Onward, Jewish Soldiers

Among the elite troops of the Israeli military’s Maglan special-forces unit, Naftali Bennett was an oddity. As an officer in the unit in the early 1990s, he commanded more than 80 young men, all of them secular and many from kibbutzim communities aligned with the left-center Labor Party. Bennett is an observant Jew, and among combat officers throughout the military he was one of the few who wore a yarmulke, didn’t travel on Saturdays, and never ate cheeseburgers because of the Jewish ban on mixing milk and meat.

Now long a civilian, Bennett had a chance recently to visit with new recruits in his old unit. Two things struck him:
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