Women in the Isreali Defense Forces

My response to the story of these Israeli women finding themselves in combat situations or handing power in a combat zone and being amazed at the barbarity it brings out in them. War is hell. It is barbaric. It should be abolished. Both men and women are innately averse to killing and to get them to do it, they must be trained to overcome their aversion and the enemy must also be vilified or dehumanized. So what happens when women (and men) are put into combat zones as warriors?

They are horribly stressed in a variety of ways. And I’m not surprised at the behavior of these women. Based solely on their biology (not including socialization), women as a group are no more innately nurturing or nicer ormoral than are men as a group. This is a widespread, mistaken belief. It is often used (unfortunately, because it isn’t true and so ultimately lacks persuasive power) to argue that women should be involved in peacemaking or leadership positions. But men who bond early with their children, for example, can be very nurturing, and women can be horrible mothers; how to be a good,nurturing mother is learned. What this means is that women put into battle/war situations will not be protected any more than men from the horrors and moral dilemmas and profoundly angry emotions they feel. Their biology will not prevent the behavior these women described in the story. Some women clearly also get high on power; they are no more innately protected from an adrenalin high that comes from wielding power than are men (although in the ordinary course of life, women do, on average, acquire power by less physically aggressive means than men and when they have power in contexts other than war, they tend to use their power for different objectives than men).

So the women’s responses on average—in terms of anger at the enemy, wanting to punish the enemy, getting a thrill out of wielding power over others—are likely to be pretty much the same, on average, as the responses of the men. Chris Hedges, in his book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning correctly likens the highs of war to a drug—it can beexhilarating in many ways, not the least of which is simply that you survived. As Hedges points out, for a man, being in a war on the battlefield andfulfilling his duty and surviving may become the highest moment in his life in terms of excitement and feeling alive. The woman soldier for whom the film is named wanted to see if she was smiling as she posed next to the corpse. Very likely she was.

The women’s feelings about their actions will, however, after they come down from the high, be tempered by the fact that they have been socialized to be kinder, gentler, more empathetic as part of the role as a woman. Yes, the men can be helped to conquer any bad hangover by knowing that their society acceptsthat what they did is legitimate for men. Because this kinder/gentler socialization is in contradiction to the primitive responses the women actually make when under this great stressor that is war, women are more likely than men to experience stronger cognitive dissonance….i.e., more women than men are likely to feel really, really bad about what they have done. How, if they are supposed to be empathetic and nurturing and “good” could they ever have done the things they did and felt the rush of power and thrill of success etc. But make no mistake, a great many men also suffer bad feelings about what theydid in war, whether their warrior culture condones it or not.

War does not so much change people, as these women felt had happened to them.Sadly, it’s more a case that war puts a person into an environment that brings out (primitive) traits in themselves that they loath. This is our “dark side,”something the vast majority of us have but most of us never have to confront. And war can do this to both sexes.

As I describe in Women, Power, and the Biology of Peace, women as a group are the natural enemies of war (but not because they are nicer). If we are ever to abolish the practice, putting women in powerful decision-making positions will be essential. So I consider it excellent that they be in the military, to experience the reality that usuallyonly our men experience, and perhaps, as one of the women in this film described as her job, help keep down the number of atrocities. And if having them serve also turns a lot of women against war period, all the better,especially if it generates sufficient resolve in them to do something to abolish this archaic evil.

Judith L. Hand, Ph.D.
www.AFutureWithoutWar.org

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