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By Ira Sharkansky
 JERUSALEM—The Fort Hood killings will reverberate. At the lower end of the military, Muslims will find their property trashed, and hear themselves called camel jockeys and rag heads. The stories differ only in detail from those told over the years by Jews, Catholics, African Americans, and Hispanics. Soldiers the world over are young and the salt of the earth, not likely to be the most sensitive members of society.
The killings also reflect a problem of the United States that comes from its assumption of responsibility for wherever in the world it decides to intervene. Its most prominent enemies are now Muslims, and it has few citizens with suitable language and cultural skills. It needs American Muslims. Major Nidal Hasan’s story illustrates a trap comprised of needing American Muslims, some of whom will respond badly to serving against other Muslims.
Israel seeks to minimize those problems by differentiating between its communities. With the agreement of community leaders, the IDF drafts Druze and Circassian men. The Druze are Arabic speaking people who follow their own religion, an offshoot from Islam going back to the early Middle Ages. The Druze homeland spreads over northern Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. There are 120,000 Druze in Israel, in a total Israeli population of 7.3 million. Most Druze of the Golan avoid conscription by virtue of holding Syrian citizenship. Occasionally they demonstrate against Israeli occupation. They may fear being traded back to a harsh society along with their villages.
Some Druze soldiers express problems with the prospect of fighting in countries where they might encounter Druze. Others indicate that they think of themselves as military property when in uniform, rather than as members of a distinct community.
Many of the Circassians in Israel are blond and blue eyed. There are about 4,000 of them. Their families were converted to Islam in their Caucusus homeland during the 17th century, and brought to Palestine by the Turks in the 19th century.
The IDF recruits volunteers from the Bedouin communities, which total some 170,000.
The IDF does not draft women from minority communities, nor does it seek to attract recruits from other Arabs, who comprise 1.3 million, make up the bulk of Israel’s minorities,
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and are most likely to identify with Palestinian nationalism.
Druze, Circassians, Bedouin and other Arabs maintain separate identities, do not intermarry with one another, nor aspire to the kind of assimilation in Israel that–at least previously–was the norm among immigrants to the United States.
Most minorities who serve in the IDF are fighters. Upon their completion of their initial enlistment, many of them remain in the permanent army, enter the police or prison service. Some have become senior officers, including generals.
Israel initially recruited its translators and military intelligence personnel from Arabic speaking Jews who arrived in the 1940s and 1950s from elsewhere in the Middle East. More recently it has relied on its schools, universities, and military for training Jews to staff its intelligence corps and security services.
Jews have a history of being a minority sent to fight against other Jews.. My wife Varda’s grandfather and other members of her family were proud to fight on the Western front in the German army during World War I, against my father and other American soldiers. One story concerns Varda’s Onkel Albert, who was a sniper. On one occasion when Onkel Albert had a French soldier in his sights, he heard the Frenchman saying his morning prayers: Shema Yisrael . . .
Onkel Albert did not fire.
That story elicits a warm response in Israel. When I told it to an American Jew who was a faculty member at West Point, I perceived that it made him uncomfortable.
The United States is overtly multi-cultural, constrained from differentiating among its Muslims according to their affinity for one or another enemy. It will take years to prepare enough other Americans with language and cultural skills to provide the intelligence needed for fighting in Muslim societies.
Reports are that Major Hasan was outspoken in his opposition to American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was in contact with radical Muslims. Security personnel knew about his statements and contacts, but decided that they did not pose a danger.
Politicians and military personnel will demand more intense coverage of Muslim soldiers by internal security, and more thorough screening of the information uncovered. There will be counter demands by organized Muslims and civil rights advocates concerned with ethnic profiling, discrimination, religious freedom, and privacy. Whatever happens will add to the tensions that come along with a multi-cultural society and military.
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