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Comment by remarkEon | Hacker News Reader

More complete naiveté. The world is not a playground full of hipster cafes where people actually take statements like that seriously.

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Norway and Israel have female conscription. Are you really trying to say that those countries are full of hipster cafes and only populated by naive people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Drafting_of_women

> As of 2013, countries that were actively drafting women into military service included Bolivia,[58] Chad,[59] Eritrea,[60][61][62] Israel,[60][61][63] Mozambique[64] and North Korea.[65] Israel has universal female conscription ...

> After a law passed in March 2003, Tunisia became the first Arab country to universally conscript women.

> In 2015 Norway introduced female conscription, making it the first NATO member and first European country to have a legally compulsory national service for both men and women

Greetings from Tel Aviv. There are many, many hipster cafes in Israel! Try one of my favorites:

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g1968311-d428067...

Norway and Israel always come up in these debates. In Norway it's national service - not necessarily direct military conscription. That's something I'd be willing to entertain. Israel is different, since one could argue they have a constant existential threat on their border and it makes sense to have a deliberate military requirement in place. They also side-step the gender integration issue by having all-female units, which isn't what happened when changes were made allowing women in combat roles. I'd still be against this.

Since you know about this topic already, please explain how your quip about "hipster cafes" and "complete naiveté" is a valid or meaningful description.

Regarding "all-female units" in Israel, I'll point out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caracal_Battalion :

> The 33rd "Caracal" Battalion (Hebrew: גדוד קרקל‎) is an infantry combat battalion of the Israel Defense Forces, one of the three fully combat units (alongside the 'Lions of Jordan Battalion' and the 'Cheetah Battalion') in the Israeli military that is composed of both male and female soldiers. ... While Caracal is a mixed gender battalion, it has been 70% female since 2009. It is part of the 512th Sagi Brigade of the Southern Command.

As an Israeli, I'm not sure the IDF has even a single all-female unit. Most of the service is quite definitely fully integrated.

You appear to have no idea of what you're talking about here.

Was there an actual idea in there?

"The prospect of only drafting men is not progress" is an empty, meaningless statement. You probably don't like the idea of the draft at all, and that's fine, but it's naive. If we don't make deliberate choices about this then they get made for us.

Norway and Israel are not melting pots. It's not the same, their conscriptions are colored by race or religion.

Israel very much is a melting pot. Yes, only Jewish people are drafted. But that includes a wide variety of backgrounds - people whose families are from the Middle East, Russia, Ethiopia, the West (particularly recent French immigrants)... The drafting class takes people who grew up in completely secular homes and in religious homes. There's an ongoing political battle over whether to draft people from ultra-Orthodox backgrounds. Additionally, there are some ultra-Orthodox volunteers, as well as volunteers from the Bedouin, Druze, Circassian, and Christian and Muslim Arab minorities.

Indeed, the IDF is what forges an "Israeli" identity within the melting pot of Israeli society.

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