Sde Teiman walkout lays bare an Israeli military running out of trust

Palestinian political analyst and researcher from inside Israel.

xwhatsapp-strokecopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoIsraeli soldiers gather at the gate to the Sde Teiman military base, as people protest in support of soldiers being questioned for detainee abuse, July 29, 2024. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov, File]The same Israeli military base that right-wing activists once stormed to shield soldiers from military investigators now watched those soldiers stack their rifles in a heap and walk out on their own commander.

On July 30, roughly 100 soldiers from the Givati Brigade’s Tzabar Battalion left Sde Teiman without permission after their battalion commander took a sledgehammer to the decorative plaques they had hung. The army said the signs were remnants of irregular “veteran-junior” traditions – informal customs governing the status of longer-serving and newer soldiers within a unit. The soldiers insisted the plaques were part of their company’s heritage, carried through Gaza and Lebanon. The distinction hardly matters. What matters is that the argument escalated until the troops abandoned their weapons, marched out chanting against their officers, and rendered the battalion temporarily unfit for the Gaza rotation it was preparing to join. Most returned by evening under threat of AWOL (absent without leave) charges. The investigation will produce reprimands or quiet discharges. That is the least interesting part of the story.

Armies know failures of discipline. What they less often confront is the quiet renegotiation of the contract that makes discipline possible in the first place. For decades, the Israeli combat soldier operated under an unwritten understanding: The political leadership could be questioned, the government could be detested, the media could be ignored, but the field commander’s authority inside the unit remained largely beyond challenge. Rank still carried a presumption. Trust was granted first and withdrawn only after clear failure. Whether this marks a lasting shift is impossible to know from a single incident. But it is becoming harder to dismiss such episodes as isolated.

Nearly three years of continuous multi-front war have done what successive short campaigns never managed. The Israeli military was built for decisive, time-limited operations that restored deterrence and returned reservists to civilian life in a short period of time. Since October 2023, the force has lived inside an open-ended attrition contest whose political horizon keeps receding. Reservists have logged hundreds of days. Units rotate between Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, with diminishing recovery periods. Manpower gaps are no longer theoretical; the army publicly acknowledges shortfalls measured in thousands of combat troops. Turnout among reservists has fallen well below the near-total mobilisation of the war’s first weeks. The burden falls unevenly on a shrinking core while the political system continues to exempt large populations from equal service. Fatigue is real, yet fatigue alone does not explain men leaving their weapons behind over smashed plaques.

Something subtler has shifted in the relationship between fighter and commander. Authority that once rested on institutional prestige now requires continuous performance and emotional legitimacy. Soldiers who have buried friends, returned to disrupted families, and watched the same strategic arguments recycle without resolution no longer treat the commander’s decision as automatically binding. The plaques may not have been the real issue. They seem to have become the language through which a deeper frustration found expression: A grievance about recognition, continuity, and the sense that the hierarchy no longer fully understands the cost being paid at the bottom. When the commander chose the sledgehammer, he answered a cultural claim with pure rank. Rank no longer settled the argument.

Sde Teiman itself amplifies the point. The base carries the double memory of detention abuse scandals and the 2024 break-in by coalition politicians and activists determined to protect accused soldiers from the military justice system. That episode already demonstrated how external political forces could penetrate the perimeter. The latest walkout shows the penetration working from the opposite direction: Israeli society’s fractures now travel inside the soldiers’ kit bags. The army that once prided itself on absorbing Israel’s political and social divisions without internalising them is discovering the reverse. Polarisation over the judicial overhaul; over the conscription of Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, men; over the war’s aims; and over the very definition of victory has not stopped at the base gate. It has entered the company lines.

Historical parallels are imperfect but instructive. During the first Lebanon war, “grey refusal” among reservists and open protests by officers signalled that prolonged, politically contested campaigns strain the traditional contract. The 2005 Gaza disengagement produced localised refusals among religious soldiers. Those earlier episodes remained contained because the underlying conflicts still had recognisable endpoints and the broader social consensus around the army’s centrality had not yet fractured. The present conflict lacks both. The result is not collapse, as the Israeli military continues to fight, but a gradual conversion of hierarchical trust into something more conditional, more negotiated, and therefore more brittle.

The deeper implication is institutional. An army whose combat effectiveness has long rested on the assumption that orders will be obeyed without the need for constant persuasion now finds itself managing legitimacy inside its own ranks. Commanders must not only plan operations; they must continually re-earn the trust of exhausted men who have learned that the strategic picture above them is contested and the burden below them is unequal. That is a different kind of leadership demand, and it is not one the classic Israeli military model was designed to meet indefinitely.

The investigation into the Tzabar Battalion will treat the episode as a disciplinary aberration. Future historians may instead see it as an early sign of a broader structural shift. For all its failures on the morning of October 7, the Israeli military that entered the war of October 2023 still possessed a residual capital of automatic trust between fighter and commander. The force still fighting in 2026 is spending that capital faster than it can replenish it. Whether this unwritten contract can be rewritten under fire, or will simply continue to fray until the next crisis exposes the damage, is no longer a theoretical question. Sde Teiman merely made it visible.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.