The political infighting, both public and behind the scenes, that has taken place in Israel over choosing a new chief of staff to replace the outgoing Dan Halutz, who resigned last week after months of public pressure following the army’s poor performance in last summer’s war in Lebanon, would be unimaginable in any other democratic country.

The latest example of this is the publication in yesterday’s Hebrew newspapers of a letter written to the defense minister, Amir Peretz, by the deputy chief of staff, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, in which the latter both withdrew his candidacy to replace Lieutenant General Halutz and recommended that no one be picked for the job before a pending investigative report on the army’s performance last summer is issued.

One can regard the substance of General Kaplinksy’s letter in one of two ways. Either it is a noble effort to remove the army from political squabbling by conceding victory to Mr. Peretz’s candidate for the new chief of staff, former Northern Corps commander Major General Gabi Ashkenazi, or else it is a less noble effort to torpedo General Ashkenazi’s appointment by postponing it until the report is released — perhaps in the hope that the report’s findings will weaken his chances.

The remarkable thing, however, is that no sooner was it written than the text of General Kaplinsky’s letter was made available to the press, whether by its author or its recipient, and that this was treated as a perfectly normal thing to do. Where else in the world would a high army officer in uniform write a proposal to his country’s minister of defense that became public knowledge the next morning?

The fact is that Israel’s army has always been involved in national politics far more than armies are or should be in other democracies — and that in recent years this tendency has been strengthened. It has become routine for high officers to make policy pronouncements and to quarrel with each other or with their country’s politicians in public, and for the politicians in turn to fight their battles on the backs of high officers, as Mr. Peretz and Prime Minister Olmert have been doing over the appointment of General Halutz’s replacement. And in the wake of last summer’s botched war, which left the army and the government blaming one another for what went wrong, things have become even worse.

It is perhaps unrealistic to think that a small country with universal conscription and a high, although falling, percentage of its male citizens serving in the active reserves can ever completely de-politicize its military as other democracies generally manage to do. In Israel, civilian and military life are simply too interconnected for this to be possible. In a society in which a reserve captain or major can one week be in the field commanding troops in combat against Hezbollah, and the next week be at home socializing with his friends, who may include journalists, academics, prominent businessmen, and other opinion makers eager to hear about his experiences, there is no way of keeping the two spheres hermetically apart.

One’s army connections play an important role in Israel. What four years of college, whether at Harvard or Peoria State, are for the typical American — a formative period in which one makes many of one’s lifelong friends and by which one’s social status is in some measure determined — three years of regular army service, whether in an elite commando unit or as a company cook, are for the typical Israeli. A great deal of networking in Israeli life depends on with whom one did and does one’s army service, and in this respect, too, there can be no clear separation of military and civilian domains.

Furthermore, Israel’s professional officer corps, whose early retirement provisions ensure that just about everyone has left it by the time he is in his late 40s, is in effect Israel’s major farm system for high positions in business, industry, and not least of all, politics. Three of Israel’s prime ministers, and many of its leading politicians and prime-ministerial contenders, have had professional army backgrounds and continued to retain their military ties after moving on, while those not yet retired but already thinking of a second, political, career start cultivating political contacts while still in uniform.

Given all this, and the fact that Israel spends much of its annual budget on its army and is in a state of actual or potential military conflict with its neighbors that permanently threatens to affect every Israeli, military issues inevitably figure in almost every major political debate, just as most major political decisions ultimately impact on the military. One cannot neutralize the two from one another in this sense, either.

And yet by now things have gone too far. The spectacle of a defense minister and a prime minister fighting publicly over who should be chief of staff when their considerations have less to do with the candidates’ qualifications than with political rivalries is not only unedifying. It is a crossing of the line between political and military life that should be considered impermissible even in Israel.

A politicized army is a danger to Israel not because Israel is a Third World country that needs to live in fear of military coups, but because an army whose generals are half-politicians, and a political system that is full of ex-generals, cannot hope to produce either the determined fighting force, or the civilian politics capable of supervising it, that Israel needs. Although General Kaplinsky is entitled to his opinions, and Defense Minister Peretz should know what these are, they are not the rest of the country’s business. All of Israel should not be part of the military chain of command that starts in the barracks and ends in the defense minister’s office. That’s what defense ministers are for.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.