Conclusions of the open interviews

Conclusions

Based on the four open (personal) interviews made, as can be seen in the section “interviews” we made some suppositions of conclusion. We know that a four person interview cannot cover a wide range of opinions and realities, and as the rest of our research the few people interviewed can give nothing but a general idea of the questions asked and of the influence of the tzahal in the political formation of the combatants and ex-combatants. We will also give directions on how the research can continue to be done in order to reach the conclusions we seek.

The people that had a previous political formation before joining the tzahal, that is, the ones which the political view was a central point in the education at home with the family, in the tnuot noar (youth movements) or other activities taken, tend to strengthen their political views during the army service. This occurs due to the fact that people who are already formed politically, see the experiences and the situations they pass thru the eyes of their values, this means that whatever happens with someone of the right wing, for example, will be seen thru the eyes of a right wing person and the same occurs with left wings.


When asked about the role of the service in the formation or the change in the political view of the combatants it’s possible to observe two different kind of answers:

The right wing people say that their service on the army didn’t change at all their political view and in the other hand, people from left wing say that, although their service didn’t change their political view (due to the fact that it was already a strong one) it does changes the view of people that aren’t much into politics or center people, saying that the structure of the army, and specially the experiences that one haves take them to the right politically. From this we can might conclude that in some cases, the tzahal does takes the political view of people to the right. Why? The right wing people don’t really see the changes because for them, they don’t occur (they are already right wing). If we take the left wing people, the changes for the right are fare more visible and thus, they see it clearly. Once again, we’d like to underline how this suppositions are based on few interviews and may be vague and general.