Since she was a child, Staff Sergeant Shaked had wanted to be a frontline soldier in the Israel Defence Forces. “It’s just something that spoke to me,” she said. “I wanted to serve in the army with a weapon.”
In most countries, little girls rarely dream of becoming combat soldiers. In Israel, where military service is compulsory for men and women and the armed services are part of the fabric of daily life, many do. At least for now.
The conflict has erupted at a moment when the expansion of women’s role in the Israeli military is under threat from the religious establishment, for whom contact between unmarried men and women is forbidden.
Shaked, 21, a former waitress who serves in the mixed-gender Paran Brigade,
