Shlomo Maoz, a former senior Israeli government official and economist, has proposed recruiting 12,000 mercenary soldiers into an “Israeli Foreign Legion” composed of four brigades operating under Israeli officers. Speaking to the Israeli daily Maariv in an interview published on 16 May 2026 and reported by Asharq Al-Awsat, Maoz presented the plan as a personal initiative inspired by Ukraine’s recruitment of approximately 10,000 foreign fighters from 75 nationalities, who receive an average of $4,000 per month from Kyiv.

The core of Maoz’s argument is that the IDF already relies on a foreign manpower stream it does not openly acknowledge. He told Maariv that the army currently fields 7,365 “lone soldiers,” a term referring to personnel who serve without family in Israel. Of these, Maoz said, 52% come from Jewish families living abroad and serve through established channels. The remaining 48%, he claimed, are functional mercenaries who serve through what he described as “secret” arrangements. These soldiers receive salaries equivalent to $4,000 per week, according to Maoz, drawn from the United States (30%), France (12%), Ukraine (7%), and a mix of Spain, Italy, Germany, Canada, and Britain.

Maoz estimated the total cost of a 12,000-strong mercenary force at approximately $2.5 billion, with each soldier costing between $8,000 and $10,000 per month in direct salary plus roughly half that again in state expenses. He framed this as manageable against Israel’s foreign currency reserves of $236 billion, equivalent to about 38% of gross domestic product. His proposal would recruit retired military officers from Eastern European countries in particular: fighters, snipers, tank operators, drone specialists, and, he said, even pilots.

Maoz’s proposal did not emerge in a vacuum. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir has delivered a series of increasingly urgent warnings about the military’s manpower deficit since January 2026. In a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu and senior officials that month, Zamir warned that the shortage of soldiers could harm military readiness in the near future and urged the government to extend mandatory service for men back to 36 months, after it was shortened to 30 months in August 2024.

The warnings escalated sharply. On 26 March, during the active phase of the Iran war, Zamir told the security cabinet that the IDF was “going to collapse in on itself,” a statement reported by Channel 13 and confirmed by the Jerusalem Post. He told ministers he was “raising 10 red flags” and demanded three pieces of legislation: a new conscription law, a reserve duty law, and a law extending mandatory service. IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Defrin then publicly quantified the gap: approximately 15,000 additional soldiers needed, including 7,000 to 8,000 combat troops. The IDF’s own institutional figure, used consistently in briefings from January through May, placed the urgent recruitment need at 12,000.

On 10 May, appearing before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Zamir repeated the demand in its starkest terms. He told lawmakers that the IDF needed more soldiers “immediately” and suggested amending the law on military reserves to allow the army to enlist reservists for longer periods according to operational needs. The head of the IDF’s Planning and Manpower Directorate, Brig. Gen. Shay Tayeb, warned that if the planned service reduction takes effect in January 2027, the army will lose thousands more combat soldiers. Reserve troops were already serving 80 to 100 days per year, a load Zamir described as unsustainable.

The domestic arithmetic that makes Maoz’s proposal thinkable is straightforward. Approximately 80,000 ultra-Orthodox men aged between 18 and 24 are currently eligible for military service but have not enlisted, according to the IDF’s own figures reported consistently across Israeli media throughout 2026. Their refusal is not individual: it is institutionally organised by the Haredi political parties, principally Shas (11 Knesset seats) and United Torah Judaism (seven seats), whose rabbinical leadership treats military service as incompatible with full-time Torah study.

The government’s response has been a bill, championed by Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth (Likud), that would nominally increase Haredi conscription through yearly quotas while continuing to grant sweeping exemptions to yeshiva students. The Deputy Attorney General, Gil Limon, told the committee in December 2025 that the bill would actually create “a negative incentive for enlistment” and roll back the tools available for military recruitment. The bill was shelved in March when the Iran war demanded rapid budget approval, but Bismuth announced its return on 31 March, claiming he was acting at the Chief of Staff’s request.

The political dynamics reached a new point of fracture on 12 May. After Netanyahu informed Haredi lawmakers that his coalition lacked the votes to pass the exemption bill in its current form, the Degel HaTorah faction announced it would push to dissolve the Knesset, forcing early elections. The faction’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Dov Lando, reportedly gave the instruction personally. Coalition allies, including National Security Minister Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, urged restraint. Elections must be held by October 2026 regardless, but any advance would throw Netanyahu’s legislative agenda into disarray.

This is the political context in which Maoz’s proposal lands. If the single largest pool of military-age Israeli males is not going to serve, someone else has to. As Maoz told Maariv, the benefits of recruiting mercenaries “outweigh the symbolic costs.” That framing is worth pausing on. The word “symbolic” does a great deal of work. The IDF was founded as a conscript army explicitly designed to integrate Israel’s immigrant populations: Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, urban and rural, European and Middle Eastern, Jewish and Druze. Maoz himself described this history as the basis of the “people’s army” myth. His use of the word “myth” is itself the signal. If the architect of a policy proposal calls the founding principle a myth in the same sentence he proposes replacing it, the principle is already dead.

Maoz explicitly cited Ukraine’s foreign fighter programme as his model. Kyiv currently fields approximately 10,000 foreign fighters from 75 nationalities, with roughly 600 new mercenaries joining each month, paid an average of $4,000 per month. France’s Foreign Legion, the world’s oldest continuously operating professional foreign military unit, has served as the conceptual reference point for Israeli analysts since at least February 2026, when the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security published a formal paper proposing a cautious expansion of the existing Mahal volunteer framework into a “Mahal+” track that would gradually broaden eligibility beyond Jewish volunteers.

The JISS paper, authored by senior fellows, acknowledged the IDF’s small population base and the structural exclusion of the Arab sector (approximately 20% of Israel’s population) from conscription, alongside the Haredi refusal. It proposed cautious expansion rather than a full foreign legion, noting the integration risks and the institutional reluctance to change. Maoz’s proposal is less cautious. He jumps directly to four brigades under Israeli officers, with a recruitment pool drawn from retired military professionals across Eastern Europe. His argument for linguistic feasibility is that millions of Israeli citizens already speak Russian, English, Spanish, and other languages as their mother tongue, making integration of foreign soldiers operationally viable.

Israel does already have partial infrastructure for this. The existing Mahal programme allows non-citizen Jewish volunteers to serve in the IDF on temporary contracts. Americans currently make up the largest contingent of foreign nationals serving in the IDF, followed by French and Russian nationals. What Maoz is proposing is not the creation of something new from nothing; it is the formalisation and massive expansion of something that already exists in a grey zone. His use of the word “secret” to describe the current pay arrangements for non-Jewish lone soldiers is the most provocative element of the interview. If accurate, it implies a parallel compensation structure that the IDF does not publicly acknowledge.

Maoz told Maariv that the government is waging an ongoing war on seven fronts while simultaneously pursuing further occupation, expansion, and the establishment of new settlements and outposts that all require protection. The settlement figure he cited, 134, has not been independently confirmed at that exact number. The closest verified data comes from Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, which documented the cabinet’s secret approval of 34 new settlements on 1 April 2026, reported by CNN, Reuters, and Democracy Now on 9 to 10 April. Peace Now separately recorded 86 new outposts established in 2025 alone. The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine’s updated West Bank map counts 34 new settlements, 127 existing settlements, 122 unauthorised outposts, and 199 unauthorised settlement farms as of early 2026. Maoz may be aggregating several categories; the exact basis for his figure of 134 is not stated in the interview.

The broader strategic problem Maoz identifies is real, regardless of the precise settlement count. Peace Now’s own condemnation of the April settlement decision made the connection explicitly: settlements impose an “intolerable burden on the army” and undermine security. Each new outpost or settlement requires a military garrison, patrol routes, rapid-response teams, and often dedicated road infrastructure. The IDF’s Planning and Manpower Directorate has told lawmakers that even without new commitments, the army cannot sustain its current deployment profile with the troops it has. Adding garrison requirements for dozens of new civilian sites to an already overstretched force is not an abstract problem; it is a concrete draw on the same finite pool of soldiers that Zamir says is 15,000 short.

The multi-front war posture compounds the mismatch. Since the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, the IDF has conducted sustained operations in Gaza, southern Lebanon, the West Bank, and Syria, and joined the United States in the war against Iran that began on 28 February 2026. The Iranian front added air defence, naval, and expeditionary commitments, while the defence budget expanded by NIS 28 billion ($9 billion) to NIS 140 billion in March. The budget can fund equipment and munitions. It cannot manufacture soldiers. That is the gap Maoz is trying to fill, and it is the gap Zamir keeps pointing to when he stands in front of lawmakers and says the IDF needs troops “immediately.”