This picture showed up on my Facebook news feed today and it brings to mind something I witnessed six years ago during a four-week tour of Israel.
Yes, more women fly F-16s than drive cars in Saudi Arabia. I’m not going to thrash Saudi cultural norms. I am, though, going to remember one of the major takeaways from my tour of Israel.
It is that the country must rely on every single able individual — men and women — who are able to serve in the armed forces.
Israel has a mandatory conscription law. If memory serves, men must serve three years in the military; women are called up for two. And, yes indeed, women are ordered to perform dangerous duty in defense of their country, such as flying high-performance tactical jet aircraft; for that matter, so are American women.
I arrived in Israel in early May 2009 as part of a Rotary International Group Study Exchange team. One of the first sites we visited was a military museum in Be’er Sheva, a modern city on the edge of the Judean Desert.
It was at that museum where we were told that enemy jets can cross the width of Israel in less than five minutes. The individual who told us that was a young woman who was serving in the Israeli air force.
Later on our tour, I stayed in the home of a family in Karmiel. One of my hosts was a young woman, the daughter of the couple who owned the home, who had just gotten out of the Israeli military. She informed me of her country’s insistence that all young people don the uniform of their country. Israel does grant religious exemptions to Hasidic Jews — which I also learned is a source of some tension among less-observant Israelis.
But the women of that small but mighty country are asked to step up and to do their part. Who should doubt that the entire country is on notice to serve? It comprises slightly more than 8,000 square miles; it is home to around 7 million residents. It is surrounded by nations with which it has gone to war multiple times since Israel’s founding in 1948.
Israel has peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt. However, it holds the Golan Heights, which once belonged to Syria … and we all know what’s happening there.
It’s good to put some things in perspective as we consider the cost of war and whether we’re asking everyone to commit to its defense.
In Israel, such a commitment becomes essential for the embattled nation’s very survival.