When we asked Major General Farkash why Israel’s military is so antihierarchical and open to questioning, he told us it was not just the military but Israel’s entire society and history. “Our religion is an open book,” he said, in a subtle European accent that traces back to his early years in Transylvania. The “open book” he was referring to was the Talmud—a dense recording of centuries of rabbinic debates over how to interpret the Bible and obey its laws—and the corresponding attitude of questioning is built into Jewish religion, as well as into the national ethos of Israel.
As Israeli author Amos Oz has said, Judaism and Israel have always cultivated “a culture of doubt and argument, an open-ended game of interpretations, counter-interpretations, reinterpretations, opposing interpretations. From the very beginning of the existence of the Jewish civilization, it was recognized by its argumentativeness.”[54]
Indeed, the IDF’s lack of hierarchy pervades civilian life. It can even break down civilian hierarchies. “The professor acquires respect for his student, the boss for his high-ranking clerk. . . . Every Israeli has his friends ‘from the reserves’ with whom he might not otherwise have any kind of social contact,” says Luttwak. “Sleeping in bare huts or tents, eating dull army food, often going without a shower for days, reservists of widely different social backgrounds meet on an equal footing; Israel is still a society with fewer class differences than most, and the reserve system has contributed to keeping it that way.”
The dilution of hierarchy and rank, moreover, is not typical of other militaries. Historian and IDF reserve officer Michael Oren—now serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United States—described a typical scene at an Israeli army base from when he was in a military liaison unit: “You would sit around with a bunch of Israeli generals, and we all wanted coffee. Whoever was closest to the coffee pot would go make it. It didn’t matter who—it was common for generals to be serving coffee to their soldiers or vice versa. There is no protocol about these things. But if you were with American captains and a major walked in, everyone would stiffen. And then a colonel would walk in and the major would stiffen. It’s extremely rigid and hierarchical in the U.S. Rank is very, very important. As they say in the American military, ‘You salute the rank, not the person.’ ”[55]
In the IDF, there are even extremely unconventional ways to challenge senior officers. “I was in Israeli army units where we threw out the officers,” Oren told us, “where people just got together and voted them out. I witnessed this twice personally. I actually liked the guy, but I was outvoted. They voted out a colonel.” When we asked Oren in disbelief how this worked, he explained, “You go and you say, ‘We don’t want you. You’re not good.’ I mean, everyone’s on a first-name basis. . . . You go to the person above him and say, ‘That guy’s got to go.’ . . . It’s much more performance-oriented than it is about rank.”
Retired IDF General Moshe “Bogey” Yaalon, who served as chief of staff of the army during the second intifada, told us a similar story from the second Lebanon war. “There was an operation conducted by a reserve unit in the Lebanese village of Dabu. Nine of our soldiers and officers were killed, and others were injured, including my nephew. And the surviving soldiers blamed the battalion commander for his incompetent management of the operation. The soldiers at the company level went to the brigade commander to complain about the battalion commander. Now, the brigade commander, of course, did his own investigation. But the battalion commander was ultimately forced to step down because of a process that was initiated by his subordinates.”[56]
Yaalon believes that this unique feature of Israel’s military is critical to its effectiveness: “The key for leadership is the soldiers’ confidence in their commander. If you don’t trust him, if you’re not confident in him, you can’t follow him. And in this case, the battalion commander failed. It might be a professional failure, like in this case. It might be a moral failure in another case. Either way, the soldier has to know that it is acceptable—and encouraged—for him to come forward and to talk about it.”
Former West Point professor Fred Kagan concedes that Americans can learn something from the Israelis. “I don’t think it’s healthy for a commander to be constantly worrying if his subordinates will go over his head, like they do in the IDF,” he told us. “On the other hand, the U.S. military could benefit from some kind of 360-degree evaluation during the promotion board process for officers. Right now in our system the incentives are all one-sided. To get promoted, an officer just has to please more senior officers. The junior guys get no input.”
The conclusion Oren draws from displays of what most militaries—and Fred Kagan—would call insubordination is that the IDF is in fact “much more consensual than the American army.” This might seem strange, since the U.S. Army is called a “volunteer” army (not unpaid, but in the sense of free choice), while the IDF is built on conscription.
Yet, Oren explains, “in this country there’s an unwritten social contract: we are going to serve in this army provided the government and the army are responsible toward us. . . . The Israeli army is more similar, I would imagine, to the Continental Army of 1776 than it is to the American army of 2008. . . . And by the way, George Washington knew that his ‘general’ rank didn’t mean very much—that he had to be a great general, and that basically people were there out of volition.”
The Continental Army was an extreme example of what Oren was describing, since its soldiers would decide on an almost daily basis whether to continue to volunteer. But it was a “people’s army,” and so is the IDF. As Oren describes it, like the Continental Army, the IDF has a scrappy, less formal, more consensual quality because its soldiers are fighting for the existence of their country, and its ranks are composed of a broad cross section of the people they are fighting for.
It’s easy to imagine how soldiers unconcerned with rank have fewer qualms about telling their boss, “You’re wrong.” This chutzpah, molded through years of IDF service, gives insight into how Shvat Shaked could have lectured PayPal’s president about the difference between “good guys and bad guys” on the Web, or how Intel Israel’s engineers decided to foment a revolution to overturn not only the fundamental architecture of their company’s main product but the way the industry measured value. Assertiveness versus insolence; critical, independent thinking versus insubordination; ambition and vision versus arrogance—the words you choose depend on your perspective, but collectively they describe the typical Israeli entrepreneur.
PART II
Seeding a Culture of Innovation
CHAPTER 3
The People of the Book
Go far, stay long, see deep.
THE ELEVATION OF LA PAZ, BOLIVIA, is 11,220 feet and El Lobo is one floor higher. El Lobo is a restaurant, hostel, social club, and the only source of Israeli food in town. It is run by its founders, Dorit Moralli and her husband, Eli, both from Israel.[57]
Almost every Israeli trekker in Bolivia is likely to come through El Lobo, but not just to get food that tastes like it’s from home, to speak Hebrew, and to meet other Israelis. They know they will find something else there, something even more valuable: the Book. Though spoken of in the singular, the Book is not one book but an amorphous and evolving collection of journals, dispersed throughout some of the most remote locations in the world. Each journal is a handwritten “Bible” of advice from one traveler to another. And while the Book is no longer exclusively Israeli, its authors and readers tend to be from Israel.
56
Interview with Lieutenant General (res.) Moshe Yaalon, Likud member of Knesset and former chief of staff, IDF, May 2008.
57
Information in this section is from Patrick Symmes, “The Book,”