For more than seven months, Israel's invasion of Gaza has dominated the news, with members of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) regularly explaining or defending the latest Israeli position — and facing fierce criticism along the way.
The IDF is Israel's national military, made up of the Israeli ground forces, the Israeli air force and the Israeli navy.
But the IDF is more than a military body. Since 1948, it's played a central role in the lives of countless Israelis and, in doing so, helped shape the country's national identity.
"[The IDF] was the most important social institution in early Israel, and it stayed as the most important social institution in Israel," Haim Bresheeth, author of An Army Like No Other, tells ABC RN's Rear Vision.
So what happens when a country is this closely intertwined with its military?
How the IDF works
Dozens of countries have some form of military conscription. Yet Israel is one of only a handful of these — including Norway, Sweden and North Korea — where both men and women are required to serve.
After high school, most young Israelis must serve in the military: 32 months for men and 24 months for women.
They are then assigned to a reserve unit, train with that cohort and can be called up for active service if needed until 40 (or even older, depending on the role).
These reserve units form the majority of the strength of the IDF ground forces.
"This has really important implications," says Eitan Shamir, a professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.
"Because not only do people do conscription, once they finish conscription … they are constantly called into the army. They're constantly involved," he says.
"The interaction between people in Israel and the military is a nonstop interaction. It's not something that you leave behind."
Reuven Gal, a senior research fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research and a former chief psychologist for the IDF, says this makes the IDF unique globally.
"It's not like in other countries where the military is kind of a caste or a separate institution. In Israel, you will not find a home that doesn't have family members serving in the military," he says.
"They don't do ceremonial things. This is a fighting military."
There are some exemptions to conscription, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, religious women and married secular women.
And, since the early days of the state of Israel in the late 1940s, ultra-Orthodox Jews have been exempt from military service, so they could study and preserve religious knowledge after the Holocaust.
But recently there has been strong pushback against this exemption from other areas of Israeli society, creating a political crisis for the current government.
The start of the IDF
In 1947, the British announced their withdrawal from Palestine after controlling it for almost 30 years. A United Nations partition plan split the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states (with a small international zone of Jerusalem and surrounds). War ensued between the two groups.
In May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, who would become the country's first prime minister, declared the independence of the state of Israel and the establishment of the IDF.
Dr Gal says the fact that the IDF was created during a war is significant.
"When a military is born in the middle of a war, it affects its genes, its DNA. It was a fighting military and remains this to today," he says.
The idea of having a large reserve army was there from the start.
"[Ben-Gurion] said, in a small country like ours, we cannot afford a standing army big enough to defend our borders. Hence, we will have to count on reserve corps."
And the vision for the IDF was always more than just a military — it was established as a nation-building institution.
From 1948 onwards, large numbers of Jewish people started arriving in Israel from a variety of countries.
There were survivors of the Holocaust from Eastern Europe, but also Jews from Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, all bringing different languages and cultures.
"[The IDF was] a vehicle or platform of socialisation for all these newcomers into Israel," Dr Gal says.
Along with its military missions, the IDF also had social and cultural missions, like teaching these newcomers Hebrew.
But it was not always straightforward.
Haim Bresheeth arrived in Israel as a baby in 1948 with his parents — both survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
"My father refused to fight [in the IDF]. He said that after six years of what he had undergone as a Jew in Europe, under the Nazis in Poland, he refused to kill, he refused to fight," he says.
But Professor Bresheeth says his father later had mixed feelings.
"He did not become a supporter of military action [but] he was ashamed that he actually refused to fight."
Professor Bresheeth says when he turned 18, he served reluctantly.
"I didn't want to do it … [But] I didn't have the moral and personal courage to say 'bugger you guys, I am not joining this army'. So I did join," he says.
"Thankfully, I never hurt anyone. But it could have been otherwise."
Conflict after conflict
Since its establishment, the IDF has been involved in many major conflicts.
In 1956, Israel successfully joined forces with Britain and France to attack Egypt after the Suez Crisis and tensions over the Sinai Peninsula.
And the Six-Day War of 1967 was its most decisive victory.
"Within six days, [the IDF] managed to combat three big militaries — Jordanian, Syrian and Egyptian," says Dr Gal, who fought in the war.
By the end of the war, Israel had massively expanded its territory, seizing the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians fled or were expelled.
In 1973, Israel was caught off guard when a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria launched an attack. This became known as the Yom Kippur War.
Dr Gal views Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon as a turning point.
"All the wars until 1982 were wars for survival, were wars of sheer existence [for the state of Israel]," he says.
"[The IDF] reached the city of Beirut and that's when people in Israel realised that this is not a war about our existence or survival anymore but it's a political effort."
And Israelis started to protest, including many reservists.
Dr Gal also says the nature of combat changed from here on.
"All the other wars until 1982 were fought against enemies that were states … And the militaries were ordinary militaries. These were conventional wars," he says.
"[In] the last few decades, we're not fighting states, we're fighting guerillas."
After the First Intifada
In the late 1980s, the First Intifada marked a big shift.
This was a series of Palestinian uprisings against Israel: mass demonstrations led by women; labour strikes; children throwing stones at Israeli tanks. It required a very different response, and one that the IDF wasn't necessarily trained for.
"Now it was soldiers against citizens, sometimes kids … It was more like constabulary, like policing," Dr Gal says.
He says it "became even more like policing when they started to put in all those checkpoints", primarily in and around the West Bank.
The IDF maintains that every "operational activity and exercise" is to "defend the state of Israel and its civilians".
But human rights groups like Human Rights Watch have slammed the country for "repression, institutionalised discrimination and systematic abuses of the Palestinian population's rights" over the decades.
Most Israelis serve
Dr Gal says being in the IDF — especially undertaking the constabulary role — can have an adverse effect on some of those who serve.
"[But] it depends a lot on the background of that soldier," he says.
"We have now in the IDF many soldiers … [who are] religious soldiers, many of whom leave their homes within settlements in the West Bank [and] they have a very clear right-wing, nationalistic ideology," Dr Gal says.
"They [can be] more immune against these traumatic impacts, compared to another soldier in the same unit, who comes from a left-wing home.
"When [these people] see 100,000 refugees in Gaza, and have to shoot into them, or fight, or destroy their homes and so on — it creates such a moral, conscientious conflict … a foundation for post-traumatic sensation."
Eyal Mayroz is a senior lecturer in peace and conflict studies at the University of Sydney who served in the IDF in the 1980s.
He lived in a kibbutz — a small township where people live and work together. Those who live in a kibbutz have traditionally opposed the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
"Most people living on kibbutzim are on the left side of the political map," Dr Mayroz says.
But he says he was told that if left-wing Israelis refused to serve in the IDF, then it would be dominated by right-wing Israelis.
"That's a recipe for even worse human rights violations. So that's why we should swallow the pill [and serve]," he says.
"I remember that as a big incentive on the kibbutzim … We should serve and try to avoid worse situations."
The war in Gaza
On October 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants undertook a surprise attack in southern Israel.
Israel says around 1,200 people were killed and 253 hostages were taken. Its response has been an extensive bombing campaign and a ground invasion of Gaza to "eliminate" Hamas.
"Israel is under severe trauma. Part of that was expressed in the way that the IDF soldiers went into Gaza … There were bursts of vengeance and aggression [by some soldiers]," Dr Gal says.
The IDF has called on 360,000 reservists to fight. Meanwhile, there is a small group of Israelis, known as refuseniks, who are refusing to serve and facing time in jail.
Since Israel's invasion, Gaza's health ministry is reporting more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed.
According to UNICEF, around 1.7 million people have been internally displaced — half of them children.
Human rights groups have strongly condemned the invasion, with Amnesty International saying it has created a "catastrophic humanitarian crisis".
In a rare rift between close allies, the US delayed a shipment of thousands of bombs to Israel in early May due to concerns about Palestinian civilian deaths in Gaza.
And this week, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, over alleged war crimes.
Both Israel and Hamas have previously dismissed allegations of war crimes.
But the war in Gaza shows no signs of abating.
Israeli forces have pushed into Rafah in southern Gaza and Jabalia in northern Gaza, as aid agencies warn of further civilian suffering.
It means international scrutiny of the IDF will continue in the days, months and years to come.
