Dual Loyalty?: American Jewish Military Service in the United States Military versus the IDF
As I have been progressively documenting in this series of articles about jewish military service; the so-called ‘anti-Semitic myth’ of jewish cowardice, lack of loyalty to non-jewish states and also lack of military service relative to their numbers is not a myth at all but rather the truth. I’ve documented this in the case of British and German militaries in World War One (1) as well as the American military in the Vietnam War (2) and the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (3)
However, one thing has long been difficult to prove absolute which was how many American jews served in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) versus the US military. I have touched on the lack of jewish service in the US military before while discussing the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, (4) which is a well-known fact but predictably completely unpublicised. (5)
Indeed in 2006 there were more Buddhists in the US military than jews! (6)
However, we’ve never really had a number to compare it to because Israel and the IDF has historically been extremely cagey and secretive about the numbers of so-called ‘Lone Soldiers’ that are serving in the IDF. What ‘Lone Soldiers’ means is a soldier who has no family in Israel, is not an Israeli citizen and whose family/citizenship is to a foreign country. (7)
Generally-speaking ‘Lone Soldiers’ are non-Israeli jews serving in the IDF who have no family in Israel.
The astute among you will already see the problem in that if large numbers of non-Israeli jews serving in the IDF rather than their non-jewish country of citizenship’s military then that directly calls into question their loyalty to that country. Thus, it is not surprising that Israel has kept a lid on the figures – always offering a total number of ‘lone soldiers’ – and not given specifics about numbers or their origin.
The Israeli-Hamas war which has been raging since 7th October 2023 however has changed all that with an intense focus on what is going on with Israel and especially the involvement of American citizens with IDF.
This then caused the Washington Post to go digging and they discovered that circa 23,380 ‘American citizens’ (read ‘American jews’) are currently serving in the IDF (8) despite attempts by the ‘Lone Soldier’ program to claim there are ‘over 7,000’ ‘lone soldiers’ in Israel and naturally – as previously noted – they don’t say where they come from. (9)
However, this is typically deceptive because what that really means is that there are ‘officially’ ‘over 7,000’ foreign jews with no family in Israel serving in the IDF while there are circa 23,380 American jews serving in the IDF most of whom are presumably not ‘Lone Soldiers’ but instead have some Israeli family so thus don’t ‘count’ even though they are very clearly foreign soldiers.
We can thus see that there are an awful lot of American jews serving in the IDF and a good figure for perspective is that a total of 13,000 non-Ukrainians have joined and fought for the Ukrainian military since Russia invaded Ukraine on 22nd February 2022 to present. (10)
The number of American jews currently fighting in the IDF is almost double the total number of non-Ukrainians who have fought for Ukraine when the current Israeli-Hamas war is been going on half as long.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that this is not a good look for American jewry.
This gets worse when we realise that we’ve also had recent estimates about how many jews are serving in the US military from the ‘Jewish Chaplains Council’ which document that only 8,000 to 10,000 jews are currently serving in the US military (11) (although jewish groups naturally only report the higher number). (12)
For perspective that is less than one percent of the US military.
To be more accurate 0.77% if we use the highest estimate of 10,000 ((10,000 * 1,300,000) * 100) compared to the fact that jews are 2.4% of the total US population as of 2020. (13)
Then jews are 3.1 times underrepresented in the US military compared to their representation in the population which is better then their more than five times underrepresentation in the US military who served in the Vietnam War (14) but mirrors their circa 3 times underrepresentation in the US military serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. (15)
When we compare that to the number of American jews currently serving in the IDF of circa 23,380 we note that 2.3 times the number of American jews are currently serving with the IDF than with the US military.
If we use the lower ‘Jewish Chaplains Council’ estimate of 8,000 rather than the higher one of 10,000; this changes to 2.9 times the number of American jews are currently serving with the IDF than with the US military.
The IDF currently has a total of 634,500 personnel (including reserves) of which 169,500 are active duty. (16) This means that with 23,380 American jews currently serving in the IDF; American jews make up 3.7% of the IDF’s total personnel and (if all those 23,380 American jews were active duty and not reserves) then a whopping 13.8% of active duty IDF personnel would be American jews.
Put another way: using the higher ‘Jewish Chaplains Council’ estimate of 10,000 jews in the US military American jewish representation is 4.8 times lower than in the IDF’s total personnel and 26.8 times lower than the IDF’s active personnel.
Let the implications of those numbers sink in.
Are jews really loyal to the United States?
Those numbers are direct evidence they are loyal to Israel not the United States.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-military-service-britain
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-military-service-the-united
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-the-military-the-united
(4) Ibid.
(5) For example: https://observer.com/2006/08/the-true-definition-of-privilege-protestants-and-jews-sharply-underrepresented-in-us-military/
(6) Ibid.
(7) https://lonesoldiercenter.com/about-us/who-are-lone-soldiers/
(8) https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/republican-bill-wants-americans-israeli-military-have-same-benefits-us-soldiers
(9) https://lonesoldiercenter.com/about-us/who-are-lone-soldiers/
(10) https://responsiblestatecraft.org/george-clooney-amal-icc-biden/
(11) https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/modern-day-maccabis-jews-in-the-us-armed-forces/
(12) For example: https://jcca.org/news-and-views/what-do-you-know-about-jews-who-have-served-our-country/
(13) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/the-size-of-the-u-s-jewish-population/
(14) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-military-service-the-united
(15) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jews-and-the-military-the-united
(16) https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2024/01/17/the-idfs-interim-data-report-shows-the-scale-of-the-israel-hamas-war/