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.