| The Fighting Pioneer Youth (known in Hebrew by its acronym NAHAL) is a unique formation in the Israel Defence Forces that combines agricultural work with traditional military service. Founded in the wake of the 1948 War of Independence, NAHAL originally drew its membership from various self-contained cells from left-leaning Zionist youth movements that had pushed for its creation. This enabled the youth movements, who had been at the forefront of the Zionist project before the establishment of the State of Israel, to continue to have some influence in the post-1948 nation-state political reality.;Since its founding NAHAL has adapted to the changing military needs of the IDF as well as to larger pressures facing Israeli society as a whole. The best means of understanding NAHAL is by placing the organization and its guiding ideology within a civil-military relations theoretical framework. With a theoretical framework in place, it becomes easier to show how and why NAHAL expanded both in military and non-military ways and what the results of that expansion imply. |
