9. War and the Army
Few subjects have affected the Israeli psyche more powerfully
than the conflict that has engulfed the country, in different
forms, since the very first day of statehood. Zionist
theory did not intend this situation to occur: Israel
was meant to be the place where the Jews would be finally
freed from the specter of anti-Semitism that had haunted
them through long centuries of persecution. According
to this ideology, the subjects that should have stood
at the center of Israeli culture were, for example, the
Bible, the Land and the transformation of the ‘new’
Jew. To a certain extent the illusion continued until
the birth of the State in 1948. While the Yishuv had constantly
to contend with acts of terror and bloodshed, it was only
with the establishment of statehood that the subject finally
broke through to the center of the Israeli psyche. It
has stayed there ever since, albeit in changing forms.
In 1948 enmity and fighting took the form of outright war
for the first time and Israel lost its innocence. The
death toll of the War of Independence (6,000: approximately
1% of the population of that time) was a blow that could
not be ignored. Despite the deep sense of achievement
at the country’s defeat of the surrounding Arab
armies and despite the citizens’ pride and enthusiasm
regarding independence, a cloud hovered over Israeli life
from that period on, compounded by recognition of the
extent of the Shoah.
However, in those early years of statehood there was an
optimism born of the belief that time was working to Israel’s
advantage and that peace would arrive at some point. Israel
represented the force of the future; with its good, moral
intentions, the citizens were convinced that right would
win out in the end. When it became clear that the War
of Independence had not brought peace and that there was
likely to be more bloodshed in the future, the population
of Israel settled down to wait patiently. Wars came regularly
at first, approximately once a decade: after 1948 came
1956 and 1967. Despite the losses incurred, most Israelis
remained optimistic. The Six-Day War unleashed the full
effect of this phenomenon, later linked with a messianic
belief set free by the capturing of what had once been
the heartland of ancient Israel.
Many consider the turning point to have been the Yom Kippur
War in 1973. After this war, a different note began to
be heard. This was caused not only by the high death toll,
but also by the way in which victory had finally been
attained after appalling losses in the first days. The
war had come as a terrible surprise, the result –
many believed – of a general Israeli arrogance and
sense of invincibility. From that time forward, the atmosphere
in the country started to change and a much more pessimistic
– some would call it realistic – tone became
part of the national discourse.
This tone has increasingly darkened over the past decades,
reaching its height at such crises as the early stages
of the Lebanese War (early 1980s), the first Intifada
(late 1980s), the terror wave of the mid-90s and the second
Intifada (late 1990s). These were interrupted by the various
peace treaties and other moves towards peace that caused
optimism and occasional euphoria. At these periods of
hiatus – the Camp David agreement with Egypt, the
peace treaty with Jordan and the beginning of the Oslo
accords – large sectors of the population found
their old enthusiasm and regained the faith that time
was working towards peace and a new, more optimistic Middle
East. At the present time, however, most optimists are
fighting hard to retain any of their former faith. The
Middle East looks darker than perhaps it ever has before.
While there is hope that, at some point, breakthroughs
to peace must occur once again, such faith is more in
the line of a prayer than a solid, rational analysis of
the current situation.
War has affected Israeli creative culture in no uncertain
terms. A parallel change from optimism to pessimism has
been evident in the artistic process as well. The heroic,
mythical view of the Israeli soldier, fighting a good
cause against an evil enemy, has been replaced largely
by a more questioning, critical outlook that stresses
the complexity of the situation. The traditional ideas
of ‘good against bad’, ‘the few against
the many’ and ‘David against Goliath’
have been replaced by a less simplistic, much more multi-dimensional
attitude.
This transition is very clear in the field of cinema, as
demonstrated by the following important markers. The early
period of Israeli cinema often featured the soldier-as-hero
as one of its central figures. The 1954 feature Hill
24 Doesn’t Answer is typical of this genre.
In a particularly famous scene, the Israeli soldier is
seen fighting for his life against a prisoner from the
southern front, who turns out to be a Nazi S.S. officer.
The Israeli is portrayed as humane, generous and merciful
(but still a great fighter) while the Nazi is portrayed
as treacherous and militaristic, with no moral beliefs.
Different versions of this tough but moral figure, reluctant
to fight but willing to do so for a just cause, are found
in many of the early Israeli films. Since the self-image
of the Israeli was happily believed in and accepted by
Diaspora Jewry, it is not surprising to find such a figure
also appearing in films like Exodus and Cast
a Giant Shadow, as portrayed (respectively) by Paul
Newman and Kirk Douglas.
It was natural that, with the passage of time, more complex
pictures would start to creep in. The fascinating 1986
film Ricochet (Two Fingers From Sidon in Hebrew)
– made by the army as a training film for introducing
soldiers to the complexity of the situation in Lebanon
– proved to be a landmark in this regard. It portrays
the struggle between the idealistic, moral viewpoint of
Gadi, a new officer sent up from training school to Lebanon,
and the world-weary Tuvia, his commanding officer, who
is cynical and hardened by his experience of a world in
which idealism is a weakness. The film does not choose
sides between these two viewpoints, but remains ambivalent.
The Time of the Cherries (The Cherry Season
in Hebrew) was also a product of the Lebanese situation,
but was less ‘establishment’ and much less
ambivalent. This scathing, surrealistic 1991 film focused
on a group of civilians, called into reserve duty in Lebanon.
These figures are a far cry from the heroic soldiers in
early Israeli cinema: they are portrayed as victims, concerned
only with surviving their service and returning home unharmed,
though not unscarred. The film’s standpoint is that
this is the most sensible thing they can possibly do.
In one particularly harsh scene, one of the soldiers screams
out an intense accusation again the politicians whom he
blames for putting the army in such an absurd situation.
It is made clear that there is no glory in this war.
Another film relevant in this regard is the darkly pessimistic
– some have called it apocalyptic – view of
modern Israeli society portrayed in Assi Dayan’s
Life According to Agfa (1992). This film depicts
events one in a seedy Tel Aviv bar. Some soldiers have
taken their injured officer out of his hospital bed for
a night on the town. As the soldiers steadily become drunker,
their behavior becomes increasingly degenerate. Vulgar
and immoral, they mock the image of the Israeli soldier
as a moral figure, just as the music of an old Zionist
song mocks them as it accompanies them out of the bar
toward the end of the film.
Also worth mentioning is a very recent film, Yossi and
Jagger (2002) which focuses on the private relationship
between two gay officers. With this film, the image of
the macho Israeli officer has finally been overthrown.
We obtain different insights from observing the situation
through the prism of music. While it is well known that
many Israeli songs commemorate war and soldiers, many
people are less aware that the early Israeli wars tended
to produce a kind of ‘soundtrack’ that became
part of the public’s memory of events. This comprised
songs written in the run-up to the war (if there was one),
during the war (if it was long enough) or – most
often – in its immediate aftermath.. Because they
had the power to evoke the time of the war period –
for both the general public and the soldiers who had been
fighting – recordings of such songs were very popular.
It is interesting to note that, while the wars of 1948,
1967 and 1973 inspired an abundance of songs, the Lebanese
War failed to produce even one song. It seems that the
experience in Lebanon was both too depressing and too
divisive to evince a creative response.
The content of war and army songs in the early days tended
to revolve around three main subjects: the commemoration
of specific battles and military engagements; memories
– often affectionate or amusing – of different
sides of army life, and eulogies for the fallen. Over
the years, the latter has become dominant, while the other
genres have almost completely ceased. During the past
decade, however, a new kind of song has become prominent:
laments for the peace that has not yet come.
Apart from the humorous army song, all these different
kinds of song are broadcast over the radio on the two
annual days of remembrance, Holocaust Memorial Day and
Memorial Day (the latter, in honor of fallen soldiers).
Thus these songs have become an ever-evolving soundtrack
for the Israeli public: rather than being connected to
a specific war, they are simply associated with the very
subject of war.
Just as individual songs have resulted from the country’s
experience of war, they have – in turn – contributed
to the national consciousness of war. Anyone who wants
to understand something about Israel and war should listen
to these songs: it will soon become clear that the country’s
war experience has not been a happy one. There are neither
jingoistic songs of national arrogance nor songs of praise
to glorious victory. The overwhelming majority of these
songs are laments. In truth, while they have been produced
by war, they are not war songs: in the deepest sense,
they are songs of peace.
The same applies to Israeli prose and poetry. Many of Israel’s
(male) writers have participated in wars, so it is hardly
surprising that their writing reflects their experience.
Israeli poetry, in particular, is mainly tragic in feeling,
the poets yearning for their lost fathers, sons and comrades,
and for their lost innocence. When Amihai writes a series
of poems about a friend of his who died in the sands of
Ashkelon in 1948, he sounds totally authentic. This is
not a poetry of detachment but a poetry of the deepest
involvement.
In wider literary terms, a similar process occurred in
cinema. The writing of the early generation of post-1948
writers, often referred to as ‘the Palmah generation’
because of the participation of many of them in that elite
corps – is largely iconic. Heroic scenes and figures
fill their pages. For several, the morally pure soldier
merges with the Sabra, the heroic native-born man of the
land.
One voice in the Palmah generation went in a different
direction, however: S. Yizhar. From the outset, he stressed
the tragedy of war and conflict, and suggested the complex,
muddy morality that affects and sullies all those involved
in the business of war. His early books and stories, set
in the 1948 war, portray the Israeli soldier as morally
ambiguous. He is capable of petty acts of cruelty and
vindictiveness. This is clearly seen in his famous, much
anthologized story, The Prisoner of 1949. He was evidently
at odds with most writers of his generation; reading it
outside of its historical context, readers could easily
receive the impression that it was written after the conflict
in Lebanon.
Even before the Lebanon situation arose, many other authors
were beginning to write more critically about the experience
of army life, although this was not necessarily identical
with the experience of war. The drab reality of normal
life now undermined the mythical dimension that informed
much of the early work of the pre-State and early State
writers. Yitzchak Ben Ner, for example, writes convincingly
and depressingly in his story The Tower about life in
an army camp during peacetime. Everyday routine leaves
no space for heroics. The subject of this particular story
is the misfit, the most un-heroic character who generally
can be found in most army units. Ben Ner’s protagonist
is the thirty-first soldier in a unit meant for thirty.
All of the media mentioned so far – film, music and
literature – have related to the situation of the
Israeli soldier in the territories, and usually from a
critical point of view. Taking an example from popular
music, the first Intifada produced only a few songs, but
of a bitter, scathing type previously unknown in Israel.
The main ones produced by the first Intifada on the Israeli
side were both extremely political and critical of the
actions of the Israeli army. Si Heiman’s We Shoot
and We Cry asked when “we” learned to
bury people alive, referring to a particularly ugly incident
of cruelty on the part of some Israeli soldiers. Hava
Alberstein’s updated version of the classic Pesach
song Had Gadya equated Israel with the devouring
animal of the song. On the other hand, Etgar Keret’s
story Cocked and Locked explored the difficulties
of the Israeli soldier who is ordered to restrain himself
against Palestinian provocation. It is an excellent allegory
regarding the benefits of strength and weakness in the
current conflict.
The fact remains that the experience of war and army life
has deeply affected Israeli culture in both broad and
narrower aspects. This explains the extraordinary popularity
and influence of the army entertainment groups who dominated
the entertainment market into the 1970s. These were units
of up-coming artists, who were able to advance their careers
within a military framework. The perfect cultural symbol
of this very Israeli phenomenon was the Nahal Entertainment
Group – the best-known of all such units –
who entertained the combat troops with Shir Lashalom
(Song for Peace) – the best-known song from
such a unit, which song stresses the need to attain peace
and the importance of not glorifying war.