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Blue Steel started out as a study track for technical subjects to suit Air Force needs and was mainly concentrated in the Air Force Cadet Technical School in Haifa. A few years later, when the program was implemented in a number of peripheral towns, the Blue Steel track turned into one of scholastic excellence to which students were proud to belong.
The research aim was to explore whether there was a gap in displays of patriotism between students in the Blue Steel track and their peers outside this track.
The subjects were 80 students in 10th grade in a peripheral town: 40 students in a Blue Steel class and 40 students in a parallel class in which there is no military program. The students in both tracks come from mixed level socio-cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.
The chosen research method was qualitative and the research tool, which was created accordingly, included open-ended questionnaires for the students regarding their perception of patriotism in terms of their emotions, thinking and behavior.
The main findings were that students in both classes demonstrated a high level of patriotism, although the Blue Steel students were far more patriotic than their non-track peers. While some students in the regular class responded neutrally, indifferently or even with disinterest to some of the national dilemmas, the Blue Steel students ranked themselves as citizens who uphold the patriotic ethos and its myths.
Keywords: Patriotism, Blue steel, Preparation for military life, Socializing agent.
Preparation for Military Life
The connection between army, memory and national identity is of great importance in Israel because these issues are very much present - separately and together - in our daily cultural, social and economic life and in how it is shaped. The Zionist attempt to create a national identity with secular western features among the Jews in Israel (and to a certain extent elsewhere in the world) continuously interacts with the processes of militarization and the construction of memory. These latter nourish the structuring of a national identity with the national ethos and myths of acts of heroism and sacrifice in defending the homeland, and in the purity of arms to which Israel society in general and the military in particular are committed. Every national identity needs memory based...