At the start of this winter I
interviewed a number of Israeli teenagers - boys and girls - for an
investigative report for my newspaper. One of them, my son, is due to be
conscripted into the army in seven months' time.
Currently he is working at a pizzeria called Tomato because
there has been a secondary school teachers' strike for a month and a half
now. He is also playing bass guitar in a rock group called Trademark and he
is reading the latest Harry Potter with an eagerness that he shows
for no other book.
"I'd like," he said to me, "to keep on
living this way. To work with dough, to play music, to launch a record and to
go to Berlin
with my friends in the spring." What he does not want is to go
back to school for the matriculation exams, nor be conscripted.
He is not the only one. Many of those with whom I spoke, young
Israelis awaiting their compulsory military service, saw the army as a
barrier in their path to fulfilling their personal aspirations and realising
their fantasies.
The military ethos is waning and the army is constantly
warning of increasing draft evasion. The military challenge is being replaced
by the internet with the wealth of possibilities it embodies, lead by
high-tech, which for a generation now has captured the hearts of young
Israelis. As a result, the country has become one of the most advanced
technological research laboratories in the world.
The army remains as the challenge of new immigrants, young
people from the weaker social strata and religious youth, whose aim is that
when the day comes for the decree that their families' settlements in the
West Bank must withdraw to the territories of the Israel of 1967, prior to
the Six Day War, they will have a strong enough foothold in the army to
prevent this move.
The Israeli army has lost much of its charm and now, it seems,
it has also lost its Satan. The American National Intelligence Estimate has
dealt a temporarily fatal blow - temporary, because the legions of fear
always find substitutes - to the perception of Iran as the Israelis' great
enemy.
The defence and security establishment, the Israel Defence
Forces, the Shin Bet and the Mossad, like every military organisation in the
world, has never existed without a designated Satan: Egypt, Libya,
Syria, Palestinians, Al-Qaeda, Iran.
Each of these enemies has enabled the Israeli military establishment to
recruit tremendous economic resources, to create panic and to make it easy
for the public to forget blunders and failures. Now it is hard times for the
corporation of fear and anxiety, because its glory has also passed.
The 2006 Lebanon War is still under investigation by the
Winograd commission even though the interest in its report has already faded.
In the south of Israel,
the drizzle of primitive Qassam rockets fired by Hamas in the Gaza Strip
continues. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (right), a skilled lawyer
and survivor, neither a gentleman nor an officer, is not eager for a large
military action. He no longer has faith in the army, nor in his Defence
Minister Ehud Barak, who is also his political rival.
Olmert was severely burned by the Lebanon War at the start
of his term in office and anyone who has been scalded, as they say here,
blows even on a watermelon to cool it off. He prefers the spectacle of
chattering peace conferences that prolong his political life expectancy to
any military operation.
For a while, it might seem as though dialogue has returned
to the stage. But knowing the Middle East
and its cyclical rituals as I do, it is clear to me that not much time
remains before we discover a new Satan.
In the blink of an eye the military option will be back on
the agenda and my son, like his father and grandfather before him, will have
to be a soldier for three years, and not a rock musician. 
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