The Pipeline
Becca Strober was hailed as a hero when she returned to the U.S. while serving as a lone soldier in Israel. As she walked around her father’s synagogue in Philadelphia in 2009, the congregants stood up to shake her hand and thank her.
“I had just finished guarding a West Bank settlement,” said Strober, now an anti-occupation activist. “Even then, I was like, this is such a weird experience.”
Strober was first introduced to the possibility of joining the Israeli military when she was 17, during a high school semester she spent in Israel. She said alumni of the semester in Israel program wearing miliary uniforms spoke to her group. “There were a lot of informal ways of talking about enlisting in the army,” Strober told The Intercept.
She later joined after participating in the Garin Tzabar program, which runs two major drafting sessions each year. The program is funded by Tzofim, the biggest Zionist youth movement in Israel and the U.S. Also known as the Friends of Israel Scouts, the group has a U.S. nonprofit in New York.
Tzofim “begins educating kids at five years old,” said one former Zionist youth leader in Australia, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. He took part in groups affiliated with Tzofim as a teen. “There is a direct funnel from educating toddlers to, as soon as they turn 18 — they’re of military age and they’re indoctrinated and groomed and brainwashed, and they’re ready to fight the battle.”
Garin Tzabar continues to recruit lone soldiers from the U.S., who often end up serving in combat in Gaza and “protecting civilians” in the West Bank — where Israeli settlers and forces have killed 1,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023.
The recruitment pipeline includes many U.S. day schools — from more conservative yeshivas to modern Jewish day schools — that advertise how many alumni go on to serve in the Israeli military.
The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, had 51 alumni serving in the Israeli military as of 2023. Another school in New Jersey, the Rae Kushner Yeshiva, has congratulated an alum who became a social media manager in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit.
“Her work was recognized as important for hasbara by the Israeli news,” the school boasted on Facebook, using a term for Israeli public diplomacy, including propaganda tailored to international audiences. Another alum of the school served as a lone soldier in the army and was a friend of the son of Netanyahu, who commemorated him after he died while traveling in 2018.
One charity reviewed by The Intercept, the Lone Soldier Foundation, specifically provides funds for the children of families that attend a synagogue in northern New Jersey who join the Israeli military. According to the group’s most recent tax filing, it also supports the units in which the children of members of its congregation serve. In 2023, the group spent over $80,000 on providing “non-combat and equipment to IDF units in which eligible American citizens served.”
North American lone soldiers are a “great example of the Zionist spirit or the Zionist dream,” Strober told The Intercept. “It keeps American Jewish communities very, very close to the Israel question. It doesn’t allow them to think critically because it’s so close, because you know people who have been killed, or people who have served.”