About Bamahane

Bamahane

Bamahane, also written BaMahane, was the Hebrew-language weekly magazine of the Israel Defense Forces. Its name means, literally, in the base camp. It was first published in December 1934 by the Tel Aviv office of the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defence organisation, as an underground publication, and it was published as a weekly until December 2016 — a run of eighty-two years that makes it one of the longest-lived magazines in Israeli history. After the last print issue it continued online, until it was formally merged into the IDF's website in January 2020. For most of its life Bamahane was the soldiers' newspaper: distributed to bases, received by soldiers on Thursdays, read by tens of thousands, and written in significant part by soldiers themselves, including some of the most famous names in Israeli culture.

Origins as a Haganah underground publication, 1934-1947

Bamahane started in December 1934 as an underground publication of the Haganah's Tel Aviv office. Its chief editor until 1947 was Ephraim Talmi. The clandestine character of the early magazine is preserved in the Haganah archive, which holds issues such as a 1941 clandestine newspaper under the Bamahane name. Publication under the British Mandate required secrecy: the Haganah was an illegal military organisation in the eyes of the Mandate authorities, and its magazine served members who could not be openly addressed. Even in those conditions the magazine attracted serious literary talent. Notable writers such as the poet Nathan Alterman and the poet and author Leah Goldberg wrote for it, establishing a pattern that would define Bamahane for decades — a military publication whose pages were also a genuine part of Hebrew literary and journalistic life.

At the end of 1947, as the struggle over the future of Palestine intensified, Bamahane became the Haganah's national publication. During that period Moshe Shamir became its chief editor. The transformation from a Tel Aviv office's underground sheet to the national organ of the Haganah mirrored the Haganah's own transformation into the army of a state in formation. When the State of Israel was founded in 1948 and the Israel Defense Forces were established, Bamahane became the soldiers' newspaper of the IDF, carrying its pre-state history into the new state's army as a living link between the underground and the uniformed present.

The soldiers' weekly: role and readership

For the following seven decades Bamahane was subordinate to the IDF's Education and Youth Corps, the branch responsible for education, culture and the welfare dimension of military life. The Jewish Virtual Library's account of the Education Corps lists the corps' media alongside its teaching work: a military radio station, Galei Zahal, and the magazine Bamahane. That placement explains the magazine's mission. It was not the IDF Spokesperson's news bulletin and it was not a commercial newspaper. It was an educational and cultural weekly for conscripts and career soldiers, meant to inform them about military and security matters, to connect units to one another, and to give soldiers a publication of their own inside a hierarchical institution.

Its circulation was in the tens of thousands. Its main readers were soldiers, who received the magazine in their bases on Thursdays, in time for the weekend rhythm of military life. Additionally, many Israeli civilians close to the IDF chose to subscribe to the publication, and in a country of near-universal conscription, former soldiers form a vast natural readership for a magazine that documents the army they once served in. Bamahane therefore performed a double function: an internal army weekly, and one of the channels through which civilian Israel saw, photographed and narrated, the military experience of its children.

Format and content over the years

The magazine's format changed with the IDF and with Israeli publishing. Between 2000 and 2005, Bamahane consisted of two parts: one including news articles related to military and security matters, and the other containing editorials, interviews and photo features. From January 2006 until December 2016 it was one publication in the form of a 68-page magazine. That final print format — a substantial weekly magazine of nearly seventy pages — indicates the resources the IDF devoted to it at its height: Bamahane employed about twenty writers in its last years, most of them soldier-journalists completing their service as reporters, photographers and editors, supervised by a chief editor. Its final chief editor, from 2013 to 2016, was Tzachi Biran; the editor before him was Yoni Shanfeld.

Content ranged across the full life of the army: operations and training, technology and weapons, military history and heritage, portraits of units and individual soldiers, interviews with commanders and with cultural figures, photography from exercises and the field, humour, sport and the small human stories of base life. Academic study of the magazine, including research on visual representations of women soldiers in its pages, treats Bamahane as a central source for how the IDF presented itself and how Israeli civil-military culture was pictured — evidence of the magazine's documentary importance beyond its original readership.

Independence and controversy

Bamahane was, by the standards of military publications, unusually independent. Although subordinate to the Education and Youth Corps, it was not censored by the IDF Spokesman until 2006. That independence made its content the centre of several controversies, and the controversies are an essential part of its history, because they tested how much genuine journalism an army will tolerate inside its own magazine.

In May 2001 the head of the Education Corps, Brigadier General Elazar Stern, decided to close the publication over what was described as questionable material, including a front-page article about a homosexual colonel. The order did not come to pass. Public outrage and an appeal to Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer kept Bamahane alive. The episode is significant twice over: a general attempted to shut the army's magazine for its coverage of a gay officer, and civilian public pressure, applied through the political level, saved it.

In September 2005 three of Bamahane's writers were dismissed for not following a prohibition from the IDF Spokesperson's Unit against documenting and publishing stories and photographs of the relocation of Jewish graves from Gush Katif into Israel proper, during the disengagement from Gaza. As a result of this and other incidents, in January 2006 the head of the Manpower Directorate, by then Major General Elazar Stern, ordered each piece in the magazine to undergo careful inspection by the Spokesperson's Unit. Bamahane's staff accused him of attempting to turn the publication into another Pravda — the Soviet party newspaper, invoked as the symbol of a house organ stripped of journalism. From 2006 the magazine continued, but the era of an uncensored soldiers' weekly had ended, and its last decade in print was produced under the closer supervision its staff had resisted.

Notable writers and alumni

Bamahane's contributor and alumni lists read as a cross-section of Israeli public life, because for many talented conscripts, service as a Bamahane writer was their entry into journalism, literature and politics. In its early years it published Nathan Alterman and Leah Goldberg. Its later notable writers include Ehud Olmert, who became prime minister; Yair Lapid, journalist, television personality, politician and prime minister, who famously wrote a column for the magazine during his service; playwright Nisim Aloni; songwriter Eli Mohar; journalist Eitan Haber; politician Tzachi Hanegbi; author Ram Oren; journalist and television personality Imanuel Rosen; film director Renen Schorr; writer and lecturer Dov Elbaum; and songwriter and poet Yoram Taharlev. Few magazines anywhere can list two future prime ministers among their writers. The list confirms that Bamahane functioned as a national training ground: the army identified young people who could write, gave them a weekly deadline and a mass readership, and released them into Israeli media and culture.

The end of print and the digital afterlife, 2016-2020

Bamahane was published as a weekly until December 2016, when the last print issue appeared and the magazine was moved online. The move reflected the same pressures that ended print editions across Israeli publishing — costs, changing reading habits among young soldiers, and the IDF's own growing digital platforms — applied to a publication whose readers were, by definition, the youngest and most digital generation in the country. Online, Bamahane continued as part of the IDF's web presence for three more years. In January 2020 it was formally merged into the IDF's website, ending its separate existence after eighty-five years from its first underground issue. It should be written about in the past tense: Bamahane was a magazine, first clandestine, then official, then digital, and its archive now stands as its legacy.

Historical significance

Bamahane's significance exceeds its circulation. It documented, week by week, the entire arc of Israel's military history from the underground struggles of the 1930s, through the 1948 war and the founding of the IDF, the wars and operations of the following decades, and into the technology-driven army of the twenty-first century. Because its writers were soldiers, its record is written from inside the ranks in a way official histories are not. Because it published poets and future prime ministers alongside unit reporters, it is also a literary and political archive. And because of its independence battles — the attempted closure of 2001, the dismissals of 2005 and the censorship imposed in 2006 — its history is a case study in the tension between a democratic army's need for control and its soldiers' claim to a real magazine of their own.

Bamahane in the Israeli media landscape

Within Israeli media, Bamahane occupied a category of its own. It was a state and military publication, yet it competed in quality and talent with commercial magazines; it was distributed free inside bases, yet civilians subscribed to it; it was a weekly magazine, yet its subject — the army — placed it at the centre of national life. Its sibling in the Education Corps, the radio station Galei Zahal, survives as a broadcaster; Bamahane's print run, from December 1934 to December 2016, remains the longer and historically deeper record. Published from Tel Aviv, in Hebrew, for the Tel Aviv District and for bases across the country, Bamahane is recorded in this directory as the IDF's historic weekly — the magazine of the base camp that grew, over eighty-two years in print, into one of the defining publications of Israeli society.