The Death of Excellence: The Plan to Turn the IDF into a Woke Bureaucracy

Despite the internal politics and favoritism that have always existed in the IDF the system maintained at least an appearance of meritocracy as its leading value. It was the place where a teenager from a remote town in Galilee and a technology prodigy from Herzliya stood on equal footing and were judged by their abilities. However the recent decision by the Head of the Personnel Directorate Major General Dado Bar Kalifa to implement geographic quotas for elite units like 8200 and other technological branches signals that even this appearance has ended.

The Erosion of the Qualitative Military Edge

The Qualitative Military Edge is not just a diplomatic term. It is the survival lifeblood of Israel. By introducing geographic or sociological parameters into the screening process we are effectively telling the next generation: The best are no longer at the security switches of Israel because of their excellence but because we had to fill statistical slots for populist reasons.

This is a process that starts with placement in prestigious units based on a map or gender or skin color and ends with turning a technological powerhouse into a dying Woke bureaucracy in the style of Western Europe. As history has proven the moment a state gives priority to identity over excellence it begins the gallop toward becoming a backward nation.

We all see where the reverse favoritism of the Bedouins in Jordan the Alawites in Syria and the deliberate anti elitist deprivation of the Copts in Egypt leads these regimes. Is this our example? And it is not just in our tough neighborhood. Even the strongest army on earth is not immune. We all moved with discomfort at the stream of media reports about the revolution of quotas and diversity in the heart of the army of our most important ally between the years 2020 and 2024. These are years that can only be described as characterized by the systematic destruction of the cultural skeleton of the United States military. Who can imagine importing the destructive potential of such a criminal idea to a small and threatened country like Israel?

There is no choice but to conclude that in the absence of judgment and due to a populist urge Major General Bar Kalifa is willing to risk the qualitative pillar on which the security of Israel relies in such a volatile region for the sake of newspaper headlines. And if there are quotas why stop at technology? Why not pilots? Naval officers? Team commanders in elite commando units? There is no escape from admitting: Bar Kalifa has lost it.

The Trap of Nasserism

There is a deeper philosophical danger in this policy of representative engineering. The IDF is not the stage for dealing with feelings of deprivation whether they are justified or not. Anyone who cried out against the gender revolution that swept the Israel Defense Forces and remains silent in light of these strange plans is not an honest person. Because in both cases we see that considerations that are not security related are supposed to overlap with the security agenda in the holy of holies of Israeli security: the screening and examination of the human element.

From here we can expand on the status of the Head of the Personnel Directorate in the Israeli army in recent decades. Usually this is a Major General for whom this will be the last role in the permanent army. Hence the desire to create headlines here or there. Interestingly many of those heads of the Personnel Directorate find themselves in politics after retirement.

This cannot continue. The Head of the Personnel Directorate must become an iron component in the General Staff body if only to prevent such desperate attempts to grab headlines at the expense of the vital interests of the IDF. An army of quotas does not produce a stronger army but a type of bureaucratic Nasserism like what already exists in quite a few government offices and state companies. Is this the human resource culture we want to root in the IDF? Replacing the ethos of excellence and the melting pot with a culture of assignments based on an arbitrary basis? True Zionism was built on the idea of forging one elite people out of many backgrounds. By classifying soldiers according to where they sleep at night the IDF is murdering the Ben Gurionist vision of a unified national identity.

A False Solution for the Periphery

The most talented people from the periphery are the first to identify the condescension in this policy. They do not want a handout or a reserved seat. They want the tools to compete and win on their own merit through proper education health and urban and regional arrangements.

The term periphery itself is a misleading label. Is a kibbutz or a moshav in the north like a development town in the south? And if you say that the current screening tests or the evaluators were found to suffer from cultural bias or are not objective the solution is to make the tests more precise and to diversify the evaluators but to tilt the results in advance based on geographic quotas? The very fact that such an anti security idea even came up for discussion let alone that a Major General in the IDF initiated it testifies to the difficult situation in the top command of the IDF.

If we do not cure ourselves of the obsession with statistical engineering for the sake of media or political capital we will become as reliable as the Voice of the Thunder from Cairo. High scores should lead to senior roles regardless of whether you come from Eilat Tel Aviv or Maalot. Anything less is a betrayal of the soldiers and the state.