What notes passed by officers reveal about sexism in Israeli army

Read More

The tweet by a friend of a female officer in the Israel Defense Forces last year caused a minor furor. She posted a photo of a note that had been passed to the officer by her (male) superior, a colonel, during a work meeting. In IDF terms it was an important event. The note, written on a piece of paper that looked like it had been torn out of a bookkeeping ledger, stated, “Believe me, you’re what interests me the most here in the room. They’re all dishrags.”

The commenters wrote angrily that the note constituted harassment of the female officer, was demeaning, and showed lack of professionalism on the part of the colonel. But quite a few also raised questions about the habit of note-passing itself. Who still passes notes today, they asked. Indeed, when you think about it, it is an odd thing to do, especially by adults. And it’s even more peculiar taking into account that everyone has a smartphone. What’s the reason that senior figures in the IDF choose to pass notes to one another written in pencil like kids in primary school?

It turns out that this is standard practice in army meetings. The reason is simple: Because of information security considerations, the participants have to leave their cell phones outside the room. In the absence of phones, they write each other notes. In some cases these are relevant professional messages, but others have a completely different content. In any event, it’s a dynamic that is a universe unto itself: a reflection of power relations between men, power relations between men and women, and even an arena in which women try to accumulate power against men, or at least to get its existence acknowledged.

“It could be perceived as a trivial and meaningless practice, even childish and game-like,” says Tair Karazi-Presler, who studied the subject within the framework of her doctoral thesis in the department of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University.

“After all, we’re all familiar with this activity from our past in school,” Dr. Karazi-Presler continues. “But passing notes has been found to be an organizational practice that constitutes an integral part of the routine of professional deliberations.” As she explains, “In the bureaucratic world, writing is tantamount to taking action. In the case of a hyper-masculine organization like the army, it assumes even greater significance.”

To probe the subject further, Karazi-Presler interviewed 67 working women during the years 2015-2017, 34 of them in the army. The women she met were aged 37 to 48, and all held either a bachelor’s or master’s degree and the rank of either major or lieutenant colonel. They served in a variety of posts and environments, but mostly in combat support tasks. Among them were engineers, programmers, legal experts, organizational consultants, psychologists, human resources specialists and other professionals. Some had continued to move up in the IDF hierarchy after their regular service; others had returned to the army while in their late twenties. Her article on the subject – “Note Passing as Gendered Practices of Public Ambiguity in a Hyper-masculine Organization” – was published last year in the journal Gender, Work & Organization. In addition to drawing praise in the academic community, Karazi-Presler received the Guttman Award from the Israeli Sociological Society for best article in the field.

“As a sociologist, I find the army to be a fascinating space for the examination of power, because everything there is extreme in terms of gender relations and power,” she notes, when we speak. “As a feminist, I find it very difficult to countenance the stories I heard from women, and it’s frustrating to be a woman in [the army]. It’s a violent organization, not only outwardly but inwardly as well. When an organization is called upon to perpetrate violence on behalf of the state, there is no possibility of the violence not seeping in.”

The secret to better leadership and parenting, and to giving good advice

Crass sexism

If there’s one thing that arises clearly from her study, it’s that crass sexism continues to exist in the IDF. Each of the interviewees had at least one story about sexual harassment, and most had many more. In some cases the harassment was clear-cut. A case in point is that of the woman who related that her commander told her in a professional meeting that he felt like “screwing you right now,” or another who recalled that a commander said to her that he would like to be in the place of her bra. Along with these accounts, the women related many comments that lie in the gray zone of ambiguity. Sometimes they themselves did not categorize the comments as harassment.

A particularly acute example of sexism was provided by a woman who served as an officer during an extensive military operation, under an officer with the rank of major general. She helped handle the technological aspects of situation appraisal meetings that were conducted by the major general, during which she was in an adjacent room known as the “director’s booth.”

“It’s a glass booth so they can see you all the time and you can see them,” she told Karazi-Presler, describing one particular meeting that stuck in her memory. “The entire upper echelon of senior officers was there… I saw notes passing between them and I thought they were discussing confidential details about the difficult event we were going through during the day. Usually people are very careful with these notes; it can be dangerous if they fall into the wrong hands. But during the breaks, I’d go in and they were just lying around – I saw horrible notes that they wrote about me. It was so insulting, ‘Look at that one,’ and all sorts of sexual remarks about me. And all this during work hours while we were at war!”

Karazi-Presler.
Smadar Kafri

Other women described sexual and flirtatious messages that were passed directly to them during meetings. Some of these women bore high ranks and held significant positions, but felt that they were being belittled by the men around them.

In her article, Karazi-Presler cites another anecdote, one that appeared in a 2006 book – “Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military” (Hebrew) – by Orna Sasson-Levy, who was her doctoral supervisor (together with Edna Lomsky-Feder).

“[In my job,] I felt I had almost half the world in my hands, until I would come to a meeting,” the soldier, who served as a staff officer, told Prof. Sasson-Levy. “They would… flirt with [me], try to hit on [me], write notes to [me].” The soldier showed Sasson-Levy a note she received from the sector’s three brigade commanders: “You must make up your mind, we can’t bear this indecisiveness, it affects our performance, distracts us, we ask you to decide already and pick one of us.”

“It’s a terribly frustrating situation,” the officer said, and related another case. She was in a staff meeting and speaking enthusiastically about what she did and how she did it, when a note was passed to her. “I think it was the intelligence officer who wrote me: Sweetie, we are at a staff meeting, no one is going to bomb you, and you can lay down your weapon.” And she wonders why, in the midst of this professional discussion, he was sending her dumb notes.

According to Karazi-Presler, “the note that was sent to the female officer from the three brigade commanders will function as a silencing mechanism. It’s meant to signal her that the three officers who are sitting opposite her don’t really care what she has to say professionally. The sexual and physical gaze that scans her and the mocking tone are meant to diminish and derogate her professionalism. When messages are sent during a staff meeting, where the officer’s professional aspect is meant to be given expression, they impair her ability to function.”

To a certain degree, the physical passing of notes can be even more blunt than sending a similar message via WhatsApp. To begin with, it is far more public – all the meeting’s participants see the note being passed and they wonder what it says. Cellular phone messages are less visible. And secondly, the women related that at the end of the meeting it’s customary to destroy the notes, a practice that safeguards the harassers.

These are accounts of flagrant sexism. Haven’t IDF officers heard about the Me Too revolution?

Karazi-Presler: “The army is a fascinating organization in that regard, because the organizational system is formally committed to gender equality and fairness. Many times, the IDF even takes the lead over civilian organizations in formal expressions of gender equality. But unofficially, it’s one of the major apparatuses that is involved in preserving gendered power relations. It’s seen in everyday interactions, in speech patterns and in physical behavior – in all the unofficial, gray, ambiguous layers.

“For the most part,” she continues, “in the IDF, there are no serious sexual offenses or attacks; it’s mainly everyday harassment, banal and ongoing, which stem from service in a male chauvinist environment that perceives a woman first of all as a sexual object. Even though clear legislation exists today, along with educational activity and punishment for sexual harassment, the military discourse and culture are successful at preserving the phenomenon in day-to-day life.”

Did the women you interviewed talk about this?

“Women in the army were reflective about gender roles and sexism there, but not critical of it in the way I would have expected. Part of what drew me repeatedly to their stories, and apparently also what prompted the interviewees themselves to speak passionately about their experiences, derives from the violent stories and the convoluted everyday politics in which they operate. Most of the time they were not critical of the organization and in particular not of the dominant masculine power within it. They identified deeply with the army. That was sometimes frustrating for me. I wondered how they were capable of justifying the violent actions that were taken against them.”

Female soldiers in the Israel army.
Olivier Fitoussi

Creating visibility

But it emerges that this practice of note-passing possesses power not only in cases of sexual harassment and the objectification of women. “The army is replete with rituals that symbolize tremendous self-importance,” Karazi-Presler observes, “and the passing of notes is a ritual that is intended to create visibility.” The interviewees related that the men customarily pass notes among themselves in order to feel important, and that women also pass notes in order to obtain recognition in this ultra-masculine society.

“It’s a channel of power amid a professional meeting,” Karazi-Presler says. “The secrecy, and to a large extent also the desire to be an integral part of the circles of secrecy in the army, preserve well the interests of those who are perceived to be powerful.”

The power that inheres in note-passing comes through in the testimony of the women in the study. As one lieutenant colonel described the situation, “Let’s say a commander is passing notes to you. ‘How are you doing? … I heard about such-and-such a thing. What do you have to say about it?’ He gives you his attention! People take notice – they examine my facial expressions. People are saying to themselves: I wonder what’s being said there, he’s probably on her side. But if he’s writing and at the same time making gestures like he’s irritated, [they’re like] ‘poor girl’!”

Another officer of the same rank summed it up like this: “I told him: I want you to let me sit in all the discussions. Get me the requisite security clearances. And it was done pretty quickly… and [at the meetings] we would write each other notes back and forth. It’s an appropriate political strategy. During the discussion, I would pass him a note. Now everyone would see that I had passed him a note, and he wrote me back, passing me a note in return… Now I always found the right topics on which to write important and relevant things. Pay attention to this, pay attention to that, okay? You see, that’s power!”

One officer explained how she wanted to take part in what was going on: “The truth is that I wanted to be the one receiving [the notes], but I also wanted to be the one sending them. I looked upon them [exchangers of notes] with envy. It was like they knew something I couldn’t know. I also felt there was something [between the others] that I could never achieve. Most of the time I had nothing to write to the commander and I was also preoccupied by the fact that I had nothing to write him.”

Something to decipher

One question that arises is how a subject like note-passing in the army comes to constitute the content of a serious academic study. The answer is, “By chance.” Karazi-Presler’s doctoral thesis dealt with the way in which women in positions of power in the army and in government ministries in Israel talk about power, what’s known as the phenomenology of power. “I wanted to find out how these women experience power and which narratives become connected to their perceptions of power,” she explains.

During the interviews with the female officers, the issue of the notes came up time and again. “I understood that there was something here I needed to decipher.” And indeed, even though Karazi-Presler’s study is very local and specific, it aroused interest among academics in the field worldwide, because of its broad ramifications.

“In the IDF, as in other work organizations – both in academia and on the editorial staff of a newspaper – we are sometimes blind to what is going on around us, because it is deliberately ambiguous,” she explains. “Within the whole organizational environment, there is a different mode of speech about power, and there are other strategies to obtain it. I interviewed many women in key positions, women who set policy, and even so, one sees clearly how in the mundane reality they are all caught up in struggles to have their value recognized, and it makes no difference which organization they are in.

“So,” Karazi-Presler continues, “when we examine how organizational relations of power are reflected in everyday activity such as note-passing in the army, we can see how, despite its inherent ambiguity, it preserves gender inequality. This sort of conceptualization can undo our blindness about ambiguous practices of gender inequality and then call them into question.”

In response to a request for comment, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit made the following statement to Haaretz: “The IDF views every sexual or gender-based offense with the utmost gravity, and is working to eradicate the phenomenon from its ranks. Ongoing oversight is conducted to ensure that informative and preventive activities take place, and to identify and monitor improper behavior. In cases where unacceptable events occur, the matter is dealt with immediately, with martial, disciplinary and criminal measures taken. Informational activities are also conducted on issues of sexual harm, gender-based equal opportunities, and safe and respectful service surroundings. Every soldier, male and female, takes part in these activities, with the aim of implanting the rules effectively and encouraging reporting if they are breached. The state comptroller’s report published about a year ago noted favorably the change that has taken place in regard to the handling of sexual harassment in the IDF.”