One of Israel’s top secrets — the number of IDF members — has been revealed.
One of the signs of the coming Redemption is the unfolding of things that have been hidden from us up to now. Why is this happening? When the Redemption comes, every secret of creation will be revealed to us. In another words we will see the divine truth on every level of creation and we will discover that “there is none but the Creator himself,” and then all the people of Israel will devote themselves to studying the hidden gems of Torah, as many sources tell us.
The prelude to this is the study of Chasidism, which already reveals to us the secrets of the Torah and allows us to enrich our lives with the bright light of these secrets. And the “reflection” of this process in the material world is already happening now — on the starting point of the Redemption — it is the unfolding of many sensitive information, secrets and other previously hidden things in the life around us.
One of the most social areas, but totally filled with secrets and mysteries is, of course, the army. Now we clearly see the progressive unfolding of this things in that public sphere .
Every army in fact keeps many secrets, because its main task is to defeat the enemy, and the best way to achieve this is to take the enemy by surprise. That is why every army throughout world history has kept in secret its plans, training, weapons, etc.
In recent years, however, we have seen a so to say “flood” of unfolding secrets, revealing many sensitive information that were previously, for many years, successfully hidden under the strictest confidence in the military sphere.
Now the Israeli Military Censor made it possible to uncover another of Israel’s best-kept military secrets: the size of the IDF.
For many years this information was kept strictly secret. Only recently the censors allowed to publish the number of fighters in the IDF. We are talking about 150 thousand men and women.
Aditionally to this number should be added the contract professional soldiers, whose number is about 40,000, according to the IDF’s public information.
The censors still do not allow us to report exactly how many soldiers and officers are deployed in combat units. At the same time, just the number of regular army personnel is something that was absolutely forbidden to talk about for many years...
The official IDF website also details the numbers of the reserve structure, permitted also to be published nowadays. According to this data, there are only 120,000 soldiers actively serving in the reserves!
This figure is much lower than the estimates previously published by foreign experts. Apparently, it reflects the dramatic reduction of the reserve structure in recent years, as I have written about many times before.
Let me remind you that according to IDF publications, in recent years large reserve units — all armored brigades based on M48 and M60 (“Magah”) tanks, as well as A41 tanks (Centurion — “shot”) and even Merkava I and Merkava II tanks — were dissolved. As a result of this dissolvement, about 2,000 tanks were removed from service!
Of course, this drastic reduction did not happen all at once, but was stretched over the period of 25 years.
The Air Force, too, reduced its strength during those years. I have already written about this. The same thing happened in the Navy, and, of course, in the various units of the ground forces, including the reserve infantry brigades and artillery units.
In fact, shortly after Eisenkot became a Chief of the General Staff (in 2015), the IDF officials announced that it intended to reduce the number of reservists by 100,000! This was done, along with significant reductions in the size of the army (especially the ground forces) that occurred in previous years.
It should be noted that relatively small number of 120 000 active reservists is somehow similar to another figure given in the other data uncovered now — 5% of citizens of the country are defined as “reservists” (though not “active”). In other words, the army can mobilize them as an additional reserve, if necessary. However, we are talking about people who have not been trained for many years.
All in all, this is about 400,000-450,000 people, of whom, as has already been said, 120,000 people regularly refresh their military skills by serving in the active reserve.
The fact of such data publication, totally declassified in recent weeks, is a great revelation, and the unfolding of “state secrets” (with the approval of the censors, of course) — in other words, is part of the great process that the whole world is undergoing on the starting point of Redemption, when everything will be finally seen, and the Almighty Himself will also be perceived to us, as the prophet Yeshayahu clearly said (Yeshayahu 30:20): “...your Teacher shall no longer be concealed from you, and your eyes shall see your Teacher”.
The holy book of Tanya explains the meaning of this verse this way (chapter 36): “...the Divine light that will be revealed to them in the hereafter without any cloak, as is written, “Your teacher shall no longer be concealed from you [literally: He will not conceal Himself from you with robe and garment]...but your eyes shall see your Teacher”.
May we all together deserve this in the closest future in joy and happiness!