Death to the IDF. It is an army of occupation and no decent person defends it.

The fuller answer

Arguing about the IDF as an institution means arguing on ground somebody else picked. Every operation is a separate case, the cases run into the thousands, and whoever is opposite you arrived with a list. That argument cannot be won in ten minutes and it does not need to be.

The argument that wins is about Jewish history, and it is not a mood. It is a set of dates.

For most of two thousand years there was no Jewish army anywhere on earth. Not a weak one. None.

What having no army meant

Hebron, August 1929. Over two days a mob killed sixty-seven Jews in a community that had been there for centuries. One British policeman was posted to the city. Three days later the British evacuated the 484 survivors, 153 of them children, to Jerusalem, and Jewish Hebron ended.

Read the sequence again. The protecting power did not protect. It removed.

Baghdad, 1 and 2 June 1941. A pogrom called the Farhud killed between 150 and 180 Jews and injured about 600, in a country holding 135,000 Jews, seven years before Israel existed.

Evian, July 1938. Delegates from thirty-two countries met to discuss Jewish refugees from Germany and, apart from the Dominican Republic, none would take more. The following May the St Louis sailed from Hamburg with 937 people aboard. Cuba turned it away. So did the United States. Of those who went back to Europe, 254 were murdered.

That is the condition the page is about: a people who could be killed with no realistic prospect of anyone intervening, whose only appeal was to somebody else’s committee, and who kept being told the committee had decided no.

What changed, said precisely

Say this carefully, because the loose version invites a correction you do not need. Jews had fought before. There were Jewish units in both world wars, under other flags and under other people’s orders. What did not exist for something close to nineteen centuries was a Jewish army answerable to a Jewish government, which could be ordered to go and get Jews out.

That is the whole claim. Not that Jews became brave in 1948. That the decision stopped belonging to other people.

It is conscripted, which is why the chant lands the way it does

Israel conscripts men and women from the age of eighteen under its Security Service Law, with reserve liability for years afterwards. In the forty-eight hours after 7 October 2023 it called up 300,000 reservists, which its own spokesman described as the fastest mobilisation the army had ever made.

So there is no professional caste to aim at. There is a niece, a flatmate, somebody’s daughter who finished school in June.

When a crowd chants “death to the IDF”, the chanter almost always means an institution and a policy. What a Jewish family hears is a wish about a nineteen-year-old they had dinner with in the spring. Both of those are true at the same time, and saying the second one out loud does more work than disputing the first.

Entebbe, and why it needs no adjectives

Air France 139 left Tel Aviv for Paris on 27 June 1976 with 248 passengers and twelve crew, and was hijacked after the stop in Athens by two Palestinians and two Germans. It ended up at Entebbe, in Uganda.

Then came the part that decides the argument. On 29 June the hostages were sorted: Israelis and Jews to one side, everybody else to the other. Forty-eight were released the next day and about a hundred more the day after that. A hundred and six were left, and among them were the twelve Air France crew, who were offered release and would not go.

On the night of 3 July Israeli aircraft flew more than 4,000 kilometres to a hostile airport in central Africa. A hundred and two hostages came home.

Give the cost yourself, because somebody else will. Three hostages were killed in the fighting. Dora Bloch, aged seventy-four, had been taken to a hospital in Kampala before the raid and was murdered there by Ugandan agents afterwards. The commander of the assault unit, Yonatan Netanyahu, was killed.

A selection of Jews from non-Jews, and then, for the first time in the history of the thing, a Jewish state came and got them. Thirty-one years after the camps closed. It needs no adjective, it requires nobody to hold a political position, and there is no version of the twentieth century in which it happens without a Jewish army.

The version an Israeli chief of staff gave, which is harder than the slogan

On 29 April 1956 Roi Rotberg, aged twenty-one, the security officer at kibbutz Nahal Oz, was killed in an ambush by men who had come from Gaza. He left a wife and an infant son. The army’s chief of staff spoke at the funeral the next day, and what he said is not what a brochure would say:

“Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.”

And then, in the same breath:

“This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice, to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

Keep it for the moment somebody expects triumphalism from you. It concedes the other side’s reasons first, from the top of the army, in 1956, and it still ends on the gun. There is no prepared answer to it, because it has already made the concession the prepared answer was built to extract. Learn the limit too: the version broadcast on the radio the following day left the refugee camps out.

And the version a father gave, sixty-seven years later

Major Moshe Leiter, thirty-nine, a father of six, volunteered to return to combat on 7 October 2023. Four weeks later he was killed in northern Gaza when a booby-trapped mine went off in a tunnel shaft. His father, Yechiel Leiter, spoke at the funeral:

“If the State of Israel had not been established after the Holocaust, the image engraved in our collective memory would have been the photograph of that helpless Jewish boy in the Warsaw Ghetto holding his hands up in the air with Nazi rifles pointed at him. But because of the birth of Israel, because of the courage of soldiers like my son Moshe, the Jewish people are no longer helpless in the face of our enemies.”

Say it as what it is, which is a bereaved father at a graveside rather than a political position, and it does the work of the whole page in four sentences.

Where to source it, because you will be asked. Not from the funeral reporting, which does not carry it. Netanyahu quoted it in his address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress on 24 July 2024, with Yechiel Leiter in the chamber, and the full text is published. Cite the speech. That is also the stronger citation: it was said on the record, in a legislature, in front of the people who would most like to dispute it.

The two eulogies belong together and do different jobs. Dayan in 1956 is for the room that expects triumphalism from you: it concedes the other side’s reasons first and still ends on the gun. Leiter in 2023 is for the room that has just told you an army is the problem, and it answers with what the absence of one looked like. One is the argument at its most unflinching. The other is the argument at its most human. Use whichever the room needs.

What none of this licenses

An army that fights wars does things that are criticised, and some of the criticism is fair. This page is not a brief for any operation. What was done in Gaza is argued in how the war was fought and the death toll, and a historical argument is not a permission slip for either. It answers whether Jews are entitled to an army. It says nothing about whether a particular strike was lawful, and running the two together is the quickest way to lose both.

The concession has a blade in it. A conscript army means the fiercest criticism of it is made in Hebrew, by people who served, about children who serve now. That is what a citizen army produces: a country where the argument about the army is conducted by the people inside it, in public, at volume. The Israelis doing that are in their own entry, and they are not asking anybody’s permission either.

The lines

“For two thousand years Jews had no army anywhere. That’s what I’m arguing about. I’m not arguing about any particular operation.”

“At Entebbe they separated out the Jews. A week later a Jewish state flew four thousand kilometres and brought them home. That’s thirty-one years after Auschwitz.”

“It’s conscription. You’re not chanting at a colonel, you’re chanting at somebody’s nineteen-year-old niece.”

“In Hebron in 1929 there was one policeman for the whole city, and when it was over the British evacuated the survivors instead of protecting them. That’s what having no army looks like.”

“I’m not asking you to approve of a single thing that army has done. I’m asking whether you think Jews are allowed one.”

Take one date

Pick a single date off this page and learn it properly: what happened, who counted it, and where the count came from. One date said accurately beats four said vaguely, and this is a page where the facts carry themselves.

Then: if somebody chants at the army in front of me, then I will answer with conscription and a person, not with a policy.

And if the reply is that history does not excuse the present, agree with it out loud, because it does not, and say that the question you were answering was whether Jews are entitled to a means of self-defence at all.