation as the most significant dimension in the thought on violence in the Philosophy of Ben-Gurion, Tabenkin, Izechack Sade, Yahari and Altermann as separating these "leftist" Zionists from the conception of violence of the right wing counterparts, the Philosophy of Zabotinsky, Hachimeir and Eldad. We would not agree. We will negate this conception in two levels of argumentation. In the first one, we will claim that declared anti-militarism is not necessarily a negation of violence; we will claim that the Ben-Gurionist anti-militarism is rooted merely in a different ideal of violence, not in an essential different praxis. The violence conception of the Zionist left, is grounded on an ideal of violence that avoids direct, heroic confrontation and looks for a praxis that will paralyze its victims in such a way that it will avoid using military means, unless in very rare cases. The conceptions of "conquering labor" (from the Palestinians working for the British government or other Jewish settlers), "Judaisation of the country" and other central Zionist conceptions are uniting the Zionist "left" and "right" in such a way that makes the construction of the differences very idle and problematic. The "left's" conception of violence was the basis for the articulation of the self- conception of the I. D. F. and its traditional educational project. Here we should not look just for the reconstruction of Zionist ideology of violence as part of an explanation for its violent co-existence with its Palestinian "other". According to our argument, here, we have to look for the reconstruction of the violence of the system; the theory and practice of the violence of the I. D. F. has to be seen as one of the manifestations of the manipulations of a specific system that enslaves its objects (the Zionist subject and its Palestinian addressee). By struggling, fulfilling and defending the realization of central concepts of the ruling Zionist ideology as "inhabiting the country" and "Judaising of the land", the object of the system is reproducing it and produced by it. This violence, as the Palestinian counter-violence, is a productive element of the system, fulfills itself as a manifestation of the current realm of common self-evidence. Therefore, it is impossible to divide this violence against the Palestinian "other" and the violence towards the land from other practices of violence as writing history and other textbooks, struggling for re-producing the consciousness that is reproducing the current dominating system and its realm of common self-evidence by destroying the "other's" memory, history and other material possessions. If this is true for the sublime and styled violence, it is twice as true for the direct organized force, the army. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the I. D. F. has traditionally had such a great educational mission. Even today, after the great evolution that We will reconstruct, the I. D. F. is one of the greatest publishing houses in Israel, publishing "non-military" texts, functioning as the greatest educational force in Israel.

It was Ben-Gurion who formed the basic concepts, the limits and the declared aims of the I. D. F. to which the army is explicitly obliged even today. According to Ben-Gurion: "All the Israeli education should be directed to the aim of raising a generation of pioneers. These pioneers should be educated to see the greatest mission in re-building the county's resonation, overcoming nature's powers in the land, in the sea and in the air and creating in the homeland an economy, society and culture... to totally destroy the gaps between the different communities and exiles, and elevating men and women that serves in its ranks... to the promising peak that awaits us".[17] Ben Gurion understood the nation building of the Israelies as part of a general war: against un-civilized nature (namely a non Zionist and yet not technologicaly udvanced locus), against un-civilized Arabs in Palestine/Israel and against not-yet nationalistically united Jewish pupilation that has to face grand challenges. The I.D.F had to function as a “school”[18] that will integrate the separate Jewish communities and traditions into a new, united, Jewish community, the Israeli subject. This was viewed as an traditional anti-militaristic etitude of Zionist socialism that its pioneer-warier ideal was an outcome of brutal conditions and not a militaristic utopia.

This conception was common in the main discourse in Israeli culture, as to its left there was a prominent critique on the ever-growing militarisation of Israeli culture and its nets of symbols, and to its right the Zabotinsky-Hachimeir persistent call for seeing a imposing task in what Zabotinsky called "dying - or conquering the mountain" as a way of life.[19] As for Ahimeir, it was more than that, it was the aim of life, like for Ernst Juenger at about the same time, when he saw humanity as striving to build the Babylon tower with blood[20] and saw the military struggle as the king of human feelings.[21] The Zionist hegemony representation of Trumpeldor's "it is worthy to die for our country" is different from that of Ahimeir, for in the hegemony (socialist) Zionist rhetoric being killed in battle was not an aim for itself although it was praised. For Juenger heroism in the battlefield and dying an hero was a supreme ideal since collective straggle, the war, was the greatest ideal: "being killed for something you believe in is the greatest fulfilling" even if it is a sacrifice for a mistake. This is so since "the thing is nothing and the commitment is everything and "the fantasy and the world are one, and the one who dies for a mistake, still is an hero"...[22] “To our succeeding reconstruction, concerning dot's relevant ideals and developments in the Israeli army it is worthwhile to mention Juenger's polarization between the "Arbeiter" (workingman) and the "Waldgaenger" (forest traveler), the writer, the individual, the Fuerer, to whom the "forest" is a place of freedom. The opposite is to be said about "the technical Principe" as manifested in the enslaved modern collective who lost Mythos and Mysterien of mother-land, lost original-powers that strive for danger and heroic death. Ahimeir demanded the spiritualization of sacred/conquering violence in which the total obedience to the ruler/commander and the will for self-sacrifice will be praised. "Our movement", he writes on Beitar, "is not a flock, it is a battalion".[23]

This concept is represented in Uri Zvi Grinberg's song, "there is one truth and not two", a song that is to be seen as one of the better Philosophical representations of Beitar's Philosophy of education: "Your forefathers thought: a land is not to be bought by money / one is baying the tilled soil and brandish in it a pick-axe. And I say: money does not buy a land / and with the pick-axe one also digs and buries his dead... and one day will come when from Egypt's river to the Ephrastus / and from the sea till beyond Mohav my Men will climb / and they will call my enemies to the last battle, and blood will be to determine who will be the only one who masters here".[24] As we have seen in Ernst Juenger also Uri Zevi Grinberg demands the unification of violence and mythos, sword and feather: ..."Poetry and sword. Not this one without the other!"[25] An (secular) total devotion was an uncompromized educational demand between the socialist pioneers in Israel, the Haluzim. As one of them wrote: we have to create a new living religion, religion of devotion, we will constitute ahead of us grand ideals and we will sacrifice ourselves for them... I am striving... for great devotion for life religion that has a supreme vision, devotion to the degree of hermits and sacrifice that will enable us to change ourselves".[26]

Like Ernst Juenger, Uri Zvi Grinberg, Ahimeir, Zabotinsky, Begin, Ben-Gurion, Hazan and Altermann understood that a nation's life is in need of myths, creative symbols that are energetic enough to activate the nation's soul to a life and death struggle, and this is their educational Philosophy's foundation. Nietzsche, knew it,[27] Heidegger, knew it,[28] but current Western culture forgets it. In the face of the annihilation of absolute values, objective truths and the actual social and cultural possibility of an autonomous subject that could have restored life to Enlightenment thinker's utopia, Western culture sinks into aimless desires. The object swallows the subject.

Ultimately, the Zionist Philosophy of education was based on a modernistic realm of common self-evidence that vitalized systems in which ideologies produced human commitment to retain sets of values and knowledge-images and bodies of knowledge that did not totally obey parameters as profit-loss, efficiency-inefficiency, practical-unpractical, but on the contrary, made them possible and negated them.[29] The presence of these was vital to the system's telos. This Philosophy of education included suitable theoretical means for the grounding of suitable manipulations for the enabling of the Zionist subject's acceptance of military services superiority as a vocation and not as a profession. It emphasized modesty, striving for honor, bravery and total devotion to the Zionist narrative's supreme ideals that included a vivid radical interpretation of Judaism as a secular-socialist project. Until the late 1970s, there were no serious cracks visible in the Israeli system, and these ideals still had real vitality: formulating it generally, there was a consistency between the hegemonicl Israeli Philosophy of education and the I. D. F.'s as an integral part of Israeli society and the modernistic meta-narrative that formulates it.

Since the Six Day War / 1967 war, and especially since the beginning of the 1980s, the Ideological part of the Israeli system started to be cracked.[30] Certain social groups, in which we can pinpoint middle class representatives as senior bureaucrats, technicians, young merchants and generally the economically better-off as well as those in free occupations and others, caught the sense of the collapse of the traditional realm of common self-evidence and its local (Zionist) modernistic system and the evolution of a new, postmodernistic realm of common self-evidence that is coming into being.[31] Popular reception of images, symbols and desires denoted this evolution that eroded both what was traditionally called (Western) high culture and the halutz-Sabra ideology; wealth and power's relevant images that were transferred by television series like "Dynasty" and "Dallas" became very relevant. Traditional mythological figures and Zionist culture heroes, like A. D. Gordon, Trumpeldor and Meir Har Zion, were openly rejected as irrelevant, instead figures like Michael Jackson, Madonna and their Israeli local models, were chosen.

Basically, the Zionist Philosophy of education was formed by modernity as a central manifestation of the Western realm of self-evidence. It produced a unique system, in which there exists a total heroic commitment to values and knowledge concepts that did not obey such parameters as profit-loss, efficiency-inefficiency, practical-unpractical. As part of advancing capitalism, naturally, these were present in the civil society's world, but they were secondary to high culture and the collective ideals and myths that were vivid and fertile, especially in times of crisis and military conflicts and the hegemony educational Ideology targeted their overcoming. The active presence of these myths, desires, fears, hopes and concepts was vital to the telos of the Zionist project that understood the individual and collective Zionist reality in the yet-non-existence, in the utopian totally different. This Philosophy of education included relevant theoretical means for the constitution of effective educational manipulations that were necessary.[32] They were indispensable to ensure the reception and identification with it. In other words, they were vital for the production of the Zionist subject as a violence focus. It includes, naturally, accepting military service as a vocation and not as a profession. It also includes the denotation of personal modesty, national honor and the presentation of heroism and devotion to modernism's grand ideals as presented by the Zionist dominant narrative. Until the late 1970s, traditional Zionist myths were generally still alive and were able to produce the ("internal" and external") required amounts of violence that were accepted as "needed" by the reality of coexistence with the Arab world and the Palestinian population. At that time it was still possible, because there existed a sufficient correlation between the Philosophy of education in the I.D.F. and the suggestive power of the hegemony Zionist meta-narrative and its standing in central concepts of modernity.

But it is almost for a generation that the socialist and (political) liberal ideals of modernity have become problematized and even irrelevant in the Israeli system. During the same time, the cultural, social and political traditional elite of the labor movement, and in its peak the representatives of the kibbutzim, completely lost its self-confidence and socio-economic power focuses as well.[33]

As elsewhere in the West, the new elites in Israel were also part and parcel of modernity; the new cultural and technocratic groups reproduced the traditional Zionist jargon. They represented modernity's weariness in the form of functionalist "pragmatism".

Parallel to the dying (atheist) Zionist myths, arch-religious and ultra-nationalist alternatives emerged.[34] This nationalistic religiosity inherited the aggressiveness and vitality of such traditional Zionist myths as the socialist farmer-warrior (halutz) and the Jewish fascist gentleman-soldier as a worrier who represents hadar, Jewish chivalry.[35] The military concept of the new religious ultra-nationalistic alternative has many roots, but a special role is played here by the impact of the thought of Rabbi Zevi Jehuda Hakhoen Kook. Continuing from Rabbi Habraham Zevi Kook, he synthesizes the religiosity of the Torah, Israel and Erez Israel under a divine project[36] in which secular history becomes a part of a grand teleological divine history. The State of Israel becomes, under such a conception, a vital element of the cosmic revelation of God, and the military aggression of the I.D.F. becomes part of worshipping the Lord, that is, holy violence.[37] This conception is to be seen already in the religious-poetic glorification of violence in Uri Zevi Grinberg, a former culture hero of the Israeli (non religious) write. In his "memorial vision to the tribes of Israel he writes: "There are no perfect for mastery as Jews, there are no gracious as they... no one will fit more than they to boast the crown of world-rolling. There is no other mountain in the world but mount Moria to climb up to Jerusalem. There is no one but us to herald the tidings of the future on mount Moria to the peoples and to the world, to grant a new religion of yearning and new everlasting expressions to man..."[38] The social milieu of Uri Zevi Grinberg's writings was basically secular and his thought, as the that of Ahchimeir, was gradually neglected even by the Israeli extreme write. Uri Zevi Gerinberg himself was conscious of the ever grater irrelevancy of his Philosophy to the Israelis of the 1967 generation and he ceased his writing on the new religion of heroism. The cult of tragic Jewish heroism came to an alt when colliding with the new civic religion that started to develop in Israel since the 1950s. But the rhetoric of mysticism of violence did not died out, it rather transformed itself under the new conditions. Jewish heroism and sacred violence has been re-vitalized from a special trend in Jewish religious thinking in Israel that some fractions of it, like that of Rabbi Meir Kahane came back to Uri Zevi Grinberg's Ideas and re-fertilized them.[39] The next step, the assassination of premier Isaac Rabin as a traitor who “gives away” the land of Israel the enemies was quite natural, following the historical development of this intellectual tradition.

This conception is heralded by a vivid growing minority in Israeli society. Over the last twenty years, there has been a constant change in the social-cultural formation of the army: as many Kibbutzim youth are less interested in a military career, and especially in the "special units", their place is gradually being taken over by religious ultra-nationalists who see themselves as Rabbi Kook's pupils. Is the fate of Israeli society going to be similar to that of Iran ? I think the basic conditions are so different that it is hard to take it as a realistic option. But that does not mean that the essence of the Iranian transformation would not manifest itself in the Israeli arena: the erosion of the current realm of common self-evidence have to be manifested in total transformation of the current Israeli system and its being succeeded by a new, fundamental, vivid system.

Ironically, the dialectic that we are reconstructing between the relations of the Israeli political elite (who's jargon is still basically a traditional modernist-nationalistic one) and the army (between the traditional ideological trends and the new, "neutral", professionalism-functionalist conceptual developments) was taking place in a very special situation: the growing Palestinian uprising (the "intifada"), which challenged the relative comfort of the Israeli repression of the Palestinian population and is shaking the Israeli collective self-confidence and presently culminated to a new violent social-political situation that is called "the peace process".

In Israel of today, the apparent triumph of instrumental reason within the framework of the positivistic ideology and its "anti-ideological" performative conclusions, suits the current situation in the West when national conflicts are becoming more sublime, collective solidarity is diminishing and the direct conscious confrontation with the "other" is minimized. One of the peculiar originalities of the Israeli reality is that in it, in parallel to the direct military/social/economic/symbolic confrontation with the Palestinians (who produce counter-ideological responses), a new consciousness is forming in Israeli society. This new collective consciousness is anti-collectivist, pragmatic, functionalistic and "neutral" towards values and collective solidarity and aims.[40] This Western spirit of our generation finds in the secular Israeli society a very fertile ground since the 1980s. In the Israeli society of the 1990s this ideology is gathering momentum and is attractive to ever greater numbers in Israeli (secular-Jewish) society, who have become tired of the Zionist system and basically from the enlightenment's entire project. This essentially modernistic trend is facing another "neutral" orientation: a postmodernistic rejection of the entire Western realm of common self-evidence. In some cases they are united, like in the case of eroding the left of the traditional Zionist myths and symbols.

The ideal of the Israeli has suffered a transformation from the ideal of a straight, simple and honest farmer-soldier, A Sabra (a Jewish Zionist native of Israel) who is a hevremann (active, solidarian figure), into an ideal of a "professional" who is the opposite of the hevremann:[41] as an anti-solidarian, he is to be praised for not being a frieherr ; [42] as a successful commander, as a wealthy stock exchange agent as unbeatable, if only he would not be disturbed with "troubling" morality and legalism. The new anti-solidarian tendency that reflects the death of the traditional Zionist myths and symbols that negated intellectualism and formal public codes and praised dugry talking[43] and hevremann behaving is joining these days the new (anti-solidarian narcissist) mode of aggression that creates in Israel an original Philosophical, cultural, social and psychological reality. In this Israeli context, a false consciousness is constituted, according to which the struggle with the Arab "other" is going to be decided by "professionalism", "excellence", and efficiency of the holly triad of Israeli army, economy and education.[44] Under the new conditions the arguments for the reproduction of the conflict in military terms are becoming more and more pragmatic and formal, less and less offensive toward the outside world while internalizing violence in the service of tanatos, while hatred and fear of the "other" continue to gather momentum under the layer of functionalist rhetoric of dreadful everyday life in a vitality that the Israeli/Palestinian manifestations of the conflict are empowering day by day.

This dialectical contradiction is not concluding itself in the Israeli orison as a modernistic system, between its obligation to realize national ideals at any cost and its attraction to neutrality and practical orientation. Basically, these are both perfect manifestations of the violent (local) collision between two systems, modernity and postmodenity. This is the substratum of the current phase of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

The postmodernistic discourse is grounded in a post-modernistic condition. It reflects and confronts the supremacy of instrumental reason that Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Juergen Habermas are reconstructing in their critique. In the present phase, instrumental reason in Israel has no internal rivals but religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalistic religiosity (that in part is willing to cooperate with the pragmatic trends), postmodernists, who do not constitute a separate political force in the narrow meaning of the term, and traditional humanists like liberals and Marxists, who are of no challenge whatsoever. In Israel, the present development of the modernistic system contradicts basic attitudes in its traditional cultural and social structures and organizations. This is especially relevant to conservative organizations such as the army. In present Western systems, where "degeneration"/"progress" is almost pure and the presence of direct grand traditional "enemies" is minimal, the contradiction is more sublime. In Israeli society, which suffers from a low stage of a modernistic national conflict characterized by a combination of the most primitive and the most sophisticated manifestations of violence, the contradiction is much richer and clearer. This is to be seen even in the Israeli army, where traditional idealist commitment is mishmashes with anti-idealist orientation as part of the erosion of the Western realm of common self-evidence and its local modernistic system. We will concentrate ourselves on the reception of T.Q.M. in the Israeli army.

Total Quality Management (T.Q.M.) is a management strategy to organize production and delivery of merchandise in an age when the ideal of an autonomous subject is fading, the use value of a product erodes and basically what remains of it in the market is its distribution value, which grounds the possibilities of representing its "quality" that is abstracted of any value. It is not just a fashioned managerial/organizational theory, it is a (fashioned) reflection of the new status of man and the present evolution of instrumental reason and its violence. The adorers of T.Q.M speak of it as "brain power and human energy"[45] as a condition for "survival"[46] in an essentially total reality where what Darwin called "fitness" is determined by the omnipotence of laws of the unconscious market. This management strategy is based on the assumption that "in order to survive in the market it is necessary to bring about a rapid essential improvement in qualities, while reducing expenses". This is so according to the most recent educational material of the I.D.F. which is part of a new trend to reconstruct the Israeli army in accordance of the principles with the new strategy.[47] We should see in it a reflection of a much deeper and essential change: it shows to what an extent in developed capitalism there is hardly a difference between the economy of death production and the production of other commodities, since human life and human relations become totally reified and abstract. Therefore it is to such an extent that such a common organizational strategy fits the capitalist production in all its manifestations.

In the last two years, the leading managers of the I.D.F. adopted the T.Q.M. not only as a substratum to reorganize Israel's military forces, but also as the foundation for the constitution of a new educational Philosophy to the production of the Jewish soldier. This revolution in the collective Israeli self-consciousness and the Zionist Philosophy of power is viewed as a simple tiny organizational change; yet, this revolution (and the general indifference to it in the Israeli public) is of utmost Philosophico-political importance.

In July 1992, a change in command took place in the Israeli navy, and General Ami Ayalon became the commander. The general climate, the commander-in-chief's policy and the new navy commander's attitude reflected the dominant tendencies in the most advanced parts of Israel and Western societies in general. The T.Q.M. was also adopted by other I.D.F.'s branches, such as the air force. When making his inaugural programmatic speech, General Ayalon said: 1. We ought to adopt in the I.D.F. advanced organizational strategies that will enable us to make the most out of the present resources we have. 2. The improvement has to include all the navy's units, while denoting the combat units; an improvement in the combat units will guarantee an immediate and direct improvement in the navy's goals. 3. The educational Philosophy must be constituted in accordance with the requirements of the organizational and managerial needs. This is to be implemented rigorously according to the definition of leading qualifications and leadership Philosophy in the army as constructs of T.Q.M.'s ideology.[48] The entire program was pronounced in the I.D.F. "total quality leadership" (T.Q.L).

One has to acknowledge the American influence. We should take into account the close working relations between the American Army and the I.D.F.. Since the American Army adopted the new myth, it was but rational that the Israeli army, which operates American weaponry and military treatment, would also adopt the T.Q.M. In a deeper analysis, we have to take into account the current development in advanced capitalism and Western societies of which Israel is a part. Comparing the ideal of the Sabra and the Jewish soldier in Israel as a commander and leader/ hero/ hevreman of his unit in the history of the I.D.F. and current Israel's culture reflects the extent of the contemporary revolution. The officer in the I.D.F., especially in "special units" and the air force, was traditionally represented as the supreme Israeli; he was accepted as a symbol of honesty, devotion to collective ideals and present existence, an idealist at his best. These qualities, as mentioned in Ben-Gurion's speech that we quoted, were understood as the main source of Israel's power. This guaranteed Israel's violence as legitimate and even as a part of a holy war for existence/expansionism. In Judaism this was traditionally understood not as existence for its sake, but existence as part of fulfilling a cosmic mission, as being "or lagoiim" and universal redemption. The Zionist (secular) version of redemption was reduced to ever more national-materialist expansionism. The obligation of the traditional I.D.F. commander was for all the Jewish past, for the recent Holocaust, for guaranteeing present national emancipation and for future global redemption within traditional Zionist ideology. Secularist leaders of Israel, like late Ben-Gurion, revitalized traditional religious Jewish conceptions when constructing and legitimizing the mainstream ethnocentrism of Zionist ideology and its violence.

Today's I.D.F. conception of the Jewish commander in Israel's army understands him as a part and reflection of advanced capitalism; as an ideal "professional" producer of efficient violence, whose aggression has no holiness or essence whatsoever, but "quality". In official educational publications of the I.D.F. the commander is conceptualized as a professional servicing his clients: "an external client is the one who utilizes a product or a service that is offered by the organization. For an example: the clients of the BAHAd (the school for commanders) are the combat unites. The clients of the dockyard are the commanders of the war ships and the control stations. The clients of the central command are the forts".[49] It is stated there that T.Q.M. (implicitly in the I.D.F.) is not a technique but "a world view".[50] In an lecture "on excellence in the Israeli army" given in Haifa University (1.5.1995) General Ami Ayalon (at that time the commander of the Israeli navy) spoke on training troops and preparations to war in terms of "input" and on the next war as the "output".[51] The performative principle was introduced in the congress as the only criterion valid for the evaluation of a commander's behavior. Pragmatism, as behaviorism is not new, but in the current context one has to understand that we are facing nothing less than an educational revolution. This revolution is to be understood as part of Instrumental rationality's evolution within the framework of a broader theory of knowledge. This revolution holds not just for the conception of the soldier or for empowering efficiency of military violence: it reflects a deeper and more general change. It is what Marx called "revolution",[52] and what we show here as the erosion of the present realm of common self-evidence. under the new conception of life violence is transformed and even in it there is no way of technical/rational/controlled reality; "only what is countable exists!" says a new I.D.F educational publication.[53] The dichotomy that Ernst Juenger and Martin Heidegger made between the mechanistic/rational/controlled and the mystic/"forest traveler"/author/Fuerer, a dichotomy that is to be seen in Aba Ahimeir and in Uri Zevi Grinberg's thought has no ground in the I.D.F's current Philosophy of violence: instrumental rationality is the guide to live in a reality of uncertainty, violence is rationalized and becomes part of general social normality. There is no more place for heroism and mystery or "real truth" in violence and for (holy violence) since the totalization of violence leaves no place for mystery, truth or any kind of "otherness".

In the fantastic world of "the new global order", the political elites are reducing the financial and rhetorical support traditionally offered to the generals and the army as an exclusive part of the system. Under these advanced capitalistic circumstances, instrumental reason can reflect and join forces to the production of the new human being, man that will be immanently prevented from being an authentic Israeli. This is so because the ideal "Sabra" is a typical cultural myth of modernity[54] and was invented under social conditions that are disintegrating in a productive way into a new realm of common self-evidence. In this sense, it is possible to show how the improvement and strengthening of the I.D.F. under new organizational theories, which are heralding the future realm of common self-evidence (and its systems), practically contributes to the destruction of the Zionist state. The destruction of the Zionist state is certain, but the demolishing of the State of Israel and the I.D.F. is definitely less certain; even under such conditions, the bureaucratic structure might hold on, but not its spiritual essence. Under post-modernistic conditions, the new Israeli personality would not be able to be a real Zionist and "a good" Israeli; he would not join efforts to garden the desert or to Judaize the land. More than that, in principle, he would not be a hevreman nor a halutz nor a patriot, and with no present or potential living national myths, the protection and development of the present system and its re-production is impossible.

Some attributes of the women and men of the future realm of common self-evidence are already to be seen in the most advanced parts of the present system. As an individualistic monad, its relation to the public sphere is no longer based on commitment to ideals of solidarity and myths of self-sacrifice, but rather on an education that at its best produces a temporal, individualistic-anarchist readiness to joint plots. This, one might say, is nothing new for human nature, nor to intellectual fashions like the nihilism of Max Stirner. But in the current historic stage, these phenomena have unique characterizations, as one of the manifestations of a post-modernistic system and the dying of the entire Western realm of common self-evidence. Even the pure yuppies, though stripped of absolute and objective values and any telos, still leave a place for values and principles, for resistance and neutrality as a revolt against the idealistic past. For "the X generation", this stand is accepted with disgust. Work, especially hard work, whether for one's self or for something or someone else, is no longer considered a value, not even a value to be rejected. "Success" is accepted, if it comes with no effort, but it is not desired. "The X generation" does not hate anything or anyone, nor does he love anything or someone. It lost one of the main characteristics of the Western realm of common self-evidence: it lost its Eros(. This cultural and social phenomena is closed to the Yuppies ideological quest for quality of "the product" that held an idle connection to "the thing" or "reality", while being indifferent to its use-value, its essence and its meaning for real human needs and aims that it is supposed to serve. In the 1990s, it is harder than ever to separate between Eros and tanatos, between the capitalist system's violence and its militaristic manifestations, because of the success in the internalization of this violence, as can be seen in "the X generation" phenomena, the virtual reality practices, and endless other manifestations of the dying out of the Western realm of common self-evidence.

The Jewish modern national movement, Zionism, reflected general trends in the emancipatory/colonialist orientation of modernity. Jewish force was not just an instrument guaranteeing independence after two thousand years; the Israeli army became a symbol and an active force that was central to the Zionist spirit and reality. This was part of the common self-evidence of the Israeli developing system, and the I.D.F.'s educational Philosophy spared no effort to represent and re-produce it as something of common self-evidence. Of course, in real life there was enough room for personal ambitions and intrigues as well as for self-sacrifice and modesty. The trustworthiness towards the central symbols and myths of Zionist ideology was central to the I.D.F.'s pedagogical practice and educational theory, and it was unthinkable to detach combat and operational instruction from the obligation towards the grand aims and central myths of Zionist ideology. It was of common self-evidence that these are elements which are not to be disassociated.

But as the Western realm of common self-evidence and the dominant ideology in the Israeli system was eroded, the vividness of general modernist central concepts, symbols and myths was lost. While staying within the framework of modernity, functionalist-instrumental-positivistic conceptions took the upper hand, and instrumental reason rules with objective reason as no rival whatsoever. This also had its impact on the army.

A modernist army is supposed to be a perfect instrumental organization: its products are not quantitative in functionalist yardsticks, since ideal success - victory, deterring the enemy, empowering nationals moral and so forth - can not be reduced into quantity or, in any case, it is unreasonable to evaluate them basically in input-output terms. Until the last stage of its development, the I.D.F. as part of modernist Israel, was organized and understood itself as part of the historic Zionist project, its ideals and realities.

As Israeli society developed and the Israeli economy was totally integrated into the most advanced leading economic trends and its parallel technological advancements, the I.D.F. was also forced to integrate into the cultural and psychological dimensions of this trend. As a bureaucratic, administrative and technologically most advanced economic organization, the army adopted new technologies and their immanent logic. Consequently, the I.D.F. integrated into the aimless developing of the new technologies and the rationality of decaying/victorious modernity; it became part of what it wanted to enslave, to use just as an instrument, but instrumental rationality does not permit such a freedom. An ever greater gap emerged in the army between the constitutive national-modernistic ideals of Zionism and the practical interests of an aimless, bureaucratic-neutral ever-growing and strengthening organization.

The army, especially at the level of high posts, suffered and integrated late modernistic and anti-modernistic influences. An ever greater applicability has emerged between the inner logic and in depended needs of high capitalistic production and the needs of technological dimensions of the old style death economy, on the one hand, and the ideological obligations to the hegemony Zionist ideals, on the other hand. The army as a violence production machine against "external" targets was always a part of the system as a focus of violence, internalizing in the psyche and in the consciousness of its carriers (the pretended "subject") the realm of common self-evidence; it was part of the educational project, producing "subjects" as objects that would re-produce the realm of common self-evidence. The military violence was to secure the universality/cummunalitability of what turned out to be, in case of success, "self-understood" truths. But as this production started to produce "individuals" with no soul, no Eros and no God, their market value changed parallel to the changes in technologies of their military killing. Inevitably, this trend is becoming relevant to the current struggle between Palestinians and Israelis.

The struggle over the legitimacy of different images of knowledge parallels the struggle over the legitimate strategies of producing the Zionist subject and the Palestinian subject; this is a combat that is to be reduced to a struggle over sources of power to control land and knowledge about the land, the legitimate procedures of producing and enabling the subject's consciousness, producing and re-producing legitimate history and censured-forbidden histories, memories and interests of the "other", an "other" whose power has to be expelled from the orisons of legitimacy. This is in order to ensure the safe production of a subject that will be ready to live and, especially, to die for the Zionist "place". Azamy Byshara writes on this subject from a postmodern-Palestinian perspective[55] but he neglects the brutal existential "fact": the subject, sand the Zionist subject included, is mainly an manifestation of the realm of common self-evidence. Even his rebellion is recruited for the progress, safety and permanency of the system, "his" system that in late modernity is regularly called the "fatherland". This is a system that embodies forces and concepts which manipulate other "subjects" to re-produce it by "educating", "protecting" and empowering new "subjects" who will struggle against the representatives of rival systems. The system has to ensure (through the "subjects" who are its carriers) material, psychological and spiritual conditions. Finally, under the conditions of a technologically advanced society at the end of the 20th century, the project is to succeed primarily by ensuring the right consciousness. Therefore, the focus of violence has to be primarily internal, educational. The realm of common self-evidence is supplying the system with the energy to control and develop the required practices of producing subjects consciousness. This energy has to be sufficient to also ensure the intellectual impotency of the repressor; a productive impotency that ensures his permanent desire to eliminate /control the "other" as an agent of "his" system and its re-producer, in the service of the current realm of common self-evidence that has no telos, meaning or foundation, but just limits, the limits of the current orisons. The borders of the current orisons are determined by the vividness of the foundation myths, symbols, concepts and desires which constitutes standard subjects who are currently produced in the existing systems that combat each other. The entire energy of what was traditionally called "education" is nothing but a vast effort to camouflage this process and ensure human impetus for productive violence. This is the concrete context of emancipatory ideals of modernity, including its political liberalism and orthodox Marxist versions.

The Western realm of common self-evidence is being eroded by its own success, and its current Bourgeois systems are holding on through its organizational-bureaucratic structures, while losing its founding myth's vividness. What remains of its youth is pure aggressiveness with no Eros. Instrumental rationality that is immanent to its success is not a substratum; it can guarantee "progress" but not powerful or meaningful life[56] of the system - in contrast to ancient Christianity, early capitalism and other historical realms of common self-evidence in the history of Judeo-Christian civilization. Under these conditions of post-modernistic traditions, the postmodernistic discourse had, in the last generation, great victories even between its negators. The hegemony force under current conditions is still economic liberalism combined with bureaucratic practices and positivist orientations. There is no real rival to present conventionalism that lost all Spirit. The modernist (ideal of) subject who is struggling, or who is categorically demanded to struggle for the emancipation of humanity in light of solidarity with humankind, was transfigured into an individual who lost his individuality, who is no longer an autonomous subject, and to whom autonomy, freedom and solidarity lost their relevancy even as regulative ideas. He adjusted himself to the gathering of the new postmodern condition and has become an object that is manipulated by mass-production desires and totally controlled by the stimulus of power and joyousness as a regular, cheap product of culture industry.(53) These tendencies are prospering in current Israeli society, especially among the elite of Jewish secular groups, and they are entering even into the Israeli army. Here they are gathering forces with the modernist-bureaucratic tendencies.

It seems that today the technocratic dimension of instrumental rationality has the upper hand in today's I.D.F. orientation. Under these conditions, "professionalism" is represented as the highest "value", and there are discussions concerning rewording the most efficient functionaries and analysis of commander-soldier relations in terms of "industrial tranquillity". At the same time, more and more money is invested in an educational offensive aimed at re-producing traditional heroism, military battle sagas in museums, exhibitions and publications; but, these are consumed and produced already as folklore, and not as vivid myths for the emerging elites in Israel's society. It is not the hero at battle, but the "expert" at the control board who is praised as the supreme "successful" aggressor with whom to identify. One of the manifestations of the new stage in the erosion of the modernistic emancipatory Eros of the Israeli society is to be seen in the formal acceptance of the T.Q.M. organizational system as the theoretical orison of the I.D.F. Even "PUM", the I.D.F.'s school for higher commanders, is organized according to the new fashion and from it drives the educational orientation of the entire Israeli army, according to the "objective", "neutral" requests of organizing the forces in light of the T.Q.M. However, T.Q.M. is not to be reduced merely to an organizational method; it is a new fashion, reflecting a new way of life, a new "set of values": anti-ideological, anti-values, purely instrumental, neutral and sterile violence. One of its characteristics is that even T.Q.M. as a "way of life" and as a theory is judged according to its performance (in an aimless society that its ends do no transcend the given reality). Accordingly, after two years of dominance in the I.D.F. the army changed its attitude towards the T.Q.M. The new policy accepts T.Q.M. locally, "where it works", other organizational theories "where they perform better then T.Q.M." and a combination of different organizational theories "where it proves to be more efficient",(54) according to General Ami Ayalon (1.5.1995). Each unit in the I.D.F. is conceived as "a close market" that has to find the production methods that fits more efficiently its "desired" output. This is called "pluralism", a new version of pluralism that is so popular in today's cultural discourse and a special success it has under the title e "multiculturalism". The "pluralism" that is worshipped today in the I.D.F. does not reject T.Q.M.'s ideology, it develops it according to its inner logic and generalizes it as empty abstraction As a cultural phenomena it is a pluralism of nothingness.

The I.D.F.'s acceptance of T.Q.M. was not accompanied with discussions of its Philosophical and educational implications. It is typical that the discussions were made after accepting the T.Q.M. and from its orientation. The yardstick for this crucial decision was purely performative: would the Jewish soldier be more efficient, more of an expert, and would the I.D.F.'s aggression be more "effective while economically worthwhile" and so forth. The decision was not affected by considerations of their relations to traditional Zionist values and the emancipation of humanity and the Jewish role in it.

There are some who will rejoice in the face of the current tendency in Israeli society and in the I.D.F. It is not unrealistic that the new I.D.F. education, that represents the neutrality of the bureaucratic-functionalist orientation towards knowledge, will join the neutrality of postmodernistic philosophy of knowledge. current technological developments, especially in electronics and knowledge production, storage and delivery, constructs a new status of knowledge and produces a new kind of subject. This post-modern, post-industrial production and consumption, that Lyotard describes in The Postmodern condition, is extreme relevant to the transformation of the army's essence as representative of the system. While accepting new technologies and possibilities (like virtual reality) for training and for combat and reaching top efficiency, the I.D.F. becomes Spiritless and neutral towards its constitutive ideals. The neutrality of modernity's present most relevant version is that of a bureaucratic-functionalist view of knowledge, which pre-supposes the subject as an abstract, adjusting as an un-reflecting self might. The neutrality of postmodernistic Philosophy, which emphasizes the end of the subject and the irrelevancy of Modernity's ideals of self as an autonomous, reflective and solidarian entity, might join productivity of bureaucratic violence that is colonialist by its nature. While different from its twin bother of modernity, the emancipation project that was obliged to direct educational violence, the power that the bureaucratic trend is using is much more "objective", less "aggressive" and of supreme un-ideological efficiency, colonizing the oppressor and the repressed alike; it is the voice of instrumental rationality's efficiency and reality that sometimes joins with political liberalism's jargon but always with economical liberalism's praxis and is conservative by its nature. In Israel the transformation of emancipatory violence to mainly bureaucratic rational uses of power has special transparency. Therefore, the change in education in general and in the army's education in particular is enlightened in a way that can also show clearly the margins of this phenomena: where postmodernistic tendencies are making their way into the army on the one hand, and an ultra-nationalistic religious alternative to secular traditional Zionism is gradually building its foundation in the army, on the other hand. But surely, the traditional mainstream in the I.D.F. is losing ground.

The T.Q.M.'s introduction to the I.D.F. in general and the restructuring of its educational Philosophy and pedagogical practices in accordance with the requirements of the T.Q.M. and other organizational theories of its family reflect the death of Zionism.

By itself, the death of its Spirit is not a death sentence of Zionism as a bureaucratic-organizational entity. Continuing development in its technological sphere and permanent strengthening of the I.D.F. are a realistic possibility. However, education towards "specialization" and ever-growing expertise via "efficiency" of neutral military experts can ensure the organization of a spiritless violence machine. As the heroes of present day positivism, interests can operate as a ground for ever more efficient use of organized violence, and the Israeli war machine is today in the best condition it has been since its formation. We doubt the future of such a lifeless nation building organized/killing machine even within the framework of the orisons of the present system. Yet, We think the army as a site of violence is not the source of violence.

It represents the violence between rival systems that share and represent polemos, a dialogue between different elements of the present realm of common self-evidence. But, since the present realm of common self-evidence is dying out, the fate of its manifestations is determined. Therefore, the introduction of the T.Q.M. is totally justified, as part of manifesting the power of transformation, as an interlude to a requiem to Zionism, which is also by the same token the voice of further advancement in the Israeli violence machine. In the next war with the Arab states that will come, it is unlikely but not unimaginable that the I.D.F. will emerge again as the winner. But it may be that in the crucial day, the constitutive symbols and myths of Zionism would not be vivid enough to ensure the required violence produced out of faith/nativity in "our" "truth" and "justice" - illusions that are demanded by organized killing machines such as armies that rationalized people's willing to sacrifice their lives into technological praxis. But even so, the voice of the winners will never be the voice of the real victor. In both cases, the victor will be the aimless Spirit that is giving birth to transformations in the present realm of common self-evidence and activation of rival systems and their representative's changing war practices. By its nature, no army can educate to challenge its immanent logic and constitutive principals. From this point of view, the present introduction of the T.Q.M. to the Israeli army is fully justified as an historical demand. This is a force the I.D.F. will not conquest without self-defeat.