From Zion Mules in 1915 to a Foreign Legion in 2026: Mercenaries and the IDF

For  seventy five years, the Israeli army has marketed itself as the ‘most moral army’ in the world, in what is known in Zionist terminology as ‘purity of arms’, which allegedly guarantees ethical conduct even in the fog of war.   Beneath this carefully constructed mythology lies an unpleasant reality:  the army is increasingly relying on foreign fighters and private contractors; what legal experts classify as mercenaries. Reports that a new ‘Foreign Legion’ unit is being contemplated, or even officially created within the Israeli army are currently circulating widely.  

The outsourcing of the army’s operations relies on new American firms like UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions, which are deeply linked to the lineage of the notorious Blackwater, (founded in 1996 by Erik Prince  during the Iraq war), before rebranding as Academi and later merging into Constellis.   Today, ex-Blackwater and Constellis executives are back in the Middle East.

The irony here is layered and complex, and it begins much earlier than the establishment of the Jewish state and the army.  In 1915, Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky,  (Netanyahu’s spiritual father) with Joseph Trumpeldor, jointly petitioned the British military in Egypt to form a Jewish combat legion to help the British liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The British refused that Zionists  serve as soldiers, but were permitted to serve only as pack animal handlers on the Galippoli front, hence the name: The  Zion Mule Corps. For the Zionist movement, this was a humiliation well worth enduring. The dream was to prove that Jews could be warriors, not muleteers, and that they could defend themselves, not serve others. In 1917, the Zion Mule Corps was promoted to the Jewish Legion, where Jabotinsky served.  Armed and uniformed, it was the first step toward the Zionist dream. 

A century later, this historical arc has not merely bent, it has collapsed.

Today, Israel pays foreign fighters up to $ 4,000 a week to fight its wars, while a growing segment of its own citizens are exempt from service. 

The scale of foreign participation is striking. Over 50,000 soldiers currently serving in the Israeli army hold foreign nationalities, with the largest contingent  from the United States, followed by French, Ukrainian, and according to the latest reports, Spanish mercenaries. The trajectory is no longer hidden. Former senior officials have already drafted blueprints for an official Israeli Foreign Legion – a corporate force of 12,000 mercenaries organised into four brigades, costing upwards of $3 billion annually. While the state debates making this privatisation official, private contractors in Gaza and tens of thousands of dual-national fighters are a reality on the ground. 

Orde Wingate and the forging of a myth

To understand the trajectory of the Zionist military ethos, one must understand how the myth was forged.  In 1936, a British officer named Orde Wingate, (1903-1944) arrived in Palestine as part of the British military effort to quell the Arab Revolt (1936-1939). A devout Christian Zionist, Wingate believed Jews had a divine right to the land and set about training them for it.  What Wingate taught the Jewish paramilitary forces became the foundation of Israeli military culture. He rejected  static defence, teaching instead that against a numerically superior enemy, the only defence was offence deep inside enemy territory. 

His special Night Squads of 1938, – joint British -Jewish units-, pioneered tactics of surprise, mobility and night attacks that became the template for elite Jewish units like the Palmach. He personally selected and trained the future founders of the Israeli army, including Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon.  As such, the ‘native’ Jewish army, the  underground paramilitary force when Palestine was a British occupied country,  was created and trained by a colonial British officer. 

Even the smallest details of this founding era have been romanticised, a pattern that is consistent with Zionist myth making right from the inception of the Zionist movement.  Legend has it that Wingate’s men invented rubber-soled shoes from recycled car tires to walk silently during night raids against the Arab population, a classic piece of Zionist ‘ pioneer’  mythology evoking ingenuity, self-reliance and the tough  ‘sabra’ spirit.  The truth was more ordinary: rubber soled plimsolls had been mass produced since the late 1800s; Wingate simply ordered them from British supply chains.

READ: Israel will remain in territory occupied in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza ‘indefinitely’: Defence minister

From Ben- Gurion’s vision to paid fighters

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, established the Israeli Defence Forces  IDF , in 1948, on a principle he considered inviolable: the  ‘whole nation is the army’.  For him, the military was never just a fighting force, it was the ‘melting pot’   designed to transform  Jewish immigrants  from all over the world, into a unified nation, ‘ stitching together the tribes and diasporas’  through mandatory  conscription.  Could Ben-Gurion and Israel’s founding fathers have ever imagined their ‘people’s army’ evolving into a force enhanced by highly paid foreign mercenaries? Probably not.   Furthermore ,  this  commercialization of the military cannot be understood without mentioning the demographic crisis that drives it. 

Approximately 66 percent of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men of draft age do not serve in the army, despite a population of roughly 1.3 million , and growing rapidly due to high birth rate. 

Ben-Gurion’s original 400 yeshiva  (religious) students intended as temporary wartime compromise in 1948,  has grown into a permanent exemption for a growing segment of society.  Because Israel’s political coalitions depend on Haredi parties, successive governments have refused to enforce universal conscription. The resulting manpower deficit, exacerbated by prolonged wars and reservist burnout has created the conditions to make the foreign forces necessary. These mercenaries are a replacement for citizens who refuse to serve.

Sparta, Crusaders and the price of outsourced defence

The historical parallels are ominous.  Ancient Sparta, the quintessential citizen-soldier state, faced ultimate collapse when its rigid citizenship system and demographic decline forced it to rely on hired mercenaries.  The very thing that made Sparta distinct, the citizen-warrior ethos, died even as the army continued in name. By the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, the ‘Spartan army’ was a hollow shell supported by mercenaries and slaves. In similar vein, the Crusader kingdoms established in the Levant lasted barely two centuries, largely because their ruling class remained a tiny, foreign minority surrounded by a hostile population, isolated from both the local populace and distant Europeans patrons.  

The Crusaders failed to integrate, and ultimately became a foreign implant and were expelled. Ben-Gurion constantly warned against the ‘Spartan trap’, and early Zionists like Vladimir Jabotinsky explicitly rejected the comparison to the crusaders, arguing that Jews were ‘returning home’, not planting a temporary foreign colony. By failing to integrate and increasingly relying on foreign contract fighters, modern Israel risks becoming exactly what its founders feared: an isolated, unintegrated implant destined for expulsion.

Among Israeli writers and historians, the Crusader analogy has been a recurring theme, a warning that a state which fails to integrate  becomes an alien outpost. A.B. Yehoshua used the metaphor to caution against the dangers of occupation, urging Israel not to repeat the Crusader’s mistakes, and as  early as 1952, intellectual Moshe Fogel published a series of warnings in Haaretz using the Crusader collapse as an allegory for Israel’s fragile future.

War crimes and the ‘most moral army’  

 The IDF’s ethical doctrine of ‘purity of arms’ requires soldiers to use force only for mission objectives, to maintain humanity and to avoid harming non-combatants. If the world once believed this myth, every Palestinian has always known the truth from Deir Yassin and Tantoura massacres to the ruins of Gaza 2023. Now, the rest of the world knows it too – and the carefully constructed facade of Israel’s moral exceptionalism has finally shattered.

The ICC issued arrest warrants for prime minister Netayahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice is hearing a genocide case brought by South Africa.

The UN Independent International Commission  found that Israeli authorities committed four out of five genocidal acts defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention. 

Human Rights Watch documented that Israeli forces routinely opened fire on starving Palestinians seeking aid.  Children and women are the overwhelming majority of  casualties.   On top of all these war crimes,  introducing mercenaries only deepens these ethical questions for the Israeli state.  The widespread presence of dual-citizens on the frontlines, combined with the active presence of private military contractors like UG Solutions-frequently blurs the lines in media reports between formal state conscription and foreign mercenary use,  and complicates legal transparency and tracking.

Orde Wingate forged a fighting force rooted in zealous, biblical conviction. Decades later, Ben-Gurion institutionalised the ‘people’s army,’ cementing the idea that a state’s defence must belong to its people, not to outsiders.

The modern reliance on foreign mercenaries is the ultimate antithesis of that founding vision. As the foundational myths of the ‘people’s army’  and its ‘purity of arms’ dissolve into lucrative private contracts, the ideological armour falls away,  leaving nowhere left for Israel to hide from itself.

OPINION: Echoes of the Lügenpresse: Unmasking Axios and its Israeli ties

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.