Among the IDF - Fighting the war on terror

June 6, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
By Edward Blum

Army Base Tel Ha Shomer

Every morning for the last five days, Mark Oberholz, a quiet 34-year-old computer programmer from Arlington Heights, Illinois, has dressed for work in standard-issue army fatigues and combat boots instead of his usual khakis and dress shirt. So has Gillian Mannie, a South-African woman with three young children. They are part of a group of 53 volunteers from around the world who will work, eat, and live side-by-side with Israeli army regulars for three weeks on an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) army base about eight miles from the West Bank. For the most part, they have come for two reasons: First, to aid Israel, and second, to make a personal commitment to the global war on terror.

Mark, who describes himself as a secular Christian, and Gillian, who is an orthodox Jew, are participating in a program called "Sar-El," a Hebrew acronym for "Service to Israel." Begun in 1982, Sar-El has attracted nearly 55,000 volunteers from over 30 countries. The program was started during the military incursion into Lebanon that year because so many Israeli farm workers were called into military service that there were none available to harvest the crops. So a hastily organized effort was undertaken to recruit volunteers from the United States to come to Israel - at their own expense - to help pick fruit. About 650 answered and the response was so overwhelming, the IDF agreed to make it a permanent program.

Israel is a nation of citizen soldiers. Every able-bodied man and woman must complete three years of full-time military service, after which time they become reservists serving one month a year in the military until age 50. In a country of only six million or so, it is an enormous drain on the economy each time a reservist is called up from the private sector to serve in the military. At the beginning of Israel's military incursion into the West Bank two months ago, 20,000 reservists were called up. In the U.S., that is the equivalent of almost 1,100,000 being called. If a few hundred-noncombatant volunteers can do the work of a few hundred reservists, the country has a lot to gain economically.

From what I have gathered from the army officers (or Madrichim, in Hebrew) in charge of supervising our work on the base, my group is fairly typical of the ones that have been coming since 9/11. Of the 53, about 85 percent are Jews from around the world, but mainly from the U.S. and about half of them are very religiously observant. The rest are Christians, also divided evenly between those who are mostly secular and those who are deeply religious. For instance, our group includes an evangelical middle-aged woman from New Zealand and a recently discharged U.S. Marine who says he doesn't attend church.

We live in a typically Spartan army barracks, with six or so to a room. Although there are two married couples in the group, they must sleep apart. There are only two bathrooms for all of us. All of our meals are Kosher and eaten in the base cafeteria with the other base workers and soldiers. After the third day or so, you stop gawking at 18-year-olds eating lunch with assault rifles on their knees.

The work we are asked to perform is manual and tedious, and it varies little from day to day. Those over the age of 65 or so, sort medical equipment for packing into medic backpacks, and those with stronger backs move boxes and rearrange supplies in warehouses. In one of our assignments my work team was instructed to take a formbook and some string tags and put them into plastic bags then place them into the medic packs. Someone asked what these were for but didn't get a response from the soldier helping us. We finally figured out why: They were for tagging the dead.

Every day we have been here, there has been a suicide bombing or a terrorist attack within a few miles of the base. This news is delivered to us each morning by one of the young Madrichim since we don't get daily newspapers. Yet, despite it all, nearly everyone in the group went into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to shop and sightsee on our first day off.

Although the program is called "Service to Israel," after 9/11 it means much more to those of us from the U.S. David the Marine said he is working to assist two countries - Israel and the United States. He felt that the two conflicts couldn't really be separated since the war on terror was the same in each country and it was really a war against democracy. In any event, Americans have had a long history of volunteering to help other embattled nations. In 1940, nearly 7,000 Americans joined the Canadian and British military services to battle the Nazis, mostly as aviators. As soon as America entered the war, those Americans transferred to U.S. units.

In this case, most of the American volunteers on this base said they were dissatisfied with what they were doing back home to help in the war on terror. Most had donated money to Israel or had heeded the president's call to become involved somehow in community affairs, but these didn't seem to be enough. They wanted to work in some hands-on capacity in which they could sweat. Literally, sweat. Packing boxes in a hot warehouse isn't anything like flying a Spitfire during the Battle of Britain, but it's the closest thing these people could find.

Since 9/11 and the escalating horrors of suicide bombings in Israel however, the volunteers from the U.S. have fallen off dramatically by almost 60 percent - about the same percentage as tourism in general. As a result, many military bases throughout the country are in dire need of workers.

Helping the Israeli economy is only part of the reason the Sar-El program is so important - boosting the morale of the 18-year-olds serving in the IDF is the other. Most of the young soldiers currently serving on this base have friends or family members who have chosen to live comfortable and relatively safe lives in America. The suburbs of Los Angeles and New York are filled with thousands of them. When Americans voluntarily work side-by-side with these young people, their commitment to the land becomes stronger, and the sacrifices they may be asked to make become a bit easier.

- Edward Blum is an adjunct scholar at the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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