Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

For my sister

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma

Part I: Victim Trauma

1. The Body as the Battlefield

2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror

3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

Part II: Perpetrator Trauma

4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator

5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator

6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature

Conclusion: The Perpetrator Complex

Notes

Works Cited

Further Reading

Filmography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book completes a journey into the heart of cinema trauma. The journey began with my prior research that delved into two post-traumatic cinematic cultures – German and American – which to a great extent defined my twentieth-century Jewish-Israeli identity. The first decade of the twenty-first century and its consequent transformation of the rules of war inevitably led me to deal with my own post-traumatic culture. Being an Israeli on the Left in the era of ongoing Israeli occupation of the Territories, and personally facing Palestinian suicide attacks, makes my subject position complex, yet clear. Providing a thorough interpretation of the unbearable realities of both victims and perpetrators became, by and through the writing of this book, an identity challenge that went beyond my scholarly aims.

My heartfelt thanks to all the people who helped me during the writing of this book. To Prof. Avner de Shalit, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University Jerusalem for his extraordinary humanity, support, and willingness to provide assistance in any way. Likewise to the head of the Communication and Journalism Department, Prof. Menahem Blondheim, for his illuminating and wise suggestions, his full support, and for the invariably interesting discussions. To Prof. Tamar Liebes and especially Prof. Ifat Maoz for their continuous help and strong support. To my colleagues in the Communication and Journalism Department, especially Prof. Elihu Katz, Prof. Etti Shelly-Newman, and Dr. Zohar Kampf. A special thanks also goes to Prof. Nurith Gertz and Prof. Mihal Friedman for their invaluable assistance at every stage.

My gratitude to Prof. Brian Winston for cheerfully volunteering his assistance throughout; as well as Prof. Daniel Dayan, Prof Bill Nichols, Prof. Michael Renov, and Prof. Philip Rosen. Thanks to Prof. Linda Williams for her generosity and warm assistance. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Prof. Janet Walker for her invaluable help and the many hours we spent in inspiring conversations.

Thanks to Prof. Yeshayahu Nir for our deep friendship throughout the years, his unstinting support and help, always with a touch of humor.

For help in obtaining the films, I am grateful to the Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts/ Cinema Project and its General Manager Giora Einy, to Yoav Abramovich and Ronit Kenan. Thanks to the Israeli Documentary Filmmakers Forum, the Jerusalem Cinematheque, The Israel Film Fund and its Executive Director Katriel Schory. Thank you to directors Tawfik Abu-Wael, Idan Alterman, Vidi Bilu, Amit Drori, Dalia Hager, Ari Folman, Eytan Fox, Dov Gil-Har, Aron Goldfinger, Nurit Kedar, Yair Kedar, Amos Kollek, Yair Lev, Eliav Lilti, Avi Mograbi, David Ofek, Yael Perlov, Eran Riklis, and Tamar Yarom for their cooperation. Thanks to Gal Uchovsky, Micha Shagrir – Tapuz Communications and the Moments Project, to Buzz Films, to Yehuda Biton Productions, to Arik Barnshtein – Lama Production, Haim Mecklberg and Esti Ya’akov–Mecklberg – 2team Productions, and Transfax Productions.

Thanks to Helene Landau, my English editor, for the invaluable assistance she provided in bringing the book to press. Her unstinting devotion and uncompromising professionalism was felt every step of the way. Thanks to my student Avichay Sharon, a founder of Breaking the Silence, for his invaluable help, and my student Noa Alfia for her assistance. Thanks to Gal Yaniv from the multimedia center at the Hebrew University for always volunteering his help.

Many thanks to Maria Marsh, the I.B.Tauris Middle East editor, and to Liza Thompson, the I.B.Tauris Visual Culture series editor. Thanks to Hannah Wilks for meticulous language editing and preparing the index.

To my extended family and friends, thank you for your love and support. And my wonderful daughters Reout and Rotem. This book is dedicated with love and appreciation to my sister, Shiffi Shmueli. And in memory of my dear friends Bilha Ben-David and Gary Bornstein.

My thanks to the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University for their generous support in funding this research; to the Levi Eshkol Institute for Social, Economic and Political Research in Israel at the Hebrew University; and the Smart Family Foundation Communications Institute at the Hebrew University for funding this research.

Shorter versions of chapters 1-3 appeared in the Journal of Film and Video, Framework, and the International Journal of Communication respectively. A shorter version of chapters 4-5 appeared in Camera Obscura.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The funeral mass, The Human Resources Manager

The journey: a moral façade, The Human Resources Manager

Displacement of Israeli terror, The Human Resources Manager

Driving the Soviet tank: emotional necrophilia and false guilt, The Human Resources Manager

The skeleton of the bus takes the place of the unidentified body, No. 17

The director of No. 17 asks for the public’s help identifying the anonymous victim from a sketch

Post-traumatic docu-activism, No. 17

The detonatorg: Said and Khaled, Paradise Now

“Who is the suicide bomber?”, Paradise Now

Looking for terror suspects, Close to Home

Endless cycle of the Occupation, Close to Home

Passengers on a bus: waiting for an attack, Just Not Another Suicide Bombing

Disembodied voices, Ringtones

Suddenness displayed as emptiness, Three Minutes to Four

Flashback to childhood voyeurism: Essam, Diary of a Male Whore

Suicidal Gay Fantasy: Ashraf (right) and Noam (left), The Bubble

Palestinian Passing: Lulu, Noam, Ashraf and Yali, The Bubble

Romantic love enables denial of the Occupation, The Bubble

The complicitous event of raising flares, Waltz with Bashir

From imagined to actual perpetrator: Folman, Waltz with Bashir

An intriguing hybrid: docu-mation, Waltz with Bashir

A crisis of disclosure: Carmi, Waltz with Bashir

Mask-to-Mask: guilt transference in Avi Mograbi’s Z32

A crisis of disclosure: the ex-soldier, Z32

Giving a cinematic shelter to a murderer? The director, Z32

Female soldiers in Gaza, Sob’ Skirt

Masculine role and complicity, Sob’ Skirt

An autobiographical-based female perpetrator trauma film, Sob’ Skirt

Becoming part of the group: Shirli (Dana Ivgy), Sob’ Skirt

Women soldiers at the checkpoint, To See if I’m Smiling

Pain and Shame: Meytal in the last scene of To See if I’m Smiling

PREFACE

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unfolding since the beginning of Zionist settlement in the area during the 1880s and lasting until this very day, is the longest running ethno-religious conflict in the modern era. It is a conflict that is constantly intensifying, escalating through the course of seven wars, two Intifadas,¹ and a series of short-term armed confrontations. Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Israeli War of Independence/Palestinian Nakba,² an average of one war or armed conflict has occurred every six years.³ The Israeli Occupation (of 1948, but particularly of 1967) has enforced colonial and neo-colonial dependency and subjugating relations on Palestinian society. This is evidenced by the more recent eruption of two Intifadas, Palestinian suicide terrorism, and Israeli state terror; it has contributed to the sharp polarization of Israeli society into left and right camps, and led to major political-religious upheavals, specifically the rise of the settlement movement and the growth of Jewish, as well as Islamic, fundamentalism. The protracted conflict has determined not only the national agendas of Israelis (and Palestinians), but their psychological and creative ones as well. In other words, the representation of the conflict has to a certain extent become an ethical criterion for assessing Israeli narrative and documentary cinema. The incessant need to respond to news-driven reality, ostensibly a creative limitation, may in fact have become a criterion for evaluating Israeli morality, past and present, enabling Israeli cinema, especially documentary, to drastically subvert traditional concepts. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema takes as its subject one major route of subversion – the post-second Intifada new wave of films (and literature) that represent the trauma of the perpetrator.

The second Intifada period, which I chose to focus on because of the drastic change in the style of war it entails, posted a challenge for the Israeli documentary maker. The moral position Israelis assume vis-à-vis the Occupation and its representation, in particular of the ethnic-religious-national other, comes to bear on documentary film-making. Israeli documentary is a cinema of constant struggle: the reality in which it is created is imposed not only on its protagonists, but on its makers as well. Moreover, it struggles to express that which fictional cinema fails to deal with. As part of the struggle, the new wave of documentary films, as well as this book, strives to tackle a repressed set of conceptions. Both in trauma cinema research and in Israeli public discourse and narrative cinema the figure of the post-traumatic perpetrator is repressed. This book ventures to analyze the case of this pioneering wave of Israeli films (and literature) in order to mark trauma cinema research’s transition from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

Every period has its own imagines mortis (images of death), which in times of war and trauma, of course, have a special resonance. In 2008, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman was one of the first documentarists to challenge local as well as world cinema audiences with his post-trauma as a war perpetrator. In his celebrated docu-animation Waltz with Bashir, Folman, who is the screenwriter and the director of the film, portrays an imaginary “dance of death,” or danse macabre.⁴ The dance scene, representing a traumatic event that took place twenty-six years earlier in West Beirut’s Khamra quarter, in the midst of the Lebanon War, shows an Israeli platoon trapped by invisible snipers. The snipers are shooting into a central junction from the upper floors of surrounding buildings while Lebanese civilians stand on balconies watching the battle “as if it were a movie.” In the midst of the chaos, when Israeli soldiers, shot trying to cross the junction, lay on the ground (shown from the snipers’ point of view), and others, trying to reach the wounded, are trapped and shot, a turning point occurs. As Folman’s voiceover tells us, Israeli solider Shmuel Frenkel leaves the soldiers’ inadequate hiding place on the street, grabs a MAG machine gun, and amid heavy enemy fire enters the junction. Instead of crossing to the other side, Frenkel stays in the middle, shooting in all directions as if in a trance, “dancing a waltz between the bullets” to the sound of Chopin’s Waltz in C Sharp Minor.

His waltz embodies, of course, the phantasmatic element of mastery over death and winning the battle. Instead of the snipers luring the Israeli soldiers into the trap, the dance was meant to expose the snipers’ hiding place by focusing their fire on the dancer. Frenkel’s danse macabre with the Lebanese snipers reflects, that is, on the subject position of the living-dead. The mise-en-scéne, however, reveals that the dance is significant beyond that one trap: it not only portrays Frenkel at the center of the frame, but also the huge poster images of the recently assassinated Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel pasted on the walls around the junction.

The historian Johan Huizinga claimed that in the Middle Ages the danse macabre was positioned against the backdrop of the fierce emotions death generates in times of war, plague, and famine.⁵ In the well-known danse macabre of medieval murals, the dancers are led by a corpse or a skeleton, which often tug or draw the living to Death (J. Cohen 1982). In a series of danse macabre woodcuts by German painter and draughtsman Hans Holbein the Younger, published in Lyon in 1538, for instance, as in the above – described scene, Death surprises one victim after another; often very violently.⁶ Folman’s voiceover, which, as we recall, reflects on Frenkel’s memories interwoven with Folman’s own convoluted memories of the war, tells us that Frenkel’s dance took place when “two hundred meters from the junction, Bashir’s followers were planning their revenge, genocide in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.”

Who symbolizes the dead, then, in the junction scene, and who embodies the living? A real waltz is performed by couples dancing closely, and Frenkel’s is obviously an ironic-tragic statement on Israel’s failed “couplehood” with Bashir. However, this danse macabre is also a portent of the extremely horrific trap yet to occur. Waltzing with Bashir aims to interrogate all possible kinds of military and moral traps – whether collective or individual, experienced by victims or by perpetrators – with the aim of redefining what seems to be an unbinding trap: the traditional intermingling of the victim and perpetrator subject positions. Thus, it is my hope to – offer a new perspective on the question of responsibility and guilt, the skeleton and the dancer, in light of the changes that current twenty-first century new war and trauma entail.

Proposing a new direction in cinema studies dealing with national traumas, one that for the first time recognizes a shift from trauma suffered by victims to that of perpetrators, requires a new epistemology: the book focuses on this new venue, requiring its readers to break deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. As an Israeli leftist scholar, caught in the trap of being symbolically and practically part of a regime of an occupation I detest, it is my aim to define the horizon of the new epistemology in order to pave the way for acknowledgment of perpetration deeds done in my name in the Occupied Territories. Thus, I see the path to a new epistemology, hopefully shared by other cinema trauma scholars who interrogate similar events and films, as one leading to possible reconciliation. Reconciliation, in contrast to conflict resolution, I suggest, must include a changed psychological orientation towards the other. As I see it, we need to overcome the deeds of the other, of ourselves, to fulfill our deep moral obligation towards the ethnic other.

INTRODUCTION

FROM VICTIM TO PERPETRATOR TRAUMA

Part and parcel with the inability to confront the evil is an inner sense that it cannot be forgiven. It is a sense that one has been part of a wound in the order of being, to use Buber’s term, a profound upsetting of the universe or of human experience. This is too much for an individual to take in, acknowledge, confront, and redeem oneself in relationship to. Robert Jay Lifton¹

Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s award-winning film² (Israel, 2008) opens with a portrayal of an ex-soldier’s post-trauma. We experience with Boaz, a former soldier and Folman’s comrade-in-arms, the rush of a never-ending nightmare featuring the barking of the dead: dogs shot before battle to prevent them revealing that Israeli troops are entering a Lebanese village. During the opening scene, the dogs are running through Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. They are barking, their eyes are gleaming, and they unceasingly howl as they wait in front of Boaz’s apartment until he comes to the window, as they have every night for the past twenty-six years. The scene’s yellow-gray colors, the menacing voices, and the stormy night in which he meets Boaz flood Folman (and conceivably the Israeli viewer) with the repressed memory of the Lebanon War. Boaz’s confession to killing the dogs gives the film the feeling of truth revealed; however, the yellow colors dominating the scene, the neon-likeness of traumatic memory, is discovered in retrospect to have been taken from the complicitous event of raising flares during the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. Moreover, Boaz’s confession is but a partial story. During his confession to Folman he neither relates to other actions taken in the village nor reflects on his comrades-in-arms, who unlike him were willing to kill Lebanese. Are the howling dogs a symbol of what he did not confess to?

The opening scene refers to one of the three nightmares in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), which deals with what Lifton calls survivor guilt (1979). In the episode entitled “The Tunnel” a recently released prisoner of war makes his way home. He enters a dark, menacing tunnel reminiscent of a throat. A dog trained in anti-tank warfare races toward him, explosives strapped to his body. It bares its teeth in the gloom of the tunnel and barks, the sound like that of a machine gun. The soldier is frightened. The close-up of the “mad dog,” as Kurosawa calls it in his screenplay (Serper 2001), is replaced by the sound of marching. The officer’s platoon of dead soldiers marches out of the tunnel. Facing the ghosts outraged by their fate, he confesses his guilt and then orders them to return to where they came from; they turn their deathly blue faces and march back into the darkness. The officer collapses next to the tunnel entrance, his back to the lights of his home, flickering in the distance. The echo of steps is replaced by the sounds of wind instruments playing The Requiem. Then, illuminated in red, the dog reappears, again baring its wolf-like teeth at the commander and barking.

In Dreams, the Japanese commander confronts his guilt for having survived the battle, his responsibility for the defeat, and the enormity of acknowledging them. The incident remains imprinted on his mind, and must be returned to and continually banished; its sounds never ceasing. Despite his acknowledgement of guilt and responsibility, the nightmare continues. In Waltz, the menacing voices and the stormy night serve as the uncanny backdrop for the first confession to acts committed by Israeli soldiers during the first Lebanon War. Folman’s hommage to Kurosawa’s film stresses that post-traumatic nightmares never cease for either the Japanese commander or the Israeli soldier. However, as Folman’s own memories unfold, Waltz reflects on the differences between survivor guilt and that of the perpetrator, and between a shared past and collective misrecognition.

As even this cursory comparison between the two scenes demonstrates, a huge difference between twentieth and twenty-first century wars is reflected in the soldiers’ coming to terms with their traumatic memories. Boaz’s refusal to shoot civilians in a vague war zone is entirely different from combat between two regular armies in a distinct war zone as depicted by Kurosawa. Moreover, the difference in the nature of trauma projects on the difference in the nature of guilt, and of memory. As discussed in the following, twenty-first century films demand a complex negotiation of the discrepancies between the post-traumatic memories of individual soldiers, those of their army units, and, by implication, of the society that sent them, as well as construction of relevant identities and subject positions (victim-perpetrator).

Waltzing with Bashir has a two-fold objective. First, it proposes a new direction in cinema studies to deal with national traumas, one that for the first time recognizes a shift from trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators. Second, driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema (e.g., To See if I’m Smiling [Tamar Yarom, 2007], Waltz with Bashir [Ari Folman, 2008]; and Z32 [Avi Mograbi, 2008]), it analyzes second Intifada cinema in light of this shift. As Folman’s haunted autobiographical film and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema’s documentary unconscious presents the complex subject positions entailed in war and cinema. This new wave of Israeli films that broaches the topic of violent acts carried out by Israeli soldiers during the second Intifada has undoubtedly pioneered in world cinema the representation of the trauma of the (twenty-first century’s) perpetrator, appearing as it did before American documentary cinema on Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The book ventures to introduce this new sub-genre, and proposes to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between the victim’s testimony and the perpetrator’s confession, it seeks to theorize perpetrator trauma, a yet under-theorized field. To help contextualize this paradigm shift and theorize the victim-perpetrator gap in psychoanalysis and cinema literature, it takes as its starting point breaking the repression of perpetrator trauma in research.

The Perpetrator as an Unwanted Ghost

Judith Lewis-Herman begins her seminal work Trauma and Recovery with the statement:

The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness … Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims (1992b, 1).

This book offers a look at yet another kind of ghost: not of the dead, the absolute victim, to whose story we are undoubtedly committed; but rather of the perpetrator, an unwelcome ghost, whose post-traumatic account stands as a profound challenge and hurdle for the society at whose behest s/he was sent. Describing the change in perspective from the victim’s to the perpetrator’s trauma and thus the complex and multi-conflictual relations between the post-traumatic perpetrator and the society that precipitated his/her perpetration is at the core of this book. Placing the post-traumatic perpetrator at center stage is neither meant to undervalue the prominence of the victim and society’s imperative to bear witness,³ nor to reduce our concerned response to testimony depicting past atrocities or our basic concern for human life. Indeed, our responsibility for healing the victim and recognizing the enticement of blind denial are eternal legacies of past traumas, primarily that of the Holocaust.⁴ The proposed change in perspective is built on these legacies, on the established concept of the victim in Holocaust research, and on the valid and relatively stable status victim trauma has achieved in Western culture and research during the second half of the twentieth century.⁵

Moreover, conjuring the post-traumatic perpetrator is not meant to undermine the achievements of political movements that for the past two hundred years have promoted recognition of victim traumas in society and research – from the republican anticlerical movement of late nineteenth-century France (hysteria), the anti-war movement of early twentieth century (shell shock/combat neurosis), and through the feminist movement of mid-twentieth century Western Europe and North America (sexual and domestic violence) (Lewis-Herman 1992b). Following 9/11, trauma studies, including trauma cinema, have been vehemently committed to ongoing efforts to comprehend the traumatic event and bridge (victims’) distant suffering.⁶ These efforts inevitably, though in as yet hidden ways, intermingle with perpetrator trauma. I suggest untangling the current hidden connections between the victim and the perpetrator and exposing this discarded ghost as a new way of deepening our responsibility towards the (usually ethnic) other’s truth, and healing the rift in the fabric of the social order. In the post-Holocaust age, at the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and in the face of “new war” trauma, trauma culture and research developed to bear witness to the witness and to tell the unspeakable story of twentieth-century victim trauma have matured and are qualified to expand previous definitions, categorizations, and binarisms.

New war, in its contemporary, multilateral, and multipolar form, has been defined by various scholars as typified by radical transformations (Crawford 2003). The major traditional contrasts now in crisis are terror–war, front–home, civilian–soldier, defense–offense, beginning–end, victory–defeat, war–peace, and moral–immoral.⁷ As Agamben claims, “We must learn to see these oppositions not as ‘di-chotomies’ but as ‘di-polarities,’ not substantial, but tensional. I mean that we need a logic of the field, as in physics, where it is impossible to draw a line clearly and separate two different substances. The polarity is present and acts at each point of the field. Then you may suddenly have zones of indecidability or indifference” (Ulrich 2004). New war indeed imposes this new logic on us, demanding we decipher it on a global scale.

Furthermore, in the absence of a traditional war zone, when fighting involves “the deliberate targeting of non-combatants” (Crawford 2003), an acute bodily-ness characterizes new war. This implies rethinking a new bodily ontology, one that is highly pertinent to the body’s precariousness, vulnerability, and injurability.⁸ Thus, defining perpetrator trauma in the context of new war will expand our understanding of the relation between this new form of traumatic experience and the ethics derived from, and implicated in, new states of emergency.

Perpetrators’ accounts of their actions are not crucial proof of atrocities, nor can they be seen as complementary to victim narratives. Members of societies that facilitate perpetration by putting soldiers in atrocity-producing situations⁹ are not interested in perpetrators acknowledging the traumatic deeds they carried out in their name. This, however, must be a pre-condition for realizing that society’s (conscious or unconscious) refusal to acknowledge the perpetrators’ traumatization prevents it from fully recognizing its position. Ideally, acknowledgment of perpetrators’ trauma will set in motion society’s acknowledgment of the perpetrator as its envoy, and its relation to (usually ethnic) others. This acknowledgment is a first step towards a fuller consideration of life with others and thus of mourning those who were previously conceived as ungrievable.

Society’s unwillingness to accept that the perpetrators’ trauma is part and parcel of denial of responsibility for atrocities made in its name is reflected in the existence of two forms of complicity: the first entails direct corporeal perpetration and is the cause of the perpetrator’s post-traumatic reaction; the second entails indirect, mental perpetration and in the case of society at large is non-traumatic and individual. If, as in many armed conflicts, a limited segment of the population, usually soldiers in foreign lands, commits violations, domestic activism and international pressure causes an entire nation to face the trauma of perpetration.¹⁰ Differentiation between direct and indirect complicity is misleading in terms of moral responsibility, but gains force and resilience in public discourse as a result of their being commensurable with the traumatic event, which by its very nature necessitates the duality of direct and indirect belated response on both the individual and the collective levels. It is no wonder that on the collective level the differentiation itself is often displaced onto denial of the atrocious act,¹¹ or that the event itself becomes part of systemic atrocities that have undergone naturalization and are thus difficult to notice even as they are being produced (Crawford 1989).

Acknowledging perpetrators’ post-traumatic accounts enables us to bridge the gap between society at large, as a collective that has undergone the trauma of perpetration merely by proxy, and society made up partly of individuals who went through this personal agony. Bridging of this gap might be of assistance in elucidating the relationship between direct and indirect complicity in perpetration, which on the collective level are dialectic rather than exclusive of each other; and thus in considering the ethical ramifications of the differences and similarities between these positions in a world dominated by new war.

Perpetration can serve as a test case revealing the deep schism between the individual and the collective inherent in collective trauma; on the other hand, it can serve to transform individual trauma into collective trauma. Society’s denial of the perpetrators’ trauma and its concomitant failure to acknowledge its responsibility places it between the individual and collective trauma; and as the films to be discussed here show, there is a constant need to bridge these levels of perpetrator trauma.

Negotiating competing demands regarding the tension between individual and collective wrongdoing in war – denial vs. recognition, ordinary vs. exceptional action, autonomy vs. submissiveness, group identification vs. dis-identification, activity vs. passivity, closeness vs. distance – lies at the heart of complicity.

Victim trauma research since Freud has imprinted on the Western cultural unconscious the inability to rid itself of either of two common responses: it either identifies with the perpetrators’ subject position as a means of denying its responsibility towards the other, the victim; or identifies with (itself as) the victim as a means of denying societal responsibility. The former response is a major bias that victim trauma literature confronts in the context of its call to recognize the victims’ ordeal, to sympathize with the powerless, and not to succumb to the temptation of taking sides with the powerful; the latter is an outcome of victim-trauma culture and trauma envy. I suggest that willingness to acknowledge the perpetrators’ trauma is required in order to break out of trauma envy, un-speak its language, overcome this entanglement, and build an ethical stand towards the consequences of new war trauma, thus healing the social order and the (ethnic) other.¹²

Repression in Research – Transitional Justice in a Murky Territory

These complex relations with the perpetrator are rooted in the evolution of trauma theory. It is somehow taken for granted that canonical psychological and psychiatric trauma research from Freud’s Aetiology of Hysteria (1896) to the present has been carried out from the perspective of identification with the victim, preventing trauma research from offering the tools necessary to cope with the post-traumatic perpetrator. Dealing with such trauma is excluded, unimaginable, and perceived as unseemly.

The abandonment of seduction theory is widely regarded as a seminal event in the history of psychoanalysis and of trauma theory. Freud’s (in)famous writing on hysteria marks the inception of trauma studies, and his abandonment marks it as a symptom of the field’s repression of the victimizer. According to tradition, in the 1890s, during the course of their analyses, most of Freud’s patients, especially female, reported having been seduced and sexually abused by their fathers in early childhood. At first, according to this account, he believed what his patients told him; however, on September 27, 1897, Freud wrote to Fliess, saying that he was abandoning the seduction theory:

The continual disappointment in my effort to bring a single analysis to a real conclusion; the running away of people who for a period of time had been most gripped [by analysis]; the absence of the complete successes on which I had counted; the possibility of explaining to myself the partial successes in other ways, in the usual fashion – this was the first group. Then the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse – the realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, with precisely the same conditions prevailing in each, whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are not very probable (264–5).

Later Freud (1925) stated:

I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them… My confidence alike in my technique and in its results suffered a severe blow.

He thereby retreated from his original claims: instead of seduction theory Freud emphasized the pre-eminent role of infantile fantasy and infantile sexuality in psychosexual development. Freud’s efforts to cleanse the father figure eventually led to it being tarnished in trauma theory. Similarly, forced to compete with Freud and Breuer and reluctant to disclose his techniques of suggestion, Janet erased the traumatic memory of his patient but reported on it as if she were the narrator of the memories (Leys 1996; Wilson 1995).

The huge body of literature analyzing Freud’s complex transformation (using psychoanalytical, autobiographical, literary, feminist, and homosexual/lesbian perspectives – to mention only the most dominant lines of inquiry), discusses the effect the position of the father as a demonic and excluded figure has had on the development of trauma research and studies over the last two centuries; but scarcely emphasizes, as I see it, that the field has being haunted by this ghostly shadow.

In fact, there is more than one ghost. The unknown abusers (husbands, brothers), Freud, but also Freud’s father and Fliess are cast in this ghostly role; in Dora’s case, Mr. K is identified and should be added to the list. Moreover, through transference and counter-transference processes described in psychological-psychiatric as well as literary literature, a “multiple fathering” emerges. Does the multiplicity of appearances further hide the abuser? Or has he become a decipherable subject?

Since the dominant point of view has always been that of the victim, even debates relating to the father figure did not discuss him beyond his real or imagined relations with the victim. On one hand, the autobiographical perspective that “humanizes” Freud as a victim is part of this complex reappraisal, including interpretations that emphasize that Freud’s claims regarding infantile fantasies are inspired by insights regarding relations with his father as well as his break with Fliess (Gay 1988). From this perspective, the death of his father in 1896 freed Freud to complete his self-analysis, and thus acknowledge the aggression that had led him to wish the worst on his father and even suspect him of incest. This line of thought highlights, as claimed above, the difference between seduction theory, which had posited widespread paternal sexual abuse of children in the real world, and Oedipal theory, which accused the sons instead, “but only of parricidal fantasies, a much lighter charge, and one which maintained a degree of ‘piety’ toward the father” (Wollen 1999, 159). On the other hand, literary interpretations suggest that through his literary writing style Freud, a modern unreliable narrator, ultimately becomes the protagonist instead of Dora (Marcus 1990; Sprengnether 1990). Others read Dora as an emblem of the rebellious woman/patient against the father/ analyst and/or her reaction as a revenge transferred to him. The fort/ da game, that is, is not only related to the mother on a metaphoric, meta-discursive level, but also to the father figure who hides and then reveals himself and his counterparts.

During, and since, the Victorian period, discussing the monstrous abuser has been conceived improper, though the symbolic status the abuser attained through the years remained untouched. Moreover, most modern research has dealt with the inevitable harm done to the victim as a result of this repression. A reading of even some of the enormous body of literature on the subject (Dora’s case in particular) reveals that whether pointing out the manifest discrepancies between Freud’s original papers and his later reports (Jeffrey Masson 1984; Allen Esterson 1998), following autobiographical/literary interpretations (Marcus 1990; Sprengnether 1990), feminist critique (Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément 1990), Lacanian perspectives (Jane Gallop 1990), or lesbian-feminist interventions (Toril Moi 1990), the victimizer undergoes mythologization. This is apparent in most of the major interpretations and by observing the various means Freud used to obscure what actually occurred with his patients during the period in question. In the following, the ways in which this upheaval not only damaged the victim, but colored trauma studies and consequently painted the victimizer as a monstrous, obscure, and undetected figure will be emphasized.

In the 120-year-old struggle of trauma research to decipher the significant transformation underwent by the father of psychoanalysis, the victimizer, even when humanized, took back stage, and when he did take front stage was denounced. One of the first scholars to define the complex, amnesic, evolution of trauma theory, Lewis-Herman, claims:

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of the pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering… In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting… After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail (1992b).

This description, intended to elevate the victim’s agenda in psychiatric and psychological circles, no less than in trauma theory, takes for granted the perpetrator-victim binarism. In terms of the traumatic experience, these subject positions are, of course, diametrically opposed. In victim trauma research – as in therapy – perpetrators of atrocities are the incarnation of evil, undoubtedly an unwanted ghost. As representative of the major trend in trauma studies, can this research deal with, for instance, the above-told nightmare of the Israeli ex-soldier? And if so, would it “victimize” him, that is, make him an inevitable – albeit reluctant – victim? Is victim trauma limited to the victim by the firm boundaries it (rightly) set in order to defend the victim of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century catastrophes? Is the trauma undergone by the perpetrator at all an inevitable part of psychiatric-psychological or cultural perspectives on trauma?

This interest in the victim, as well as continuous discussion surrounding the crisis of testimony in psychoanalysis; literature; the courts; and the writing of history and trauma, was widely analyzed during the 1990s and the first decade of this century vis-à-vis the Holocaust, war, and domestic and state violence.¹³ In other words, in the following decades as well, treatment-oriented or ideology-motivated research, duty-bound to study the major catastrophes of the twentieth century, is inherently committed to the trauma of victims and far less to that of perpetrators. Psychiatric and psychological trauma research is not alone. Contemporary humanities-based trauma studies, whose main tenets embrace the temporality of the victims’ traumatic memory (e.g., Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 1995; Caruth 1996; and Leys 2000) and cinema trauma research (e.g., Walker 2005; Kaplan 2005; Kaes 2009; and Sarkar and Walker 2010) also largely identify with the victims and are devoted to illuminating their ordeal. The pervasiveness of this perspective has inevitably contributed to the firm victim-perpetrator binarism and the exclusion of perpetrator trauma.

In the late-1990s, however, especially during the deliberations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, three major theoretical transformations emerged and played a significant role in human rights discourse: first, each category identified by the Commission (victim, perpetrator, bystander, beneficiary) was examined independently of the others; second, the main categories (victim and perpetrator) were considered hetero- rather than homogeneous (differentiation was made between institutional and sectoral perpetrators, individual perpetrators, victims by proxy, secondary victims, etc.);¹⁴ and third and consequently, the victim-perpetrator binarism was broken, opening the possibility for interchange between the two categories. These new theoretical insights could not have been included in contemporary trauma discourse prevalent in the mid-1990s pioneered by Caruth, and they have yet to be adopted by new trends in cinema research, which may perceive the transcendence of this binarism as an inevitable act of critique in certain political situations, especially in relation to the post-9/11 war on terror/new war. We should recall that conceptions of war trauma are generally derived from old, modern, wars.

Despite its limitations, this review reveals the extent to which perpetrator trauma is repressed in trauma research. The absence of such a history; the humanistic need to defend and treat the victim; processes of societal denial and projection; and the threat post-traumatic perpetrators pose to the privileged position of victims and their social-cultural monopoly – all demonstrate that this abhorrent figure is rejected and obscure, thus making the scholar’s (or the therapist’s) identification with the field extremely tenuous.

In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominique LaCapra, one of the first scholars to address the nature of this category, claims: “There is the possibility of perpetrator trauma which must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from an earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices” (2001, 79). This acknowledgment will henceforth serve as the cornerstone for a preliminary definition of perpetrator trauma. The discussion will take this suggestion together with Judith Butler’s notions of the precariousness of the body and self, of responsibility, and of the grievable (2000; 2004; 2005; 2009). Although they do not relate specifically to the issue of perpetration, their contribution to the inquiry and to defining ethics of subjectivity, especially in the context of new war/war on terror, makes the epistemic extremity of perpetrator trauma highly relevant.¹⁵ The following introductory definition of perpetrator trauma is inspired by these works as being part of the by now all-pervasive “ethical turn” in current cultural-philosophical research (mainly but not exclusively developed after 9/11).¹⁶

Defining Perpetrator Trauma

To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself. The disorientation of grief – “Who have I become?” or, indeed, “What is left of me?”… posits the “I” in the mode of unknowingness… But this can be a point of departure for a new understanding if the narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia can be moved into a consideration of the vulnerability of others (Butler 2004, 30).

The following table compares perpetrator with victim trauma. At first glance, it invokes a temptation to ignore the differences between the two subject positions, accentuate their similarities, and displace the ethical with the psychological register.¹⁷ This slippery habit of addressing the perpetrator as a victim seems to be based on at least four major preconceptions: the “victimized” point of view one is conditioned to when relating to trauma after the Holocaust, which also attests to the vast influence of Holocaust discourse on conceptualizations of the postmodern subject (as Eric Santner, for instance, claims [1986]); the traumania of the twentieth century;¹⁸ the conflation between what LaCapra calls structural, trans-historical, trauma and historical trauma (2001, 76–85); and the above mentioned transformation of traditional/ modern war to contemporary forms of new war.

In contrast to LaCapra’s seminal work that follows the course of traditional wars, I suggest that defining perpetrator trauma in the era of new war requires a different hierarchy between the psychological, the ethical, the social, and the political. In line with Caruth/Freud’s definition of victim trauma on one hand and Butler’s call for rethinking the precariousness of the body and self in new wars, mentioned above, on the other, we should take into consideration the shift in the nature of trauma.

New War Trauma

In the following, I will discuss the disparate characteristics of the two paradigms as demonstrated in this table. In order to avoid cultural slippage into habitual victim-centricity or trauma-envy, one should take as a point of departure the very foundation of perpetrator trauma – the ethical account. Future-oriented towards the ethical imperative, this basic disparity between the ethical and the psychological registers determines all other differentiations between perpetrator and victim trauma.

| Victim trauma | Perpetrator trauma
Character | Psychological [ethical, social, political] | Ethical [social, political]
Fundamental psychic process | Psychological disintegration | Profound moral contradictions
Nature of representation | Crisis, incoherent, unrepresentable, might be “historically inaccurate,” based on emotional truth | Crisis, coherent, representable, historically accurate, based on ethical truth
Epistemology | Recognition | Acknowledgement
Traumatic experience | Death/ Survival | Perpetration of atrocities
Relation to the other | Rejection | Empathy
Relation to the event | Distanciation | Presentness
Relation to audience | Address, demand for participation, eliciting compassion | Shame, guilt, [hidden demand for forgiveness]
Emotional attitude | Self-involvement | Self-denouncement
Mode/Format | Testimony | Confession
Time/Space | Belatedness | Being there
Subject position | Given | Conditioned

The paradigm shift from victim to perpetrator trauma requires a change not only in regard to the nature of trauma, but, as hinted above, to the nature of guilt. Writing on Vietnam war veterans, for instance, Robert Jay Lifton (1980) characterizes two types of what he terms “static guilt”: first, “a self-lacerating, or mea culpa form, in which one constantly proclaims one’s own evil in a self-enclosed fashion that permits little change”; and second, a “numbed guilt, the inability to confront one’s death immersion, resulting in a pattern of avoidance together with vague but often distressing feelings of uneasiness and, in many other cases, other symptoms as well (including depression, uncontrollable anger, and various bodily complaints)” (120).¹⁹ These two forms of guilt (together with survivor guilt described by Lifton in later writings) indicate a pre-conceptualization of the veterans as victims that, as described at length above, was conceived in psychological terms in pre-new-war research (and treatment). Perpetrator trauma, in contrast, is committed to an active epistemic sense of guilt, and not to guilt feelings.

The gap between guilt feelings (characterized by evoking identification, melancholic narcissism, self-pity, and looking “backward”) and a sense of guilt (motivated by empathy for the victims and characterized by assuming responsibility and looking “forward”), will therefore be an inevitable part of the perpetrator’s relation with society, which I define as the perpetrator complex.²⁰ “Looking forward” includes but is not limited to halting policies that lead to atrocity, increasing the impact of international human rights norms and proper functioning of the public sphere, making reparations, encouraging domestic activism, and reviewing and revising the choice of weapons and rules of engagement.

Although cinematic representations of perpetrator trauma might seem to have a psychological character similar to that of victim trauma, with its abundance of symptoms, the core of perpetrator trauma lies in the profound moral contradictions challenging the perpetrators rather than in their psychological disintegration or disturbing and intrusive memories. The reason for this distinction lies in the nature of the traumatic experience. The events perpetrators need to face are not “shock and complete surprise,” (Critchley 1999, 237) overwhelming catastrophes that entangle “knowing and not knowing” (Caruth 1996), but events of (usually active) participation in known-in-advance atrocities.

As Laub and Lee claim (2003):

With respect to the infliction of trauma, we believe that at some moment the perpetrator makes a conscious decision to act. That conscious decision and the action that ensues, whether the perpetrator is acting under another’s orders or not, undoes the libidinal and empathic bond with the other – the victim in this case – and releases the death instinct from its neutralizing tie to Eros. The death instinct then continues to function as a force of erasure, a silencing of that destruction and its memory (439).

Therefore, although, as mentioned, perpetrators may suffer from recurring belated symptoms similar to those of victims, they relate to the perplexity of denial of wrongdoing or the inability to prevent returning to the guilt-ridden experience rather than to the incomprehensibility at the heart of the traumatic events. Perpetrator trauma therefore induces perpetrators to reflect on fissures in their own integrity, which stand in contrast to victims’ truly knowing/not knowing the threat of death or the enigma of survival.²¹

In other words, epistemologically, acknowledgment of the deed stands in contrast to recognition of the catastrophe. My choice of the term “recognition” to define victim trauma is based on two distinctions offered in Butler’s discussion of recognition (vs. apprehension), in which she framed contested notions of personhood.²² First, she regards recognition as the stronger term, derived from Hegelian texts and subject to many revisions and criticisms, while apprehension implies marking, registering, and acknowledging without full cognition. Second, she regards recognition as a reciprocal act or practice undertaken by at least two subjects (2009, 4–12). I choose to use the term “acknowledgment” when referring to perpetrator trauma in light of the perpetrator’s knowing in advance the catastrophe s/he causes the victim, and the absence of reciprocity in victim trauma.

Thus, unlike traumatic belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) as discussed, for instance, by Van der Kolk and Van Der Hart (1995) and LaCapra (2001, 81 note 56, 81–2), which characterizes victims’ psychological quest for recognition of the undecipherable nature of life-shattering experiences, perpetrator trauma is more associated with being in the actual space where the event took place, the site of atrocities, taking the Barthesian “being there” literally. This conception accentuates the evidentiary of the physical space over the volatility of time.²³ The physical tangibility of the war zone is crucial for the perpetrators’ acknowledgment; in many respects it is complementary to the physical traces of the atrocities themselves.

In other words, victims experience the traumatic event as an experience in time, a durée; however, it is the physical space in which the event took place that haunts the perpetrators’ post-traumatic subjectivity. Acknowledging their part naturally has to do with “being in time,” but even more with “being there.” In contrast to the unreferential trauma of victims, that is, the site of atrocities is a key point of reference for the perpetrators. As Fredric Jameson suggests (2009), “The space of modern warfare is vulnerable by definition and no longer belongs to anyone” (1537). The forgotten space of atrocities characterizes perpetrator trauma because, as I formulate in the following, even though in new war the body has become the battlefield, the space of atrocities provides trace evidence of the event.

Unlike victims, whose position necessitates, so it seems, a distanciation from, and rejection of, the perpetrators, empathy for the victim and openness stand at the core of perpetrators’ new war relations to otherness.²⁴ In a Butlerian post-Hegelian formulation, primary and irreducible relations to others are a “precondition of ethical responsiveness.”²⁵

In terms of perpetrator trauma, should this concept of primary-ness and self-fathoming to the degree of accepting the other within me be adopted, as suggested by Butler and others; or should the concept of postulating a preontological persecution by the other be adopted, as suggested by Levinas (1969; 1985; 1986) and others (Wright, Hughes, and Ainley 1988)? Whether or not the differences between Butlerian and Levinasian ethics are considered, if Butler is correct in suggesting humility is the final aim of self-accounting, it certainly has a special resonance for the perpetrator.

Moreover, the perpetrators’ empathic unsettlement, to use LaCapra’s vivid phrase, as a response to the victim – including the dead – might lead to mourning only if forms of self-involvement (like self-pity, guilt feelings, melancholia, and reactionary nostalgia) are replaced with self-denouncement. On the other hand, as Lifton argues, in relation to the twentieth century, “With events like Hiroshima or the Holocaust, the experience is too massive… How can you grieve or work through the mourning of all that? It is not possible” (in Flynn 1999, 49). Undoubtedly, notwithstanding the scale of the trauma, the tension between the possibility of mourning or grievability, and impaired mourning, is at the core of the perpetrator’s post-traumatic reaction.

How do we grasp the personal vs. the social-political facet of this relation to otherness? In the context of new war, the law of grievability, with its emphasis on the substitutability of the I rather than its singularity, tends more towards understanding the social conditions of responsibility. Even if the post-traumatic perpetrator were capable of diverse forms of self-awareness through confession, the outcome of the confession would be redefined, necessarily, as a social dilemma. In other words, the perpetrator’s ethical insight must be tested against society’s willingness to accept responsibility, rather than its willingness to accept the perpetrator.

In new war, in an Agambenian bared space, this means that society, as Benjamin; Butler; and others state, must disclose the hidden relationship between law and the absence of law.²⁶ The structural interrelation of the Benjaminian (1940/2009) dissociation between schalten and walten (command and administer) (2–3) must be reevaluated. Agamben (2005) claims that the state of exception has acquired the meaning of public mourning. He tries to understand this dramatic shift and its connection to sovereignty through a genealogical inquiry into the sovereign death, which is mourned; that is, the imperial iustitium (65). Evolution from the state of exception to public mourning is explained by the resemblance between the manifestations of mourning and those of anomie (periods in which normal social structures collapse and social functions and roles break down) and by pointing out that the ultimate reason for this resemblance is sought in the idea of “anomic terror.” The explanations given by Agamben and Butler above all point to the irresolvability of this shift in the state of exception. This is another impediment to society’s necessary efforts to simultaneously interrupt the killing (bio-political) machine and reestablish the structure and cultural conditions for adequate mourning for such overwhelming events. In sum, beyond perpetrator’s empathy towards the other, the victim, rests a societal obligation to establish new forms of governance that will enable adequate mourning. The perpetrator’s empathy will gain meaning only in relation to these collective processes.

In contrast to victims’ testimony, perpetrators “confess” their accounts, which I regard as the relevant mode for describing their ethical response:²⁷ confession unravels the tangled relationship of memory to trauma and history. As indicated above, in current trauma research victim testimony is marked by the absence of the traumatic event, since it neither registers in, let alone integrates into, the victim’s consciousness. Moreover, in contrast to the (failed) narrativization of victims (as most scholars dealing with the subject claim), the perpetrators’ confessions are “successful” because they are inherently self-incriminating. While the failure of testimony (ambiguous, contradictory, opaque, fragmentary, partial, indistinct or disguised – to recall but few of the ways it is described in research) to capture the incident is evident (Felman and Laub 1992), the “success” of confession ideally captures its referent, the deed. This does not mean that the confession is a truer depiction of the traumatic event, but rather that it is a truer conveyor of total acknowledgment based on appreciation of the historical-traumatic referent. Again ideally, perpetrators’ confessions are shaped by willful introspection aimed not on providing a narrative of selfhood, but a reassessment of values and affirmation of total transparency regarding the content of the confession.

Central to confession as a mode, regardless of its religious roots and in contrast to its appearance in contemporary forms of entertainment (e.g., talk shows, public apology performances, public groveling),²⁸ is its uncathartic nature. This is an essential indication of both the difference between perpetrator and victim traumas and between confession and testimony. A cathartic revelation regarding the trauma of committing atrocities calls for spectator identification and thereby blurs the boundaries between the psychological and the ethical; and through emotional reduction, between the victim and the perpetrator.

Personal conflict and structural factors demonstrate both the power of confession and the limits of its sincerity: the urge to tell vs. the burden of secrecy that may last for years, the need for self-protection vs. self-incrimination, the need to identify with society vs. with themselves, the desire for integration and inclusion vs. exclusion,²⁹ the manifest intentions vs. the non-narratable or even unspeakable dimensions of the unconscious powers at work, and the foreignness of language itself.

The hidden demand for forgiveness that perpetrators may present during the confessional act should not override their sense of guilt and shame. Although it might seem as if they are addressing an implied listener – in complete contrast to the victims’ dependence on the testimony being heard by a supportive community – the perpetrators’ confession is above all an intrasubjective process. Ideally it should adhere to its convention as a monologic genre based on introspection.

Finally, unlike the victims’ subject position, that of post-traumatic perpetrators should be regarded as conditional. Its ontological status depends on the devotion of the perpetrator to a – sometimes long process – of (self-imposed) acknowledgment of guilt with all its ramifications. In this sense, the victims’ trauma is a given, one that has happened, while the perpetrators’ by definition is conditional and future-oriented. In other words, it is defined and measured according to an idealized conception of ethical fulfillment. In fact, perpetrator trauma oscillates between being epistemologically a trauma-in-retrospect and one that is future-oriented. Inevitably, by defining the epistemological and actual boundaries of perpetrator trauma, we re-conceive the conditions upon which responsibility is possible and moral life is based.³⁰

The Israeli Case

For almost eight decades (1910–87), Israeli documentary cinema supported the Zionist project, reproduced its ideology, and endorsed the heroism and morality of the Israeli soldier who fights “just wars.”³¹ The few critical documentaries that appeared during this period were made after 1967 and only retrospectively attained the status of ideologically pioneering, subversive works.³² Over the course of its development, Israeli documentary cinema evinced major ideological transformations with respect to Zionism; occupation and terror; and the ethnic-religious other: the Palestinian. These transformations were highly intensified during the second Intifada.

Following the gradual recognition that the first Lebanon War (1982) was unjust, Israeli narrative cinema began to represent the Palestinian other, thus drastically ending his/her long exclusion from the cinematic screen, while simultaneously de-mythologizing the Israeli soldier’s heroism and morality. This early 1980s shift toward the other, known as the Palestinian Wave,³³ came to a halt, however, during the period of the two Intifadas. Instead, from the early 1990s until the second decade of the twenty-first century, narrative cinema was frozen in denial of the Occupation and terror that resulted in the re-deepening of the I-other binarism.

In contrast, left-wing documentary cinema, reacting to the psycho-political-moral crisis exposed by the first, and particularly the second Intifada; influenced by Palestinian Wave films and post-Zionist trends that deny Zionism is a revolutionary movement of Jewish renewal;³⁴ ruptured the Zionist ethos and shifted the “collective voice” to an “anti-collective” one. The drastic change in the style of war and the eruption of a second Intifada dramatically changed the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by creating a major moral breakdown in Israeli society; and therefore led to various processes of humanization of the Palestinian other (both in public discourse and on television)³⁵ and de-mythicization of the Israeli soldier. Negotiating the power of prevailing binarisms – Zionism-post-Zionism, victim-perpetrator, state violence-terror, recognition-disavowal, and Left-Right – becomes critical in light of the changing nature of war, emphasizing the unbearable transition from Zionism’s New Jew to the “new (war) soldier.”³⁶ Through self-critical, un-hegemonic, and ideologically-fractured films, documentary cinema criticizes the Occupation, portrays the Palestinian as the ultimate victim, and expresses a heartfelt sense of soldierly and civil (uncathartic) guilt.

The representations of perpetrator trauma are of special interest both because of the corpus itself and, despite it being a special case, as an introduction to the wider phenomenon of perpetrator trauma in world cinema. The new wave of documentary films in Israel began twenty years after the outbreak of the first Intifada³⁷ and after years of second Intifada bloody terror attacks.³⁸ Most of them emerged during the post-second Intifada period by way of soldiers’ accounts twenty years after generations of Israeli soldiers had begun serving in the Occupied Territories, forty years after the 1967 Occupation (Six Day War), and fifty-nine years after the 1948 Occupation.

Israeli narrative cinema, however, both during the height of the Intifada and following it, has, as mentioned earlier, ignored the terror, the Occupation, and its consequent price – both for Palestinians and Israeli society.³⁹ In other words, one of the keys to this new documentary trend is provided by the obvious failure of current Israeli narrative cinema (especially the war film genre) to address perpetrator trauma, particularly in relation to Israeli soldiers’ service in the Occupied Territories during the Intifada. Twenty-five years after the end of the First Lebanon War, narrative Israeli cinema is driven by what seems to be a compulsion to return to Lebanon as a preferred ideological zone (as in Berlin Silver Bear winner Beaufort [Joseph Cedar, 2007], and Venice’s Golden Lion winner Lebanon [Samuel Maoz, 2009]). The typical Intifada situation in which the Israeli soldier-turned-cop confronts a civilian population and serves state terror is displaced onto a more traditional war (film) in which one soldier confronts another (or a civilian population mixed with a military force), so that the potential for ethical reflection on the war is partial and limited. The “Lebanon films” share another prominent characteristic – a re-mythologization of the Israeli combat soldier through a process of sacrificial victimization that overshadows the subject position of the perpetrator, and inevitably, of the Palestinian victim as well. Heroic victimization (by the war, the generals, or the government) wins. In other words, current Lebanon War fiction films involve a two-fold process of displacement: from the Intifada to the First Lebanon War and from the figure of the victimized Palestinian to that of the (heroic) victimized Israeli soldier. Aesthetically, the Lebanon films depict a noisy world of entrapped consciousness (at the posts, in the tank, in nightmares), which does not rest on any epistemological aporia regarding the perpetrator-victim relationship. The genre consistently denies a full discussion of perpetration and the trauma within.

I would like to briefly discuss Amos Kollek’s 2008 narrative film Restless as a film which, though not belonging to the war film genre, illustrates the tension between representing victim trauma and perpetrator trauma. The film evokes one of the major icons of the post-Mohammad al-Dura second Intifada climate – the Palestinian child, and the tragic new war situation of the encounter between him or her and the Israeli soldier.

“Instead of the red white and blue, /Our flag is just blue and white, /We’ve shed so much blood, /We’re out of red, and we’re out, /Of being right” (Kollek 2008, 36). This semi-confessional poem read by an ex-Israeli US immigrant demonstrates Restless’s relative uniqueness as a second Intifada Israeli narrative film that touches on collective, vicarious guilt, and – by implication – perpetrator trauma. The death of the Zionist dream as felt by two different generations serves as the backdrop for a drama involving two post-traumatic Israeli ex-soldiers, father and son.

Zach (Ran Danker) arrives in New York after his mother’s death and his release from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in order to meet his father, Moshe (Moshe Ivgy). Twenty-one years previously Moshe had abandoned him before birth and immigrated to America, where he barely ekes out a living. Upon his arrival, the camera shows Zach doing push-ups on the roof above his father’s apartment in a murderous obsession similar to that of Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)’s in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Kollek, who is also the scriptwriter, characterizes both generations – father and son – as guilt-ridden; he avoids, however, dealing with their guilt directly. Moshe, newly trying his hand at standup comedy, reads his poems in a New York bar populated mainly by expatriate Israelis. His guilt feelings, spoken from afar, unattached to a specific traumatic event and therefore befitting of everyone or no one, contrasts to Zach’s deep, numbed and unspoken guilt feelings over accidentally killing a young Palestinian child while serving as a sniper in the Territories. But the film also serves to make Moshe’s guilt akin to Zach’s because Restless mitigates both collective and individual guilt and the portrayal of the perpetrator.

Restless foregoes a subversive stance towards the protagonists’ different degrees of guilt. Moshe, the immigrant, embodies the paradox of indirect feelings of complicity in Israel’s human rights violations, a subject position which is exacerbated since, though living far away, he still nostalgically identifies with an imaginary homeland: pre-1967, pre-Occupation Israel. Thus, his feelings are not related to responsibility or a clear ethical stand. The question of direct guilt over the Occupation is raised through Zach who, as a sniper, embodies the ultimate perpetrator position: he follows orders, makes no decisions, shoots anonymously from a safe distance, and kills directly; that is, he is the perpetrator of one of the “cleanest” and most abstract modes of killing.

Far beyond any other Israeli narrative film made between the mid-1990s to 2010, at least since Assi Dayan’s Life According to Agfa’s (1992) dark apocalyptic vision of how Israel’s violence towards the Palestinian is turned inward and becomes a veritable civil war, no other narrative film has exposed the problematics inherent in acknowledgment of guilt. But Kollek does not place either perpetration or perpetrator trauma at the core of the film. Restless encourages our identification with Zach’s suffering at being abandoned (personal-familial victim trauma) at the expense of his trauma as a perpetrator (personal-collective historic trauma); thus guilt is displaced onto oedipal relations and is totally marginalized and forgotten as father and son navigate their reunion as part of narrative cinema’s long denial of the evils and consequences of the Occupation. The complex and unresolved relationship in Restless between personal-familial and personal-historic guilt and between direct and vicarious guilt become part of the nostalgic-traumatic realm, and so, frozen as guilt feelings, is excluded from an ethical stand.

As the first corpus in current world cinema representing perpetrator trauma, the new Israeli documentary wave undoubtedly has affinity with the “discourse of sobriety” (to quote Nichols famous phrase [1991, 1]). The corpus asks when society will become mature enough to go beyond the subject position of heroism and/or victimhood and give voice to the (uncomplimentary and difficult to adopt) subject position of the perpetrator, as well as whether this position will be represented alongside heroism/victimhood, or instead of it. A different aspect of the issue has to do with acknowledging trauma, not in the sense of taking collective responsibility for injustices carried out in the name of the society, but the psychological damage sustained by the soldier who is in the frontline against a civilian population. Society has an obligation to the two others who have suffered trauma – the inner other, who represents it, and the external, usually ethnic, other. Each, of course, experiences trauma in different ways. The definition of perpetrator trauma to a certain extent includes both others, since the impact of the trauma experienced by the perpetrator is in direct proportion to the scale of the trauma experienced by the victim. The incident ties the perpetrator and victim in a Gordian knot; however, this entanglement must be followed by separation.

Against the differentiation between victim and perpetrator trauma, as defined above, the coexistence of the two paradigms in the same culture raises questions beyond those involved in the split between narrative and documentary cinema. First of all, what is the meaning of the socio-cultural coexistence of the paradigms? Second, is complete differentiation between them at all possible in Israeli culture? Does the representation of perpetrator trauma appear in an ethical context which recognizes the ethnic victim? I argue that in the Israeli context of the second Intifada, the concurrent existence of the two paradigms is, in this sense, based on competition between them. In cinema – and in Israeli documentary literature about the Intifada⁴⁰ – it points to the crisis of the second and third generations of the Holocaust. Though not necessarily direct descendents of survivors, because of their role as perpetrators during military service in the Territories, and especially because of the character of new war that has transformed them from soldiers to police, they are caught in a severe identity crisis regarding their identities as Jews and as Israelis. Above all else, the existence of paradigms so contradictory shows the deep schism in Israeli society and inevitably reflects on its ethical implications.

The Persecuted Perpetrator

At this point, it is important to draw attention to terminology central to my conception of Israeli cinema. First and foremost, is the term “perpetrator” appropriate to the discussion and does it pose an adequate contrast to the term “victim”? Hebrew differentiates between the kibush (Occupation), signifying Israel’s control over the Territories since the 1967 Six Day War,⁴¹ and kovesh (perpetrator), which is not in common use in this context because of connotations connected to Hitler’s racist and genocidal regime. The terms meavel (wrongdoer) and mecholel (violator) are prevalent in the discourse and more precisely describe the conqueror/colonizer involved in wrongful acts during the Intifada. The problem is that these terms themselves are devoid of historic connotations.⁴²

I therefore suggest using the term “persecuted perpetrator.”⁴³ It captures the historic character of the identity crisis of soldiers serving in the Territories because in a symbolic sense, as Israelis they are members of the second and third Holocaust generations. That is to say, it makes reference to the inter-generational transfer of the trauma of the Holocaust, which is pervasive in Israeli identity discourse, while at the same time preventing the term perpetrator by itself being equated with the Nazi perpetrator. In any case, while it is of course not my intention to apply the trauma of the Holocaust to Israeli cultural products dealing with perpetrator trauma, I do believe that in documentary films and literature and soldiers’ accounts of their army service, perpetrator trauma erupts precisely because the persecution complex has been internalized. The term persecuted perpetrator does not refer to generational identification with the perpetrator,⁴⁴ although identification, usually belated, with the Palestinians as a persecuted people is sometimes discernible. The crisis brought about by the historical burden of the Jews as a persecuted people is realized in this utterly unbearable – and inevitable – subject position. The term reflects what might be one of the reasons for the emergence of perpetrator trauma documentaries in Israel, and not in post-9/11 American cinema, for example. It is difficult to imagine American soldiers in Iraq constantly imagining themselves in another stage of American history, or that overwhelming collective memories would cause identity crises to such a degree.

In his novel The Legend of the Sad Lakes (1989), Itamar Levy presents the extreme case of someone who believed he was the son of Holocaust survivors but discovered his father may have been a Nazi war criminal:

Why do I write my feelings privately? Why don’t I listen to my heart like I was told to? Why do I run away, close the gates, build walls around myself, forget and remember and try to forget and ask and erase the blue numbers that float around and rise from the skin on my left arm?… Why do I insist on assigning you names and professions but do not talk of sorrow, and of suffering, and of pain?… How do I talk about the fear of trains they passed down to me?… Do I hoard food? Do I throw away bread? Am I in dream therapy? In nightmare therapy? What effect does a rap on the door have on me? Or one ring of the telephone?… Who am I named after?… Am I a Nazi or a Jew? Am I strong or am I weak? Am I persecutor or the persecuted?… (53–4).⁴⁵

According to accounts by Israeli soldiers – both male and female – about their service in the Territories to Breaking the Silence, an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories,⁴⁶ their post-traumatic identity is based to a large extent on the contradictory semi-paradox of the persecuted perpetrator. This is not the fantastical doubling of victim-perpetrator identity as put forth by second generation literature such as Levy’s. The identity of the persecuted perpetrator has an ethical basis that relinquishes in advance the option of self-victimhood. It is not by chance that the victim-perpetrator fantasy is more prevalent in 1980s second generation literature⁴⁷ than that written during the 1960s or 1970s. Both because of the first Lebanon War and the outbreak of the first Intifada, to mention only two notable traumas of 1980s military service, internal contradictions intensified. But for the generation of soldiers that in 2002 begins to give their account of what happened during the transition “from Beirut to Jenin,” this means a growing confrontation with Israeli identity as based on the Jewish Diaspora past. Their decision to give their confessions to Breaking the Silence inherently points to an internal ethical conflict and to choosing a subject position different from the one represented, for example, in either the war genre or narrative films. The term persecuted perpetrator suggests, therefore, a clear ethical distinction between two common attitudes towards the Occupation – denial of perpetration and assimilation in the (historic) subject position of Israeli-Jewish victimhood, and acknowledgment of perpetration and wrongdoing (despite the huge burden of the past).

In order to further illustrate the meaning of the term persecuted perpetrator, what follows are two representative quotes from accounts soldiers gave to Breaking the Silence. In both, consciousness of the Holocaust flares up, indicating the identity crisis of the post-traumatic persecuted perpetrator.

Account 1:

Staff Sgt., Givati Brigade, Gaza, October 2003⁴⁸

SOLDIER. After the incursion into Netzarim, where three soldiers [two male and one female] were killed, when the terrorist infiltrated the post at Netzarim, we were moved there, only the command post, and they blew up two huge buildings, a jail and a police station. Because they blew up two 15–20 storey buildings with a ton of explosives, they had to evacuate the whole neighborhood. It was an up-scale neighborhood. The Palestinians have a rule in those neighborhoods: they don’t fire from there. Because if they fire from there, you see, they’ll be destroyed.

Palestinians, like all Arabs, worry about their own skins. It was a neighborhood where all the corrupt Palestinian Authority people lived. A neighborhood, what can I tell you, if it was in north Tel Aviv – would look the same. Big houses and new cars, so cool. Not Gaza at all. I wish I lived somewhere like that. Really huge homes, villas. Of course we knew they wouldn’t shoot even one bullet, and they didn’t. The thing was that 4,000 people had to be evacuated.

INTERVIEWER. How was it done?

SOLDIER. Did you ever see Schindler’s List? When they empty the ghetto? Even though it’s completely different, it was an unbelievable sight. You see thousands of people.

INTERVIEWER. Did they call out names?

SOLDIER. No. They went around in armored carriers with giant speakers, yelling at them in Arabic, passing out notices, a reconnaissance unit went from house to house almost and evicts everyone, without shooting, without anything. But 4,000 people, you can imagine, and there are big buildings too. Simply, the first thing that came to my mind was Schindler’s List. You see thousands of people with small children.

INTERVIEWER. Where did they send them?

SOLDIER. They told them to go east. Simply to take everything and ride towards the east. 4,000 people, in the middle of the night. And you see children, old people, women, packed into cars, walking. You can’t believe it, an incredible picture, staggering. It gives you goose bumps. Me, I don’t know, you can’t help but compare it because it’s like in the movie. Of course you know that it isn’t the same thing because you’re not a Nazi and you’re not going to murder them and you’re not doing it because you hate them or something. You’re even doing it for their own good, so they won’t get hurt in the explosion. But it’s impossible not to compare it, not to think of it. (My emphasis)

Account 2:

Lieutenant, Civil Administration, Jericho, 2001⁴⁹

OFFICER. There is the checkpoint next to the Jericho DCO [UN District Coordination Office], number 327. The squadron guarding the border would man the checkpoint and we would send either a soldier or an officer to reinforce them for a few hours to deal with permits and things like that. When it was my turn to go, they would have been standing there on the average of eight hours more or less, in helmets, in bullet-proof vests, in the unbelievable heat of the Jordan Valley that is beyond description, simply playing with shit all the time. And if one of our soldiers or officers wasn’t there they weren’t always sure which permit passed and which didn’t. And all that pressure from the Palestinians. Until you see it with your own eyes you simply can’t understand it, because it fucks up your mind. I completely understand all the soldiers who went crazy at that checkpoint, because it messes up your head. It’s hard to explain. Jericho, because of the bridge, because of the people who want to go to Jordan, it’s strange at that section because scads of people flow to it. And you can’t entirely understand the instructions. Can you let people in? Is it forbidden? If they have a passport, then is it ok? I don’t know. They congregate around you and you have to search through the vegetables, inside the truck, because the day before they found a rocket in the Jenin sector. And you need to search all the ambulances, and she’s with an old lady and she yells right in your ear, and you yell at her all the time: step back, step back, and you freak out.

In the beginning you think you’re a Nazi soldier, you feel like some Nazi soldier, and at some point you forget that idea, because how long can you make yourself feel you’re a Nazi, so you simply go with the flow. And it fucks up your mind. It really does. I think that any soldier who didn’t go nuts from that, I think there is something wrong with him. Or he closes himself off entirely.

INTERVIEWER. What does it mean that at the beginning you think you are a Nazi soldier?

OFFICER. Because they yell at them in a sort of Arabic-Hebrew, because the soldiers don’t know Arabic. We know it so we try to help them. So you yell at them in a kind of Arabic-Hebrew like this: Step back. They don’t pay attention to you. So you start to raise your weapon as if you’ll really do something with it, and everyone is there – children and women – then they start to cry, and they scream and in any case it’s steaming hot and you feel that in another second you’ll pulverize them. You simply can’t understand what you’re doing there. Me at least. (My emphasis)

Both of these accounts strip bare the heart of the topic under discussion, both in the Israeli context and beyond it. They demonstrate that persecuted perpetrators who take an activist stand and confess their actions are conscious of the Holocaust. The accounts are the antithesis of the cathartic confession genre of war movies;⁵⁰ each of the confessors to Breaking the Silence is alone in his/her isolation. They self-reflectively reconstruct what they went through. Even though the interviewer guides them with questions, as the two examples show, this is no dialogue, but a deep, unspoken partnership between two people committed to reporting and to recognizing personal responsibility. The interviewer, like all other volunteers in the organization, is an ex-soldier.

Documentary cinema and literature present persecuted perpetrator trauma as well as transformation of the Zionist “new man” to the “new soldier” involved in new war. S/he is burdened with Israeli society’s intricately woven traumas from the Holocaust, the 1948 and 1967 conquests, the Nakba,⁵¹ second Intifada terror attacks, two Lebanon Wars, and the war in Gaza. Return to the Holocaust as the constitutive trauma in the above accounts must be examined in keeping with the ethical criteria of perpetrator trauma presented in this introduction.

The book is divided into two parts: The first focuses on terror-caused victim trauma through examination of the representations of victimhood as related to suicide terror and the Occupation in Israeli narrative and documentary cinema. In this section I choose to focus not on the war film genre, in which the Israeli perpetrator assumes the subject position of victimhood (as in the “Lebanon films” mentioned earlier), but rather, by analyzing films dealing with victim terror trauma, to reflect on the possibility of accepting both the Israeli victim of terror and the Palestinian victim of the Occupation. These films, made prior to the emergence of the new documentary perpetrator trauma wave, reveal the maturity of this new wave, reflecting on the transition towards the ethnic other as victim. I present three cases: documentary cinema and short cinema, which break the prevalent repression of suicide terror representation in both narrative cinema and public discourse; and narrative cinema, which presents terror trauma. Thus, the huge split in Israeli cinematic culture between documentary and narrative films is underscored. I then theorize the complexity of Israeli terror victimhood by comparing it with conceptions of shahidism in Palestinian cinema. The second part of the book focuses on perpetrator trauma through analysis of the new documentary cinema wave featuring male and female perpetrators and new documentary Intifada literature. The Conclusion defines what I term “perpetrator complex” as a major outcome of perpetrator trauma as it relates to the irresolvable relationship between society and the perpetrator who served at its behest. It ends with a brief indication of possible implications the perpetrator trauma paradigm may have on related new war films in world cinema.

PART I

VICTIM TRAUMA

CHAPTER 1

THE BODY AS THE BATTLEFIELD

The suicide bomber today is the ideal type of the terrorist, since in this figure several nightmares are condensed… He or she is a murderous martyr… being in some paranormal state of conviction, ecstasy, and purpose, often built up through quasi-religious techniques such as isolation [and] indoctrination… the victim of propaganda...the suicide bomber thrives in the spaces of civilian life, thus producing a form of permanent emergency. Arjun Appadurai¹

A consideration of Israeli narrative films produced since the outbreak of the second Intifada (2000–4)² reveals a perplexing phenomenon. Although the majority of Israeli filmmakers identify with the Left, which generally supports the Palestinians and opposes the injustice of the Occupation, as hinted above, fiction films never deal with the reality of the Occupation. It is denied. Further to this trend, despite the record number of terrorist attacks that took place during those years, most of these films repress the trauma of these attacks.³ There is nothing judgmental in this last observation. On the contrary, according to trauma theory, repression, or inherent latency, as Caruth calls it (1996, 17), is an inevitable, necessary stage in the reaction to trauma.

In Israeli narrative cinema, the trauma of the terror attack appears at most in only a few films, and then as a sort of distant background to the drama.⁴ In the only two films produced during these years that portray families in mourning – Nir Bergman’s Broken Wings (2002) and Sabi Gabizon’s Nina’s Tragedies (2003), both of which met with considerable commercial success – the reason for the mourning, namely, the death of a father or of a husband, involves displacement. In the case of Broken Wings, the death of the father is not an outcome of the Occupation or a terror attack, but from a bee sting. In the case of Nina’s Tragedies, why the husband died is of marginal importance; instead, romantic serendipity is central (a young man randomly joins the casualties department of the Israel Defense Forces and as part of a detail entrusted with informing a widow of her fresh loss, falls in love with her). In these two cases, the arbitrariness of the circumstances (the appearance of the bee, the appearance of the young man) “replaces” the tragic arbitrariness that typifies a terror attack. In all the cases, the Israeli fictional cinematic space remains shielded against any recognition of the trauma of the terror attack, and hence against its visibility. According to the mimetic paradigm approach within trauma studies, the trauma is still at the repression stage and has not reached that of post-trauma, which involves recognition that trauma has occurred.⁵

Narrative Cinema – False Mourning Work

The Human Resources Manager (Eran Riklis, 2010), made during the post-second Intifada period, attests to the ongoing denial of terror trauma in Israeli narrative cinema. Like Restless (made in 2008), this film uses a broad psycho-geographic space outside of Israel in which to discuss guilt and responsibility; however, its use of displacement to a different space and to family or quasi-family relationships as a substitute for relating to collective recognition of the terror is much more radical.

The Human Resources Manager tells the story of Julia Petracke, a non-Jewish foreign worker, an engineer, who was killed in a 2002 suicide terror attack in Jerusalem. Since no one came to look for her or identify her body, a salary slip found among her belongings motivates a local reporter nicknamed the Weasel (Guri Alfi) to publish her story. He writes about her being abandoned by her employer, a Jerusalem bakery where she worked as a cleaner. His criticism of this lack of compassion causes the bakery owner, called “the widow” in the film (Gila Almagor), to entrust the task of discovering how they failed to notice Julia was missing to the bakery’s human resources (HR) manager (Mark Ivanir). He locates the body, collects her belongings, and the widow assigns him the task of accompanying the body to Julia’s homeland somewhere in the former Soviet Union. There, instead of burying her in the city where her former husband (Bogda E. Stanoevitch) and her son (Noah Silver) live, he fulfills the son’s request and brings Julia to her birthplace for burial. They arrive at their destination after a long journey during which the HR manager is given a Soviet tank from what used to be a military post in which to make their way down the snow-piled road. After the funeral mass, Julia’s elderly mother asks him to take the body back to Jerusalem. The widow refuses to finance the return trip and the HR manager takes it upon himself. The last scene shows him driving through the snow in the old tank.

The funeral mass – The Human Resources Manager

(Courtesy of Haim and Esti Mecklberg – 2team Productions)

Riklis’s film seems to be exceptional among narrative films made during the post-second Intifada in that it deals with a terror attack (and is indeed dedicated to a woman who was murdered in one). From the plot and the emphasis on the funeral trip, it could be assumed that the film represents the repercussions of the trauma of the attack. In fact, however, like A.B. Yehoshua’s novel A Woman in Jerusalem (2006) on which it is based,⁶ it is clearly a reactionary text, the product of consensus regarding the pretense of ethical stands and responsibility: it de-politicizes terror and the Occupation.

The Journey: a moral façade – The Human Resources Manager

(Courtesy of Haim and Esti Mecklberg – 2team Productions)

This does not mean to say that the trauma represented in the text is unrepresentable, or that the film is a reflexive example of the difficulty in representing trauma; but rather that Riklis’s text avoids taking a clear ethical stand regarding the reality of trauma or the relation between the Occupation and terror. Displacing the trauma of a terror attack to a different country evades Israeli socio-political reality.⁷ The trauma of the Occupation or of terror is neither represented in the text nor in the subtext. The characters and places are never referred to by name (with the exception of Julia, who is only seen in photos, that is, as an image). Thus, the plot neither directly indicates a clear relation to the Israeli context nor invites a reflection on what A.B. Yehoshua called “a three part Passion” (referring of course to Jesus’ redemptive suffering and death by Crucifixion). The absence of names does not make the film an allegory of the human condition. Though the narrative takes place within the specific context of 2003 Jerusalem as the journey’s point of departure as well as of eventual return, the journey itself lacks context and is spurred by ambiguous psychological motivations.

Substituting real names with position or status (widow, manager, Weasel, divorcee, etc.) is, according to Judith Butler (1997), tied to subjectivization: “To be called a name is one of the first forms of linguistic injury that one learns. But not all name-calling is injurious. Being called a name is also one of the conditions by which a subject is constituted in language” (2). In Butler’s view, linguistic injury is a result not only of the words said, but the mode of reference, which creates interpellation and names the subject. In this film, nicknames and labels confer general recognition based mainly on familial or professional status, but are devoid of social positioning derived from subjectivity that is ethically involved in the tragedy. The nicknames signify subjectivity as it relates to the tragedy only through the false or twisted compassion of the HR manager, the widow, the daughter (Roni Koren), the consul (Rosina Kambus), and the vice consul (Julian Negulesco); and/or the false intimacy of those eager for benefits, like the widow, the divorcee (Raymond Amsalem), the driver (Papil Panduru), and the Weasel.

Displacement of Israeli terror – The Human Resources Manager

(Courtesy of Haim and Esti Mecklberg – 2team Productions)

The anonymity, on one hand, and emphasis on labels, on the other, are not aimed at emphasizing the arbitrariness of a suicide bombing (as in the films of the period mentioned earlier). The total lack of names makes the characters bearers of the sin of anonymity, or at least the sin of distance from the dead, despite their stated roles (divorcee, son, mother). But Riklis and Yehoshua persist in keeping the relatives anonymous: the text is not intimately familiar with any of the characters that surround Julia, and her family fails to reveal her in intimate terms. The only character the spectators do get to know and identify with is the HR manager, since the camera is close to his point of view.

Driving the Soviet tank – emotional necrophilia and false guilt in The Human Resources Manager

(Courtesy of Haim and Esti Mecklberg – 2team Productions)

Can the Passion of the journey be disconnected from the identity of the victim? Moreover, can it be carried out in her name, the other’s name? The only means the HR manager (and the spectators, who identify with his point of view) has to approach the trauma of the other is to fall in love with the dead woman, a kind of emotional necrophilia or compassion. Moreover, the ambiguous guilt of the HR manager towards his ex-wife and daughter is inexplicitly channeled into his decisions during the mission, especially to fulfill Julia’s son’s request to bury her at her place of birth.⁸ As the journey progresses, it seems that compassion has taken control of his actions.

Peters (2001), who analyzes the connection between compassion and pity and morality by relying chiefly on Kant and Adam Smith, argues:

Like the ancients and Spinoza and Nietzsche, Kant held that pity, however praiseworthy it might at first seem, should not be honored as a virtue. “A suffering child, an unfortunate and pretty woman, will fill our hearts with this sweet melancholy [of pity], while at the same time we will coolly receive the news of a great battle in which, it is easy to consider, a more considerable portion of the human race must undeservingly succumb to cruel calamities.” Pity has no sense of proportion. Our moral sense is biased toward vivid cases instead of aggregates. We readily wallow in the sweet melancholy of pity for a single face but find the work of understanding many deaths difficult (6).

In this film, is our capacity for compassion subject to abuse because we care more for the HR manager than for the deceased or, even more, the other – unrepresented – victims? Our compassion for Julia’s son, the natural subject of pity, is limited because he is, as I hinted above, like all the others, a marginalized and undeveloped character. Following Peters, whatever treatment Julia received after her death (identification of the body, the funeral journey) or that her family received (compensation, transport of the body to their remote village) is not within the scope of care; that is, it is not an ethical expression of acknowledging trauma but a moral façade, false compassion. The film ostensibly represents Julia’s death in the attack but actually ignores it – as well as the death of others who perished in this and other attacks.

The HR manager’s infantile-narcissist behavior is revealed at the heart of the false guilt; emotional necrophilia; and false compassion that are apparently oriented towards the other. This is especially apparent during the scene at the former military post when he is ill with food poisoning, hallucinating, and totally dependent on his surroundings. It is easy to interpret the irony of this and other situations that show the infantilization of the Israeli male, in this case a former army commander. The scene in which he is driving the Soviet tank, for example, is another ironic reflection on loss of masculine power, but the irony is meaningless because it is non-political. Like the foreign worker caught up by chance in a tragic conflict she has nothing to do with, by the end of the journey it is still not clear whose conflict it is. Indeed, it makes no difference if she is buried in her homeland or in Jerusalem.

The victim trauma of the foreign worker, experienced indirectly and incompletely by the HR manager after the incident, is not, of course, his trauma. At least to begin with, the situation is merely a cut-and-dried mission to identify the body and deal with the bureaucracy; only as the story unfolds does he immerse himself more and more, as mentioned, in his task. Accordingly, the story includes elements that are ostensibly connected to victim trauma (guilt, responsibility, compensation), but in the film are ambiguous or false.

Riklis’s narrative choice to focus on the HR manager at the expense of the other, not refer to the characters or locations by name, and refrain from using other cinematic strategies to create a symbolic layer all make The Human Resources Manager a text that de-politicizes the Intifada under the pretense of moral compassion. A different tone is impossible because the film imposes comic relief on the surreal and apparently symbolic happenings. These tones in the dialogue; journey scenes; and the music, which seems to be Eastern European, perhaps Romanian or gypsy, completely limits the spectators’ perspective.

Riklis’s film, like Kollek’s Restless discussed above, puts into focus the need to build a cinematic world that takes an ethical stand regarding questions of morality Israeli society faced during the Intifada, including its relation to the various victims, and the question of mourning work. Assimilating the HR manager’s Jewish identity into Julia’s through fetishism or a necrophilic-erotic attraction, however, leads only to a false mourning work.

Documentary Cinema

In contrast to narrative cinema, Israeli documentary cinema deals with the Intifada (both the Occupation and terror attacks) in an almost obsessive fashion.⁹ Dozens of documentary films have been screened, particularly on the local Discovery channel, in cinematheques, and in Israeli film festivals over the past ten years, and more and more such films are still being made. Dozens of the movies describe Palestinian life under the shadow of the Intifada from a standpoint sympathetic to Palestinian suffering and sharply critical to the Occupation (for example, Yoav Shamir’s Checkpoint [2003], which shows the routine played over several seasons at an army checkpoint near an Arab village in the Occupied Territories). Some fifteen films deal directly with terror attacks. These films describe Israeli life under the shadow of the attacks from a perspective sympathetic to the suffering of civilian victims of suicide bombings (for example, Orna Ben-Dor Niv’s One Widow, Twice Bereavement [2005], which describes a group of women who have lost two close relatives – a husband and a child – in the same attack).¹⁰ To put it another way, the two main stories told by documentary cinema, the story of Palestinian suffering and the story of Israeli suffering, are presented as detached from one another. Very few of the dozens of documentary films provide any hint from within the drama of the connection between the two faces of the Intifada, the Occupation and the terror, and even those do so in only a very limited fashion (for example, Anat Halachmi’s film Channels of Rage [2003], which portrays how two Israeli rappers working in a local nightclub, one Jewish and one Arab, become ideologically distanced). In the vast majority of cases, the drama fails to strike a balance between these two objects of empathy that are so entirely different from each other. From the aspect of the corpus of documentary films compiled during those years, building empathy with Palestinians as victims of the Occupation as well as empathy with the victims of terror attacks has resulted in two separate cultural edifices. In fact, the two are totally disconnected and separate subject positions. The broader subject position in which the two Israeli viewpoints (opposition to the Occupation together with empathy with Palestinian suffering, and opposition to suicidal terror together with empathy with the suffering of Israeli victims) exist side-by-side is found, not by chance, it seems, only in autobiographical films, which are few and far between (for instance, Yulie Cohen Gerstel’s film My Terrorist [2002], which describes her struggle to free from prison the terrorist who attacked her).¹¹ In my opinion, these autobiographical films affirm that for those who have personally experienced suffering (in the above case, as a victim of a terror attack), the position of dual identification or empathy becomes the only possible ethical way to react to reality, and accordingly, to present it as cinematic reality. From the aspect of these filmmakers, the dual subject position is part of the belated recognition that trauma has occurred. It is the only option available to stop the vicious cycle of the conflict.

This chapter is written from a standpoint that is closer to the victims of terrorist attacks and the subject position of “victimhood,” while still taking into account the deficiency of the dual subject position (and perhaps also the tremendous difficulty involved in identifying with both sides while the struggle for the survival of both continues; that is, before it is possible to speak of the aesthetics and politics of the past, or of memory).

The Body as the Battlefield

Since the trauma of terror is controlled by mechanisms of regulation, excommunication, and taboo both in public discourse and in narrative cinema, the visibility of trauma is actually the sole measure of its occurrence.¹² It is therefore no wonder that visibility is one of the main issues regarding which overt, and primarily covert, negotiations are held in public discourse about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At its best, documentary cinema acts as an agent of this visibility. The question is, what is seen in documentary films and what is distanced, excluded, or covered up, and what does the exclusion or, alternatively, the visibility, tell us about Israeli identity that is changing amid the trauma? The visibility of the trauma seems to be, first and foremost, the visibility of the human body.¹³

As hinted earlier, “new” war in its contemporary, multilateral, and multipolar form has been defined by various scholars, including Frey and Morris (1991); Walzer (1977); Baudrillard (2002); Johnson (1999); Kaldor (2001/2007); Moskos, Williams, and Segal (1999); Gray (2001); Latham (2002); Žižek (2002); and Crawford (2003) as typified by radical transformations.¹⁴ Terror, as a component of the “new” war, should be distinguished from all other modes, whether they are different from this sort of war or included in it (e.g., infowar, nanowar).¹⁵ As mentioned earlier, in “new” war the traditional contrasts that have either been dismantled or are in crisis are terror-war, sovereign state-legitimate authority, front-home, “us”-“them,” civilian-soldier, individual crime-organized crime, human system-posthuman system,¹⁶ high tech-low tech, victim-perpetrator, defense-offense, beginning-end, victory-defeat, war-peace, moral-immoral.

Even though these scholars have noticed the changes that have occurred in the traditional (“modern”) battlefield, they have missed the principal change. In the reality of terror, it is no longer a matter of territorial borders in which the army of one state fights the army of another, or of the Baudrillard-type virtual battlefield. In the “new” war the human body is the battlefield. Consideration of the human body in its changing corporeal states (as body and as corpse) is, thus, unavoidable. The human-body-as-battlefield captures the transformation occurring in the emergent parameters of contemporary war. Precisely because the central change in contemporary war is the “deliberate targeting of noncombatants,” an analysis of the relation between body and corpse can provide a focus for the diffuse variety of modes of contemporary war.

Documentary cinema, which offers a counter-reaction to the repression of the trauma of the terror attack and the exclusion of the abject,¹⁷ therefore, necessarily makes the body a signifying symbol. Rendering the tension between body and corpse in documentary cinema on the Intifada “captures” the development of an unpredictable and complex pattern of contemporary war – namely, its multipolarity and crisis of binary definitions. The nature of contemporary war is more accessible to the body as a textual component than to other textual components such as emplotment or genre, for example. The non-bodily components of the text become part of the textual fabric but cannot become the main textual symbol. The capturing of the essence of the war and the possibility of symbolization result from the fact that in these films the body transcends the bodily limitations and the contours of the representation of trauma/the abject, and becomes an indexical sign.

The relation between the body and the corpse is not a simple relation between opposites. In the “new” war, the fact that the body replaces space as the battlefield produces a crisis – both of the body and of the space. The crisis of the body raises questions such as, “Can there be a corpse without a body?” as occurs, in extreme cases, to victims of suicide bombings; or, “Can there be a body that does not turn into a corpse?” as with a suicide terrorist after the reconstruction and recorporealization of his body via the video recordings that are broadcast after the attack.¹⁸ The crises of the body and of space are necessarily based on the modes of visibility they involve.

Characteristics – The Attack

In her well known book Powers of Horror (1982) Kristeva writes:

Abject… is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses… The corpse… that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death… A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death… These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border… The corpse… the most sickening of wastes… seen without God, and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object… For the space that engrosses the … excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic (2–8).¹⁹

The first characteristic of the crisis of the body and space in a terrorist attack is pre-traumatic. The space of the attack is transparent. This is because of the invisibility of the terrorist’s body as a terrorist’s body, since it is usually unidentifiable. My look (as it moves, together with that of others, within the space) is powerless. It is not a gaze. There is no visualizable field. I want to break through the transparent space, locate the invisible body, turn my look into a gaze, and use this “empirical gaze” both as a means of gaining knowledge and as a tool for the embodiment of the terrorist’s body. The result is that it is impossible (or at the least, highly unlikely) to interpenetrate the transparency of the space, to gaze.

The second characteristic is also pre-traumatic. The transparent space does not create distinctions or relations among points, planes, sectors, or Territories. It is a space in which two sorts of spatial relations are dominant: distance/closeness and density/spaciousness between bodies. The space is constructed exclusively of “bodily relations” (between one body and another) rather than, for example, relations between a body and an object. The distance from the “invisible” dominates the interaction among the human bodies and between these natural bodies and the terrorist’s artificial, cyborg-like body.

The third characteristic is connected to the moment of the trauma itself. This is the radical moment in the crisis of the body and the space: the body as anticipated corpse. In this situation, the body is consumed by the trauma that is about to occur. The body hardly exists in the present (the tragic present of “just a moment”), and it has neither past nor future. The “potential” space of the attack, being “everywhere and nowhere,” negates itself: the corpse inevitably has no space.

The fourth characteristic of the body/space crisis is what happens to me as an onlooker at the moment I am confronted with the trauma of an attack – that is, when I am turned into an object by the corpse. The abject changes my perception of myself as a subject and the pattern of subject-object relations. On the one hand, the taboo against seeing the abject is an inevitable layer in the repression of the trauma of the terror attack. On the other hand, when I look at the trauma, it is actually gazing at me. It is the one with the gaze. I am thus turned into an object. I cannot use my look to impose my power on the corpse. I cannot subordinate the extreme abject – that is, the corpse – and turn it into the object of my look. But the abject, like the mythological Medusa, does this to me. It is repelling, freezing, objectifying, abjectifying. This crisis of subject-object relations is part of the versions of body and self that are unceasingly decomposed and reorganized in the face of the trauma of the terror attack.

The fifth characteristic is the short-term change in the transparent, recently traumatized space that has been transformed – that is, the instability of the process of identification. The possibility of identifying the space as a concrete place stands in painful contrast to the impossibility of identifying the dead body after the terrorist attack. The place of the attack, the skeleton of the bus, the building that housed the pizza parlor or café, takes the place, on the level of identification, of the body that cannot be identified. The familiar public space replaces the anonymous private individual, creating closeness in a place where distance is forced upon us, and gives it a name (such as “the attack at the Moment Café”). The name of the place is the substitute identity, since the corpse, as mentioned, does not have a space. The result is another station in the cartography of terror in the public space.²⁰

The final characteristic is the long-term change in the transparent space. This is the cycle of transparency-trauma-exclusion-transparency. The cleanup of the place where the attack occurred and the almost immediate reopening of the establishment – which are indicative of the official Israeli reaction to trauma (“There is no trace of what happened”) – make the space transparent once again. At the same time they turn the relations within it into “bodily relations,” making the body of the terrorist transparent as well, turning the body of the future-victim into the anticipated abject, taking away the observers’ power and knowledge and objectifying them, and making the trauma invisible. The instability of these identity-oriented relations distinguishes the terror event in a process that is based cyclically on transparency-trauma-exclusion-transparency.

The Case of No. 17 (David Ofek, 2003)

What is unique about Israeli documentary cinema, which functions to fill in the “empty screen” of the traumatic terror attack, is that it disrupts this cyclicality by representing the tension between visibility and invisibility. At its best, this documentary cinema counteracts concealment, cover-up, sanitization, and exclusion. It not only is present in the arena of trauma, it not only grants visibility to trauma, but it is also an active participant in constructing the changing Israeli national identity.

An excellent example is David Ofek’s film No. 17. It shows a production crew of four people, led by Ofek, who decides to search for the identity of the seventeenth fatality of a suicide attack on a bus near the Meggido Junction in northern Israel. The film documents in real time over a period of six months the search for the identity of this man, whose body was so badly mutilated he could not be forensically identified. Since no one reported him missing, he was buried in an unmarked grave. Along with the story of the search for one victim’s identity, the film looks into the stories of many other people. During the course of his investigation, Ofek naturally tracks down various clues and pursues several promising leads that wind up going nowhere. When it seems that the investigation has reached a dead end, a vague lead suddenly emerges and two witnesses attempt to accurately describe the dead man for a sketch artist. After the sketch is made and publicized in the press, someone contacts the crew and identifies the sketch. The seventeenth victim is Eliko Timsit.

The film opens with the television news report on the blowing up of Bus 830 at the Megiddo Junction by a suicide terrorist. The opening shifts among various foci: the newsflash from the scene of the event, a map of the area, the roadside memorial to the victims, and a newspaper edition containing faces, names, and human-interest stories. So far this is a familiar iconographic method of reporting on the trauma of a terror attack. But then there is an unfamiliar act, an act of drawing closer. In contrast to this entire iconographity is a visit to the heterotopia of deviance, to use Foucault’s terminology – the Institute of Forensic Medicine.²¹

The crew comes to visit the Institute and interviews the chief police anthropologist, Zipi Kahane, about how the unidentified body of the seventeenth victim was handled, and about her personal and professional life. While they are at the Institute it turns out there has been another suicide attack on a bus, and on voice-over Ofek announces that the filming crew decided to stay at the Institute and document what happened next. While awaiting the arrival of the victims’ corpses, the staff of the Institute prepares their lunch. The camera documents the preparation of the meal and the conversation around the table that centers on the attack and the arrangements for dealing with it: “Dentists say that they’re on the way, identification technicians say that they’re on the way…”

The skeleton of the bus takes the place of the unidentified body, No. 17

(Courtesy of David Ofek)

The director of No. 17 asks for the public’s help identifying the anonymous victim from a sketch

(Courtesy of David Ofek)

This basic description of the opening sequence suggests the significance of the quest undertaken by this film. It is a quest for the body that is behind the corpse, of approaching the visibility of the abject. This approach is typified by the conversation with Zipi Kahane about the physical condition of this corpse-without-a-body. (In response to a question from the director, Zipi answers, “In the specific case of this attack, the corpse was in very bad condition, completely charred. The only thing we were able to determine with certainty is that it was a man. After we analyzed him… he looked to be about forty to fifty years old… no jewelry remained… his height was about 1.7 meters. This is a very ordinary man who died a very unordinary death”.)

The approach to the abject is also embodied in the camera’s view outward through the window of the room in which the interview is held. The separate shot shows the backyard, in which rows of empty mobile beds stand, parked and waiting… It is also embodied, in a different way, in the preparation of the meal, where apparent normalcy harbors a certain unease that pervades the whole scene (a vague unease that is reminiscent of the dinner scene of the police inspector and his wife in Hitchcock’s Frenzy [1972], for example, in which the inspector is forced to take part in a symbolic meal of the corpse of the woman whose murder he is investigating [Modleski 1988, 109]). The filming compels us to take note of the view outward from the window, emphasizing the abjective link between the “external” and internal spaces of the Institute. The filming of the preparations for the meal and of the meal itself, achieved with no trace of voyeurism, exposes us to another, unfamiliar boundary between the normal routine of life and terrorist attacks.

On the one hand, we are made aware of the various boundaries of the presence of the abject in the heterotopic space, the Institute of Forensic Medicine. On the other, in the context of the announcement about the decision to wait for the ambulances, the close-ups create an unavoidable connection between the vegetables being cut up on the plate and the future cutting up of the corpses. The esthetic precision of the salad being cut and eaten evokes cannibalistic associations. The space of oppositions between living/inanimate and dead, between sterility and earthiness, between peeling off the skin and the flesh underneath it, between fragment and wholeness, also contribute to the situation in which the closeness to the abject becomes ambiguous. The text does not allow, however, any respite or relief from the closeness and does not allow the closeness to be shattered to provide a comfortable distance. The sense of relief that dominates the scene when the meal is over, when the unexpected closeness to the ever-changing boundaries of the abject is past, is replaced by a renewal of the closeness at the end of the scene, as we wait with the crew for the ambulance. First we see Zipi Kahane, wearing sterile clothes, gloves, and glasses with magnifying lenses. This operating room attire connotes closeness to the corpse. So does the row of mobile beds where out of habit she sits during the wait, projecting her future-immediate approach to the corpse. Second, when the camera follows her to the ambulance parking lot, we see the refrigerators next to the parking area. Third, when the ambulance arrives, we see a close-up of the place where the shapeless corpse is lying on the stretcher, and we become witnesses to the question, “Which side of the stretcher is the head on?”

Until the screening of this film, the Institute of Forensic Medicine was basically a name with no visible substance. The last shots of the scene reveal, literally as well as metaphorically, the backyard of the trauma of terror attacks. This is a world full of people (police anthropologist, dentists, identification technicians), objects (operating attire, gloves, magnifying lenses), and accommodations (stretcher, mobile bed, refrigerator for corpses), a world that brings us closer to the abject. Closer, though, for the sake of distancing, for the sake of exclusion. The heterotopic space facilitates acquaintance, and immediately afterward the opposite, exclusion. This movement from acquaintance to exclusion means that the contours of acquaintance are only temporary. Their temporariness is the temporariness of the functional treatment of the corpse. After exhausting the potential for knowledge that it contains (identifying the dead, the time of death, the reason for death [the explosive materials, whether there were nails in the bomb, burning, impact…]), the corpse is restored to the forgetfulness of exclusion and swallowed up by it. In absurd fashion, it is precisely the giving of the name – that is, the identification, the very heart of the process of acquaintance – that becomes the beginning of the exclusion. At all times, the approach harbors the knowledge of the exclusion. The Institute, as a heterotopic site, constantly embodies this duality, which has been politicized.

In the specific case of this film, the focus on the Institute emphasizes the process of approaching the abject rather than the counter-process of exclusion – that is, the penetrable principle of Foucault, however temporary and illusory, rather than the Institute’s also being a Deleuzian site of control. It is precisely because the Institute does not identify the seventeenth victim that the film’s quest for him redefines the possible visibility. The uniqueness of Israeli documentary cinema during the second Intifada in general, and in this film in particular, lies in subverting the contours of the abject as the public discourse has defined them, with the aim of approach rather than distancing, inclusion rather than exclusion. Such cinema insists on revealing the first part of the process (acquaintance) more than its politicized counter-process (exclusion); on returning to the trauma neither in its iconographic form nor by means of its exclusion. The verification of the abject and the approach to it signify, to me, not only a recognition of the emergence of contemporary, “new” war, including, of course, recognition of its political implications, but also of the trauma’s effect on identity.

The power of the film No. 17 stems from the fact that the search is a search for identity – not only the specific identity of this anonymous victim, but the Israeli identity. The subversive element is that the basis for dealing with identity is in the ability to approach the abject, to come closer to the trauma.

Emphasizing the approach to the abject is also essential because of the nature of the drama. Along with the subversive process of exposure to the abject, the spectator undergoes an additional process that has a calming appearance. The anonymity of the seventeenth victim reinforces, of course, the arbitrariness of the terror attack. In other words, the seventeenth victim could be – horrifyingly enough – any one of us. But as the investigation progresses, and the details of Eliko Timsit’s identity are gradually revealed, “he” is no longer “any one of us” – that is, the future victims of the arbitrariness of terror attacks. The possibility that “it” could be me naturally loses its force. In this regard, by the end of the film there is an unavoidable aspect of repression: “It happened to him, not to me,” with its overtones of “It won’t happen to me in the future, either.”

A process that counteracts any aspect of calming or exclusion, including the one just discussed, is also realized at the level of the genre. In terms of genre, the film operates within two formulas: the road film and the detective thriller. Yet it establishes between them a hierarchy that is important for the spectator’s standpoint on the body-corpse trauma of the terror attack. The detective thriller is, of course, based on a pattern of retardations, gaps, curiosity about the past, suspense about future events and surprise in the face of unexpected endings. The road film is, at its best, a psycho-geographic quest.

No. 17 progresses, it appears, without debriefing and without prepreparing the interviewees in advance. The spectator thus participates both in the authenticity of the search and, at the same time, the question it raises. The dominant pattern in terms of spectatorship is that of the quest, not the detective thriller. The director seems to maintain the advantages of the detective pattern while also subordinating it, in a positive sense, to the quest pattern, which lends spontaneity and investigative mobility. Therefore the achievement of stability when the mystery is solved does not constitute an affirmation of the social order, as in a detective thriller. Rather, as in the road film, this achievement only raises the question anew.

The main question is not one of identification. To be sure, the challenge of identifying the victim confronts the filming crew and the police investigating crew. But amid the quest for the inner recesses of the Israeli identity(ies), the main questions are social ones, with symbolic implications: To what extent are we prepared to draw near to the corpse? To the abject? Are we willing to see it as a body? To grant it an identity? To what extent are we prepared to re-experience the trauma entailed in this “resurrection”? To what extent are we willing to be exposed to the price of the Occupation and to ourselves as perpetrators (even indirectly)?²² The difficulty does not stem from the identification process but rather from the taboo associated with it. The seventeenth victim was found, as we saw, to be Eliko Timsit, a smalltime criminal from the town of Sderot in southern Israel, who was traveling to the north on Bus 830 for a vacation. His family suspected he had been involved in illegal activities and so when he disappeared did not look for him. The film ends with the episode in which, after DNA from the remnants of Eliko’s body are matched with that of his father, his remains are exhumed from his anonymous grave and buried in a Jewish cemetery.²³

But the anonymity in the public discourse symbolizing the taboo on the visibility of terror continues. In this regard, the choice of the road film rather than the detective-thriller as the dominant genre is essential. The film does not provide the spectator with a solution that affirms the social order. It acts, as a text, against conservative and forgetful tendencies, against disavowing the Occupation, and repressing the trauma of suicidal attacks.

Does the (post)traumatic relationship between the body and the corpse also appear in the Palestinian texts representing attacks – in the video recordings and the film Paradise Now (Hany Abu-Assad 2005), the only Palestinian film to deal with suicide bombers? If so, of what kind? The first stage of answering these questions will describe the process involving the body/corpse in the videocassettes, both because of the centrality of the recordings to the Palestinian discourse on terror and because the film Paradise Now refers to the videocassettes. It does so in two ways: metonymically and on the plot level – the whole text is actually a dramatic extension of the videos (before/after). The following analysis will therefore also serve as an analysis of the scenes within Paradise Now that show the protagonists recording their video messages.

Post-traumatic docu-activism, No. 17

(Courtesy of David Ofek)

The Detonatorg

According to Gray (2001), “Postmodern war depends on a new level of integration between soldiers and their weapons, what are called human-machine weapons systems or … cyborg soldiers” (56). But the suicide terrorist is not the typical cyborg of faceless combat in the “new” war that occurs, as Gray describes it, across enormous distances and by remote-control. The terror attack, as we saw above, is a completely different mode of the “new” war. Thus, “detonatorg” (a combination of detonator and organism that does not emphasize the cybernetic organism but rather the specific, artificial nature of an organic body that is connected to a homemade bomb; that is, not the connections between brain and computer but between religious-national belief and low-tech) is a preferable term. The detonatorg becomes itself in a transformative process of immediate, alive-to-dead mutation.

Tragically, the suicide terrorist acts facelessly in what is precisely a case of face-to-face encounter. In an interview in Tom Roberts’s film Inside the Mind of the Suicide Bomber (2003), Majdi Amri, who acted both as a recruiter of suicide terrorists and as a bomb engineer, effectively describes the detonatorg’s anonymity in seeking to blend into the surroundings until the moment of the symbiotic realization of flesh and steel: “If the explosive belt is on the stomach, you stand so that there will be many people in front of it. If it is on the back, there should be many people behind it.” What determines the position of the face (in the sense of the front of the body) is the location of the explosive belt, not the actual face of the suicide terrorist. The post-human body lacks an actual front, being oriented, robot-like, according to the human body/space that is before or behind it. The detonatorg thereby becomes, at the moment of symbiosis, hyper-lethal. The constructed ambiguous techno-bio body is annihilated. It has no existence beyond the moment of post-human symbiosis, which is, paradoxically, the moment of death.²⁴

The use of the term detonatorg in the context of the suicide terrorist is meant to highlight the set of transformations involved in recorporealizing the terrorist’s corpse. The widely displayed videocassette (including the one produced in Paradise Now) presents the suicide terrorist as a rifle-clutching fighter and not as a terrorist who conceals his explosives. The rifle that is borne overhead as part of the standard pose in these videos has the status of an extension of the body. These two elements – the overt pose of the fighter and the weapon as extension – contrast completely with the concealment of his body, that is, with his covert behavior as a suicide terrorist, and with the explosive belt that causes his annihilation, his fragmentation. In other words, the video recordings as “before” scenarios recreate an image that is the inverse of the process that is about to occur. It is not just the visibility of the living instead of the dead – the visibility of the body in a place where actually there are at most the burnt fragments of a corpse. It is also an image that is the complete contrast to the body, the anti-detonatorg, exposed and open.

As noted earlier, the corpses of shahids (the Arabic term for the suicide terrorists who are granted the status of martyrs after their death and who are assured a place in heaven) (Israeli 2003, 74)²⁵ are retrospectively granted renewed visibility via videocassettes that were filmed before the attack and broadcast afterward, even though their bodies usually cannot be identified. Indeed, this is a permanent visibility. The corpse of the suicide terrorist once again becomes whole and coherent by means of the Palestinian transcendental-religious-national reconstruction: seemingly a body, not a corpse. The videocassettes, in contrast to other representations of terrorists who have committed suicide (such as the still photos in the press, graffiti drawings, posters on message boards, etc.), also function in the public discourse as a metaphor for movement, for the renewal of the Palestinian struggle. But the main power of the video recordings consists in recorporealizing the terrorist’s corpse. It is a recorporealization in two senses, and involves two transformations: from the mechanical-organic (the body and the explosive belt)²⁶ to the organic (the body, clutching a weapon), and from death to life.

Body, Corpse, Soil

The recorporealization that is an inherent part of the videocassettes and of the film has a basic significance in the struggle for visibility, and, concomitantly, a symbolic meaning in the struggle for the imaginary, lost, soil of Palestine.²⁷ From the Palestinian standpoint, the discourse on the lost soil is conducted via the body that represents it. The recorporealization of the terrorist’s corpse in the video, that is, the “replacement” of the corpse with a living body, signifies an ongoing claim to the soil. In this struggle for visibility, the Palestinian recorporealization stands in complete contrast to the taboo on visibility in Israeli public discourse.

In her book The Chosen Body: Politics of the Body in Israeli Society, Weiss (2002) asserts, “The chosen body of the fallen stands for the body social and the contours/borders of the territory. Body and territory become one… The land is personified, given a body, as it remembers the fallen” (122–3). But she does not distinguish between what she calls the “chosen body” (4–5)²⁸ and the abjected body, just as she does not distinguish in the first place between different modes of war. Weiss specifies three stages of Israeli media coverage of terror, stages that in her view characterize every war: loss and chaos, regathering, recovery (the element of “chaos” in the first stage of the coverage pertains only to terror). The first stage involves an emphasis on the leitmotif of the lost and unidentifiable corpses, and on the disorder. In the second stage the city, like the body, returns to its normal life. Media coverage is not only informative but ritualistic and symbolic. The corpses are covered. The day after each terror attack is declared a day of commemoration as part of the ritual of regathering. The third stage of the coverage is typified by such rituals as a visit by the prime minister to the site of the attack, the lighting of candles, a demand to the Palestinian leaders that they fight the terror, and so on.

In regard to terror, this analysis is entirely at odds with the premises of this chapter. The loss does not involve recovery but only retransparency. Indeed, in modern warfare the body of the warrior has tragically become a metaphor for the nation’s relationship to the land. In “new” war, particularly in the case of terror, as argued earlier, an array of substitutions occurs: the body of the civilian replaces the body of the soldier, the body of the civilian replaces the battlefield. Not the chosen body but the body that is abjected, excluded. The cultural metaphor of the body as soil that typified the portrayal of Israel’s wars until the Intifada has been dispelled, and a new, crisis-ridden connection with the land has necessarily been formed. Public discourse has created a hierarchy in which the soldier who has been injured or killed is placed first, while the civilian who has been injured or killed is placed second.²⁹ Relating to the abjected body as if it were a “chosen body” in a time of terror entails hegemonization that is distorted in every regard: Zionist, Jewish, and patriarchal. Ignoring this transformation in the nature of war means ignoring the implications it has for Israelis’ understanding of their identity. Understanding the crisis of space, the crisis of the body, and the crisis of the metaphorical connection between the body and the soil from the Israeli standpoint are linked one to the other. In this regard, even when No. 17 performs a kind of process of resuscitation of the corpse (beginning with conjectures about Occupation, character, education, mannerisms, and ethnicity so as to enable constructing a sketch of the face), and even when the “resuscitation” process has a significance in terms of identity, it does not involve, in an immediate, metaphorical sense, a link to the soil. Israeli documentary cinema during these years indeed recreates a closeness to the abject and grants visibility to the trauma of terror, but it does not reestablish a metaphorical relation between the body/corpse and the soil. It thereby makes a major contribution to Israelis’ understanding of their changing identity as one that requires it be separated from the ethos linked to the soil.³⁰ Forced to discern the body as a battlefield and adjacent to the (civilian) corpse, means gradually losing the militaristic-metaphoric “traditional” claim to the land, and undermining the attitudes regarding the struggle for the soil that guide the Occupation.

Paradise Now

Paradise Now tells the story of two Palestinian childhood friends, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who are recruited by an unnamed Palestinian organization to undertake a suicide attack in Tel Aviv. The film follows them during the two days preceding the climactic deed. They are allowed to spend their last night with their families, but to ensure absolute secrecy they are prevented from taking their leave properly. The next morning is spent in preparation for the mission – praise, shaves and haircuts, suits and ties, a ceremonial dinner, and a video recording. They learn how to handle, wear, and detonate explosives; how to infiltrate Israeli territory; and how to stay cool as the time for the attack approaches. Said has his doubts, thanks to Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a legendary Palestinian hero, who questions terrorist acts on both theological and practical grounds. Said falls for Suha but decides to continue. The operation falls apart and the two friends are separated. On the second try, at the last minute, Khaled balks and prefers to stay alive, while Said perseveres. The last scene shows him sitting on a bus in Tel Aviv.

The detonatorg – Said and Khaled

(Courtesy of Lama Films)

The fact that the abject is not visible is conspicuous both in Paradise Now and in the videocassettes recorded by suicide bombers. Paradise Now deals with the videocassettes and, as previously noted, uses them as a metonymy as well. The title of the film (which contradictorily acknowledges both the film Apocalypse Now and the Israeli left wing political movement Peace Now)³¹ is already worded as an anticipatory demand for immediate, urgent realization (“Now”) of the recorporealization of the body versus the corpse. This demand for urgency is first realized through the genre, a psycho-political thriller that develops according to the paradoxical principle of the end foretold. The end – the explosion – is not shown, even though from the beginning it is obvious that it will be carried out. This turns the film, in the language of Kristeva (1982), into art that advocates the rejection of abjection. That is to say, the style does not channel the pain and the fear into abjection, but rejects it. In Freudian parlance, it is “dependent upon a dialectic of negativity” (11).

How does this foretold conclusion present itself? In the plot, the final scene opens when the two protagonists have successfully infiltrated Tel Aviv. Following a shot in which Khaled is seen crying after Said gets out of the car that brought them into the city, there is a cut. The next shot shows the inside of a crowded bus. Using a long shot, the camera finds Said sitting in the back of the bus. The sound is realistic – diegetic; that is, the sounds of the journey are audible. Most of the passengers are paratroopers, identified by the red berets they wear. Only a few women, children, and other civilians are seen.³² The camera approaches Said. The close-up shows his face devoid of the tension that has characterized it during the hours leading up to his decision to carry out the attack. The next shot is an extreme close-up of Said’s eyes. After the cut there is a shot of a white screen. Silence. The End.

“Who is the suicide bomber?” – Paradise Now

(Courtesy of Lama Films)

From the standpoint of identifying with the victims of the attack (while keeping in mind the difficulty inherent in the dual subject position), the meaning of the last shot (the white screen) is not “going to heaven (paradise).” It rather fulfills the objective of allowing ongoing identification with Said and what he represents by abstaining from audio-visualization of the attack. In other words, if the film had shown the results of the attack, the entire film would have had a different impact, a less sympathetic one.

Not only do the genre and the closing scene establish the rejected invisibility of the abject, but most of the textual strategy fulfills the same objective. The text constructs four dominant spectatorial strategies: voyeurism, specularization, acceptance of passing, and unaudiality. The spectator becomes a voyeur to the ceremony marking Said and Khaled’s transformation into detonatorgs; s/he becomes a participant in the intensified specular character of the fighter on the videocassettes; his/her look that identifies with the passengers’ looks in the bus means s/he accepts Said’s passing as a detonatorg; and in contrast to the bus passengers in the extra-diegetic world, the spectator is deprived of audiality: in the last shot s/he is exposed to the silencing of the explosion.³³

The four strategies, as mentioned, create rejection of the abject. But they serve as spectatorial compensation for its absence, or more accurately, its negation. On the surface, the voyeurism of Paradise Now provides a cathartic solution to the extra-textual enigma created by the media: “Who is the suicide bomber?” The film shows the aspirants, the families, the recruit, the inner workings of the organization, the taping of the videocassette, and the protagonists’ transformation into detonatorgs. The subversion embodied in the videocassette-recording scene gives a sense of physicality grounded in the comic relief provided by a detailed portrayal of a series of events (the video recorder breaking down, people eating breakfast while watching Khaled, etc.). This physicality is a substitute for the absence of abjection.

The question is, does the film provide only spectatorial compensation for the absence/rejection of the abject through voyeurism and physicality, or does it also permit a physical approach to the detonatorg, that is, the body-as-anticipated-corpse? Will the text, in this sense, despite its characteristic rejection of the abject, suggest a temporary closeness to the anticipated abjection?³⁴

Paradise Now depicts temporary closeness to the anticipated abjection. This particularly occurs in the scene after the failure of the first plan, when Said and Khaled are separated, and Said, who is on the run, enters the public toilets at a food stand by the side of the road in Nablus. The scene shows him inside the small space attempting to wipe off the sweat running down his body under his suit. The camera gazes at his body and reveals what is underneath the suit: the explosives are attached to his body by thick layers of dressings and adhesive bandages. Actually, they are wound around him, except for the fuse hanging down his side. The fuse provides him the only way of ridding himself of his burden – by exploding himself. The sweat and the location make the scene the most abjective in the film. The fear of bodily transformation, of being a detonatorg, and the impossibility of re-entering the pre-transformative body is shown physically. But the film does not amplify this aspect over and above this single scene.

The editing links the scene at the cemetery where Said is laying on the ground next to his father’s grave holding the fuse (he was ten when his father was murdered for collaboration) with the second meeting he had with the head of the organization, Abu-Karem (Ashraf Barhom). The symbolic act that connects the body-as-anticipated-corpse with the dead father becomes the act of deciding to explode. Therefore, in contrast to the potential abjectness of the cemetery, the scene continues the textual trend of rejecting the abjection and favoring the symbolic body as a substitute. The meeting establishes the symbolic-paternal relationship as central to the Palestinian masculine heroism, having a higher value than the brotherly connection between Said and Khaled. Said confesses to Abu-Karem his motivations for being a suicide bomber: his humiliation at being the son of a collaborator, anger at the Occupation for not providing his father any option other than collaboration, and life in a refugee camp. ³⁵

Though the confession takes place under the patronage of the symbolic father, the film abandons the mythicization that had until that point been built around the character of Abu-Karem and begins to project it onto Said. During the whole length of the confession, the discussion between the two takes place with a continuous close-up on Said. Abu-Karem is sitting with his back to the camera; there are no shot-reverse-shots. The position of the camera is not unusual. The dominant aesthetic in Paradise Now is that of the frontal image. The film abounds with close-ups of faces turned to the camera. They are mostly silent close-ups that encourage projection on the part of the spectator. In the case of this scene, subverting the shot-reverse-shot convention encourages the projection of Abu-Karem’s mythicization on Said. The result is that the oedipal component of the conversation – like other perspectives – is dwarfed, and the transcendence of shahidism is intensified. That being the case, the confession is the turning point in which the film succeeds in providing a “complete” solution to the enigma of who is a suicidal terrorist (by breaking the suspense and uncovering the motivations) and supports it with the aesthetics of over-visibility (excess of close-ups).

The conclusion is that the spectator becomes a participant in a complex process of voyeurism and specularity that rejects/negates abjection and simultaneously provides compensation for this negation: personalization of the terrorist, recorporealization of the body, concreteness of physicality, temporary closeness to an abjective location and abjective fluids and aesthetics of over-visibility. But, overall, the rejection vanquishes compensation. Since the privileged subject position á la Hany Abu-Assad is that of the shahid/hero and not of the (post)traumatic subject, the victimized, the dominant tone is not one of drawing closer to the abject. In addition, the film does not give the feeling that the abject is agitating beneath the surface. At most, it is “local”, that is, it unavoidably grows out of the thematics – the preparations for death.

The privileging of the symbolic body and not of the corpse comes to its culmination during the scenes showing Said’s passing. As opposed to Valerie Rohy’s (1966) definition of passing as “a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not,” (219), Paradise Now depicts dual, unusual, passing. While the spectator is aware of the detonatorg’s secret, he is a non-participant, looking from a distance at the audiences validating Said’s passing with their looks. It is a dual passing since Said presents two different identities for two different audiences in the diegetic world – to Palestinians in Nablus, Said is a young Palestinian dressed like someone on his way to a wedding; to Israelis traveling on a bus in Tel Aviv, Said is an Oriental Jew.³⁶ The body of the wedding participant is symbolic in the tragic sense, since, after all, Suha appears in Said’s world as a kind of unrealized concrete substitute for the seventy-two virgins he is promised when he reaches heaven. According to this interpretation of Paradise Now, the wedding-participant identity is not a deception like that of the Oriental Jew. Passing as an Oriental Jew associates Said with the lower socio-economic sector of the Israeli population, which, like Eliko Timsit, the seventeenth victim, was forced to rely on public transportation even during the Intifada. Said’s masquerade does not entail the tension usually associated with “real” passing (such as racial passing) that involves fraud, treason, or self-denial. It is different than “real” passing á la Rohy because it does not open either political or psychological space regarding the identity of the other, or the possibility of playing with identities. Said wants to be accepted as an Oriental Jew, but, of course, does not identify himself within himself as a Jew. In the duality of passing he reveals the impossibility inherent in the Palestinian desire for a concrete, stable identity, as opposed to a transcendental one. The question is, does the technical passing, in spite of this, offer a subversive option regarding identity? Are other dual identities at work here, besides those of outward appearance? Does passing reveal the artificiality of boundaries, of separation between two peoples that so closely resemble each another in appearance? Not in the opinion of the author. In the extra-texual world, at the site of the attack, the coming together of the suicide bomber’s body with the bodies of the Israeli victims is replete with the intermingling of blood. Immediately after a terror attack it is impossible to differentiate between the corpses of the terrorist and the victims – only after the body parts have been collected by ZAKA does the process of separation begin. This means that on the level of the abject, the passing has become total. In this sense the crisis of contradictions characterizing the “new” war, as described in the introduction, goes beyond binarism (we-them, civilian-soldier, etc.) – to a labyrinth. In the world of Paradise Now, as the result of the rejection of the abject, the passing does not offer subverting options regarding identity. Beyond the awareness of physical resemblance, the questions asked are in fact impossible to ask. The film channels all possible opportunities for a subversive discussion of identities towards the longed-for journey of the shahidic identity.

What takes place at the visible level also takes place at the auditory level. The (tress)passing creates the split inherent in the detonatorg – between the body (seemingly visible) to the (unheard) voice of the anticipated shahid. In contrast to the way the split is presented in the final scene, in Said’s videocassette the recorporealization involves the subjectivization of the fighter through audiality. In the extra- diegetic reality, the sound of the explosion would speak in his place. In the final scene, the white screen denies the results of the attack both visibly and audibly.

The unavoidable conclusion is that Paradise Now does not construct the shahidic option as being (post)traumatic. The trauma that does take place under the surface mainly refers to the question of whether it is worthwhile for a young person to give up his life – and not if it is proper. The film presents several positions: the non-shahidic, Khaled’s subject position: choosing life, a possible but not a proper option; the anti-shahidic, Suha’s position: opposition to violence (this option is presented in the film only through dialogue and so lacks real power in the world of the organization and its emissaries, and in the end is pushed to the sidelines); the a-shahidic, Khaled’s mother’s (Hiam Abbass) position: survival, which according to Said is comparable to a living death. This series of contradictions leads to the proper subject shahidic position.³⁷

As a psycho-political thriller, Paradise Now depicts a secret operation which climaxes with the detonation of a lethal time bomb and is based on suspense (failure of the first operation, the relationship with Suha…). This suspense, however, is in lieu of exposure to the timer that will detonate the bomb. It is clear that if we had been exposed to it, if it had been Hitchcockian, it would have had to detonate the bomb – and be visible. The delays do not have anything to do with whether the bomb will explode or not; but to the question of whether Said will decide to go through with his mission. As a result, the climax is not an open question. The development of the drama from failure to success and from hesitation to decision is what determines the final cathartic tone.

In Paradise Now, as in Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (2002),³⁸ the Palestinian body bears the burden of change that befalls the subject. As described above, this change involves objectification. Whether the objectification is real (in Paradise Now, transformation into a detonatorg), or if it is fantasmatical (in Divine Intervention the female ninja returns to being a silhouette target), from the Palestinian standpoint the pre-transformative body, sans objecthood, has no chance in the “new” war.³⁹ The call to “paradise now” perpetuates the suicidal relationship between objecthood and subjecthood. Analysis of the relationship between the body and the corpse therefore shows the terrible price Palestinian society pays for the place objecthood holds within the Palestinian conceptualization of subjectivity. Paradise Now maintains that the subject position of shahidism-heroism is an outgrowth of victimization resulting from the Israeli Occupation. This construction does not allow the portrayal of the shahid-hero as a perpetrator; that is to say, a victim transformed into a hero for Palestinians while he is simultaneously a perpetrator to Israeli citizens. The rejection/ negation of the abject in Paradise Now, the fact that it is not only invisible, but un-imagined and substituted by a disembodied spirit, above all else serves the single dimensionality of the Palestinian subject position (victim transformed to hero). The analysis of the relationship between the body and the corpse suggested here points to the price that Palestinian society also pays for denying the trauma of terror attacks. Its tanatography does not include what according to Kristeva is essential – confrontation with the abject.

Body/Corpse/Ethics

An analysis of the relationship between the body and the corpse (approaching versus rejection of the abject) reveals, first of all, the inability of each of the films to include the dual subject position. The tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the second Intifada does not permit – neither in No. 17 nor in Paradise Now – fluidity of identities and identifications. During the heyday of the second Intifada, Israeli documentary cinema constructs a victimized subject position and subliminally attempts to dismantle the position of the perpetrator (body-corpse-soil); therefore, as previously mentioned, it is ahead of Israeli fiction cinema, which represses the position of the victim in relation to terrorist attacks while denying that the perpetrator’s position is the result of the Occupation, and paves the way for perpetrator trauma documentary cinema. Palestinian fiction cinema, in the case of Paradise Now (and the videocassettes), constructs a heroic-shahidic subject position, which depends on a subliminal victim position (victim of the Occupation), though it denies the position of the perpetrator in relation to terror attacks. The absence of a dual position is characteristic of the two films under discussion, though to the author Paradise Now is the more conspicuous – both because of its rhetoric and because it obstructs all subversive options. Second, body/corpse negotiation attests to our willingness to accept impurity á la Mary Douglas (1966) and Kristeva (1982); that is, to become contaminated by the corpse becomes an additional criterion of accepting the other. As the above analysis has shown, this is a crucial component for understanding the involved discourses, those that are open to fluidity and doubling, as well as others that lack this fluidity.

Third, the Israeli-Palestinian case might offer a new perspective for trauma studies at large. Current psychological-psychiatric-cultural trauma research (from Caruth to Walker) is marked by excessive emphasis on the question of memory as central to understanding and characterizing trauma (and to treating its victims). This question encompasses what this research defines as the inherent duality of the traumatic experience (two spans of time and space, two kinds of experience/awareness, two “types” of influence – on the body/on the soul, etc.). This definition harbors a predisposition and does not seek to understand trauma outside the processes of memory, while the application of the question of memory to all aspects of trauma precludes all other discussion of those aspects. Is not the fetishization of memory an outcome of a certain world order? A perspective appropriate to the post-1945 world seems particularly germane to the twentieth century, the century of the crisis of testimony. In regard to terror, the “new” trauma requires a different concept of the “crisis of memory.” Despite the recourse to such temporal/epistemological terms as trauma and post-trauma, unknowable and belated knowing, and so on, a discussion of the substantivity of trauma must include additional dimensions “outside of memory.” These are primarily ontological, not epistemological, dimensions – body and corpse, body and space – and what was described above as the perception of time involved in the attack, the time of the body as anticipated corpse. This is the time of “one more moment” (without a past, a brief present that moves inevitably toward its end, without a future).

Giving centrality to the question of memory also leads the research to emphasize what it describes as two dichotomous paradigms (mimetic/identification/hypnotic imitation and/or antimimetic/dissociation/estrangement) (Leys 2000, 299).⁴⁰ But are these paradigms indeed dichotomous? The trauma of a terrorist attack by a suicide terrorist does not “fit” either of them. As the validity of this dialectic between the paradigms diminishes, “memory crisis” can no longer be the exclusive characteristic of traumatic discourse. In contrast to the trauma of modern war, in the case of terror, because of the lack of knowledge of who the attacker is, and the death of the latter (unlike in situations of ongoing captivity, for example) – there can be no identification with him or hypnotic imitation. Nor, because of the sudden, arbitrary, catastrophic nature of the attack, can there be an opposite, antimimetic situation in which the traumatized subject becomes a detached observer of the event. Thus it is impossible to apply the dialectic between the paradigms, which according to Leys is part of the history of trauma, to the trauma of a terror act committed by a suicide terrorist. In other words, this is a “double telling” in Caruth’s sense (1996, 7)⁴¹ but in a different, additional regard: not only a story of death and survival, but a story both of death and survival (of the victim of the attack) and of death with no pre-choice of survival (of the suicide terrorist).

The transformation needed in the current conceptualization of traumatic memory must be based on changes in the nature of subjectivity and the relationship between objecthood and subjecthood. In addition, the difficulties in containing the contradictory positions of perpetrator and victim, in the perception of the event, in the perception of death, and in the visibility and acceptance of the abject/the other are also factors to be taken into consideration.

Tragically, as this deconstruction of the “classic” paradigm of trauma studies shows, terror attacks to a large extent force Israeli society and Palestinian society to sink into a trauma without cure, with no transition to the post-traumatic stage. Within the reality of ongoing exposure to trauma, Israeli documentary cinema in the period of the second Intifada has been able to show what has not been seen in public discourse or the fiction cinema. The public space as a psychological space becomes a tragic participant in a gradual process of menticide⁴² that is imposed on the citizens of Israel by the continuous Occupation and by the terror organizations. Repression, invisibility, and exclusion become substantive to menticide. In complete contrast, documentary cinema relates to the body and the corpse anew as a defining power. This renewed interpretation is a basic component of the changing Israeli identity. The contours of the approach to the abject should be defined not by the inevitable repression of the trauma by the psychopolitics of the public space, and not by the ultra-Orthodox functionality of the “return of the repressed” according to ZAKA.⁴³ The approach to the abject does not mean “death infecting life,” that is, ultra-religious-motivated conceptions of “pure” or “impure,” “prohibition” and “sin,” and so on, but the opposite. The approach is “death affecting life.” Documentary cinema recreates the awareness that the “new” Israeli self (which has been reconstructed by the terror) is a vagrant in the zone between the hysterical body that does not “speak” because of the taboo imposed on such speech in the public discourse, and the abject, silent body/corpse. Moreover, as the film No. 17 demonstrated through its director’s docu-activism, this cinema is reconstructing the “new” Israeli identity, devoid of the “traditional” claim to the land, and is in the midst of becoming open to the other. Tragically, as the next chapter demonstrates in relation to the chronicity of terror trauma, re- understanding of death is needed for this purpose. As the Book of the prophet Nahum (3:3) states, “A multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses, and there is no end to the bodies.”

CHAPTER 2

CHRONIC VICTIM TRAUMA AND TERROR

The effect of trauma is precisely to freeze people in time. Jacqueline Rose¹

The knowledge of trauma, or the knowledge which comes from that source, is composed of two contradictory elements. One is the traumatic event, registered rather than experienced. It seemed to have bypassed perception and consciousness, and falls directly into the psyche. The other is a kind of memory of the event, in a form of a perpetual troping of it by the bypassed or severely split… psyche… Traumatic knowledge, then, would seem to be a contradiction in terms. It is as close to nescience as to knowledge. Any general description or modeling of trauma, therefore, risks being figurative itself, to the point of mythic fantasmagoria. Geoffrey H. Hartman²

This chapter focuses on how chronic victim trauma caused by terror attacks was presented in Israeli narrative cinema during the height of the second Intifada (2002–4). The chronicity stemmed from a long series of attacks perpetrated by lone Palestinian suicide bombers carrying explosive-packed belts or parcels into crowded urban settings.³ While according to B’Tselem an average of three such attacks occurred monthly between October 2000 and November 2004, as indicated earlier, they were pushed away from the public eye by Israeli public discourse and narrative cinema, preventing them from becoming post-traumatic collective memories of the past. On the personal level, which of course has ramifications on the collective, a significant number of personal post-traumatic stories reported in the media⁴ calls attention to the tremendous difficulty entailed in accepting the personal traumatic event as a one-time event. In the existing milieu, collective memory forces chronic victim trauma (itself unseen and unheard as a result of iconographic repetition) on the personal. Personal victim trauma is silenced and, in fact, absorbed by the collective. This is not recognition of trauma, but its repression within the a-traumatic chronology. I claim that both public discourse and fiction cinema create a chronic reality of anti-memory, a reality that cannot be transformed into post-traumatic memory.

As claimed earlier,⁵ it is widely recognized that the link between trauma, memory, and fantasy has become (since Freud’s suppression of seduction theory) an almost Gordian knot, which research, especially feminist research, has tried to untie (for example, Mitchell and Rose [1982] and Waldman and Walker [1990]). Recent humanities-based trauma studies from Lewis-Herman (1992b) and Caruth (1996) to Walker (2005) have repeatedly focused on analyzing the single traumatic event (rather than chronic trauma), doing so through conceptualization of memory (which is constantly perceived as central to understanding trauma and its attributes, and to treating victims of trauma), and not anti-memory. This research describes memory as incorporating an inherent duality: two periods of time and space (past and present), two modes of experience or acknowledgement (the story of death and of survival), and two types of influence (on the body and on the soul). Other approaches also emphasize instabilities regarding remembrance of the traumatic event as a central issue in understanding trauma and how it is presented (Walker 2005, 17); however, they also failed to define trauma outside the boundaries of memory. Thus, traumatic memory (with obvious characteristics of double telling, a-referentiality, and belatedness) (Caruth 1996, 7, 11, 17) determines the character of traumatic discourse and its limits.

The question is how the reality of “anti-memory” was expressed in Israeli cinema during the second Intifada; i.e., is it possible to present post-chronic trauma outside memory? And further on, will Israeli cinema treat the acoustic phantom, the generator of chronicity? If so, will presentation of the sound, as the volatile other of the post-traumatic image, assist in mediating a new approach towards the symbolic, the horrific? Understanding how the trauma of suicide attacks is presented in Israeli cinema is, therefore, another layer in the attempt to comprehend chronic victim trauma, the traumatic event, and the possibilities for presenting it.⁶

In the following, a different option is examined. My questions are: how was the reality of what I call “anti-memory” expressed in Israeli cinema during the peak years of the second Intifada, and as a consequence, is it possible to present trauma outside memory?

Beyond Memory and into the Time Trap

I contend that both Israeli citizens exposed to terror in the public space and past victims of terror suffer from the same anti-memory trauma. The victims are in an especially tragic situation, since even if they have begun to process their personal trauma into future memories another attack can catch them at any moment. In other words, whenever they find themselves in a public space their personal traumatic experience ceases to be a one-time blow and becomes repetitive. Recognizing trauma, however, becomes even more complex when one examines how chronic trauma is constructed in cinema.

I believe that conservative political orientations, Israeli discourse focusing on Jewish victimhood,⁷ the avoidance of Israelis from confronting the heavy price of Occupation and the hegemonization of victory all operate to retard the recognition of terror attacks, and therefore, post-traumatic memory. According to Brown (1995):

We are also challenged… to observe how our images of trauma have been narrow and constructed within the experiences and realities of dominant groups in cultures. The dominant, after all, writes the diagnostic manuals and informs the public discourse, on which we have built our images of “real” trauma. “Real” trauma is often only that form of trauma in which the dominant group can participate as a victim rather than as the perpetrator or etiologist of the trauma (102).⁸

While this chronic, on-going trauma prevails, the dominant discourse prevents recognition of trauma after the latency period and further prevents assimilation of the trauma and its progress into the stage of post-traumatic memory. The dominant discourse causes personal traumatic memory and collective traumatic memory to merge. This is not fusion on the basis of commonality, the usual subject of research, but the opposite. The structuring of victim chronic trauma (based on repeated traumatic events) causes both personal and collective traumatic memory to undergo transformation. That is, the collective memory of the Israeli imagined community as it is manifested in public and fiction cinema discourse forces itself on personal memory (which has not passed through the recognition stage), and subjugates its single-event character to the chronicity of collective memory (which opposes recognition). The result is two modes of memory that have in common not what they share (the trauma of the terror attack), but what they do not share (the recognition of victim trauma and its conversion to post-traumatic memory) because they interfere with one other.

In other words, Israeli reality manifested in public discourse and fiction cinema during those years is one of anti-memory. Therefore, all attempts to analyze victim trauma and how it is presented must develop tools either outside of memory or past it.⁹

This distancing is built into the level of visual imagery allowed by the media. The attack is represented in media reports by familiar iconography (long shots, invisibility of the corpse, etc.). In terms of sound, one can’t even speak of representation, but rather of a total absence, the result of a silencing. Even though the blast waves of the explosion are mainly responsible for the traumatic forcefulness of the event, i.e., its visible traces, the volatility of the sound of the blast is consistent with its “silencing” in terms of representation. The traumatic sound lacks any intimacy with the symbolic. In this sense, when speaking of levels of traumatization, repressing sound seems to be the deepest level. No wonder, then, that Israel’s chronic social fantasy regarding terrorist attacks is first and foremost acoustic: every Israeli is familiar with the visual aftermath of attacks, but only the victims have actually heard them. The fantasy, structured around the moment of the blast as a phantom, is powerful precisely because the sound quickly vanishes and is unrepresentable. Like the traumatic event itself, signified by its reverberating boom, the sound is conceptualized only later, in its imagined post-effect. From this perspective, sound symbolizes the unapproachable essence of the traumatic event, and is thus more commensurate to the event than the visual image could ever be.

I suggest, therefore, the term “pre-memory” to describe memory (both personal and collective) that has not yet become part of the belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) process. Pre-memory hampers or obstructs belatedness in an attempt to distance its effect, which is the belated response of recognition. Using the term pre-memory does not mean, of course, that the traumatic event did not occur. I am not referring here to pre-trauma, but the mode that comes before the first belated processing of the traumatic experience.

Discussing extreme traumatic events, Marianne Hirsch and Janet Walker define distinct types of remembrance. Hirsch (2001) coined the well-known term “postmemory” to define the identification-related traumatic memory of the post-Holocaust generation as opposed that of the Holocaust-generation itself, the victims:

Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation – often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible… It is defined through an identification with the victim or witness of trauma, modulated by the unbridgeable distance that separates the participant from the one born after… Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who… have grown up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the powerful stories of the previous generation, shaped by monumental traumatic events that resist understanding and integration (9–12).

In order to free herself from the binarism of false memory/true memory and discuss the immanent and inseparable link between fantasy and reality in unrealistic modes of historical memory in cinema, Walker (2005) coined the term “disremembering”:

The process described by psychological literature as that of conjuring mental images and sounds related to past events but altered in certain respects shall be termed “disremembering.” Disremembering is not the same as not remembering. It is remembering with a difference… Disremembering can become urgent when events are personally unfathomable or socially unacceptable. Disremembering incest or the Holocaust is a survival strategy par excellence (17–19).

Are postmemory and disremembering beyond-memory forms? Are they anti-memory? I believe not. Despite their disparities, both are involved – in different ways – in the processes of identification, displacement, vicariousness and belatedness. Neither of the writers is defining a condition of a-memory, but rather a condition in which the memory form is forced upon the person doing the remembering, and is recast as a survival strategy. (Walker says so openly, Hirsch hints at it.)

Should pre-memory also be looked upon as a survival strategy? I believe not. Both of the above memory modes facilitate defining pre-memory by opposing it: pre-memory is the polar opposite of these processes. It abrogates identification with the personal memory; rejects metaphoric, metonymic, and displacement relationships in order to separate the modes from one another as much as possible and impose the collective on the personal; and rejects or halts belatedness. Caruth, in the steps of Freud, assumes that despite being enigmatic, belatedness is an all-encompassing process. I believe, however, that two factors take part in “transforming” belatedness from a process that induces recognition of the event to the obstructive process of pre-memory. The first is the chronic nature of the trauma of terror attacks, which resulted in the memory of personal events being overcome by the chronicity of the attacks. The second is the subjugating invasiveness of the collective memory. When the conditions contributing to chronic trauma are present, it is difficult to provide any meaningful answers to the questions of whether the dominant (anti)memory forms can hinder and/or disallow memory forms belonging to marginal groups in society (terror victims),¹⁰ or if collective memory can destroy personal memory (while in essence being based on it). I can only point out that the struggle over traumatic memory takes place only in the margins of the public sphere – in documentary cinema and other forms of personal memory.

If pre-memory is essentially the opposite of post-traumatic memory, the question becomes how to define the “opposite” of the temporality of belatedness and how is it possible to describe the temporality of this personal/collective anti-memory. I believe that beneath the trauma of terror attacks, the temporal reality of anti-memory is a pathological milieu that has trapped Israeli society between two “possibilities of time.” These possibilities do not conform to the approach to time currently accepted in psychiatric, psychological, and cultural circles regarding trauma (“before and after”); rather, they undermine it. On one hand, pre-memory is the time of the attack, the time that “any minute an attack can happen”; on the other hand, it is the other time, the interval.

The interpretive parameters of secondary trauma and distance suffering (Zelzer and Stuart 2003; Chouliaraki 2004) that were adopted consequent to the events of September 11 do not accurately describe the unique Israeli combination of catastrophes that are simultaneously one-time and chronic. 9/11 in fact symbolizes its one-time nature, and calls attention to its Israeli antithesis – almost twenty years of continuous trauma – and accordingly and necessarily – what alters the psychosocial approach to time and the status of traumatic memory for those who experience it.

What characterizes the time trap? First of all, the two possibilities of time accelerate the presentification of the experience as “new” time: “The significance of the now is… in the presentification of both the ‘now-no-longer’ and the ‘now-not-yet.’ This is where the now differs from the ‘ordinary’ conception of time” (Heiddeger, quoted in Bohrer 1994, 49, 65 note 45). I maintain that both possibilities of time create radical temporality of presentification as part of the survivors’ instinct not to give in to premonitions of the future. The accelerated version of presentification is based on two separate systems of time. In one, the arbitrary moment controls the individual/singular. In the second, time is the interval, seemingly infinite, until the moment of the event. In contrast to the individual moment, the critical moment of temporality, the interval has double significance in three aspects: it is composed of a compressed multiplicity of events, but also acts as a gap; it is infinite, but has the potential to become singular; it is perceived as an a-traumatic break, but has the traumatic potential to take possession of us. The gap between the critical moment and the interval (compression/emptiness, endless/singular, a-traumatic/traumatic) is based on the second characteristic of the time trap, negative circularity.

The question is how to describe the critical singular moment. Beyond Walter Benjamin’s theory of shock (1940/2009), how can the negation of continuity be described? As the suspension of consciousness of the passing of time? As the opposite of durée? Bohrer, who studies the modality of the moment from the beginning of the Romantic Period until modern literature, uses the term suddenness to describe the aesthetic moment (Plötzlichkeit). He claims that “suddenness is understood… as an expression and a sign of discontinuity and nonidentity, as whatever resists aesthetic integration” (1994, vii). His discussion of the historical aesthetics of the sudden, especially in connection with what he calls the generation of the “dangerous moment” as a symbolic variant of the “ecstasy of the moment in modern poetry,” can to a certain extent supply the missing tools required for analysis of the cinematic representation of the pathology of the time of terror attacks. According to Bohrer:

The effect of terror [as aesthetic phenomenon] arises – as Nietzsche, continuing Schopenhauer’s description, asserts – because the “principle of sufficient reason” suffers an “exception” when the human being “is suddenly dumbfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena.” Suddenness is the temporal precondition of such a perception… To recognize the structure of suddenness in our perception of events, we must disregard causal explanations, renounce the traditional concept of knowledge, give up trying to explain things with the concepts of cause and effect (40–1).

If this is true, suddenness is the third characteristic of the time trap, describing both the quality of the one/singular moment of abruptness and the double significance that characterizes the interval, as I described above. The sudden as an ontological category indicates precisely the watershed point at which the referential and the indexical fractures break away from the traumatic event. In Bohrer’s terms, acknowledgement of the a-causative is a prerequisite for recognizing the effect of the sudden.

I’ve already alluded to the fourth characteristic of the time trap: in Israel, there is no anticipation of the unknown, but anticipation of a known unknown (shall we call it uncanny presentification?). It is no wonder that Bohrer has followed the genealogy of the concept of the sudden in the writings of two authors who look at the critical moment in similar ways. Speaking of anxiety, Kierkegaard wrote, “The demonic is the sudden” (quoted in Bohrer 1994, 43, 63–4, note 20). Bohrer notes that “Heidegger… ties the perceptual category of the sudden to the concept of alarm (Erschrecken)” (47).

In Israeli society, change occurred in the perception of the irreversible moment, the arbitrariness in which the public space is transformed from a fertile space to a consuming space where the status of the citizen changes instantaneously from that of street walker, like the flâneur of Benjamin and of Baudelaire (1964), who is “a passionate lover of crowds and incognitos” (5) to terror victim. That being the case, suddenness is thereby characterized by irreversibility, arbitrariness, and specific bi-temporality (caught between the already-occurred and the yet-to-occur).

So far I have described a number of characteristics of what I metaphorically called the time trap: rejection of the before/after traumatic temporality, structuring the relationship between the one/singular moment and the interval, merging of one-time and chronic catastrophe, accelerated presentification, negative circularity, rejection of the continuance of the durée, anticipation of the known unknown, and suddenness (irreversibility, arbitrariness, temporality between already-occurred and the yet-to-occur). Discussing these characteristics raises several questions that will be addressed in most of the following discussion: Does Israeli cinema during the second Intifada respond to the time trap? If so, how? Does it succeed in locating the sudden? What audial-visual modes are represented? Is there a style of suddenness?

Narrative Cinema

As indicated above, victim trauma resulting from terror attacks appeared in only a very small number of Israeli narrative films made during the height of the second Intifada; when it did, the trauma was neither the heart of the drama nor the subject of the film. In the few films that do depict an attack, for example, Haim Buzaglo’s Distortion (2004); Raphaël Nadjari’s Avanim (2004); and Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water (2004), it is used as a kind of pre-text, a referential world that for Israelis is complete, extra-textual, and familiar.¹¹ It accelerates the dramatic action of the film and sustains the tension. Visually, the attack is usually presented as a television image.

That is to say, this type of victim trauma appears in fictional cinema not as a re-creation of the event, but as it was iconographically portrayed by the conventions of live broadcast. The standard image shows the site of the attack – the charred skeleton of the bus, the gutted coffeehouse, etc. – in a long distance shot. The most conspicuous element in the frame is the activity of the security and rescue forces. The abject, that is, the corpse, is excluded, covered, and hidden. Since the event is not re-created, the sound of the explosion is not represented. It is silenced. In other words, the iconography is maintained in the soundtrack as well. The sounds heard are the ones regularly heard after suicide attacks: analysts, witnesses, sirens, ambulances. They substitute for the volatility of the sound of the explosion.

This audio-visual iconography appears in narrative films in one of two ways: in the first and more common, the film includes a scene in which the characters are watching a live broadcast originating at the site of the attack. For example, in Walk on Water, which depicts a meeting between a Mossad agent and the grandson of a fugitive Nazi, the protagonists find themselves watching such a broadcast, not a critical event in the world depicted in the film, one coping with the burden of the Holocaust and perceptions of heroism and homosexuality. With that, the event sustains the interaction between the two protagonists – both the concrete and the symbolic – through the perpetual tension of the Israeli experience. In the second type of audio-visual iconography, the attack is filmed within a diegetic world unmediated by televisual apparatus, but keeping its characteristic format. In Avanim, for example, the terror attack does not carry strong ideological connotations, as it does in Walk on Water, but is the turning point in the narrative. The protagonist, a thirty-year old married woman, is having an affair which ends with the death of her lover in an attack. Despite the centrality of the attack to the narrative, the movie distances it from the eye. The woman, traveling to meet her lover at a main city plaza, discovers an attack has taken place and the site is blocked by security forces. She is forced to stay behind police barricades erected to keep out bystanders, and therefore – like the viewer, and analogous to televisual iconography – observes from a distance. At the hospital she cannot receive information about her lover because she is not next of kin. Thus, the distancing of the terror event is duplicated in the consequent spheres of the tragic event. Even though this is a turning point after which the heroine’s life is changed beyond recognition, the film minimizes the dramatic intensity of the attack in comparison to other subplots. In other words, the loss of her lover in the attack is only one of many causes for the change that takes place in her life.

Though Avanim is more complex than Walk on Water vis-à-vis the construction of distancing and exclusion of the trauma, the results are similar. They both treat the attack as a pre-text, using iconographic presentation that not only indicates exclusion, but allows the time trap to be ignored. They force framing on the traumatic event through linear development dominated by a-traumatic and a-chronic temporality (the period spent locating the Nazi grandfather in the former case and the period of the break-up of the marriage in the latter). That is to say, pre-marginalization and iconographication nullify the traumatic event from the temporality of the time trap in which it was situated and displaces it.

According to the mimetic paradigm of trauma discourse,¹² visual exclusion, audial silencing, and a-traumatic temporality are evidence that fiction cinema is in the repression stage and not the post-traumatic, which would involve recognition of the trauma. I argue that Israeli narrative cinema is subject to pre-memory. The time trap reinforces the awareness that it is impossible to pass into the post-traumatic stage until the conditions causing chronic trauma have ceased to exist.

Close to Home

The only Israeli fiction film during those years to give expression to the time trap and victim trauma is Close to Home (Vidi Bilu and Dalya Hager, 2005). The film deals with the development of a relationship between two female soldiers who are partnered during their compulsory army service in the Border Police. They are stationed in Jerusalem and their job is to follow Arabs wandering around the public space in the center of the city and identify potential suspects, that is, to interview and report those not carrying an Israeli identity card. The film approaches the trauma of terror attacks vis-à-vis subject, background, events, place, and time, despite the fact that the drama is centered on the relationship developing between the two protagonists (Smadar [Smadar Sayar] and Mirit [Naama Schendar]) and not the terror attack. That is to say, the film follows the tradition of the “odd couple” genre in police films more than it does conventions of the terror film genre. (Mirit follows orders while Smadar disobeys them; Mirit accepts that the army conducts its affairs in a degrading and inhuman manner, while Smadar opposes it and does her best to avoid the surveillance and the security checks; Mirit has trouble building relationships and is withdrawn while Smadar is open and friendly, and so on.) Despite the fact that like other Israeli narrative films, the terror attack is represented as an iconographic television image, I believe the suspense involved in its presentation is especially salient regarding the time trap. Presenting the time trap (for example, by depicting the soldiers’ daily routine) is in aesthetical and ideological opposition to presenting the event as ever-approaching. This kind of suspense naturally prepares the viewer for the event, provides information, and moves to the climax, in contrast both to the radical structure of suddenness á la Bohrer and negative circularity.

Looking for terror suspects in Close to Home

(Courtesy of Vidi Bilu, Dalia Hager, and Transfax Film)

Two dramatic choices, therefore, make Bilu and Hager’s film respond authentically to the laws of reality referred to in the film. The first is the unavoidable terror-linked suspense that mounts throughout the film, even though it is not in the open and does not dominate the dramatization of the relationship. Depiction of the soldiers’ relationship creates emotional identification (that is to say, the drama begins with conflicts and confrontations, has turning points, reaches the stage where facades are removed and lies are exposed, and ends with friendship and cooperation) and takes over as the main tone of the viewing experience in place of fear resulting from of the likelihood of an attack. To put it differently, for the viewer, the main experience is proximity to the point of view of the soldiers and their world as young women emotionally separated from their families, searching for romance, anxious about their appearance, and having all the mischievousness of youth. Despite that the main turning point in their relationship occurs as a result of an attack in their territory, the film does not structure a sado-masochistic world according to Hitchcockian rules of suspense in the classic sense, which punish the viewer; i.e., the viewer is not exposed to dramatic structures like “will there be an attack”/“will she be killed?”

Close to Home not only avoids this kind of structuring, but – especially – retains the structure of the terrorist attack within the time trap. The question of whether there will be an attack is part of the backdrop because it is integral to the soldiers’ daily routine, but does not, however, set the psychological or emotional boundaries of their world or the viewing process to which we are exposed. That is to say, the suspense of the potential attack is a distanced awareness and displaced by the suspense connected to the relationship, which has a political weight to its “solution,” with each of the soldiers taking a different stand in relation to army service, the Occupation, responsibility vis-à-vis terror attacks, etc. The quasi-documentary photography of the street action taken with a hand-held camera in winter daylight and the almost mono-chromatic gray and khaki give the film a realistic grainy look that radicalizes the dramatic changes taking place.

The second dramatic choice made regarding expression of the time trap and thus victim trauma is the decision to show at the end of the film the cyclical tragedy of Occupation and terror. In this scene, the two soldiers, who are now close friends, ask a young Arab to show his identification. He refuses, and a verbal exchange ensues (“I refuse; what will you do to me?”). What began as a humorous teasing becomes a bitter argument as a result of the interference of three Israeli passers-by. The camera is placed very close to the events and records the commotion in a quasi-documentary style. From the moment it becomes clear the men are striking the Palestinian and the soldiers have lost control of the situation, the camera cuts from the commotion to the silent image of Smadar and Mirit on Smadar’s motorbike. This image is held until the end of the film. It looks as if they are riding the city streets but in fact the camera is continuously circling them. The daylight photography and medium close-up emphasize their frontal gaze, their faces unsmiling. For some minutes the soundtrack plays only the diegetic sounds of their confrontation, as women, with the violence of the young Palestinian being beaten: Smadar yelling at the men to move away, sounds of kicks, her pleas to stop hitting him, her tears. The circling of the camera and the length of the shot emphasize the perception of the Occupation as an endless cycle, a nationalistic-religious but also gender-oriented trap (not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but between Israeli women and the militant/racist perceptions of the Israeli male). Above all, the violent scene intimates the obvious tragedy while presenting the opportunity for the next terror attack. Therefore, the world laid bare to us in this film, from the point of view of the time trap, is a world that expresses the tension inherent in it. That is, the actions of the two soldiers (evading their assignments, arguing over whether to try on a hat or get their hair cut while on duty in the public space where they are forbidden to fulfill their personal needs) are perceived in the end not only as the personal characteristics of their age or political leanings, but also as an almost literal expression of a (failed) attempt to force a-traumatic, a-chronic time on their chronic-tragic routine and life in Israel.

Endless cycle of the Occupation, Close to Home

(Courtesy of Vidi Bilu, Dalia Hager, and Transfax Film)

Moments

From 2002, the height of the second Intifada, until 2005, the Jerusalem Cinematheque’s International Film Festival, with the participation of Israeli Television, sponsored a film competition. The short-short three-minute format was chosen as a way to provide a cinematic response to the political situation and to its usual representation in mainstream media. The project, hence, was called Moments. By 2005, hundreds of films had been submitted, of which about ten were shown each year. On the cultural level the entire project was a response to the time trap in which the random moment constructs reality.

I argue that the short-short film as a cultural category surpasses the boundaries of media texts and operates within exceptional time and place. Like the episodic films generated by the fall of the Twin Towers, which tried to capture the lack of control evident during this chaotic event by using a multiplicity of perspectives, the three-minute film is a response to the traumatic reality of terror events. In my view, however, a post-traumatic episodic film such as Alain Brigand’s 11’09”01-September 11 (2002), for example, is based on a gimmick: each of the eleven directors from the eleven countries, as we know, had to produce a film whose length had to be exactly eleven minutes, nine seconds, and one frame, corresponding to the date 9/11/01.¹³ Despite the attempt of the episodic film to respond via the format to the arbitrariness of the event, I would argue that in the Israeli case, the three-minute film is neither a gimmick nor a one-dimensional response to arbitrariness. The three-minute format can provide an exact and faithful expression of the intensive time experience that quickly reaches culmination and makes the attack a traumatic event. Here is a one-to-one ratio of screen to actual time, which is impossible, of course, in feature films. But this is not the salient element of the films. In contrast to narrative films, the short-short films of Moments are characterized by dealing with the suddenness of terrorist attacks through rapid format and audial presentation.

The re-audialization of the trauma, which expresses the perception of time in the three-minute film, does not deal with the moment of the attack itself. The attack is not presented. Instead, the films, through their use of sound, build what may at first glance seem to be the familiar representation of “before and after” the trauma, though this is misleading.

First of all, representation of “if” has been added to “before and after,” a construct based on a Žižek-like return of the repressed from the future. Second, the three possible constructs of time are not expressed in isolation. Representation of the trauma of ongoing terror requires portraying each of the three possibilities as invariably embodying the other two. In each of the films, the “before” is also the “after” which is also the “if,” as if the attack that has already occurred will re-occur.

The following analysis of four of the films will illustrate four possibilities of representing post-traumatic terrorist attacks through a combination of the short-short format and sound which transcends the time trap: the quiet of the interval (waiting for the attack), the techno-sound of the scanner (the culture of surveillance), ringtones of cellular phones (the unheard modulation of the corpse), the ticking of a time bomb (the symbolic sound of approaching death), and the ostensible video recording (simulation of postmortem sound).

Possibility I: The Quiet of the Interval (Waiting for the Attack)

Just Not Another Suicide Bombing (Amit Drori, Israel, 2004)

Synopsis: For the entire three minutes, the film depicts passengers on a bus: an elderly woman, a female soldier, a young man, a girl, etc. They are all photographed in medium or full close-ups, and are all seen observing the activities unfolding on the bus. Only diegetic sounds are heard.

This short film is built on the no-sound of waiting for an attack; that is, on the typical quietude of the time trap in which anticipation of the random moment structures time as an interval that lasts until the very moment of the attack. This momentary silence, defined by Lacan as beneficent punctuation, connotes the horrific antithesis of nothingness – it is a quiet something, unavoidably present. The quasi-documentary depiction of an April 2004 Jerusalem bus ride is presented as a period of waiting that is important for several reasons: First of all, the exterior of the bus is never photographed and the world of the bus becomes a closed one. Second, the waiting emphasizes the interval, the gap, because there is no action. Third, the passengers look into the camera in a way that is almost premonitory, since, almost absurdly, the camera is placed where a potential terrorist could be standing. They look at the camera without being aware of its presence, just as they cannot be aware of the presence of the invisible terrorist. Vis-à-vis both the camera and the terrorist, the passengers’ look is not a gaze, but is rather the undirected glance of ordinary bus passengers. The fourth reason for the feeling of waiting is that it is filmed over a long period of time. The camera follows the passengers with long shots, the silence emphasized by the length of time passing.

Passengers on a bus – waiting for an attack in Just Not Another Suicide Bombing

(Courtesy of Amit Drori, Tapuz – Micha Shagrir)

The facial shots, lack of action, undirected looks, long takes, diegetic sounds (voices of the passengers, horns, doors opening, ambulance, sirens), and the complete lack of dialogue suspend the moment of suddenness; they indicate that the passengers are complete strangers. But most of all they indicate and emphasize the arbitrary randomness of their being together on the bus and suspend the moment of suddenness. As a result, though, the traumatic “before” and “after” are united. In the mute look at the camera and the complacent quietude, there is anticipation not only of the future, but also of the past. The inability to see the invisible, so tragic here, becomes in a deep symbolic sense a symptomatic effect that precedes the traumatic cause. This three-minute film catches and represents the time trap of terrorist attacks through the sound of silence and the “look without a gaze.”

Possibility II : The Techno-Sound of the Scanner

Security Groove (Idan Alterman, Israel, 2002)

Synopsis: Against the of backdrop of urban Tel Aviv, the film opens with the voice of a car park security guard asking a driver to open the trunk of his car for inspection. From the instant the hood is slammed, pounding music accompanies the security signifiers (bags and cars inspected, zippers opened, bodies scanned, security surcharges rung up). The faces of the public are almost unseen. We see only the faces of the security guards, and especially, the bodies being scanned, the scanner, bags being opened, etc. The editing of the shots is fast and cut by the rhythm of the music. The film follows the inspections, the instructions (“open the trunk”), and the questions (“are you armed?”) repeatedly until the last car. Its inspection is accompanied by the ticking of a clock and the Israeli national anthem. The last shot is the sound of the hood closing and then a fade to black.

This short-short film, unlike Just Not Another Suicide Bombing, depicts twenty-four hours, from morning to morning. With that, Security Groove deals with the second aspect of waiting time, not the interval or the gap leading up to the moment of the attack, but the two meanings of compressing events into the single moment of “security.” The portrayal of the waiting period is ambiguous in an additional sense. On one hand is the catalogue of the technical sounds of the security routine – opening, closing, knocking, slamming, patting, pulling, zippers, the click of the keyboard, a dog barking at the café entrance. But this is probably a reflexive indication of the habitual naturalization of the technical tones that liberates the security sounds from the ordinary and brings them into the domain of the aesthetic. The techno-music is seemingly a part of contemporary musical reconciliation expressing technolust. The technolust and the humor that yield to the rhythm indicate that we are in the domain of a double-facet defensive illusion: both of security and of cinematic aesthetics. On the other hand, the repetitiveness and redundancy of the ritual of the sound indicate anticipation not of the defensive illusion but of the possible failure of the surveillance culture. Tel Aviv’s reputation as “the city that never takes a break” is realized here in a very defined way that bases the time trap on negative circularity. The ritual of the sounds of checking, responding, and approving is necessitated by the crisis of the senses fostered by the terror.

Visually and audially the film highlights the practices of the security system. But Security Groove invalidates the gaze as a possible source of power and control. The camera is located inside the open car trunk or the open bag, and together we observe the security guard – and not the opposite. The “place” of the potential bomb is actually looking at the security guard. In concert with the panoptical question “Are you armed?” the scanner is the main pan-auditory instrument, the auditory correlative of the surveillance culture. The sound of the scanner, which determines the techo-narrative, emphasizes the loss of the power of the gaze and grants preference to sound. What is hidden from view is discovered by the ear. Absurdly, the denaturalization of the sounds of security reminds us that this also characterizes the time of the terror attack: what is hidden from the eye is discovered by the ear… The urban soundtrack of Security Groove ends in an ironic audial dystopia. The sounds of the national anthem HaTikva (The Hope), which describes the two-thousand-year dream of the Jewish People to be free in their own land, replaces the ritual repetition of the security sounds. Only the music of the anthem is heard, outside its usual context, its national ceremonial nature expropriated.

The techno-political sounds of the period of the second Intifada turn the eternal time of national hope and pride into an eternal time of security. This is not, however, the time of eternity. The failure of the culture of surveillance is revealed in repetition, culminating in the ticking of a bomb heard together with the closing of the hood in the last shot, and alludes with finality – by making use of the convention of audiality – to the failure of surveillance. In this sense, Security Grove Groove returns us in the end to the negative circularity of the time trap.

Possibility III: Cell Phone Ringtones (The Unheard Modulation of the Corpse)

Ringtones (Dov Gil-Har, Israel, 2004)

Synopsis: This short-short film opens with a close-up of a ringing cell phone left unanswered. The camera shows a series of such phones ringing and occasionally returns to one seen at the beginning to show the words displayed on their screens (“Mom,” “Dad” “Sarit is looking for you”). The ringtones are heard one after the other and then one on top of another. We hear the repeated rings of the same phone. Later, the frame gradually opens and we see the surroundings of each phone – the interior of an incinerated bus filled with shards of glass. The series of cuts between phones is replaced by the movement of the track camera revealing the exterior of the bus and then entering it. The camera, scanning the empty seats, blood-soaked floor, scattered school bags, destruction and fire, is accompanied in the last minute by narration: a live radio broadcast announcing there may be casualties. The film ends with a shot of a half-burned phone ringing.

Disembodied voices in Ringtones

(Courtesy of Amit Drori, Tapuz – Micha Shagrir)

Unlike Security Groove, Ringtones offers no auditory pleasure. Since a cell phone is always connected to the body – to the ear or the mouth – the sound of the ringtones, as disembodied voices, confirms the absence of the body in the total sense. This is not only the disembodiment of the caller’s voice so familiar in contemporary culture, unconnected to total absence since the voice is present and only the body absent, but also the absence of the voice of the caller from the body of the call recipient, since in this case only the sound of the caller is present. Instead of the voice of the recipient being a representation of its body, we are exposed to a request for modulation that signifies total absence of the body that also includes absence of the voice. The telephone represents the missing body of the dead as a kind of prosthesis. It is expressed very simply – most of the phones are lying on the seats.

The movement of the camera within the bus takes us to the invisible site in public space, inside the charred bus. It seems to be presented as a post-abject space, mechanical-acoustically controlled. As the history of the invention of the telephone proves, even from the start it has been associated with death. With that, in this film, which plays havoc with the rules of the telephone-story genre,¹⁴ a change takes place in the threat of the perverse acousmêtre described by Chion (1999). The invisibility of the voice gives it, according to Chion, the power to be all places, all-seeing, all-knowing, and invincible (23–9). In Ringtones, the horror is brought into the situation in reverse, since it stems from the negation of the acousmêtre. That is, the ringtones replace the potential acousmêtre voice, which becomes absent, and in its absence reflects the horror of the unanswered ringing. The acousmêtre repeatedly loses the horrific and powerful status usually ascribed to it in cinema. The horror stems from the repetition of the negation of the response, which every additional ringtone confirms.

The photography requires that we first listen. Only after one minute, one-third of the film, does the frame open to reveal the context. The meaning of the ringing begins to become apparent from the visuals. Almost immediately the sound of sirens is heard mingling with the ringtones. The film ends with narration from four commentators. The last commentator creates a dramatic narratization of the journalistic story, which retrospectively verbalizes what had not been said. It contradicts ringtones as a recycled symbol of the culture of knock-offs and downloads, which in this nacromedia site consumes and annihilates itself.

Possibility IV: The Ticking of the Time Bomb and the Ostensible

Video – Simulation of Post-Mortem Sound

Three Minutes to Four (Eliav Lilti, Israel, 2002)

Synopsis: Some ten speakers (mother and daughter, young couple, old couple, policewoman, two children…) face the camera one after another and describe their upcoming deaths in a terror attack.

Three Minutes to Four is based on the nightmare time of an imagined attack. The speakers describe their upcoming deaths or injuries. Above all, future time, as it is realized in the words of the characters (“I’ll start to run away”; “Tomorrow I’ll say that I don’t believe he’s gone…”; “I leave behind me a wife and three children”), creates an uncanny feeling. The opening overhead shot reveals the site of the attack from above – a busy car-filled Tel Aviv intersection. The narration imitates the ticking of a time-bomb – tick-tock, tick-tock. After each monologue the camera returns to the same shot of the intersection, but it is clear time is passing and the speakers hasten what the future will bring. For this reason, the last tick-tock is heard together with a visual shot of the same intersection, this time empty of traffic. The moment of suddenness is displayed as a moment of emptiness.

Suddenness displayed as emptiness in Three Minutes to Four

(Courtesy of Eliav Lilti, Arik Bernstein – Lama Productions)

The nightmare time of the imagined attack is realized not only in the perception “if” as in, “if there will be an attack that has already taken place.” That is, this imagined attack does not only involve the perception of the “if” in terms of a proleptic traumatic symptom of a repressed that returns from the future. The decision to compress the time into the time “before” four o’clock by describing those minutes after they have already transpired is a distinctly political choice.

The film works on two planes: first, as a response to the so-called martyrdom videos Palestinian suicide bombers make before they leave on their missions and are broadcast afterwards.¹⁵ Since it is usually impossible to identify their corpses after an attack, they thus attain permanent visibility ex post facto; in actuality the visibility is permanent. The corpse of the suicide terrorist again becomes whole and coherent by means of the Palestinian transcendental-religious-national reconstruction: it appears to be a body, not a corpse. The main power of such video recordings, as claimed earlier, is the re-corporealization of the corpse of the terrorist. That is, the visualization of the body instead of the burnt remains of the corpse.

This re-corporealization has significance in the struggle for visibility, and concomitantly symbolic significance in the struggle over the imaginary lost soil of Palestine. From the Palestinian standpoint, discourse on the lost soil is sometimes conducted via the body that symbolizes it. The recorporealization of the corpse of the terrorist via the video, that is, the replacement of the corpse with a living body, signifies an ongoing claim to the soil. In this struggle for visibility, Palestinian recorporealization stands in complete contrast to the Israeli taboo regarding visibility of the corpse in public discourse.¹⁶ That being the case, Three Minutes to Four stakes a claim for visibility of attack victims, for replacing the corpse with a body, which may also be thought of as a claim for legitimacy of the soil, previously accepted in Israeli culture mainly regarding soldiers. The second plane, consequentially, uses the metaphorical postmortem to actualize being in the place of the ultimate other who is not I. Does the cinematic fiction succeed, given the strangeness of the situation of the “I” who has undergone trauma, to present, as a way of working through the trauma, the ability to be in the place of the other? That is, does this film represent not only what the theory of trauma in the last two decades seeks to locate again and again – namely, the I in the place of itself, in the place where the trauma occurred, and was experienced – but also the I in the place of the suicide terrorist? Or are we speaking here of the opposite situation – of the impossible of another kind, that is, the ritual resurrection of the dead?

Three Minutes to Four adds to the certainty of the flashback/forward an “if” of a special kind. It is impossible to separate between the I and the other, or between the body-that-underwent-resurrection of the other, and my-body-that-underwent-resurrection, which claims to possess, at least, my postmortem audiovisual re-presentation.

An interesting phenomenon is developing here as part of the possible responses to the representation of terror attack/victim trauma. This is precisely sound that can not be closely identified with the infantile scene; that does not permit access to language; or that is associated as well with phenomenal loss, with the birth of desire, and the aspiration toward discursive mastery. That is to say, not sound as researchers like Kaja Silverman (1988), Rick Altman (1992), Mary Ann Doane (1980) and others have described. Not sound from a psychoanalytic context, but from a moral one. Neither pre-linguistic nor extra-linguistic sound, but sound as political language. The most complex and original use that has been made of sound – as we saw in the last example – brings us to the moral possibility of taking the place of an other. Sound enables this more than any other textual component. I suggest here a retreat from the so very complex theory of sound in the cinema, to its most simple meaning. To be the other through his voice. This does not mean rejection or negation of his voice, but the opposite – an attempt to speak through his lips, which becomes my attempt to speak through my lips. In his name, in my name. In fact, this is an unavoidable result of an act of terror. A terrorist attack is characterized by an intermingling of blood that lasts until ZAKA representatives separate the mixed-up body pieces from one another. At that place, that of the unidentified abject, he is given a voice. It seems that as long as it is heard, there will be an option of recovery.

What does the before/after [if] structure discussed above in a different regard have to do with the time trap? In order to answer, I need to briefly outline Laplanche’s re-interpretation of Freud’s writings on trauma (as told to Cathy Caruth), in which LaPlanche returns to Freud’s seduction theory in order to clarify the double significance of Nachträglichkeit. In his opinion, even Freud did not fully understand how the two meanings belong to the same concept and how they interact in seduction theory.

We translate Nachträglichkeit in French as après-coup, and in English I have proposed that it be translated as “afterwardsness”… because there are two directions in afterwardsness… The phrase “deferred action” describes one direction, and the phrase “after the event” describes the other direction… For instance, I can say, “The terrorists put a bomb in the building, and it exploded afterwards.” That’s the direction of deferred action. And I can also say, “this bridge fell down, and the architect understood afterwards that he did not make it right.” That’s an after-the-event understanding (emphases in the original) (Caruth 2001).

According to this observation, Freud created a split in the seduction theory between determinist theory, in which the first traumatic event decides the second, and the hermeneutic theory, in which the second event retroactively projects on what has already happened. The importance of this split and the double significance of the concept that Laplanche prefers, and accordingly translates as afterwardsness and not belatedness, are connected by the need for synthesis of the two directions/two meanings.

As Caruth argued in the same interview:

So to understand the truly temporal aspect of Nachträglichkeit… you have to take into account what is not known, both at the beginning, and later… Whereas the other two models of after-wardsness imply either knowing later, or maybe implicitly… knowing earlier.

Does the structure of Three Minutes to Four create synthesis between the two meanings of trauma as they are perceived in chronic trauma? In this sense, the film represents more than the straight-forward aspect of a symptom of social trauma; it also manages to create in a radical manner the structure of immanent dislocation for each traumatic event, the understanding of which is made possible, according to Laplanche, by examining the temporal structure. It may be that in this sense, expression of the traumatic chronicity of the time trap during the second Intifada reveals immanent dislocation to a traumatic event more than a one-time expression of the event would. In any case, Laplanche’s rereading of the Freudian claim that all trauma is built around two scenes, suggesting that there is a see-saw effect between the two,¹⁷ enjoys maximum realization within the before/after [if] structure. Laplanche adds that traumatic nightmares are connected more directly to the original traumatic message. In the present case, it may be that this effect – structuring the nightmare as the subject of a short-short film – also influences the strong uncanny feeling of the time trap.

The Sound of Terror

An analysis of these four short-short films shows that in one sense the moment of the explosion is preserved by the audial phantom. That is, the significance of non-expression of suddenness is a result of a certain level of rejection of the terror attack. In another sense, however, the use of suddenness creates a sonorous envelope¹⁸ that is not a reproduction of televisual iconography. Instead of the sound of the explosion, the envelope embraces the quiet (the interval, the waiting); the ringtones (the mechanical-acoustic substitute for the absent body); the scanner (confirmation of a living rather than mechanical body), and the ticking of the time bomb and post-mortem narration that projects on the past and merges with it through afterwardsness. The material objects in the terror scenes contribute to this merging because they act as prosthetic objects. That is to say, the scanner, the cell phone, the skeleton of the bus, the imagined time bomb, and the imagined videos are actually, á la Grosz (2005), a concrete expansion of the corpse.

The sound continues to preserve the terror as chronic trauma and represent the time trap. As a consequence, and in contradiction to the ideological orientations of victory, three-minute cinema converts the cinematic scopic drive into an auditoric drive in a reality where the hyper-surveillance of the camera has lost all value. This is not the prominent invisibility of terror representations in the public sphere, which serves conservative-reactionary purposes, but a declaration of the loss of the power of the gaze within the culture of surveillance after the terror. Within a reality in which the panoptic look has lost its power, the sound brings us closer to the event and offers the opportunity to conceptualize and internalize it.

Israeli short-short cinema brings us closer than either narrative or documentary cinema, or any other representation in the public sphere, to the repressed-terrible and to the place of the other. Doing so through sound, short-short cinema responds to the perception of time as cultural and culture-dependent. The short-short films of Moments prove that only the cinematic psycho-acoustics of terror attacks afford us the opportunity to get past the time trap.

The next chapter discusses the proximity to the other through analysis of the complex interracial sexual relations between men as rendered in Israeli and in Palestinian narrative cinema. Both corpora deal with the post-traumatic intersection of race and nationality with gender and sexuality, thus offering, during the heyday of terror, a possible new perspective on “I-Other” relations.

CHAPTER 3

QUEERNESS, ETHNICITY, AND TERROR

I think it happens like this: after a certain shock, I refuse to live. But, incapable of thinking about my death in clear, rational terms, I look at it symbolically by refusing to continue the world… Slowly my psyche will propose to me funeral themes. Actually, first I know I’m capable of not continuing this world in which I live, then I continue, indefinitely, the gestures of the dead. Edmund White¹

An analysis of two films depicting interracial sex between men in Israeli and in Palestinian cinema produced during and after the second Intifada (2001–8) reveals a complex picture of the connection between post-trauma, nationalism, race, and sexuality. Gay cinema has existed for decades in Israel and since the 1980s has also dealt with interracial sex between men (Stein 2010; Yosef 2002). Palestinian cinema, on the other hand, caught in the paradox of being both national and stateless, is still struggling with the issues of self-definition, national identity, and space (Dabashi 2006; Gertz and Khleifi 2008). It would seem that in its attempts to re-articulate the Palestinian space as part of laying down the foundation for a national narrative, to present “a journey through blocked space” (Gertz and Khleifi 2008), Palestinian cinema has not yet begun to deal with the body in the context of sexual identity and interracial sex, whether homo- or heterosexual.

Tawfik Abu-Wael’s prize winning short film about interracial male-male relations, Diary of a Male Whore (2001),² can be considered a breakthrough. His venture into dealing with this social taboo is striking not only against the backdrop of the present state of Palestinian cinema, but also against developments in contemporary world and Islamic pan-Arab cinema.³

This chapter will compare Abu-Wael’s film with The Bubble (2006) by Eytan Fox, a leading Israeli gay director, and will discuss the complex ways the two films can serve as mirror images of each other. In Diary, while servicing an Israeli client, a Palestinian street hustler recalls his violent childhood – culminating with the memory of seeing his mother raped by an Israeli soldier. The Bubble deals with a love affair between two young men, an Israeli and a Palestinian, which ends tragically when the Palestinian becomes a suicide terrorist and detonates himself together with his lover. That is, while Palestinian cinema places interracial sex within the reality of the post-traumatic memory of expulsion and loss of home, Israeli cinema places it within the Western urban reality of the gay community that becomes caught up in terrorism.

I contend that these two separate and unique experiences of post-trauma impede what should be the basis of the creation of dialogue – the recognition of the other in its radical otherness. However, whereas The Diary assumes responsibility over the traumatic past by reenacting it in the present while examining the violence both within the Palestinian society and that inflicted by the Israelis, The Bubble assumes no such responsibility. In its dealing with the Palestinian other, in its attempt to “embrace” and understand the other, it projects its own subjectivity (without any attempt to analyze it) onto what ultimately cannot be grasped – the other’s subjectivity.

The marked contrast between the two films immediately brings to light the central issues that will be discussed here: In what ways is the mirror image fantasmatic? How do the films represent the connection between sexual and ethnic repression and the traumatic histories of occupation and terror? Do interracial relationships reproduce the social pathology of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle? Can the post-traumatic fantasy, which characterizes both films, serve as a force behind (at least) a (cinematic) reconciliation? This chapter will offer a close textual analysis as the preferred way to delve into these intimate post-traumatic epistemologies.

Diary of a Male Whore – Hustling in the Shadowy Memory of the Nakba

The plot is revealed through the voice-over of Essam (Tahir Mahamid), a young Palestinian from a refugee family, illegally residing in Tel Aviv and earning his living as a street hustler. The entire film is bracketed by a car scenario, in which he masturbates in front of an elderly Israeli client and recalls scenes from his youth. The beginning of the flashback depicts the outset of his sexual maturity in an Arab village before it was conquered by the Israeli army: committing sodomy with a sheep, listening to his parents have sexual relations, and secretly watching a village girl, Asya (Ruth Bernstein), as she bathes in a spring. His memories date from when the village was first occupied, his father’s murder, and the rape of his mother. The film ends as Essam receives his payment and continues to walk the dark Tel Aviv streets.

Diary depicts the traumatic events reenacted in the flashbacks as historically ambiguous. The imprecise timeframe indicates that the film proposes to describe the everlasting character of the Israeli occupation, beginning from the Nakba and continuing through the 1967 conquest and the Intifada; in particular, it seeks to portray the trauma of the Nakba as an inter-generational burden. Taking into consideration Essam’s age during the flashback (twelve or thirteen), whether the flashback reenacts events during the Nakba or the 1967 conquest, it would be impossible for him to be a young man residing illegally in Tel Aviv during either the first or second Intifadas. As a result, the tension between the Nakba, the Israeli Occupation, and the Intifada; between past, present, and eternal time; magnifies the tension between fantasy and trauma that stands at the core of the film.

Diary places interracial male-male sex between the Palestinian hustler and his Israeli client within a narrative structure in which the post-traumatic memory of the Nakba/the occupation, structured through flashbacks, accounts for the character of interracial relations (anonymous one-time sexual meetings, paid masturbation/voyeurism). In other words, in the present, Essam’s sexuality is depicted as post-traumatic. The first clue to causal relationships between past and present is presented in an incident with a prostitute that opens the film and is a portent to the scene in which Essam himself becomes a prostitute.

In the first scene, against the backdrop of noir photography of nighttime Tel Aviv (cars, people in cafés, Essam walking the streets), his voice-over is heard: “The sheep and the hen were my first females.⁴ I first slept with a woman the day I arrived in Tel Aviv. My late friend, Abu-Krah, and I got drunk and we looked for a prostitute. I went in first. ‘How was she?’ ‘She has no teeth.’ ‘No teeth?’ he yelled. I answered, ‘The mouth between her legs has no teeth.’”

According to Barbara Creed (1994):

The myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell – a terrifying symbol of woman as the “devil’s gateway” (106).

The fear of the vagina dentata is already visually hinted at in the beginning of the film with a close-up of the prominent teeth of an Israeli woman sitting in a café. The editing cuts sharply between the prostitute incident, with its high level of anxiety, to the present: the client and reenactment of traumatic childhood memories.

When Essam enters the Israeli client’s car and the act of prostitution and memory process begin simultaneously, the editing uses flashbacks to tie together the two traumatic audial voyeuristic events that took place earlier in Essam’s youth: listening to his parents have intercourse (the primal scene fantasy) and his mother’s rape.

According to Kaja Silverman (1992), the moment of infantile voyeurism signifies “the point of entry for an alien and traumatic sexuality” (156). The child-spectator is unable to decipher what he sees and, therefore, “The spectacle assumes its full force only later, after it has been internalized as representation” (168). The outcome is a complex dramatization of temporality, since the primal scene which “occurs not so much in ‘reality’ as in fantasy… is a construction after the fact… it is either constituted through a deferred action… or constructed as a fantasy on the basis of some remembered detail” (164). Being overwhelmed by the sounds and images of parental sexuality, the outcome – as Freud notes – is a profound disruption of the “conventional” masculinity of the onlooker. Diary confers a new meaning on Silverman’s paradigm of the look regarding the primal scene: it is not “either too early or too late,” as she defines the child’s experience with respect to sexuality. But, because of the extended primal scene – that is, the audial connection between being a deferred voyeur to his parents and a voyeur to the rape – the spectating child undergoes the “too early” as well as the “too late.” As the incident with the Israeli prostitute demonstrates, the primal scenes in Diary, revealed to be traumatic only much later, post-factum as it were, through their effect, had the shattering effect of being both “too early” and “too late” because of the Nakba; and so, predetermined Essam’s sexual behavior as post-traumatic.

In other words, Essam’s fear of vagina dentata (and his prostitution) is presented as resulting from his exposure to the primal scene, the absence of a father figure, and his consequent over-attachment to his mother during childhood. Of course, when speaking of the dyadic mother, the projection of the image of the mouth to her genitalia is linked to oral pleasure (Creed 1994). Nevertheless, the fantasy of the dyadic mother that symbolically incorporates him ascribes the castrating position to her: “The image of the toothed vagina, symbolic of the all-devouring woman, is related to the subject’s infantile memories of its early relation with the mother and the subsequent fear of its identity being swallowed up by the mother” (109).

According to Creed, and contrary to Freud (1918/1991), it can be argued that the genitalia of the mother that were depicted in the voyeuristic fantasy are unconsciously perceived by Essam as castrating, and not as castrated. If so, the racialization of the primal scene acts retroactively: during Essam’s first sexual experience with a woman as an adult the vagina dentata, which characterized his mother in his imagination, is projected on the Israeli prostitute.⁵

Flashback to childhood voyeurism: Essam, Diary of a Male Whore

(Courtesy of Tawfi k Abu-Wael)

The question is, why didn’t Essam’s voyeuristic witnessing of the rape of his mother change the fantasy of vagina dentata? That is, why was she not transformed from castrating to castrated in his imagination? I suggest that racialization generates transformation that transcends the text: during the first audial incident, Essam presents himself as innocent and describes his voyeurism as naivety; during the second incident, the Israeli conquest and the rape, Essam fantasizes/ remembers himself as a passive voyeur, almost a collaborator. He does not answer his mother’s calls, but hides. The editing uses cross-cutting to show Essam sitting in silence while she cries to him for help.⁶

As the narrative shows, Essam’s inevitable guilt feelings “froze” his (unconscious) perception of his mother before the rape in his imagination. The trauma of the rape and especially his guilt preserves the castrating mother in his “sexual memory.” If so, the survivor guilt he suffers expands his fantasy of the mother in the primal scene to his perception of her during the rape, so that her fantasmatic “status” remains unchanged. The result is projection of vagina dentata onto the Israeli prostitute, and hustling.

By ascribing Essam’s interracial sexual relations, and especially his hustling, to his past traumatic experiences, the film, of course, severely criticizes the destructive consequences of the Israeli occupation (from the Nakba to the second Intifada) on Palestinian society and masculinity. Still, one of the most subversive aspects of Abu-Wael’s oeuvre is that he combines criticism of Israeli society with criticism of Palestinian; moreover, he points out the interdependence of Palestinian and Israeli violence. The brutal relations existing between the father and other family members within Abu-Wael’s Palestinian cinematic families are reflected in Israeli violence. The violence wreaked by the Israeli soldier on Essam’s mother in Diary echoes his father’s violence towards her – both physically and as imagined by Essam in his primal scene fantasy.

In Diary, Essam confesses that he did not mourn his father’s murder because as a child he had been a target of his brutality. In this sense, the constant textual tension between traumatic fantasy and memory creates the (unseen) murder of the father as a fantasmatic unconscious realization and not only as an actual event. As post-traumatic films, both Diary and Abu Wael’s prize-winning Thirst (Atash, 2001) present Palestinian society as one in which patricide (both imaginary and real) is inevitable, and is carried out at least as much by the castrated sons’ generation as by the Israeli occupation.

The double function of the flashback as both real memory and fantasy is intensified by its scenic quality (including the transition from the darkness of the car to the brightness of childhood scenes, and from the closed space of masturbation to an open one filled with participants and action). For Freud, the term fantasy, as many have claimed, is bound to a scenic quality. Similarly, Silverman (1992) argues that “unconscious desire generally assumes the form of a visual tableau or narrateme” (160); Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis (1973) also name the fantasmatic “a mise-en-scène of desire” (318). In Fantasme Originaire (1985), they further expand their discussion about fantasy as dramatization in which the subject plays a role. Their analysis (1986) of primal fantasies (“Urphantasien”) according to Freud, emphasizes that these fantasies – dealing with the origins of subjectivity, of sexuality, and of sex differences – are scenic.⁷

Essam uses memory to direct his primal fantasmatic scenes so that the dramatis personae of childhood is projected, as Laplanche and Pontalis (1986) claim, on those participating in real scenes in the present. This dramatization containing a sequence of images from the past that leaves its mark on the roles played in the present is based on interchanging post-traumatic subject positioning. As a post-traumatic subject, Essam positions himself in the “time of auto-eroticism,” as Laplanche and Pontalis suggest. The result is two contradictory subject positions: in the rape flashback, Essam is positioned as “himself” and observes himself as a young man; in the present, during his act of prostitution, he gives pleasure to the symbolic perpetrator, the elderly Israeli, who, given his age, could have been the soldier during the 1967 war: Essam is his prostitute, and so he is positioned as his mother. The elderly Israeli observes Essam in a way that gives him pleasure or sexual stimulation, as in the past (during the primal scene fantasy), Essam had observed his mother. Though the incidents are different, of course, the fantasmatic analogy of Laplanche and Pontalis exists. The disparity in age, race, and social standing perpetuate fantasmatic exchanges between the perpetrator and the victim in the victim’s post-traumatic imagination.

The film, however, does not relate only to the post-traumatic castration of Palestinian masculinity. Further to Abu-Wael’s other work, which proves “reciprocity” between Palestinian and Israeli violence, Diary reveals post-traumatic memory as bi-directional: the Nakba/ Occupation also castrates the Israeli, turning him into an (impotent?) onlooker dependent on a Palestinian hustler. The scenario in the present changes the oppressive hegemonic gaze of the symbolic perpetrator, and turns it – sexually – into a look based on dependence. Still, it is clear that from the perspective of the “diary” of the male whore that this is only a momentary reversal of power relations within the political reality: the Palestinian is the illegal resident and the Occupation, with its political and economic subjugation, continues. In the present, the Palestinian depends upon the gaze of the perpetrator for survival; in the past, observing his mother had become – as a consequence of the Israeli presence in the scopic space – a masculine version of the Medusa gaze. This, as I claimed above, froze him in the vagina dentata fantasy and in self-objectifying relations. The primal scene paradigmatically emphasizes the isolation of the subject against the backdrop of the union of the parents, and imparts knowledge of adult sexuality, a situation exacerbated by the conquest and the rape.

In Diary, past memory is neither dead nor alive. It is fixed neither in the stability of nostalgia nor in denial. The past haunts Essam’s consciousness in the present through various agents: memory, yearning, trauma, guilt, and the body. The ghost of the past is present in the body defeated time and again by traumatic memory’s overwhelming powers. According to Abu-Wael, nothing can free the Palestinian from his tormenting past: not remembering, not confession, and not automatic day-to-day survival. It is no wonder, then, that Diary constructs commensurability between reenactment of past traumatic events and the sexual act in the present: The editing cuts from the groaning soldier to Essam moaning as he climaxes in front of his Israeli client.

What is the meaning of the choice of prostitution based on masturbation/voyeurism? Of transition from fantasmatic-imaginary orgasm to an actual one? And from the Nakba to the Occupation? It is clear from the horrific incident with the Israeli prostitute that Essam’s post-traumatic sexuality divorces women from the domain of sexual pleasure. His only prospect, described above as a variation on the Medusa myth, is a re-living of the traumatic jouissance with the mother and “planting of the symbolic… in the materiality of the body” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1985, 68–9).

Structuring the rape (the [supposed] orgasm of the Israeli soldier) together with Essam’s orgasm in the present signifies uniting in traumatic pleasure. Given that the two-fold traumatic violence (conquest and rape) irreversibly sabotaged Palestinian sexuality, as far as Essam is concerned physical pleasure is possible only through a post-traumatic ritual of remembrance. Diary of a Male Whore asserts that Palestinian male pleasure is totally and paradoxically dependent on the trauma of the (past and present) occupation.

In this world of the body-subject (Grosz 1994), that is, of the subject embodied through his body, masturbation enjoys a special status. Diary undermines both structuring interracial male sexuality as penetrating and/or being penetrated and the myriad implications of colonial power relations.⁸ Representing the voyeurism of the rape as a continuation of the voyeurism of the primal scene, as discussed above, completely changes the indeterminacy of the primal scene and the possibility of sadomitical (which emphasizes identification with the father and penetration) or queer identification (which emphasizes identification with both the mother and the father).

Abu-Wael’s decision to represent voyeurism/masturbation rather than homosexual contact as a form of post-traumatic sexuality takes on, I believe, a radical significance not only in regard to Palestinian castrated masculinity but to potential interracial relations as well. Under permanent occupation, this is but an alienated sexual transaction. Fantasy-ridden masturbation leaves each of them, the Israeli and the Palestinian, the one masturbating and the one looking on, isolated and captive within his own world. The film emphasizes this by almost completely avoiding any two-shots showing them together in the frame.

Moreover, as Laqueur (2003) argues, masturbation contains three components: fantasy, solitude, and insatiability. I believe there is a direct link between them and the post-traumatic reaction. Masturbation, in fact, has a double function – it symbolizes (in a somewhat paradoxical manner) the repetitive nature of post-traumatic behavior and at the same time, as will be elaborated later, it allows a subversive view of (political, patriarchal, and sexual) repression. In Diary, masturbation is unique as post-traumatic repetitious behavior. In contrast to other forms of sexuality, it represents the dominance of post-trauma in the solitary life of the Palestinian male since in an almost literal sense it is based on repetition compulsion. The power of masturbation as a physical accompaniment to post-traumatic reenactment is embodied in its practice, based on continual repetition. In other words, because of its repetitive character, masturbation probably corresponds more than any other form of sexuality (either penetrating or penetrated) to traumatic repetition. Essam seems to bodily enact the inaccessibility of past images by repeating them over and over: the repetition embodied in masturbation turns it both into a metaphor for, and a performance of, this compulsive practice. In this sense, masturbation symbolizes the perpetuation of trauma. Each night the Palestinian male serves as a hustler (post-traumatic reenaction/masturbation) makes him reproduce anew the seemingly interminable past.

The film alludes, of course, to Jean Genet’s novel The Thief’s Journal (Journal du Voleur) (1949) and his short film A Love Song (Un Chant d’amour). Subordinating Essam’s adult Palestinian subjectivity to colonial interracial relations is noteworthy given Abu-Wael’s homage to Mohamed Choukri’s 1972 autobiographical novel For Bread Alone (al-Khubz al-Hafi) (1972/2000).⁹ Though most of the narrative elements appear in both, Choukri’s world is more dominant than Genet’s in Diary. Although Choukri’s novel about Genet, Jean Genet in Tangier (1974), is free of orientalism, Abu-Wael apparently abstains from referring more directly to The Thief’s Journal because Genet’s persona is infamously linked to Western sexual projections on the East, especially on Morocco. His diary and well-known film are present in Abu-Wael’s film mainly in his use of masturbation as a medium.

As an autobiographical memoir, For Bread Alone describes appalling brutality in Choukri’s home; escaping his father; life on the street; abject poverty; and his wanderings – from Tangier to Algeria – in a constant search for casual work, food, and shelter. It is also replete with descriptions of his male prostitution, without which he could never have survived, and homosexuality. Choukri’s childhood in Morocco during the 1950s took place against the backdrop of French colonialism and the 1952 uprising against the French, and that, apparently, is the importance of the homage for Abu-Wael. It is not by chance, therefore, that the changes he makes in the narrative elements taken from Choukri’s novel have to do with racialization: his fantasy of love for Asya is replaced by the fantasy of his mother’s rape, and oral sex with the old man is replaced by masturbating in front of him: “In order to come quickly I imagined that I was raping Asya in Tatwan… What am I doing with this old man who gave me a blow job? I will hate myself and everyone else, if I’ll keep doing this… he gave me fifty pesetos… if so, this is how one falls into prostitution” (81–2).¹⁰

Contrary to Choukri, however, who asserts in his novel that learning to read and write at twenty-one liberated him from the colonial, social, and familial cycles of oppression, Essam remains caught up in these cycles through prostitution and dependence on the overwhelming destructive force of post-traumatic memory. Does the film claim that liberation from the past is impossible? On one hand, as noted, the cycles of oppression take an orgasmic-repetitious form, based on “stimulation” by the past and its “release”; on the other, as hinted at the above, masturbation itself allows a subversive view of repression, and alludes to its possible disruption. Though Essam’s masturbation is part and parcel of his prostitution, that is, carried out on the borderline between privacy-secrecy and sociability-openness, it is still beyond social panoptic control and defies Israeli society at least as much as it defies Palestinian.

Essam’s subject position as a witness to the conquest and to rape is problematic, and not only regarding the ambivalence of “having-been-there” in the context of fantasy; that is, the issue of Essam’s actual presence in the time and place of the trauma. It is also problematic vis-à-vis the extent to which Essam has, to use Peter’s (2001) words, lost moral authority emanating from being a bystander to an atrocity. Diary does not judge its protagonist. The disparaging force of post-traumatic memory and latent guilt produces a constant performance of embodied reiteration in which the imaginary witness doomed by an overwhelming past becomes self-oppressive.

The following analysis will entail a shift from the nuanced psychoanalytical explorations (mainly of the primal scene) adopted in the analysis of Diary of a Male Whore to a primarily cultural analysis of The Bubble, especially regarding such terms as passing, shame, and race. The nature of Fox’s film warrants such a shift. Diary’s linking traumatic histories to queer sexualities is based, as described above, on the fantasy of origin and identity; that is, on exploration of the foundation of the Palestinian subject. As I see it, The Bubble, a film made in a sovereign country, does not require delving into the traumatic origins of the subject (both psychoanalytically and/or historically), since they are taken for granted. Diary, driven by the Palestinian lack of state and unrelieved traumatization by a colonial regime, is “forced” to dive into the origins of subjecthood and decipher its vicissitudes from the Nakba onward. In contrast, The Bubble presents a different version of subjectivity with a stable and definitive identity. In other words, the following shift in methodology from psychoanalysis to cultural studies is an outcome of the huge disparity between the relationships of the two films to their respective political-social contexts.

The Bubble – A Suicidal Israeli Gay Fantasy

The Bubble focuses on forbidden love between Noam (Ohad Knoller), a young Israeli who lives in a bohemian quarter of Tel Aviv, and Ashraf (Yousef ‘Joe’ Sweid), a Palestinian from Nablus. Ashraf lives with Noam and his roommates Yali (Aron Friedman), who is a gay, and Lulu (Daniela Virtzer). On their advice he takes the Hebrew name Shimi and pretends to be Israeli; he gradually becomes part of the gay Leftist community. When he decides to tell his beloved sister Rana (Roba Blal) he is gay, she angrily disapproves. Rana marries Jihad (Shredi Jabarin), a local Az-Adin El-Kassam leader, but the morning after the wedding she is accidentally killed by Israeli soldiers searching for the perpetrator of the latest Tel Aviv suicide attack, in which Yelli had been injured. Jihad tries to force Ashraf into marrying his cousin and threatens to reveal Ashraf’s secret if he refuses. Instead, Ashraf decides to revenge Rana’s death in place of Jihad. In the final scene, with a bomb strapped to his body, Ashraf comes to the Tel Aviv restaurant where he used to work as a waiter. Noam, his Israeli lover, hugs him in greeting and the two explode.

Suicidal Gay Fantasy: Ashraf (right) and Noam (left), The Bubble

(Photo: Karin Bar. Courtesy of Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky)

The film opens with two reversals that are symbolically tied to the fantasmatic ideologies on which it is based: “passing” and the “enlightened occupation” (which enables an interracial romantic love). The first occurs in the opening scene at a checkpoint, where Ashraf, together with the other Palestinian men standing there, follows regulations and lifts his shirt. The gaze of an Israeli soldier attempting to discover hidden explosives, which has become one of the symbols of the Occupation, reverses when Ashraf returns the gaze (of Noam, a reserve soldier standing in front of him). The militaristic gaze, based on racialization and racial differentiation, becomes, in the queer Israeli narrative, a sexual gaze, following the “love at first sight” formula.

The second reversal is tied to the arbitrariness of the plot that makes the romance possible: Ashraf passes the checkpoint and later goes to Noam’s apartment in Tel Aviv to return Noam’s Israeli identity card, which he had dropped at the checkpoint. This is a fantasmatic reversal of the modus operandi of the Occupation, in which Palestinian identity cards are handled by Israeli soldiers, and not the opposite. Returning the gaze and the identity card presciently symbolizes within the political reality of the second Intifada the geo-psychological space of fantasmatic identity reversals. This denies the reality of the Occupation and makes it ideologically “enlightened.”¹¹ These reversals are the cause of a two-fold passing fantasy for Ashraf – both spatial (crossing the border between Tel Aviv and Nablus) and sexual (passing as an Israeli gay in Tel Aviv).

Fantasy about the Palestinian space as open space also appears in Palestinian cinema (e.g., in Hany Abu-Assad’s Ford Transit [2002] and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention [2002]). In Raed Al Helou’s Hoping for the Best (2004), awarded the grand prize at Ramallah’s First International Film Festival, a car is seen racing down the streets of Ramallah. It does not stop for even a moment. The space is open; there are no checkpoints, no fences, no stop signs, and no representatives of the law – Palestinian or Israeli – to impede the car. The falling rain that blocks the field of vision is part of this ambiguous spatial fantasy. A speeding car in an open/closed, infinite/unseen space conforms to the need for a scathing representation of reality and a deep-seated need for delusion. In this way, the fantasy of space in Palestinian cinema strives to liberate space from the Israeli scopic regime, while at the same time admitting to its own helplessness.

In complete contradiction, spatial passing in The Bubble is constructed as gay fantasy which disavows its political scopic dimension. Gay liberation, that is, the process of gay-ization that Ashraf undergoes under the supervision and guidance of gay Israelis, replaces acknowledgment of the urgency to liberate the closed Palestinian space (as well as the political-historical factors that created the pathology of the Occupation).¹² It seems as if the Israeli gays give Ashraf refuge and out him; in reality, The Bubble constructs them adhering to the spatial fantasy (denial of the Occupation) through a semi-colonial act, the gay-ization of Ashraf.

In this sense, despite the interracial love story, The Bubble is part of the Western model of gayness that Joseph Massad (2007) considers oppressive. In his groundbreaking work, Desiring Arabs, he claims that this oppressive discourse, which he calls the Gay International, is the direct outcome of an “orientalist impulse borrowed from predominant representations of Arab and Muslim cultures in the United States and in European countries” (16). Massad argues that the Gay International “produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology” (163). The Gay International especially affects the persecution of the yet un-Westernized poor and nonurban men “who practice same-sex contact and who do not necessarily identify as homosexual or gay” (188–9). This imperialist-missionary project therefore destroys the sexual beings it wants to “liberate” (189–90).

In contrast to Diary, Fox’s film contains absolutely no representation of Ashraf’s process of sexual maturity within his society. This exemplifies the problem Massad (2002) points to, and thus strengthens his claim that the universalization of gay rights is based on the premise that “‘Oriental’ desires… exist… in ‘oppressive – and in some cases murderous home-lands,’” and therefore are “re-oriented to – and subjected by a ‘more enlightened’ Occident” (364).

As described above, in Fox’s film, Ashraf’s gay-ization is masked as a spatial and sexual enlightened liberation; but in fact, the colonialist gaze at the checkpoint is converted into the gay gaze that controls Ashraf’s behavior in passing rituals (changing his name, biography, attire, accent, bodily gestures, and lifestyle). In this sense, gay Israelis supervising Ashraf’s passing as an Israeli is but a variation on the Israeli surveillance regime. Both at the checkpoint and in Tel Aviv, passing is based on checking racial identity. By making confirmation of identity dependent on the Israeli gaze, The Bubble denies the pervasiveness of Israeli politics of surveillance: the film structures these gazes as two different mechanisms of confirmation, while in actuality the same omnipresent gaze tries to determine if he is a Palestinian/an illegal resident/a potential terrorist.

Structuring Palestinian passing in Israeli queer cinema conforms to the basic definition of passing as “a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not” (Rohy 1996, 219). I suggest that under a scopic regime, passing inevitably involves its traumatic failure. According to Carole-Anne Tyler (1994), “In fact, passing can only name the very failure of passing, an indication of a certain impossibility at its heart, of the contradictions which constitute it: life/death, being/non-being, visibility/invisibility, speech/silence, difference/sameness, knowledge/ignorance, coming out/mimicry” (212).

Ashraf’s failure of passing is not only the epistemological failure described by Tyler and others, e.g., Ginsberg (1996); the failure prophesized by Massad (2007); or that defined by Homi K. Bhabha as “not quite/not white” (Bhabha 1984/1994, 131),¹³ that is, one embedded in colonial relations. Bhabha describes mimicry as an ambivalent and ironic compromise: “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122). As a form of colonial discourse, mimicry poses as least as much an immanent threat on Whiteness as does imitation and appropriation: The failure of passing in the context of the Intifada, as I hinted at above, is the result of it being dependent upon a political culture based on the gaze as a means of hegemony, subjugation, and control. Ashraf wants to look like an Israeli, but does not want to be Israeli/ Jewish. Despite that, he wants to be gay and look like an (Israeli?) gay. It should be noted that Ashraf participates not only in his stylization as Shimi, a young Israeli, through the gaze of the gays around him, but also through his Jew-ization, as exemplified by his adoption of a loving gesture from the Israeli stage adaptation of Bent (Sherman 1979) that he saw with Noam. Should Israeli queer cinema, which structures Jew-ization as the climax of the process of gay-ization, be seen, following Massad (2007), as contributing to “destroying social and sexual configurations of [Arab-Islamic] desire in the interest of reproducing a (Arab) world in its own image?” (189). Is the dominance of the scopic regime a means of avoiding Bhabha’s (1984/1994) split, that is, the immanent threat of mimicry?

What happens when an Israeli performs passing? Does The Bubble, like Diary, reveal the interdependences of the Israeli and the Palestinian? Does it expose Bhabha’s (1984/1994) double bind of mimicry, “where the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed” (127)?

After someone at the Tel Aviv restaurant exposes “Shimi” as a Palestinian, he panics and returns to Nablus. Noam is despondent over his loss and Lulu obtains a temporary foreign press card so they can travel to Nablus to visit him. They decide to pass the checkpoint by impersonating French journalists, and introduce themselves as such at Ashraf’s home. They set up a clandestine meeting between Noam and Ashraf using the excuse that he invited them to photograph his sister Rana’s wedding for French television.

Palestinian Passing: Lulu, Noam, Ashraf and Yali, The Bubble

(Photo: Karin Bar. Courtesy of Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky)

Noam and Lulu’s passing is for the most part spatial. They own the cultural capital necessary to insinuate themselves into forbidden spaces.¹⁴ In a complete reversal of Palestinian passing, Israeli passing, in both senses of the word, is entirely void of racialization.¹⁵ Lulu and Noam’s decision to pretend to be French rather than Palestinian suggests that Israelis would almost never consider passing themselves off as Palestinian. The two Israelis are not exposed to the gaze at the checkpoint since in any case, as foreign journalists they are in an advantageous position. In fact, for a short while they simply exchange their privileged position as Israelis for a different one. Accordingly, Lulu and Noam’s passing does not make them renounce their denial of the social pathologies Palestinians undergo at the checkpoints. Assuming the identity of French journalists, passing into the Palestinian space, and Noam pretending to be heterosexual in Ashraf’s home are all temporary impostures that were never meant to lead to closeness to the other, either racially or sexually, or – similar to the Israeli client in Diary – experiences of social marginality and multiple subject positions. Consequently, the level of spatial fantasy makes the trip to Nablus both practically and symbolically futile in its attempt to structure the Israeli world as open to otherness.¹⁶

Romantic love enables denial of the Occupation, The Bubble

(Courtesy of Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky)

Moreover, Fox’s playfulness fantasy relates to these forbidden spaces as unconflictual, free of danger. In contrast, Noam’s passing is a dramatic turning point in Ashraf’s life: After Jihad, his future brother-in-law, sees him kissing Noam, he is trapped. His reaction during his secret meeting with Noam (“Do you want them to kill me? Are you crazy?”) is a portent of the future. The Bubble represses not only the disparity between Noam’s playfulness and Ashraf’s falling into a trap, but the meaning of the asymmetric passings. In fact, the mischievous heterosexual passing of Noam in Nablus is the cause of the traumatic failure of Ashraf’s heterosexual passing in Arab society.

Eytan Fox’s Israeli queer cinema, which contributed to Israeli society’s homo-normative legitimating process during the 1980s and 1990s (mainly through the success of the television series Florentin [1997] and Yossi and Jagger [2002]),¹⁷ fantasmatically denies racial differences during the 2000s, revealing the failure of The Bubble to establish queer epistemology in a colonial ethnic-sexual space. The gay-ization of the Palestinian masked as romantic love enables the ongoing denial of the Occupation, the humiliation of the Palestinian, and their replacement by gay pride. This is especially noticeable because the editing links the Nablus visit with a rave party demonstration against the Occupation – a sort of substitute for a gay pride parade.

Judith Halberstam (2005) claims that “shame can be a powerful tactic in the struggle to make privilege (whitening, masculinity, wealth) visible” (220). She strongly criticizes the identity politics of white gay males that exclude the queer adult brown man, the absence of appropriate white gay masculine language for discussing shame, and the role of the brown gay male body in the white shame narrative. She presents – while criticizing – three solutions to the white gay male shame: normalization (gay white men can work through gay shame by producing normative masculinities and presenting themselves as uncastrated, muscular, whole), projection/aestheticization, and adoption of “gay shame [that] can be used… in ways that are feminist and antiracist” (228–9).

Unlike the Israeli gay who has come out of the closet and romanticizes gay pride in order to deal with his shame, Ashraf’s situation in the context of shame as a “gendered form of sexual abjection” (Halberstam 2005, 226) is complex. The tension between being closeted or out that Ashraf is forced to deal with does not conceal the tension between pride and shame (exemplified by his participation in the rave), but rather between (gay) pride and (racial) humiliation. To-be-gazed-at at the checkpoint is for Ashraf a physical experience of shame (involving feminization and castration), which (in contrast to Noam’s experience) undergoes racialization and is not transformed into pride. The checkpoint experience, unlike the childhood experiences of the white gay, is not transformed from “abjection, isolation, and rejection into legibility, community, and love” (221). This is true not only because Ashraf is too young to have had the chance to adopt the theoretical language of the adult queer in order to recognize his sexuality, as Halberstam claims regarding Western gay communities. For Ashraf, humiliation at the checkpoint is both gay shame and racial humiliation. It cannot, therefore, be reinterpreted or resituated in the gay pride world. The film does not offer the option of recognizing both worlds; the more Ashraf becomes gay within the Israeli community, the more his experiences at the checkpoint are suppressed. The Bubble does not directly address the latent collusion between the different apparatuses of repression and is therefore not critical of the tension between racial shame and gay pride.

Israeli queer cinema offers the solution of projection: instead of recognizing the ethnic humiliation of the Occupation, it projects white gay male shame on the “brown male” in the “white narrative” it rewrites. This projection is intensified through disavowals: first, through the playfulness of Noam’s passing, that is, by gaining access to vulnerability and humiliation without embodying it; second, through Ashraf’s self gay-ization, displacing racial humiliation with gay pride (When he arrives late at the rave, for example, he hurriedly apologizes and mumbles something about how hard it was to get there and about the checkpoint, and immediately joins the party); and third, through romanticizing the terror.

Indeed, is it surprising that Ashraf finds himself at the vanishing point of subjectivity? In structuring the suicidal terrorist, the gay Israeli narrative fantasy reaches its most extreme juncture. What is the relation between romance and terror? Between presenting sexual relations and presenting the suicidal terrorist? The Bubble offers a more progressive representation of interracial sexual relationships between men than had appeared in Israeli cinema before the turn of the century; that is, it is not based on power relationships tied to the tension between penetrating and penetrated.¹⁸ Ashraf and Noam change positions according to the anal-oral circuit. As Elizabeth Grosz (1994) has written, “It may be this… that distinguishes heterosexual men from many gay men who are prepared not only to send out but also to receive flow and in this process to assert other bodily regions than those singled out by the phallic function” (201). Even though the film presents a radical sexual structure freed from constraints of (cinematic) tradition, hierarchy, and perception of the body as a battlefield, the gay Israeli narrative cannot integrate the gay racial body (even if, or perhaps because, the narrative rewrites it, á la Massad, as a non-racial body).¹⁹ The result is a fantasy of loss.

The film does not present the suicide terrorist as a radical fundamentalist Muslim, Israeli society’s conventional profile, but as a person whose sexuality is repressed and despairs of ever being able to live as a proud gay in Arab society; that is, he is tragically unable to work through shame and humiliation. The Bubble does not take responsibility for the (lack of) awareness and/or the playfulness of the “enlightened” Israeli. By tying shahidism to the tragic detachment of a man from his social image as well as to traditional Arab society’s attitude towards homosexuality, the Israeli narrative is able to cast off its guilt for both Ashraf’s gay-ization and his becoming a suicide terrorist. The Bubble chooses to solve this through projection, since the film is unable to contain its own epistemological contradictions in a racial and scopic context. Although I do not completely agree with Massad’s vehement belief in a Western narrative conspiracy (inter alia because he regards the various Western queer schools monolithic), it is clear that the starting point for understanding this contradiction is linked, as he claims, to colonialism. I believe it is also linked to colonial guilt, which by and large Massad obviously does not relate to. By structuring a terrorist attack, the cinematic narrative of the Israeli gay during the post second Intifada projects the repressed sin of denying the Occupation (shame/humiliation) onto the closeted Palestinian gay. Noam pays the price of unconscious guilt when he becomes the victim. But even this quasi-confession of unconscious guilt for denying the Occupation undergoes gay romanticization during the final scene of the film.

This scene presents an imaginary picture of Ashraf and Noam as children playing together in a playground in Jerusalem, where the Israeli neighborhood French Hill converges with the Arab village of Esawiya. The shift from the romanticized fantasy of lost coupling (the camera circles the two at the moment of the explosion; Noam’s words of love contrast with the sight of their shrouded bodies) to that of a shared childhood is anchored in Noam’s narration; that is, not in Ashraf’s (or the shahidic promise of paradise),²⁰ but in a seemingly shared fantasy of reconciliation. Except that Ashraf and his family abandoned Esawiya after their home had been demolished and traded their identity as Arabs holding Israeli citizenship to become Palestinian refugees in Nablus. Furthermore, Noam recalls a conflict from his childhood over whether to allow Arab children from Esawiya to play together with Israelis in French Hill. That is to say, Noam “returns” post-mortem to the moment of “enlightened” reconciliation. Ashraf seemingly “returns” (in Noam’s fantasy) to the same reconciliation, but in actuality returns to an asymmetric and repressive reality of the Occupation. Regardless of the nostalgia for a lost paradise of a common childhood (which never occurred), the fantasmatic picture of the two with their mothers is taken from the reservoir of Israeli rather than Palestinian images.

Suicidal Mirror Images

Both Diary of a Male Whore and The Bubble present mirror images that refer to the perennial other. Both deal with intimate bodily interracial interaction and in both the symbolic and actual violence of the Israeli Occupation precludes their proximity from being free of either past or present traumas. In both, the imaginary bodily merger becomes a parting, and leads to temporal or eternal loss. In Diary, after Essam gets paid, he is seen wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, with the red lights of passing cars signifying future danger. In the last scene of The Bubble, the lovers’ bodies are seen from a high angle shot, in the center of the suicide site.

Will Essam become an Ashraf? This absurd post-textual question makes it clear that although both films stage a psychic mirroring pattern, there is an essential gap between them, as the immense difference in the nature of the sexual relationship – financial transaction vs. romantic love – reveals. Analysis of the main mechanisms of sexual and ethnic repression attests to antagonistic consciousness, which places the Nakba/Occupation; the rape; and the hustling on one side, and racial denial of the Occupation; denial of the scopic regime; gayization; and homo-(suicidal) romance, on the other.

The analyses of Diary and The Bubble discussed in this chapter, which point to the striking differences between the depictions of interracial relationships in the two films, seek to examine the significance of these differences. More specifically, they seek to explore what these differences mean to Palestinian vs. Jewish-Israeli understanding of male (homo)sexuality; repression; and identification, and to explore the place of post-traumatic fantasy in shaping the encounter between the I and the other in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

From the Palestinian point of view, post-traumatic memory determines the subject’s identity in the present – whether homosexual, prostitute, or illegal resident – as well as the boundaries of interracial pleasure: lack of contact and Genet-esque masturbatory self-sufficiency. According to Abu-Wael’s film, Essam will never become Ashraf. The Palestinian who as a young man experienced the consequences of the conquest is mentally and physically subjected to an endless acting out of past traumatic events. Recalling past events is not a way to consciously embrace Palestinian history, but an unconscious compulsive repetition of past traumas: the conquest, expulsion, murder of the father, rape of the mother, survivor guilt. While the mirror images also reveal the castration of Israeli masculinity, the momentary fantasmatic symbolic exchange of “perpetrator-victim-bystander” positions does not prevent the participants from being subjected to memory, mutual dependence, exploitation, and alienation. The subversive act of masturbation, aimed against the omni-voyeuristic Israeli regime with its politics of surveillance, defines Palestinian cinema as post-traumatic cinema fighting for the national cause.²¹

Diary’s defiance intermingles with its claim of victimhood, and though Fox’s film makes a similar claim, his definition of victim is totally different. As I hope the above analysis has shown, in Abu Wael’s film victimhood – presented as a direct outcome of Israeli policies of exclusion, occupation, and dispossession – is an ever-reenacted irrefutable subject position onto which the collaborator’s identity is carefully sutured. Therefore, it is not clear how the rape as the constitutive event of Essam’s post-traumatic identity stands in relation to Frantz Fanon’s claim that “the concern about heterosexual rape functions doubly: it attends, importantly, to violence against women, but it also forcefully masks triangulated desire, whereby the fear – and fantasy – of the penetrated male is displaced onto the safer figure of the raped female” (quoted in Puar 2007). The link in editing between the primal scene and the rape, described above, points to the power these events have had on Essam’s solitary form of sexuality. Diary’s retrospective fantasizing turns Fanon’s and Bhabha’s colonized apparently “same but not quiet” desire into self-staged victimhood, even to the point of risking pathologizing queer sexualities. Moreover, as claimed above, both the primal scene and the rape suggest how queer sexualities might form the basis for understanding the link between loss of sovereignty and post-traumatic subjectivity (in this respect, Abu Wael’s liminal position as an Arab-Israeli director is very much like that of his protagonist).

Unlike Abu-Wael’s film, Fox’s falls short of explicitly pointing out the historical and social processes that would be the causes of the bubble’s bursting. The film depicts the terror breaking through the surface of gay playfulness as if despite the gay Israeli denial of the Occupation. Even though it subverts previous cinematic representation of interracial homosexual relations, the essential asymmetry is wrapped in a romanticized self-centered gay fantasy. The failure to acknowledge the radicality of otherness while ignoring the nature of post-trauma of Israelis living in Tel Aviv (the Jewish Israeli protagonists’ own traumatic subjectivity) results in subjecting the Palestinian other to the world of Tel-Avivian gay pride, leaving no place for epistemological mediation.

Both films require the fantasmatic to work through the pathologies of interracial sexual relations – be it a past-oriented fantasy, as in Diary, or a future-oriented one, post mortem, as in The Bubble. But the gap between Abu Wael’s endless acting out, which becomes a device for self-examination and Fox’s “benign” ethnocentrism points not only to different options of using the fantasmatic in cinema, or different narrativizations, but, in Bhabah’s words, to epistemic violence (1984/1994, 60).

By fantasizing suicidal terrorism, post-second Intifada Israeli gay narrative (in The Bubble) projects the repressed sin of denial of the Occupation on the closeted Palestinian gay; that is, on traditional Palestinian society. In this way, it rids itself of any sexual or political responsibility. Nostalgia for the imaginary paradise of a shared childhood is part and parcel of this denial. The sexual celebration of the Israeli white gay produces only a façade of victimhood shared by the Palestinian and the Israeli. Although the suicidal terrorist attack might be interpreted as an unconscious guilt-ridden Israeli act of self-loss, it still ignores the ethnic otherness. Transforming Ashraf into “Shimi” not only makes him invisible but precludes any interconnectedness between sexual and ethnic mechanisms of repression. Projecting gay-ization and the violence of the Occupation on the destructiveness of the Palestinian suicide terrorist while avoiding any subversive attitude towards the (ethnic or sexual) Israeli occupational order stands in sharp contrast to the ethnic and sexual subversiveness of Diary. Till the very end, Noam does not interpret Ashraf’s suicide as a mirror-image of himself; i.e., as a racially violent projection of Israelis onto Palestinians. Moreover, the deferred deaths of Ashraf and Noam, embodied in the final scene’s postmortem redemption, are taken from the Israeli bereavement myth that presents shared death as an integral part of men’s comradeship. This myth plays a central role in Israeli society and contributes to forging a gendered and eroticized nationalism. The Bubble expands the boundaries of this myth in service of the re-staging of both Ashraf’s Jew-ization and Israel-ization regardless of the circumstances – Israeli and Palestinian “buddies” dying in a terrorist attack rather than Israeli comrades-in-arms killed in war.²² In other words, the mechanisms operative in the conflictual interaction between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians stand at the fateful juncture of sexual and national claims to gay pride; love; desire; and pleasure, on one hand, and space; rights; justice; and acknowledgment, on the other. The collapse of othering stands at the core of these processes and inhibits new possibilities of the self and identity while curtailing the development of alternative modalities of belonging, connectivity, and intimacy.

Both Diary of a Male Whore and The Bubble revolve around possible encounters between the I and the other (prostitution, masturbation, gay-ization, passing, romance). In the contested post-traumatic spaces of the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 conquest, and the second Intifada, these encounters are subjected to denial, repression, projection and fantasy. By proving the unavoidable failure of the (fantasmatic) mirror images of each another, the films in the end do not represent a wished-for (cinematic) reconciliation, but rather a reproduction of the unsolvable pathology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

PART II

PERPETRATOR TRAUMA

CHAPTER 4

THE NEW WAVE OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA: THE MALE PERPETRATOR

Let the atrocious images haunt us. Susan Sontag¹

This chapter offers a preliminary interrogation of perpetrator trauma based on analysis of recent Israeli films making up the new current in Israeli cinema. In contrast to fiction and documentary films produced between the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1987 and 2006, after the end of the second Intifada, the new wave focuses not on the trauma of the victimized Palestinian or the Israeli victim of terror described in previous chapters, but rather on that of the Israeli as perpetrator of atrocities. As indicated earlier, in just a few years, three major Israeli documentaries – To See If I’m Smiling (Tamar Yarom, 2007), Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), and Z32 (Avi Mograbi, 2008) – have changed the cinematic-cultural agenda, raising vehement controversy while receiving numerous prizes.² Shifting the traumatic perspective away from Palestinians and onto Israeli soldiers, this new wave reopens a debate about perpetration, one which for the first time includes women who are former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers.³

The chapter will address the questions of how the trauma of the perpetrator manifests itself in this new trend; how the epistemological – and somatic – conditions of guilt should be understood; and if this cinematic trend paves the way for Israelis to assume moral responsibility for their deeds.⁴ In the face of the insidious denial of perpetration in fiction films (especially the Lebanon War genre hinted at earlier), no wonder that the new trend in documentary cinema based on confession attests by its very nature to difficulties entailed in the subject position of the participants vis-à-vis atrocities: on the personal level, the soldiers find it difficult to acknowledge they have committed atrocities, admit their guilt, or take responsibility – despite committing themselves to confess (and even while they are confessing); on the cinematic enunciation level, auto- and non-autobiographical cinematic language encounters difficulties in articulating the confession and reenacting the yet unacknowledged deed; and on a social extra-textual level, acknowledging perpetrator trauma is difficult for Israelis since it means a concomitant acknowledgment of societal perpetration.

One of the immediate outcomes is the discord caused by acknowledgment of guilt regarding human lives. The films constitute a continuum: on one end are those depicting the most extreme atrocities (including exacting revenge on innocent Palestinians) that leave the perpetrators emotionally numbed, with unresolved guilt, however, gradually willing to take responsibility for their deeds; on the other are films depicting acts carried out by complicit indirect perpetrators⁵ who, not involved with murder, have turned a blind eye to looting, doctored reports evidencing abuse of Palestinians, or paved the way for a child’s death by reporting him throwing an incendiary bomb. Complicit indirect perpetrators not involved in murder are more able to directly confront their guilt and engage in self-reflection. The split between direct and indirect perpetration makes the other’s corpse the ultimate “other” for the perpetrator of atrocities.

Somatic Tensions and Epistemic Crises

The new current attests to the difficulty Israeli documentary cinema encounters in breaching the repression and denial⁶ prevalent in Israel, which despite undergoing myriad internal political and ideological ruptures during these years (1987–2006) maintains its self-image of a victimized Jewish society (Zertal 2002). This is evidenced by the fact that despite the emergence of the new wave, by 2010 only a few such films had been released, and relatively few perpetrators – male or female – appeared in them.⁷

It is no wonder then, that in Waltz with Bashir and Z32 the complex subject position of the post-traumatic perpetrator is structured through a series of (mostly somatic) tensions, including total facial exposure vs. concealment behind digital masks, corporealization vs. phantomization, archival footage vs. documentary animation, simulacric aura vs. desire for referentiality, and realist vs. Brechtian reenactment.

The films display five prominent characteristics of perpetrator trauma, which I define as crises because they are guilt-ridden and therefore inherently irresolvable. The first is the crisis of evidence, which attests to the epistemological impasse of accepting that perpetration has indeed taken place; that is, of confronting the epistemic dynamics of horror with evidence of the horror. The second is the crisis of disclosure, represented in the films by various types of concealment (of the act, of the perpetrator’s face or identity). The third is the crisis of gender, ingrained in internal masculine and feminine self-definitions as well as intergender power relations. The fourth is the crisis of audience, the absence of an imaginary supportive community. The last is the crisis of narrativization, which reveals the unbridgeable gaps between pre-war identity and perpetration, and between the victim’s testimony and the perpetrator’s confession. These five crises are, of course, interwoven in the films, and the following discussion will center on their relative significance in each of them.⁸

In what ways do Waltz with Bashir and Z32 present these crises? Discussion of the textual tensions constituting the subject position of the post-traumatic perpetrator will clarify the epistemic and somatic conditions of guilt, and thereby, the ethical-based substance of perpetrator trauma.

Waltz with Bashir – The Complicit Indirect Perpetrator

Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s award-winning autobiographical animated documentary, charts the director’s quest to recover his lost memories of the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, Lebanon. At the end of his quest for the forgotten last three days of the war, through various encounters, especially with former comrades-in-arms, Folman recalls the traumatic incident, which returns to him as a picture of Palestinian women walking and crying. He discovers that the night of the massacre he and other Israeli soldiers launched flares illuminating the refugee camps, aiding the Christian Phalangists avenge the assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel.

As a post-traumatic film, Waltz with Bashir presents the trauma of the complicit indirect perpetrator, though it defines the degree of complicity ambiguously. On one hand, it shows Folman’s complicity largely as one of omission, silence, inaction, and failure to oppose the injustice vociferously and actively. On the other, it shows what might be defined as active complicity with the government war machine, performing as an important cog in facilitating atrocities. Put another way, although the film presents the genocide in the camps, the Israeli veteran does not assume responsibility for his complicity, either on the individual or the collective levels. The film avoids a clear ethical position towards the historical trauma in Lebanon (and by implication, towards Israeli involvement in the Occupied Territories in the Intifada era, during which this film was made).

The complicitous event of raising flares, Waltz with Bashir

(Courtesy of Ari Folman)

Waltz structures a causal narrative in which Folman’s missing memory and uncanny unutterable feeling of guilt does not originate from his complicitous and traumatic act of shooting flares, but from horrific childhood memories related to the Holocaust. This is exacerbated by Folman’s structuring the narrative on the personal chronology of (a victim’s) belatedness (Nachträglichkeit), that is, the film follows the course of the subject’s recognition of an earlier trauma (as Caruth described, based on Freud), which is also Israel’s founding trauma. In Folman’s imagination, as the quest reveals, the earlier trauma has appropriated the later one.⁹ The work of post-memory, described by Marianne Hirsch (2001) as the response of second generation Holocaust survivors to the trauma of the first,

describes the relationship of children of survivors of… collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they “remember” only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right… Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation – often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible” (9).

The unconsciously assimilated concentration camp memories of his parents unwillingly imposed on Folman, the young soldier, “the role of the Nazi,” as his best friend, the therapist, tells him during his quest. The double post-memory shift from indirect perpetrator in Lebanon to direct perpetrator in the Holocaust, and from the Lebanon camps to “those” camps, involves the blurring of identifications of childhood innocence and youthful complicity through mechanisms of repression and projection.

In fact, Folman’s is a unique case of post-memory because his position as a second generation Holocaust survivor involves more than one loss event and one agency.¹⁰ Marianne Hirsch explores the second generation’s identification with the parent-victim, but not identification with the Nazi perpetrator through the subject position of the victim. Her victim-oriented paradigm (2008) does not include more than one option of post-memory, while Waltz suggests an expanded concept, by which second generation post-memory work might be comprehended as more heterogeneous. I contend that this unconscious work is carried out under conditions similar to symbolic kidnapping or life-long captivity characterized in the psychological and psychiatric literature by identification with the hostage taker.¹¹ For the son of Holocaust survivors – raised under conditions of enforced symbolic captivity – becoming an (indirect) perpetrator in Lebanon caused the horrific figure of the Nazi, the direct perpetrator, to haunt his (post)memory. This complex dynamic of identification processes ultimately blocked Folman from acknowledging his deed for twenty-six years, causing his unresolved guilt to grow to enormous proportions. The inter-subjective trans-generational space of remembrance, linked specifically to collective trauma, allows this alteration. Displacement of ambiguous guilt over his indirect complicity in the genocide in Lebanon to the unambiguous past of World War II, for which, of course, Folman cannot be blamed, permits his (indirect) refusal to acknowledge. That is to say, although his post-memory does not change Folman’s subject position from perpetrator to victim, it fails to provide him with a much needed full circle of re-transference: from past to present, from imagined perpetrator to actual (though indirect) one. Experiencing the post-memory subject position of the perpetrator ultimately creates an epistemological deadlock and a crisis of narrativization.

From imagined to actual perpetrator: Folman, Waltz with Bashir

(Courtesy of Ari Folman)

Moreover, the quest for the missing days entails finding the “missing piece.” Although this missing piece is shocking live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, it still functions as the protagonist’s revelatory insight and the end of his self-tormenting search for missing memory. This redemptive narrative structure, not recognized by LaCapra (2001), Eric Santner (1986) and others, prevents the circumstances surrounding the massacre to be dealt with – how it came to happen, who allowed the Phalangists to enter the camps, what is the ethical meaning of the IDF presence, etc. Moreover, the film does not relate to the incommensurability between Folman’s revealing the missing piece, finding evidence of the deed, and the genocide. Indeed, as LaCapra contends, “Certain events, which should really pose ethical and political problems as serious problems, are assimilated in a way that is too easily redemptive… when the beginning [of the narrative]… gives way to a … revelatory insight at the end” (156–62). In other words, a crisis of narrativization inevitably follows the structuring of a redemptive narrative.

Waltz also presents perpetrator trauma as a crisis of evidence, realized through an iconic and indexical contrast between the animation illustrating the quest and archival footage of the massacre seen for the first time in the final scene of the film. Folman’s quest for the missing days involves meeting five of his former comrades-in-arms (whose stories are told in flashbacks intertwined with his own) and other figures. The last we are introduced to is Ron Ben-Yishai (Israeli Television’s military correspondent at the time), whose voice-over explains the evolution of events.¹² The first journalist to enter the refugee camps, Ben-Yishai describes the morning after the night of the massacre as Colonel Amos Yaron, IDF commander in the Beirut sector, arrives. Depicted from a high angle and extreme long shot, which emphasizes the yet unseeable, Yaron looks at the group of women, children, and Phalangists running away from the camps and shouts, what in retrospect will be evidence of the extreme complicity of the IDF as indirect perpetrator: “Stop the shooting! Stop the shooting immediately!”¹³ Following the women and children, who turn back and re-enter the camps, Ben-Yishai’s voice-over is heard: “Suddenly I see a hand of a child and a curly head… My daughter is the same age as this child.” The camera shows the scene from Ben-Yishai’s point of view: the (animated) alleys of the refugee camp full with bodies of young men. Lying one on top of another, the heap, as Ben-Yishai’s voice over tells us, is chest-high. Then, over this animated scene, the sound of weeping women is heard. The camera is positioned behind them as they walk and cry. The track ceases gliding when the camera shows Folman’s shocked expression as he stands before them; the close-up also represents the revelatory moment of regaining memory twenty-six years after the event. The editing cuts from the close-up to archival footage of the women crying, showing the camp full of slain bodies, until it stops on the curly hair of a small child. Cut. End.

An intriguing hybrid: docu-mation, Waltz with Bashir

(Courtesy of Ari Folman)

The crisis of evidence is based on conflictual yet complementary relations between the iconic sign and the indexical. An intriguing hybrid, the film’s innovative language (animated documentary) has its origins in the “old” logic of cinema aesthetics – the alleged disparity between the icon (animation) and the index (live footage) – and moves between the two. This transformation endows the archive with a truth value that animation apparently lacks, and an eeriness and uncanniness that are “not associated with the realms of the icon or symbol” (Doane 2007a, 2).

In regard to anxieties surrounding the status of representation in our post-medium condition, Mary Ann Doane (2007b) claims “Krauss stressed the abrupt and striking meaninglessness of the indexical trace or mold, its sole proposition that of ‘thereness,’ irrefutable presence… In [her] argument, there is no tension between the index as trace and the deictic index; both involve the sheer affirmation of an existence, the emptiness of a ‘meaningless meaning’” (3).¹⁴ In Waltz, the “thereness,” with its abjective materiality entailing the conjured corporealization of the crying women and the corpses, becomes utterly distinct from the phantom quality of the animated bodies seen before the last scene (that is, before transformation from animated women to photographed). Consequently, the “thereness” of the archive becomes firm, indeed, irrefutable, evidence of the deed, but still preserves the epistemic gap between the deed and its acknowledgment. That is, the “sheer affirmation of an existence,” described by Doane, presented as an un-acknowledged deed, projects its emptiness on the realm of the epistem.

For Folman and spectator alike (both Ron Ben-Ishai and the film spectator), “the index makes that claim by virtue of its privileging of contact, of touch, of a physical connection. The digital can make no such claim and, in fact, is defined as its negation” (Doane 2007a, 136). The immediacy and certainty of the corpses (which, according to these terms, negate the animated corpses Folman encounters on the first day of the war) stand in contrast to the ease of manipulation of the digital, and to its immateriality and timelessness, which proffers “the vision (or nightmare) of a medium without materiality” (142). In the final scenes, because of the sound, the presentation of the women is a portent of the privileged status endowed to the referential. The sound bridge of the women’s cries (heard over their animated image and continuing through the archive scene) intensifies the difference and sameness of these two realms, as eventually both reflect the desire for a traditional, photographic, logic. The sound fortifies the representational shift from the phantom as “(dis)embodied voice” (animated women crying) to the “speaking body” (archival women crying).

The archival footage of the wailing women which, as described above, allows an effective visceral connection to the past as well as transmission of emotional truth, conceals the lack of any reference to the perpetrator assuming guilt. In viewing the video, one does not need further “evidence.” As Susan Sontag (2003) tells us, “The very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence” (74). Moreover, the final scene offers a horrific fascination with the negative sublime, the realm of the abject, through its confusing complicity with transcendence and acknowledgment of the deed. From the ambiguous title of the film (dance as a death trap) to the archival footage (the camps as a death trap), the spectral evidence does not resolve the irresolvable guilt.

A crisis of disclosure: Carmi, Waltz with Bashir

(Courtesy of Ari Folman)

The crisis of evidence is manifested at the technological unconscious level as well. In order to describe the language of the film, especially during the interviews, I suggest using the term “photo-animation.” The source of inspiration is the “photo-painting” of the German artist, Gerhard Richter. In contrast to Richter’s technique, however, Folman did not draw the animation on top of his photography; rather, he filmed a series of interviews and drew the film’s animation based on that material. The drawn objects match very closely the filmed ones. By imitating photography, the animation demonstrates a contemporary “desire for referentiality” (Doane 2007b, 1). (As the Making Of [Waltz] reveals, most of the scenes were photographed in the studio by using uncomplicated substitutes to create the basis for the animation. For example, a tennis racket instead of a guitar for the Apocalypse Now beach scene, or filming a member of the staff dancing for the club scene).¹⁵

To state it differently, Waltz hardly takes advantage of the well-known ability of animation to stretch the boundaries of reality or the laws of physics and physiology. This emphasis on the referential quality of the photographic as a type of mirror “underneath” the animation is an important contributing factor to the indirectness of the complicit perpetrator. Conceptualized through old logic and new appearance, the choice of photo-animation, like the choice of the redemptive narrative structure and the sound of women’s cries over the animation, masks the indirect position of the complicit perpetrator with a feeling of closeness to reality – to truthfulness; in fact, it fails to commit to an ethical stand towards the truth that has been revealed.

In changing the viewers’ perception of the nature of (documentary) cinema using high affinity between previously untapped manipulative techniques and a hallucinatory, nightmarish mode, Waltz has established new forms of spectator engagement and audience address. Closer to fiction than reportage, Waltz has given aesthetics a prominent role, both as a new mediator of the “desire to know” typical of more traditional forms of documentary cinema, and a way to portray the documentary unconscious. Waltz refers to contemporaneous audience acceptance of simulation as an unproblematic bearer of reality as much for its frustration with slippery paradoxes of the post-photographic era as for its yearning for more traditional forms of realism. The conflux aura of handmade painterly-based animation, digital images, and traditional photography explain Waltz’s new spectatorial experience. In the incessant tension between the simulacric aura endowed to the animation and the desire for referentiality evoked by the photo-animation, Waltz provokes a steady level of epistemological crisis.

A deep ambivalence towards acknowledging the complicitous perpetration is realized in the interconnectedness between the crises of narrativization and evidence and that of disclosure. The film presents different kinds of ontological concealment. Most of the locations, incidents, and people are easily recognizable in the animation; however, the animation still functions as a major strategy of semi-disclosure. Moreover, two of the former soldiers whose confessions appear in the film conditioned their participation on concealment: animation made possible the creation of two fictitious characters with voices dubbed by professional actors.¹⁶

As the analysis of these crises proves, this haunting autobiography has, in my opinion, reproduced our epistemological anxieties far more than the genre of mind-game films typical of the late 1990s, for example. While the latter focused on the viewers’ cultish hermeneutic activity, this remarkable docu-mation, with its undertow of guilt, introduced irresolvable questions connected to genocide. A somehow renewed Rashomon, the film’s success (totally unexpected by its makers) lies in its bare equivocation: by mixing genres; cinematic modes; old and new media; cinematography and digital photography; and autobiography and collective memoir, Waltz promotes the culturalization of politics rather than the assumption of collective responsibility. Even though the docu-celeb-turned-patient leads us back, in a somewhat self-deceptive way, to the sofa on which the talking cure will be discovered as an endless night of ambivalences, Waltz undoubtedly reopened the discussion of new war indirect, complicitous, perpetration; thus, its hybrid expressivism does not merely render a new aesthetic, traumatic, and epistemic impasses.

Z32 – Cinematic Shelter for the Post-Traumatic Perpetrator

Two years after the event, the director Avi Mograbi accompanies an anonymous ex-Israeli soldier to Deir as-Sudan near Ramallah in the Occupied Territories, where he and comrades from his elite unit had been summoned to murder six innocent Palestinians in retaliation for the deaths of six Israeli soldiers. The ex-soldier gradually confesses his crime in front of the camera and his girlfriend. During the entire confession the two are concealed under variously shaped digital masks.¹⁷ The director intervenes throughout by performing Brechtian-like songs that reflect on his own involvement in the unfolding confession.

Z32 presents the trauma of a perpetrator who actually committed an atrocity.¹⁸ In contrast to Waltz, centered around Folman’s quest for his tortuous (post)memory, Z32 is centered around the ex-soldier’s long confessional process, partly motivated by this visit to the actual site. A re-narrativization of the flow of events preceding the killing, through which the veteran strives to overcome his numbed, undeciphered, guilt, is repeated ceaselessly; the whole film is thus bracketed by the formative process of acknowledgment.

Interdependence of the crises of narrativization, audience, and disclosure is embodied in a multi-confessional form: the role of the confessor is played out to various degrees by all the participants in the drama. The film stages three confessors (and an accompanying Greek-tragedy-like chorus), all of whom wrestle with the retelling of the “eye for an eye” narrative.¹⁹ The first is the actual perpetrator, the ex-soldier, who struggles with the act of confession and with a relief-oriented wish for imaginary guilt transference and forgiveness. A film student, the ex-soldier also functions as the director of the scenes in which he and his girlfriend talk. He directs himself (and his girlfriend) during his gradual acknowledgment of the deed, exposing himself to both his inner and outer gazes. The digital gap between shooting the film without masks but with the protagonists aware of their imaginary presence and post-production serves the tensions entailed in gazing through a mask: exchangeability vs. authenticity of identity, being someone vs. being no-one, visibility vs. invisibility, feeling vs. numbing, and castration anxiety vs. death anxiety. As the confession unfolds and more details are revealed (the excessive pressure to conform [groupthink],²⁰ the craze of killing, revulsion over touching a corpse), it is evident that the veteran should have wrestled with deep moral, ethical, and military dilemmas during his military service; however, only during the confession, two years after the event, does he finally realize that they conflict in major ways.²¹

The crisis of narrativization is exemplified in its double, contradictory, function: on one hand, narrativization becomes a substitute for, and a defense against, conscious guilt, that is, against the production of truth.²² Moreover, the ex-soldier chooses repeated re-narrativization to transfer his guilt to his girlfriend (“Now tell my story as if you had been there, as if it’s me”), hungrily seeking his self in the mirror constituted by the significant other. That is, telling becomes a self-persecutory mode, a substitute for real persecution that (due to the mask) will never take place. On the other hand, this self-tormenting procedure (“Tell me my story”) gradually becomes a way to work through memory, to be ethically committed, and thus to undermine the evasion of guilt: “Confession… needed no longer to be concerned solely with what the subject wished to hide, but with what was hidden from himself, being incapable of coming to light except gradually and through the labor of a confession” (Foucault 1978, 66).²³ The crisis of narrativization rests, that is, on the contrast between the narcissistically aggressive and the mentally adaptive dimensions of guilt.²⁴

The second confessor is the girlfriend, whom the veteran positions, as noted, in the imaginary role of (male) combat soldier turned war criminal; that is, in the role of his former pathological selfhood. He asks her again and again to confess his story (“Now you tell it”) as if she were him, while she tries in vain to embody the dual role of audience and enactor of his former “self.” The girlfriend’s failure to describe even the initial stages of the chronology (enlistment and training) proves the IDF’s policy of gradually habituating soldiers, beginning with their recruitment, to what Crawford (1989) calls “structural systemic atrocity” (189). That is, the girlfriend’s failed reenactment and her final refusal (“I don’t feel like doing it”) reveal her boyfriend’s submission to a (un-mimic-able) climate of profound ideological distortions and deeper attitudes of indifference, including denial of the humanity of civilians. While assimilating the unbearable thought that her lover is a murderer, the girlfriend expands the boundaries of confession by raising moral issues:

She. But I don’t understand how you could have felt joy, pleasure, intoxication.

He. Babe, you think I’m a murderer?

She. I… no… I… no… I don’t think you’re a murderer – but… I’m sure the wife of the person you killed and his children see you as one.

He. And you? Do you see me as a murderer?

She. It was murder, he was not a terrorist! It was not done in defense! It is murder, it was murder, and you were part of it, so what can I say?

He. And do you forgive me?

The girlfriend’s failure to confess is noticeable, for example, when the veteran’s first-person masculine account of the story is transformed in her rendition to a failed mimicking of his tough voice. Her failure also attests to the crisis of gender, both masculine and feminine. Her repeated technical and mental failures expose the tension inherent in shared responsibility, since she represents not only the huge gap between women (in their traditional role of non-participation in or support of wars, let alone war crimes), and men; but also between the actual perpetrator and society, the indirect perpetrator. Being part of Israeli society, the girlfriend embodies a level of collective morality through her negative attitude towards normalization of systemic violence and the relative permissibility of dehumanized actions that took place during the second Intifada.

Mask-to-Mask: guilt transference in Avi Mograbi’s Z32

(Courtesy of Avi Mograbi)

The third confessor is the director, Avi Mograbi, who – mainly through the postmodern post-Brechtian songs he writes – intervenes to advance the revelation of truth while simultaneously performing-confessing his complicity in what he defines as “giving a cinematic shelter to a murderer instead of turning him over to the courts.” The gap between contradictory forms of intervention (identification with, criticism of, and complicity with the protagonist; and self-denouncement over both identification and complicity), on one hand, and the combination of confessional acting out and performance of confession, on the other, exacerbate the crises of narrativization and audience. Beginning with the first scenes, in which Mograbi is shown near his desk struggling to breathe through a black hood, the director succumbs to a postmodern ironic playfulness and takes on various roles: imaginary detainee; disclosed perpetrator; investigator; military policeman who locates the crime zone; and the (post)Brechtian narrator.²⁵ Self-positioned in front of his camera, he is both protagonist and docuauteur; like the other vicarious confessor, the girlfriend, he crosses the boundaries between participant and listener, there-ness and hereness. In this sense, Z32 renders a perverse reflection on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (UK, 1966), in which, as is well known, the director’s camera reveals what the protagonist, who witnessed a murder but cannot find the body when he returns to the crime scene, fails to reveal. In other words, Z32 is simultaneously a cinematic indictment and a cinematic cover, a work that tracks the ambivalence of complicity while the docu-activist’s confession ironically celebrates the epistemic impasses of his complicitous act.²⁶

The crisis of disclosure continues throughout the entire film. The mask chosen by the ex-soldier to hide his identity (and prevent the threat of being arrested abroad) connects him in a ghostly way to his victim – the innocent Palestinian who was chosen arbitrarily and whose name he does not know. Like him, the perpetrator becomes anonymous. In Israeli visual Intifada culture, the mask symbolically functions as the hood, frequently used in torture of detainees or prisoners. As the confession reveals, in the case of Deir as-Sudan taking prisoners (of war) was never an option. Does the missing hood turned digital mask attest to its absence in the narrative of revenge? Is this also a kind of self-projection into the preferred pre-revenge status of the absent victim, that is, the prisoner? Or is it an imaginary hood in the hands of the cinematic executioner – the director? The imaginary torture that the veteran did not suffer and of which he is afraid turns into a self-tormenting procedure symbolized by the mask. In this, the crisis of disclosure is strongly linked to the crisis of narrativization.

Paradoxically, the digital mask does not provide relief. During face-to-face, or rather, mask-to-mask, encounters, the mask increases the veteran’s anxiety since – in acting out different strategies of denial and concealment – he is afraid of losing face in front of his girlfriend. Moreover, the mask seals off the body and prevents sentience in the Levinasian sense. In fact, the body itself functions as a mask: a faceless entity, it serves as a barrier to itself. The cold mise-en-scène, dominated by grays and blues, serves as an appropriate background for their confessions. The ex-soldier positions himself and his girlfriend on the sofa or in the kitchen, usually framed in medium shots, thus limiting their bodily interaction and movement. Similarly, in the Deir as-Sudan scenes, the ex-soldier, confused by his inability to recall the space of atrocity and bridge the gap between his unbearable memory and the “normalized” present life he evidenced, can’t find his way. His body lacks orientation, is almost blind, castrated.

A crisis of disclosure: the ex-soldier, Z32

(Courtesy of Avi Mograbi)

As Butler (2009) contends:

Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization… Does violence effect the unreality?… If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated. But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again). They cannot be mourned because they are always already lost to or, rather, never “were,” and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness. Violence renews itself in the face of the apparent inexhaustibility of its object. The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral (33–4).

Mograbi’s use of a variety of digital masks intensifies this spectral estrangement (Verfremdungseffekt) felt by the spectators who have no clue as to a possible affinity between the expressionless mask and the face hidden beneath. Moreover, the mere variety of masks disrupts their taken-for-granted camouflage status. Transformation from a noticeable, opaque mask to one almost unnoticeable and transparent further reflects on the connection between the absent subject, the dead; and the perpetrator, the living ghost.

In describing his encounter with primitive masks during his 1907 visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, Picasso writes, (quoted in Malraux 1976):

They were against everything – against unknown threatening spirits… I understood what the Negroes used their sculptures for… All fetishes… were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. Spirits… the unconscious

… they are all the same thing… All alone in that awful museum with the masks… Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have been born that day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting – yes, absolutely! (10–11)

Similar to Picasso, who intuited the apotropaic function of the mask (to ward off evil) and the function of this art as a form of exorcism, the psycho-aesthetic shift in Z32 to more “face-like” digital masks hints at constant dialectics with evil and exorcism. Is disclosure (of booby-traps, of the atrocity, of the dead, of the perpetrator, of those hiding him) evidence of a culture that fetishizes the act of concealment? At the height of this process Mograbi superimposes his face between the ex-soldier and his girlfriend, reflecting on the contrast between the faceless masks and his face, literalizing his position as an intermediary.

Giving a cinematic shelter to a murderer? The director, Z32

(Courtesy of Avi Mograbi)

The ex-soldier wears a very noticeable mask with clear contours when he confesses to his girlfriend the first offense he was indirectly involved in. He tells her that in clear disregard of recommendations, a pressure-sensitive explosive device was placed near the Palestinian post from which a sniper had shot IDF soldiers. The next morning on their way to school, “four kids stepped on it and were blown to bits. Four brothers were killed.” In the next scene, in front of the director’s camera, as the ex-soldier talks about preparing for the revenge mission, the mask he wears is so inconspicuous that the viewer is forced to reconsider what is seen. In this way, Mograbi plays with different levels of revealing the truth and with audience expectations regarding changes in a person’s expression as he confesses. The more he is involved, the more imperceptible the mask becomes, as if his bare face is indeed being revealed to us.

At the center of the interdependence between the crises of narrativization; audience; disclosure; gender; and evidence in Z32 stands the sub-plot of revenge, one of the oldest topics in Western literature and to this day an ubiquitous element in popular culture. Psychoanalysis theory and current trauma theory pay only scant attention to revenge, even among theorists such as Lewis-Herman, Lifton, and Leys, interested in the role shame and narcissistic injury play in the psychic life of trauma survivors.

The processes leading to the act of retaliation described by the ex-soldier throughout his confession – and as To See if I’m Smiling (described in Chapter 5) also reveals – are typical of the second Intifada period and conform to the major reasons for a predilection to war crimes indicated by Lifton:²⁷ strain; struggling with anger and grief over the death of comrades; a desperate need to identify an enemy; ideology that equates resistance with acts of terror and seeks to justify almost any action; an environment in which sanctioned brutality becomes the norm and dormant sadistic impulses are expressed; a perverse quest for meaning through the act of atrocity; and death anxiety.²⁸ Analyzing the mechanism at work in what he terms “an atrocity-producing situation,” Lifton claims in his interview with Caruth: “Extreme trauma creates a second self… It’s a form of doubling in the traumatized person… There have to be elements that are at odds in the two selves, including ethical contradictions” (Caruth 1995, 137). Moreover, “The second self functions fully as a whole self; for this reason it is so adaptable and so dangerous. It enables a relatively ordinary person to commit evil… Another function of this doubling is… in the case of perpetrators, the transfer of conscience. The conscience becomes associated with the group, with the sense of duty” (Lifton 1988, 29).

Crawford (1989) elaborates on Lifton’s characterization, emphasizing that this situation is typical of counter-insurgency wars, the new war on terrorism, and wars of occupation, which, she claims, are “particularly prone to sustained atrocity [when the conflicts are] driven by profound ideological distortions” (190). She calls attention to the pre-existing social structure: “Military atrocity… may be… the foreseeable consequence of policies and practices that are set by collective actors… These are systemic atrocities in the sense that they are produced not so much by individuals exercising their individual human agency, but by actions taken under the constraints of a larger social structure” (188–9). An act at the limits of social rationality, revenge – following Lifton’s and Crawford’s insights – demonstrates the destructive forms of maleness that seem prevalent in the Intifada period. It also demonstrates the difficulty entailed in assigning moral responsibility in cases of systemic atrocity and understanding how the moral context (and structure) within which individuals act is shaped.

The original script of Z32 is brimming with stories the ex-soldier tells about abhorrent acts he was involved in during his military service (e.g., blowing up Palestinian houses for no reason, assaulting old people, arresting and humiliating the innocent, crushing vehicles with tanks).²⁹ Mograbi, who is also the film’s editor, cuts these stories out of the film and focuses on the story of the revenge killing. This is made particularly clear in the title sequence, which appears after the first third of the film, following the story about the children but before he confesses to the revenge killings. In this, Mograbi’s subversion of the relationship between the integral cinematic form and the title sequence as a miniaturized, compact cinematic form embedded within it, makes the first third of the film not only a conventional cinematic play of dissolution and combination, one that captures the specific mood of what is to come, but initiates the spectator into the perpetrator trauma narrative by differentiating between participation in indirect or in direct atrocities.

In many respects, the revenge sub-plot is emblematic of the quintessential never-ending character of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially during the second Intifada. Perhaps more than any other symbol, revenge, an obsolete desire, offers a way of thinking about Israeli-Palestinian relations in terms of time because it signifies the regressive power of the inescapable past to persist and to retreat to some original moment of violence: “Revenge is usually understood as belonging to the past, both structurally and historically: although the seeking of revenge involves planning for the future, this future is conceived of as a direct product of and response to events in the past while the replacement of revenge by an impersonal system of law-based justice has stood as the foundational gesture of Western civilization since at least the Oresteia” (Hack 2006, 278). The revenge cyclicality, however, worsens the crisis of evidence by transporting the confessional act back to its mythic-religious origins. The notion that a random group of victims must pay for the guilt of others simply because they belong to a certain people suggests reasoning based on religious ideology, since it presupposes a notion of collective guilt or sin. From the Israeli perspective, in terms of the kind of war waged, this concept is translated into the “sin” of Palestinians “winning” an attack. Therefore, in a profoundly pitiless act, the extreme anger of the avenger becomes punishment: by death in the case of the victims, and by fear of death among the Palestinian civil population at large.

René Girard (1979), who regards the problems posed by revenge transhistorical inevitabilities, argues that scapegoats are useful in modern politics since, by projecting a community’s resentment onto the scapegoat and then executing it, it is possible “to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric” (18). Sacrificing a scapegoat satisfies a community’s need for vengeance while simultaneously stopping the cycle of violence; hence, Girard argues, “the function of sacrifice is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting” (14).

The interweaving of crises is revealed by the representation of revenge caught in the dialectic between being a mythic and transhistorical, however, cyclical form, and a backward desire grounded in historical time and place. A perverse mode of healing, the aim of the attack was not merely to avenge the dead soldiers, but to avenge the damaged self, which underwent unbearable experiences during military service. It apparently allows the ex-soldier to recover an honorable military image in line with his heroes, Superman and Chuck Norris. During the confession, however, revenge reveals the perpetrator’s inability to make the act a repository for traumatic emotion, one that, due to feelings of gratification and achievement, might assist in recovering a sense of agency, cohesion, or meaningful action. Drawing strength (and later his critique) from steadfast commitment and attachment to his social-military community, the ex-soldier’s painful realization of the group’s misdeeds and moral barrenness leads to a more inward-looking emotion of collective shame. Telling his girlfriend that after the deed, back in the base, the whole regiment cried over the dead Israeli soldiers, and so exposing a hidden prohibition on Palestinian public grief, the nature of his confession paradoxically imitates the act itself – a cyclical repetitious acting out.

Through its multi-confessional performers, Z32 explores various issues relating to perpetrator trauma: the ability of stand-ins to reflect on/participate in a trauma they did not experience, the concept of complicity, the nature of confession, the many levels of mediation of a trauma, the artist’s capacity to assimilate horrific information into his or her work, the different layers of intra-psychic and inter-personal processing of the actual occurrence, the probing and unsettling relationship between history and memory, and the possibility of finding relief, if not redemption, in the acting out of retelling a trauma.

Comparing these two films points, on one hand, to the striking similarities between them; on the other, Waltz stands apart as a radically different cultural phenomenon, not because of its far-reaching cinematic innovation, which made it the only one of these films to attain major international success, but because of its distanciation from the Intifada period and its radical ambiguity. Z32 exposes (albeit anonymously) the very existence of the horrific deeds, its masks paradoxically becoming part of Israeli society’s ongoing cover-up of atrocities and enabling the veteran to be seen as any ex-Israeli soldier. That is, the digital mask not only conceals the identity of the specific perpetrator but also enables this non-identity to become an all-identity, thus inviting a direct embodiment. Similarly, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 5, the female perpetrators in To See If I’m Smiling confess their guilt openly, and so pave the way for Israelis to acknowledge their deeds. In contrast, Waltz’s hybrid expressivism blocks a clear moral response.

In other words, the split between the confession of the direct perpetrator and that of the complicit indirect one suggests not only the deep schism inside Israeli society towards its still hidden moral obligation, but also ongoing repression of the Intifada’s evils. Earlier, I claimed that the atrocity-producing situation of the Intifada was more dominant than gender differences in shaping the moral stand of soldiers. It is therefore clear that the confessions of the indirect perpetrators – though aimed at rupturing the repression – are but another indication of it. As both the Breaking the Silence project and this new documentary wave show, once the worst period of Palestinian terror had passed, IDF veterans were able to contribute a new perspective to the discourse surrounding the chronic ills of the Occupation.³⁰

The differences in the perpetrators’ willingness to acknowledge guilt demonstrates the importance of taking into account the ecology of perpetrator trauma; that is, the environment in which trauma is recognized and the traumatic and non-traumatic backdrop to the events. In different ways and varying intensities, the films structure the socio-cultural ecology that labels, shapes, and gives meaning to their depiction of perpetrator trauma during war, as well as allow recognition and articulation of a range of emotions and attitudes regarding the confessions. In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), LaCapra emphasizes “the importance of providing social contexts in which former perpetrators may acknowledge their past actions and attempt to work out a different relation to former victims… – including the dead – in a manner that enables empathic response and the possibility of mourning” (214). Though LaCapra is not referring here to the post-traumatic perpetrator, his suggestion is very much in line with Lewis-Herman’s claim, mentioned earlier, that a political movement to promote societal recognition of (victim) trauma is essential. As I see it, the films’ emergence indicates a relatively mature phase of Israeli socio-cultural life, one which, following LaCapra and Lewis-Herman, is part of an ecology for assuming responsibility and encouraging mourning of those formerly conceived as ungrievable.

As widely known, at age eighteen almost all Israeli women are conscripted. The next chapter will analyze the female perpetrator’s Intifada films. In this case, like that of the male perpetrator, Israeli cinema takes upon itself a pioneering role in world cinema by rendering confessions of female perpetrators.

CHAPTER 5

THE NEW WAVE OF DOCUMENTARY CINEMA: THE FEMALE PERPETRATOR

We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. Judith Butler¹

Western feminists have thought about war when they felt circumstances called upon them to do so, with World War I occasioning the first such sustained period of feminist reflection and activism. World War II occasioned another such burst, followed by a third one during the late 1960s and early 1970s’ wars of decolonization, in particular United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.

The traditional role feminist critique took upon itself regarding pre-modern or modern wars (discussed from various perspectives by e.g., Scott [1987], Cooke [1993], Enloe [2000], Schott [1996], Oliver [2008]) dealt with exposing the mechanism of power inherent in women’s draft regulations and/or service, investigating how power imbalances inevitably create conditions for routine abuse of power, pointing out the particular consequences for women placed in what would conventionally be thought of as a masculine environment, and challenging prevailing war myths. That role now requires adaptation to the psychological, gendered, ethnical, religious, geographical/spacious and militaristically unique characteristics of new war doctrine. Taking into consideration the masculinized nature of women’s involvement in new war as suicide bombers, guerrilla warfare warriors, torturers, and combat soldiers² adds another unique layer of inquiry for the feminist critic.

In the absence of a moral doctrine to rely upon (Bat-Ami 2008, xi), feminist critique defines the autonomy of the female soldier agency as caught in the fluidity of atrocity-producing situations and gendered involvement within, while recognizing that, as Enloe (2000) has it, “[m]ilitarization is the step-by-step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on or derives its value from military as an institution or militaristic criteria” (291).³

This unstable gendered situation is exacerbated in the context of protracted strife such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the Intifada period, which, as mentioned earlier, has no clear or steady temporal and geographical boundaries. Perpetrator trauma films, especially those about women perpetrators, as will be elaborated on in the following, entail an understanding that “the aftermath of war is crucial to the justice of the war itself” (Bass 2004, 384). Post-traumatic confessions by female director and other female ex-soldiers, which emerge out of an ethical stand in the so-called postwar (in fact, post-service) era, reveal a feminist rupture in the framing of new war’s timelessness and space-lessness. Their particular gendered perspective on the military permits a reflection on both genders, making women’s confessions more intense than those of male soldiers, and thus, more demanding of the healing of the social order. In a context characterized by the absence of well-defined aims the public can debate and agree about, and because “We have passed from an era in which ideals were always flatly opposed to self-interest into an era in which tension remains between the two, but the stark juxtaposition of the past has largely subsided” (Gelb and Rosenthal 2003, 7), this feminist intervention is crucial. I suggest regarding the female perpetrator trauma film as a new sub-genre of women’s cinema: its uncathartic confessions stand as a social challenge for (usually democratic) patriarchal and militarized societies in terms both of recognizing that female and male soldiers have undergone traumatic experiences in perpetration and attempting to heal them.⁴

Tamar Yarom’s docudrama Sob’ Skirt (2002) and documentary To See If I’m Smiling (2007) are, as mentioned, undoubtedly pioneering works that for the first time in both world and Israeli cinema deal with the unique experience of the female perpetrator.⁵ Both films represent the female soldier’s encounter with the violent and unpredictable militaristic, spatial, ethnic, and gendered situation of the Intifada. In both, the female soldier has to deal with systemic atrocity, participation in the oppression of the civil population in combat zones, performance of routine military jobs that naturalize systemic androcentric and ethnocentric violent norms, and sexual harassment, typically verbal.

The questions to be asked, then, are how does the subject position of the post-traumatic female perpetrator in these films reveal anew the complex relations among women, men, and (new) war? What does the belated confession disclose when post-traumatic symptoms intermingle with belated memories of gender conflicts during war? Does it make a difference if the representation of post-traumatic autobiographical-rooted confession is made by a semi-fictional character or by a real character interviewed by the director? How does the director’s awareness of her past indifference towards the ethnic other and complicity with wrongdoing affect the films’ approach to individual and collective moral responsibility?

In the following, analyzing these films aims at exposing the differences and similarities between them in regard to representation of female perpetration. I claim that the female perpetrator, both as insider and outsider to the armed conflict, exposes through this unique, usually unbearable, position the difference between trauma as an experience that affects the individual soldier, and trauma as a (militarist) cultural process. The films offer an exceptional perspective on female perpetrator trauma not only because of the clash between the genders but because in her militarized male-like involvement, the female perpetrator sheds light on both genders’ involvement in new war deeds.⁶

Sob’ Skirt

Sob’ Skirt⁷ tells the story of a young female soldier, Shirli⁸ (Dana Ivgy), who joins an infantry platoon as their new Welfare NCO. Under incessant, mainly verbal, ostensibly humorous sexual harassment, she tries to fit in and do her job. She falls for the platoon’s commander, Yaron (Moshe Fokenflik), but is torn between him and a maladjusted soldier, Daniel (Dado Elbachari). Gradually, she becomes closer to, and part of, the soldiers in the platoon, who in their chauvinistic and sexist way learn to respect her. The platoon is sent to Gaza and confronts the local population during riots, except for Daniel, who refuses to shoot even when, on guard at his post on the roof, he is responsible for protecting the patrol. Looking for Daniel, whose hints she previously ignored, Shirli is shocked when she accidentally discovers that a tortured Palestinian detainee is being kept by her comrades-in-arms in the basement of the abandoned building in which they are staying, tied to the generator, abused and half-dead.

Sob’ Skirt is based on Yarom’s own experience as the Welfare NCO of an infantry platoon in the Occupied Territories during the first Intifada. In its autobiographical-based representation of a female soldier’s confession of complicity with severe ethnic abuse, Sob’ Skirt paves the way for the confessions presented five years later by actual female ex-soldiers in Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling. Though both films take a subversive stand towards the IDF and the evils of the Occupation, Sob’ Skirt’s release at the height of the second Intifada terror attacks made acceptance of its denouncement of Israeli soldiers problematic. To See If I’m Smiling, however, released during the post-second Intifada period, was accepted as a depiction of the by-then long-time chronic ills of the Intifada.⁹ No less than the difference in genres, this difference in political climate is a major factor in the following analysis.

Female soldiers in Gaza, Sob’ Skirt

(Photo: Amos Zuckerman. Courtesy of Buzz Films)

In an interview she gave to Haaretz newspaper in 2007 about her service in the IDF, Yarom divulges the autobiographical moment that caused her to write the script and direct the film: One night when she was sleeping, one of her soldiers woke her up and told her he wanted her to see something in the basement of the abandoned house in which they were staying:

Before we opened the door I heard this awful noise from a generator and there was a strong smell of diesel fuel. I saw a middle-aged Palestinian detainee, lying with his head on the generator. His ear was pressed against the generator that was vibrating, and the guy’s head was vibrating with it. His face was completely messed up. It amazed me that through all the blood and the horror, one could still see the guy’s expression, and that’s what stayed with me for years after – the look on his face… [The soldier who woke me up] wanted to share this horror with me. Maybe he hoped I would do something, that I’d raise an outcry. I don’t remember how we left there or what happened afterward. The next day, I asked one of the commanders what happened in the basement and he politely told me that I mustn’t interfere in things that were none of my business. That detainee I saw taught me something about myself that I would never have learned in years of university. And he’s imprinted in my memory, engraved in every cell of my being. I saw a human being in the lowest, most suffering state. A victim of cruelty I did not know existed. And I stood there unmoved, apparently (Karpel 2007).

As this confession shows, as a post-traumatic film Sob’ Skirt represents the cultural process of transforming post-traumatic memory about complicity in wrongdoing into a cinematic account about the complicity.¹⁰ As Butler claims (2005), “the account is completed only on the occasion when it is effectively exported and expropriated from the domain of what is my own. It is only in dispossession that I can and do give any account of myself” (36–7). And it is only through belatedness (these works, as noted, were made twelve and seventeen years, respectively, after Yarom’s trauma), and – as the films disclose – through awareness of the “primary and irreducible relations to others as a precondition of ethical responsiveness” (135) that Yarom is able to yield to narration.¹¹ In this regard, the accounts in both Sob’ Skirt and To See If I’m Smiling involve a process of “dispossession” by which other (fictional and real) characters tell Yarom’s story, and so vicariously perform her post-“dispossession.” Comprising many levels, (including the non-narratable or even unspeakable dimensions of the unconscious), Sob’ Skirt demonstrates this complexity through the link between Shirli and the ethnic other, one that finally overrides the (spurious) link to “her” soldiers.

Taking ghostwriting to be an essential characteristic of autobiography as a genre,¹² it is noteworthy that in Sob’ Skirt two ghosts presenting complicity with the atrocious event converge: the ghost of the author, whose personal story is unfolded by the fictional character(s), as hinted at above, and the ghost of the Palestinian in the basement. The ghost story genre, mainly in its Gothic formulations (especially in women’s Gothic novels) is about the undying spirit, not the dying flesh. It offers the spectator (or the reader) an escape into the land of the impossible, a reassurance of his/her own mortality, excitement at stimulating horror and fantasy, and thirst for the suspension of disbelief. Transferred to the reality of Gaza, the ghostly figures of the Palestinian (and the young Yarom) are presented in contrast to these conventions. The ghost-in-the-basement convention serves to uncover textual secrets and bring to the fore other enigmas, which demand, but are not susceptible to, a satisfactory solution. Beyond all is the enigma of complicity in the perpetration of atrocities.

The first stage in uncovering this enigma is the film’s representation of how Shirli relates to the soldiers’ degrading behavior towards her: she ignores their salacious hints and gestures.¹³ Sasson-Levy (2003) claims that in the IDF, female soldiers in “masculine” roles show both resistance to and compliance with the military gender order. She describes the trivialization of sexual harassment that characterizes female soldiers in “masculine” roles as part of emulation of the masculine model of the combat soldier and construction of alternative gender identities.¹⁴

Both Sob’ Skirt and To See If I’m Smiling show that sexual harassment is primarily a way of reinforcing male power over women (Farley 1978), keeping them “in their proper place” (MacKinnon 1979). Above all, however, it preserves male dominated Intifada norms. Sasson-Levy’s (2003) survey of women in combat roles fails to take into account the nature of new war and the fluidity of gender roles it imposes. Although she rightly analyzes the ways women are entangled in gendered conflict, she does not discuss their involvement in violent manly conflicts in which, repressed by both outer (new war combat) and relentless inner (soldierly) forces, and in the face of incessant confrontations with both the male other and the ethnic other, the female soldier succumbs to the demands of the inner other. Thus, I suggest that both films show that acceptance of (mainly verbal) sexual harassment from the inner other leads to acceptance of violence towards the ethnic other. This, as the following analysis aims to demonstrate, is a trap that lures the female soldier into perpetration of atrocities: mimicking the male soldier has disastrous consequences for her in new war combat zones.

Masculine role and complicity, Sob’ Skirt

(Photo: Amos Zuckerman. Courtesy of Buzz Films)

In Sob’ Skirt, Shirli’s complicity with the soldiers’ deeds is represented in the first scenes in Gaza through mise-en-scène, intertextuality, and editing. When the platoon’s soldiers complete their daily mission, the omniscient camera shows them entering their barracks wearing their helmets and their rifles positioned for firing – as if they were still in combat. Clutching a blue-flowered scarf, the main symbolic element in the mise-en-scène, they yell: “Where’s the Sob’ Skirt?” Then, seen from Shirli’s point of view, they come closer, dancing towards her with the scarf while singing their variation on a very old and still very popular Israeli children’s song, “Brave Danny”:¹⁵ “A flower I gave to Shirli/ A flower, beautiful and blue/ The most beautiful flower in Gaza/ I gave, while dancing, to you.”

When they stop singing the soldiers encircle Shirli and the scene is built around the dialogue between them:

SHIRLI. Where did you get it?

OFER. From Fatma’s head.

ZION. We saw it and knew it would look better on you. At first we wanted to bring it with the head, but we were afraid you wouldn’t like it. So we explained it to her. At first she didn’t understand. But when I explained it to her with my rifle against her ear, she understood real well.

The close up on Shirli shows her smile freezing.

AVI. Stop it, now she won’t wear it… They’re kidding, they probably got it off a clothesline.

OFER. You can’t say it’s a dirty gift.

HAGAY. I told you she wouldn’t like an Arab gift.

AVI. It’s not Arab. It’s yours.

ZION. Do you like it? Say you like it. It’s a gift that can’t be exchanged.

SHIRLI. (smiling): It’s nice.

OFER to HAGAY. Nice.

I told you, she understands what art is.¹⁶

Ofer places the scarf on Shirli’s head in a variation on IDF initiation ceremonies and celebration of brotherhood. The cut reveals Hagay carrying Shirli on his back with her arms around him, the two circling the room while everyone laughs. The feeling of togetherness is abruptly ended by the commander, Yaron, whose expression of disapproval is exposed by the camera. He orders the soldiers to check the basement. The editing reveals a deep irony when the camera follows Shirli in the next scene as she passes the basement door and enters a nearby Palestinian shop. There she sees the Palestinian woman who serves her wearing the same scarf.

An autobiographical-based female perpetrator trauma film, Sob’ Skirt

(Photo: Amos Zuckerman. Courtesy of Buzz Films)

I argue that in autobiographical-based female perpetrator trauma films, the female soldier’s complicity with wrongdoings is built in three phases, defined herein from her perspective: (1) the outsider phase, which involves experiencing (mainly verbal) sexual harassment and/or a requirement to adjust to the group’s androcentric and ethnocentric norms; (2) the motherly phase, in which mothering the soldiers mitigates previous ethno-sexual conflicts, thus turning the woman soldier into an “inside-outsider”; and (3) the complicity phase, in which direct or indirect projection of violence on the ethnic other is inevitable, a continuation of the female soldier’s previous partial or total acceptance of all-male norms and the previously established belonging to “her” soldiers.

Analyzing the scene described above sheds light on the representation of these stages in Sob’ Skirt. The original poem “Brave Danny” presents a young child’s point of view:

Mother told me: Danny! / My child is brave and bright / My child never cries / He knows better than that. //

I never ever cry, / I am no crybaby / It’s only the tears that come, / they come by themselves //

A flower I gave to Nurith / Small, beautiful, and blue / I gave her an apple, too / I gave her my all. //

Nurith ate the apple / The flower she threw in the yard / Then she went to play / With somebody else. //

I never, ever cry, / I am brave, I am no crybaby / But why is it, Mother, why? /

Do the tears keep coming by themselves? (Yalan-Stekelis 1958) (my emphasis)

On the surface, this poem, like other children’s poems by the author, portrays them “playing and frolicking yet also struggling, hurting and, especially, suffering from the judgment of adults.”¹⁷ The intimate depiction of a small child’s inner self (his mother’s betrayal worsens Nurith’s, and he is confused and relieved over his body’s betrayal as the tears “keep coming by themselves”) has undoubtedly contributed to the poem’s enormous popularity. However, generations of Israelis grew up reciting the poem mainly because, written in 1943, it reflected the prevailing political ideology of the new Israeli society coming into being.¹⁸ The role of Hebrew literature in the creation and establishment of the “New Jew” myth during this period was immensely significant as a new site for designing national identity (Gluzman 2003, 13), with children’s and young adult literature playing an especially important role in epitomizing the New Jew. Adult inculcation of various precepts is therefore most evident in literary works written for children.¹⁹

Becoming part of the group: Shirli (Dana Ivgy), Sob’ Skirt

(Photo: Amos Zuckerman. Courtesy of Buzz Films)

During the 1940s and the decades following, bravery became a major characteristic of the New Jew/Man myth. I claim that when Holocaust children’s literature gradually entered the Israeli youth culture, this myth intertwined in the national memory somehow paradoxically with a well-known Holocaust tale. Abba Kovner, a partisan, Hebrew poet, and leader of the Vilna Ghetto, told the story of a young girl who, after leaving their hiding place asked, “Mother, may I cry now?”²⁰ Jewish children’s ordeals during the Holocaust, depicted most notably in Anna Frank’s diary (1993), describe that, even the very young, when ordered not to cry to avoid revealing their hiding places, managed to keep silent.²¹ Despite the innumerable transformations the relationship between Zionism’s New Jew and the Holocaust’s Old Jew has undergone through time, Danny, embodying both, has remained the nation’s best-loved child who “never ever cries.”

The soldiers’ use of the song in Sob’ Skirt, in all its rich and contradictory meanings, is complex. Singing Danny’s words reflects both on the platoon’s alleged heroism and its dependence on Shirli’s motherly love. Thus, the soldiers’ joyful imitation subverts the hidden Zionist ideal of the New Man, the Sabra (tough but, in contrast to Jewish children during the Holocaust, allowed to cry but choose not to) and simultaneously preserves it. In contrast to Danny, however, as the film’s final scene reveals, their abusive deeds are merciless, devoid even of those tears that should have come by themselves… Their Intifada-like version of early Zionist and Holocaust myths (and even the myth of first love) – “A flower I gave to Shirli… The most beautiful flower in Gaza” – racializes the original song, drastically subverting the conception of the Israeli humanistic nature, and serves as a way to tempt Shirli into complicity with the platoon’s violence. Their singing and dancing are but a variation on belly dancing with a scarf: a Scheherazade-like performance, though by men, meant to keep them from “dying,” that is, from losing Shirli’s motherly love.

Sob’ Skirt reveals their heartless attitude, their cruelty and false bravery during the dialogue about the scarf. Shirli ignores the soldiers’ use of dark and ambiguous humor about looting and accepts that they took the scarf from a clothesline (“You can’t say it’s a dirty gift”). She also ignores their Mafia-style violent behavior towards the Palestinian woman (“At first she didn’t understand. But when I explained it to her with my rifle against her ear, she understood real well”) and their racist and de-humanizing attitudes (calling the woman “Fatma,” a derogative nickname for all Palestinian women). Unlike Danny’s mother, Shirli fails to judge the soldiers’ deeds. Instead, she pretends that she shares their world-view, submits to the requested mothering, and so becomes part of the group (an inside-outsider). The films describes the act of belonging and aims to overcome Cynthia Enloe’s (2000) adage – men are the military; women are in the military – as a major factor in this denial.

The soldiers enter the room calling for the Sob’ Skirt, referring to Shirli by the code name by which all Welfare NCOs are referred to in IDF radio communications (they are usually on the receiving end of soldiers’ tears). In this case, however, the tears that cry by themselves at the sight of the abused Palestinian will be only Shirli’s. By ignoring their deep (albeit inhuman) feelings in the name of (false, inhuman) bravery, her motherly attitude towards them is much like that of Danny’s mother; however, crying in the basement facing the horror she tried so hard to avoid, she more resembles Danny. The film plays on her alternating between the two roles, but by drying her tears they become but momentary shifts in her subject position. Shocked by the awful abuse and cheapening of human life (and perhaps her earlier denial of veiled hints), she returns to the joyful group without saying anything about the basement or the Palestinian. The last shot reveals her frozen face in a close up. Her complicity has reached full circle.

Sob’ Skirt describes the step-by-step mechanism of becoming a female perpetrator (and the indirect complicit perpetration as post-traumatic). Wearing a scarf procured by life-threatening threats on a Palestinian woman, that is, ignoring de-humanization and looting, inevitably leads to complicity with deadly torture of the ethnic other. In her silent approval, Shirli turns herself into the Palestinian woman she “imitates,” through the wearing of “her” scarf, and so totally denies her own human-ness.²²

To See If I’m Smiling

Through [the women] you can understand the psychology of the guys who serve in the territories. It’s not different, it’s just more extreme. It makes no difference what your job is. If you’re in the territories you’ll be sullied by this thing and come out a different person. I went into the territories with an excellent upbringing and came out a different person. I was afflicted by moral confusion there. That’s my position, and the position of the film.

One of the statements that I most identify with is Meytal’s, which opens the film: “Sometimes I think that I’m insane, because I have memories that are not connected to reality and maybe never happened. But I know that they did happen because of the intensity with which I feel them today” (Karpel 2007).

The following analysis will compare the documentary To See If I’m Smiling with the two films about male soldiers discussed in Chapter 4 – Avi Mograbi’s Z32 and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir.

In To See If I’m Smiling, director Tamar Yarom interviews six women who had been IDF soldiers and served in the Occupied Territories during the second Intifada. Unlike Z32, in Smiling, all of the women fully confess to their participation in, or complicity with, wrongdoings and human rights violations a number of years after their release. In contrast to the male perpetrators in Waltz and Z32, who are concealed behind animated figures or digital masks, Smiling does not hide the protagonists and thus does not present a crisis of disclosure. The female perpetrators talk openly to the camera about their deeds: Meytal, a medic and medical officer, posed for a picture of herself with the naked body of a dead Palestinian; Libi, a combat soldier, humiliated and abused Palestinians during her shifts at a checkpoint; Rotem, a video surveillance officer, supervised a chase during which a child who threw an incendiary bomb at IDF soldiers was killed; Dana, an education officer, failed to report looting carried out by her platoon; Tal, a welfare officer, searched and checked Palestinian women at checkpoints; and Inbar, an operations sergeant, did not report abuse of a Palestinian child by IDF soldiers and assisted her commander in replacing the criminal report with a false one.

The interviews capture some of the reality experienced by female soldiers who were not charged with crimes but who must wrestle with deep moral dilemmas that are the result of their (indirect and/or complicit) perpetration. In contrast to Folman in Waltz and to the anonymous ex-soldier in Z32, the women in Smiling, holding apparently privileged positions as non-combatant soldiers and therefore exposed to a relatively lower level of atrocity-producing situations, talk about their past very directly, with self-awareness and acknowledgment of guilt uncommon in the male perpetrator’s confession.²³ Devoid of self-pity and narcissistic self-blaming, they share their stories with Yarom through a rare intimacy; their exceptional openness influenced, so it seems, by the empathy of the director, herself, as mentioned, an ex-soldier who went through similar tribulations during the first Intifada.²⁴

The confessions here are characterized by a pattern similar to the biblical account of the Fall, showing a more drastic before-and-after contrast than those of the male soldiers. The narrativizations of the women indicate an unbridgeable gap between their naive idealism before being drafted and their later shattered adjustment to, and complicity with, a reality described by one of them as the Wild West.²⁵ Gender crisis in Smiling, as in Sob’ Skirt, is embodied in the female encounter with a male world of atrocities. Repressed both by their brothers-in-arms and the Intifada, the female soldiers, desiring acceptance into the prevalent comradeship, underwent incessant subordination to forces that trapped them in a contradictory situation in what they wrongly believed were equal relations.

Being part of a male dominated system, the women describe in an un-sentimentalized and self-alienated yet painful tone how they had to adjust to appalling events perpetrated by their male comrades, including bombing of Palestinian houses and consequent street fighting during Palestinian riots (as Tal, for instance, confesses: “My first operation took place on my twentieth birthday… It was the first time I had encountered a population in a real distressed state of fighting, of war… when your house is destroyed and you are out on the street with all your belongings, which are pretty much nothing, and in amok… My commander orders me: ‘Go ahead, take a bat and beat them! You are with us, so do it!’”). The women attest to a sense of selfhood that was fundamentally enmeshed in violent circumstances by their surrounding militarily disciplined world and the gendered reality of the Intifada.

Women soldiers at the checkpoint, To See if I’m Smiling

(Courtesy of Tamar Yarom)

Moreover, all of these women talk about the unbearable lightness of mortality in the Territories and their shocking encounters with the ubiquitous (Palestinian and/or Israeli) death – on the base, at suicide bombing sites, in the hospital, in the streets. Part of a daily routine, this new intimacy with the “utmost of abjection” (as Kristeva calls it [1982, 4]), the corpse, became highly menacing, especially when occurring in abusive situations. Inbar, for instance, recalls an incident in which a Palestinian reached the fence of the military base she served in, and climbed it shouting Allahu Akbar! (God is [the] Greatest). Since this happened at the height of the second Intifada, instead of being shot in the leg (the order of the day at other times), he was shot dead. “The body remained hanging over the fence and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

As Eyal Weizman claims (in Godfrey, et al. 2010):

The logic of separation has fractured. Rather than being linear and continuous, as in the geopolitical imagination of the Cold War, borders these days are fragments, splintering across and through “deep space” within cities, between neighbourhoods. Cut apart by border and segregation devices, space is woven together by highly policed and intensely filtered networks of transport and communication. Checkpoints and borders mean that sovereignty (of a state, an institution, a corporation) is exercised in its ability to block, filter and regulate movements across its boundaries.

The threat of uncontrolled death, on one hand, and feelings of uncontrolled evil, on the other, haunts the women soldiers. For them, as Weizman has it.

Contemporary spaces thus no longer seem fixed; rather, they are elastic, almost liquid… The linear border, a cartographic imaginary inherited from the military and political spatiality of the nation state, has splintered into a multitude of temporary, transportable, deployable and removable border synonyms – separation walls, barriers, blockades, closures, road blocks, check points, sterile areas, special security zones, closed military areas and killing zones – that shrink and expand the territory at will.

The ghostly presence of an abused or dead Palestinian, especially a dead child, has a visual correlative in Smiling. A repeated image, which appears between the confessions, shows a war zone – poverty, deserted streets, hostile looks, absence of life – taken through the open back door of a jeep driven by an unseen driver constantly traveling the streets of some Arab city in the Territories. This no-one’s-point-of-view imparts both the feeling of being haunted by ghosts and of falling down. Like most of the footage used in the film to illustrate the confessions, such images have almost never been shown on Israeli television. Yarom chose to insert only non-hegemonic illustrative material, untypical of the usual Intifada iconography, to challenge the Israeli spectator.

Shot by the organizations B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Machsom Watch; the Ramallah news agency, Ramatan; and foreign news agencies like AP, these illustrations were occasionally turned into reenactments by Yarom. For example, she encloses the illustration used in Rotem’s confession of her part in chases after Palestinian children who threw stones and bombs in a frame reminiscent of a video surveillance monitor. In this way she transforms arbitrary illustrations into truth-laden reenactments. The result is a unique case of the absent subject discussed by Bill Nichols in his analysis of fantasy in documentaries. According to Nichols (2008), “A lost object haunts the film. The attempt to conjure that specter… signals the mark of desire… Attempts to come to terms with death, catastrophe, and trauma are extreme or limit cases of the more general desire to come to terms with loss” (74). However, in Smiling, there are two ghosts – one is the female perpetrator who, although present, becomes the living-dead after the event; the other is the victim, the dead child.

The crisis of narrativization, less severe than that of the male perpetrators, is embodied mainly in the women’s confessions of the enormous difficulty in both conjuring the dead (mainly the Palestinian child) and forgetting them. Paradoxically, their avoidance of concealment fails to enable the camera to function as a prosthetic extension of the dead. The return to the lost object, the corpse, to the irretrievable moment of perpetration, becomes, therefore, their (and the film’s) major imperative. The no-one’s-point-of-view and illustration-turned-reenactment constantly conjure ghosts. As Nichols (2008) suggests, “Reenactments… effect a temporal vivification in which past and present coexist in the impossible space of a fantasmatic. This form of coexistence revolves around a lost object and the signifiers that serve as resurrected ghosts that both haunt and endow the present with psychic intensity” (88).

In the impossible fantasmatic-traumatic space of the Intifada, it is noteworthy that the female perpetrators present two spheres of gender crisis: motherliness, and femininity. Tal, Inbar, and Rotem devote their confessions to what they conceive is a failed, almost treacherous, motherliness; while Libi, Dana, and Meytal struggle with images of femininity revealed to be unsuitable in a highly masculine militaristic order. In the following I describe two representative cases – Rotem’s perpetration, linked to failed motherliness; and Meytal’s, linked to failed femininity.

The interwoven crises of gender and evidence are embodied in the image of bloodstained hands that stands at the core of Rotem’s confession. As mentioned earlier, she reveals that during a chase she directed as a video surveillance officer, a child who threw an incendiary bomb was killed. Shocked over the unavoidable in-jus in bello ([in]justice in war) as well as the impossibility of jus post bellum (justice after war), she recalls her initial acknowledgment: “I used to go home on leave and call my friend in the army: ‘Sivan, it won’t come off!’… I keep trying with soap!… I have blood on my hands! I don’t know what to do!’” The link between bloodstained hands and evidence entails religious connotations well known in the Judeo (and Christian) traditions:

And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil (Isaiah 1: 15–16).²⁶

The perpetrator’s hands attest to the crisis of evidence: similar to Isaiah’s rebuke, they serve as an indexical trace of the un-seeable bleeding-to-death body; however, as a deictic index, they also imply “an emptiness, a hollowness that can only be filled in specific, contingent, always mutating situations” (Doane 2007b). The duality of the (Peirceian) index as both a trace and a deixis points to duality of the resurrection of the unseeable event by the unseeable bloodstained hands. In other words, the tension between the two attributes of the index intensifies the crisis of evidence.

In contrast to the confessions of the male perpetrators, Rotem does not blame (implicitly, as in Waltz; or explicitly, as in Z32) their military training, the nature of war, or her commanders. She describes her guilt in Biblical-religious terms (that, as Kampf suggests, has a special resonance in the second Intifada visual culture), as if she has internalized both the ancient and modern male voice. Moreover, being trapped in a prophetic male inner voice is irresolvable given her relationship to the child. In this regard, her “masculine” behavior during her shift generates the unbearable subject position of being both a fe(male) perpetrator and a female, and is exemplified in her loneliness. Isolated from the bonding characteristic of male veterans after they leave the army, when repeatedly after her release asked what is wrong, she tersely answers: “I killed a child.”

Analyzing the relation between murder through negligence and the right to avenge such a death in the Talmud, Emmanuel Levinas (1982) contends that for a person who commits murder through negligence (horeg bishgaga) “there must be cities of refuge where these half-guilty parties, where these half-innocent parties, can stay shielded from vengeance… The city of refuge is the city of a civilization or of a humanity which protects subjective innocence and forgives objective guilt and all the denials that acts inflict on intentions” (39–51).²⁷ Is Rotem a modern horeg(et) bishgaga? In contrast to the Talmud, there is no city of refuge for her: the blood avenger is her own inner voice. Like the other women in Smiling, gender crisis and failed motherliness are evident in the huge gap between the moral bareness of her masculine surroundings, the normalization of the act of atrocity, and her individual – tragically helpless – moral agency. When Levinas asks if negligence limits our responsibility in the present, he answers that the city of refuge is still relevant because acts of hariga bishgaga happen metaphorically everyday in Western society: the advantages of those who enjoy the privileges of a wealthy society should be regarded as the indirect cause of somebody’s dying somewhere else. In this way as well, because she is part of the unbridgeable social gap between Palestinians and Israelis described in Smiling, Rotem is indeed a modern horeg(et) bishgaga.

One of the main protagonists in Smiling, Meytal, a medic and medical officer, was responsible for the southern West Bank Hebron sector. Her confession is built on two interrelated stories that connect the crisis of gender to inter-gender and ethnic relationships. Both stories concern rituals of purification meant to overcome fear of contamination from the Palestinian corpse and from the deed.

Meytal describes her first encounter with a corpse, which she was ordered to clean because, suffering a non-fatal injury and slowly bleeding to death, the victim lost control of his sphincters. She scrubs his body, “And then his eyes opened again. It happens. It’s a reflex. And it’s a very scary moment. It’s as if he’s coming back to life.” With self-loathing, Meytal describes how she was required again and again to clean corpses of Palestinians before they were returned to the Palestinian Authority so that “they wouldn’t see what we did to him.” Thus, the second story depicts what became a “normative” situation of her being alone in the sector when the corpses arrive:

Another body… and cleansing… then… something very funny happens. He has an erection. A dead body with an erection. We laugh a little because it’s embarrassing. And… some female sergeants that I knew arrive from the operations room. One of them has a camera and… without even thinking, I tell her: “Come take my picture.” I sit down next to the dead body and… I have my picture taken.

Using static camera and close ups or medium close ups during the entire confession, Yarom depicts Meytal’s facial expressions (shock, disgust, self-alienation, shame, embarrassment, determination to tell, deep sadness).

In both stories, the Palestinian corpse becomes “alive” through subversion of the (symbolic and actual) castration imposed on it. The uncanny reoccurrence of these incidents reflects on Butler’s (2004) culture of un-grievability described above:

Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization… But they have a strange way of remaining animated and so must be negated again (and again)… The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral (33–4).

The crisis of gender is revealed in how the two stories emphasize the tension between the triumph of the female perpetrator over the defeated body of the male other, and its seeming “indestructibility.” As the narrative proves, the oppressive forces that placed the female perpetrator involuntarily in a vulnerable position culminate in her complicitous purification of the other’s body. Simultaneously, induced or seduced by malicious circumstances, she abuses it. Overcoming corporeal vulnerability, the excremental becomes “magic” (Douglas 1966/2002, 147) because the dead “insists” on keeping the abject disruptive forces constantly unassimilated, calling into question the dialectics of contamination and purification.

The revolt of the dead against objectification through the act of seeing is closely related to the scopic regime of Israeli culture. Although, as Sontag tells us, the dead are profoundly uninterested in us – they do not seek our gaze – the Palestinian “look” is strongly connected to the perpetrator’s refusal to see. The confessions made by the six women show that the Israeli culture of perpetration during the second Intifada is based on phallocracy, omnipresence, and the omnivoyeuristic impulse; however, as the paradox of living on in a state of deadness proves, the escalation of omnivoyeurism (Rotem’s video surveillance, Meytal’s photography, Tal and Inbar’s checkpoint body searches, etc.) is concomitant with the perpetrator’s denial of, or refusal, to see: “This ‘not seeing’ in the midst of seeing, this not-seeing that is the condition of seeing, has become the visual norm, and it is that norm that is a national norm, one that we read in the photographic frame as it conducts this fateful disavowal” (Butler 2007, 996).

Is the picture of Meytal with the dead body a case of fascination with abomination?²⁸ Is this the “first… transgression that gets you into the hallowed halls of the taboo?” (Taussig 2008, 104). As hinted at above, there is no doubt that as a traumatic gendered experience, cleansing and erasing the traces of the castrated other has meaning beyond ethnic differences. Because it had been a potential sexual threat earlier, the corpse objectifies and haunts the female soldier. Meytal’s act also means a sexualization of the act of seeing and photographing that is distinct, though in tandem with, the sexualization of the depicted scene of degradation. An interesting twist in the common Barthesian connection between photography and death, the moral indifference of the photograph is enhanced by its investment in the reiteration of the scene.

Moreover, John Durham Peters’ (2001) etymological analysis of the bodily basis of testimony sheds light on the erection as the victim’s “testimony” to the dehumanization he suffers. According to Peters:

Testimony stems from testamentum, covenant (testis plus mentum). Testis, which in Latin means both witness and testicle, itself stems from tertius, meaning third (party). In ancient Greek, the word for witness is the word for testicle: parastatês, which literally means by-stander. In German, Zeugnis means testimony, and zeugen means to testify as well as to procreate… This curious web of metaphors… attests to some deep assumptions about the physicality of witnessing (712–13).

That is, the erection might be seen as a bodily testimonial to the victim’s trauma. From the Israeli viewpoint, the act of purification validates death but also causes the opposite effect – it makes the corpse “live” again, apparently conjuring its sexual “prowess,” that is, its will to testify. The photograph freezes the testimony of the dead body in tandem with Meytal’s wrongdoing indicated by the perverse sadistic pleasure of her smile.²⁹ After her release from the army, the smile stands in contrast to her self-loathing as she sees the corpse’s “testimony.”

Posing and smiling for a picture is, therefore, the site of perpetration, a means of mastering the ghostly-manly power of the other, of finally arresting and degrading it. Denial of her vulnerability to the other through a fantasy of mastery means active involvement in the perspective of war, elaboration of that perspective, and validation of its ignored or broken rules. In this, the photograph functions in part as a way of registering a certain lawlessness. The corpse has been deprived of honor by sadistic use of his “pose” (so to speak) to take a picture during the most intimate moment of dying. The symbolic violence of taking that picture becomes an irreparable act.

Traditional readings of Sophocles’ tragedy present Antigone, who buries the dead soldier, as a heroine and a feminist icon of defiance, and Creon as abusing the dead soldier. According to these readings, Meytal is closer to Creon than to Antigone: it is Meytal’s anti-Antigone-istic impulse (of not obeying the agrapta nomina, the unwritten laws) that eventually shocks her, and the viewer. In contrast, Butler’s (2000) anti-Hegelian and anti-Lacanian rereading of Antigone does not see the burial as a rebellious act. She suggests that Sophocles provides ample evidence that Antigone is just as flawed as Creon:

Antigone emerges in her criminality to speak in the name of politics and the law: she absorbs the very language of the state against which she rebels, and hers becomes a politics not of oppositional purity but of the scandalously impure… Opposing Antigone to Creon as the encounter between state forces and kinship fails to take into account how… her language, paradoxically, most closely approximates Creon’s, the language of sovereign’s authority and action (5–6).

The crisis of gender in Smiling demonstrates that the tragedy of the female soldier during the Intifada is embodied, like Antigone’s, in never truly being outside the “law of the father.” While in traditional terms, Meytal is closer to Creon, in Butlerian terms, because she “absorbs the very language of the state,” she is closer to Antigone.

Smiling presents the after-effects of Meytal’s act. When she is released from the army she becomes depressed (much like Boaz in Waltz), suffers from insomnia, and starts drinking. In the final scene, years later, she looks for the first time at the photo she wanted to distance from her conscience. We do not see it, only her face. In shock, with tears and pain, she says, “How in God’s name did I ever think I could forget this?” The female ex-soldier breaches the unspeakabilty of the corpse in a continuing inner dialogue with it. Her willingness to relive her wrongdoing becomes an ethical act that indicates her willingness to recognize the other: both the victimized other and the perpetrating other within herself.

Rotem and the other women resemble Meytal in that they cope with their guilt by disclosing their vulnerability. The film reveals that women are more likely to express the tension between direct and vicarious participation in wrongdoings. In this sense, the unconcealed trauma of the female perpetrator is completely different from the (concealed) one of the male perpetrator.

Does Smiling indeed depict the Intifada’s (atrocity-producing) situation in the Territories as being more powerful than gender differences? The film reveals that such differences were highly influenced by the masculine order of the Intifada. Moreover, in Israel, where their military service is compulsory but is much more likely to be spent in support roles than actual combat, female soldiers rarely succeed in radically negotiating gender identities within the military institution. The question still remaining to be asked is what types of transformations in their gender ideology and practices did the traumatic events cause. The confessions prove that the female soldiers’ marginal place in the male-dominated military, along with their so-called equality in quasi-combat jobs, not only makes it more likely they will follow orders and try to fit in, but traps them in morally corrupt circumstances. The film offers various conflicting accounts of what it means for women to wage war. Only the post-trauma of military service compels the women to examine their previous norms and explore avenues for asserting possibilities of agent selfhood. According to Smiling, military service does not radically transform traditional gender relations, but leads to later acknowledgment of how the gendered norms of war operate when atrocities are carried out. The changing perceptions and experiences of war enable Rotem, Meytal, and the others to confess and fully acknowledge their gendered guilt and acquire moral autonomy.

Pain and Shame: Meytal in the last scene of To See if I’m Smiling

(Courtesy of Tamar Yarom)

CHAPTER 6

THE NEW WAVE OF DOCUMENTARY LITERATURE

[The mourner] must deny his impulse to make extensive and detailed reparation because he had to deny the cause for the reparation; namely injury to the object and his consequent sorrow and guilt. Melanie Klein¹

In Breaking the Silence: Male Soldiers Testify on their Service in Hebron 2005–2007,² an anonymous Israeli ex-soldier tells his interviewer:

I remember the first time I was totally fucked up in Hebron. When I opened a zig [street corner or house] in one of my first patrols, when, you know, you’re in shock. During the patrol I was sure that wow in a minute I’ll be stabbed, I’ll be shot. You’re looking through every window, you open every zig, all stressed out. After a while you don’t care what happens, yeah, but in the beginning… I remember opening a zig and my rifle was aimed right on a little boy. I had awful nightmares because of it, it’s true.³ He began to cry and ran away… and then I said to myself: wow, that’s it, I lost it. Really… I was fucked up. Everyone is talking all the time about burnout, about this shit, but this is really terrible, they’re all around you. First, you’re afraid, then you act humanely, and after that nothing gets to you. You’re apathetic. This is what happens in all the Occupied Territories, but especially in Hebron… You don’t, you don’t understand what, what happened to you as a human being (9–11).

As this typical account demonstrates, Israeli documentary literature written during the first decade of the 2000s is characterized by its first-person depiction of the post-traumatic experiences of ex-soldiers as perpetrators. It thus takes a subversive approach to the Occupation as a form of colonialism and illustrates that its ongoing violence is present in all aspects of Palestinian life. In the following, I describe the two major forms of perpetrator-trauma documentary literature that have emerged, and in a sense also matured, during these years: the fragmentary parrhesiastic confession,⁴ and the perpetrator trauma autobiographical docu-novel. I take the study of autobiography (following the work of Lejeune [1989]; Eakin [1989; 2008], Heyne [2001]; Bruner [2004]; Butte [2005]; and Sandberg [2005/2006]) as a starting point for discussing these forms; however, my interest lies mainly in analyzing the specific themes and strategies that characterize the ways new war has affected perpetrators coming to terms with themselves.

The works discussed below are not combat memoirs according to traditional definitions, whether pre-modern or modern.⁵ Although their major theme is wartime experiences, they describe non-combat warfare. Because of the interweaving of belated trauma; confession as performance; and critical imperative, they are also, to a certain degree, non-memoirs. That is, the confessional mode – though based on the traumatic experience of perpetration – involves harsh criticism of what Lifton calls the “atrocity producing situation” and thus becomes a confessional-critical mode that overcomes the stream of memory.⁶ Bolton (2006) contends, “In the corpus of World War II literature, perhaps the most urgent and significant form response to the war came in the form of autobiography… In many ways it makes sense that writers facing the possibility of death or whose lives were altered permanently by the war would turn to autobiography” (155–6). In new war’s atrocity-producing situations the autobiographical impulse emerges partly from the perpetrators’ need to impose order on their past and link their individual fates with those of the community in which they live. Thus these narratives become not so much “the story of [the author’s] personality,” but a story of transformation that by its very nature, given the perpetrators’ role as envoys of society, deeply involves sociohistorical diagnosis and political and institutional protest.

Subverting previous definitions of similar genres, like the diary and fictional war novel, and related types of autobiographical writing, such as the autobiographical poetic prose novel, as described below, these works conform to Lejeune’s pacte autobiographique. According to Eakin (1989) in his forward to Lejeune’s On Autobiography, Lejeune sees the autobiographical pact as a form of contract between author and reader in which the autobiographer “explicitly commits himself or herself…. to the sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life” (1989, ix). As I hope the following Foucauldian-inspired analysis demonstrates, this commitment has a special resonance in the forms under scrutiny. In perpetrator trauma literature, the autobiographical pact, therefore, is considered commensurate with ethical performing. Given the unique historical-social context of the Occupation, on one hand, and Israeli society’s prevailing denial of the Occupation’s evils carried out in its name, on the other (which is typical, I presume, of other new war contexts as well), the subversive stance of the authors/narrators/protagonists toward themselves (and society), which transcends the self-referential gesture, is inseparable from contractual ethics; and is, in fact, prominent in them. If, as Eakin (2008) claims, “Readers take it seriously when autobiographies claim to be based in some sense on biographical and historical fact” (x), the ethical implication of these history-oriented works, as opposed to novels, means they are identity works in action, for both writer and reader. Intended to become representative of the generation and not merely personal stories, they strive to make ethical writing ethical reading as well. I suggest that defining the autobiographical pact in times of new war includes not only the sincerity of the writer but also a latent content and strategy that work to promote the sincere commitment of the reader. It is, above all, an ethical pact. Eakin claims, “Our participation in… narrative identity system is governed by ‘social accountability’” (24–5). He quotes the psychologist John Shotter, “‘What we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves – and for it – to the others around us… And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate’” (141) (emphasis in original). Playing on this narrative identity game, as Eakin calls it, becomes risky if the culture does not supply a more coherent system, or if the authors fight to free themselves of its (Israeli/IDF) identity regime.

The Fragmentary Parrhesiastic Confession

The depiction of the post-traumatic perpetrator subject position with its uncompromised ethics stands in sharp contrast to allegiance to the victim’s position in fiction written during the same period by major Israeli novelists, such as A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman.⁷ Though they describe various identity crises, through their emphasis on victimhood the novels directly or indirectly ignore the Occupation’s atrocities and wrongdoings. This epistemic gap between documentary and fictional literature is very similar to the one, described in Chapters 4 and 5 in this book, between the new wave of documentary films and narrative films. After forty-four years of Occupation (1967–2011), the documentary voice attempts to make public an experience that to a large extent had been rendered invisible by the dominant fictional literature, and demands that its readers recognize the reality of the speaker and incorporate that reality into their views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The first decade of the 2000s evidences more clearly than previous decades that, because of its denial of the Occupation, traditional Hebrew literature, which played a major role in Israeli national renewal and is considered national-canonic literature in the context of Zionist culture, has changed drastically. Israeli literature has lost its previous identity, the boundaries between canonic and popular literature have collapsed, and at the height of the post-second Intifada period it is rooted in a deep schizophrenia (Hever 2001; 2007, 194–7). In a culture based on a double standard – official national ethics for Israel, and another, practical, ethics acted out only in the Occupied Territories – Hebrew literature that was previously canonic-national with a clear ethical worldview avoids recognizing this double ethics. Instead, it adopts a popular mode as the appropriate site for this avoidance (Hever 2007, 196–9). As the above analysis of Riklis’ (and Yehoshua’s) The Human Resources Manager, which is typical of these processes, shows, fictional popular literature (and film) that embraces moral façade and false compassion displaces national questions onto familial ones, and thus, in fact, sustains complicity with society’s denial of the Occupation’s evils.

Within this schizophrenic socio-cultural mentality, documentary works are clearly revolutionary. They attempt to expand the range of voices heard and serve to turn the experience described into a crucial formative experience in the future identity of Israeli society. In this, they take upon themselves a unique cultural role meant to affect the chaos of new war. Two major characteristics define these works: the first is their emphasis on confession. In June 2004, following a scandalous exhibit in which sixty Israeli ex-soldiers displayed photographs they had taken of atrocities committed during their military service in Hebron, Breaking the Silence published hundreds of personal accounts of (male and female) ex-soldiers talking about their malevolent military service in the Occupied Territories. The cultural shift from presentation of photographic evidence to oral confession and then to written confession intensifies the prominent role the post-traumatic confession plays in a society that, as described above, is abuse-supportive as well as immersed in denial. Breaking the Silence calls these confessions “testimonies” in order to express the urgent need that, in a culture of denial, the confession be received as testimonial proof of the wrongdoings it describes. I see the aim of writing differently. These works are indeed documents of their age, however to give “testimony” to another ex-perpetrator (the modus operandi of Breaking the Silence) is, in fact, to act parrhesiastically. Though not all the confessions reveal remorse, they all reveal guilt and a moral stand typical of the subject position of the perpetrator.

The second characteristic that defines these works is their politicization of the personal confession. Starting its written activism with pamphlets that included personal accounts such as the one quoted above, in 2010 the organization published a book entitled Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000–2010. The book is different than the earlier pamphlets in its stark politicization, intensified by scale; its hundreds of confessions meant to elicit a stronger public impact; and in its form. Intended to commemorate the first decade of the second Intifada by exposing Israel’s colonial policy as deliberate, it is organized into four major sections that characterizes this policy: prevention (sikul), separation (hafrada), daily life (mirkam chaim), and law enforcement (akifat chok). Deliberately using neutral language prevalent in discourse to describe systemic IDF acts, the sections reveal this language to be Orwelian-like “newspeak” (for instance, the section heading “Separation” states that this term apparently refers to the required distance between Palestinians and Israelis, but in fact means “control, expulsion, and annexation”). It is no longer, as in its pamphlets, scattered and fragmented information relating to various acts that have nothing in common. The content of the confessions has been politicized by aggregating dozens of confessions relating to the same act and the same newspeak framing. The new form elucidates how often, and how systematically, these wrongdoings are carried out.

The confessions in the pamphlets and especially those in the book demonstrate the collective meaning of the repetition of militaristic routines (revealed in retrospect to be post-traumatic), but contribute as well to turning the post-traumatic personal voice into a collective one, a symptom of an entire generation. Blurring the lines between private and public, these accounts, coming from almost every branch of service and unit of the IDF, derive their evidentiary power from being chronicles of the ordinary, depictions of the degree to which the trauma of wrongdoing has pervaded day-to-day army life in the Territories. As post-traumatic militaristic accounts based on the historiography of mentality, the confessions confront the soldiers’ psychological deterioration and raise controversial issues of social identity in regard to perpetration, especially collective responsibility and complicity. In this way, Occupying the Territories: Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000–2010, a black-covered book designed entirely in black-and-white,⁸ transforms the confessions into a direct argument, an extreme literary dissent.

One major theme running through the confessions is the soldiers’ reaction to the total absence of a moral father figure, which led to their complicity in wrongdoings. For example, one ex-combat soldier tells the interviewer: “We had a unit commander who would simply say in these words, and this is awful, he would say: ‘I want bodies. That’s what I want.’”

Interviewer. Do you remember a specific incident in which he said it?

Ex-soldier. I recall ten times that he said it, ten incidents… since his introductory talk with us, and in these words, he said: “I want bodies full of holes.” It was awful. Later I met him in civilian life, visiting my friend who was wounded, and then he told me: “Yes, we killed twenty-eight people. They are not people at all, the terrorists, it’s okay.”… This is what he wanted. This is what he said should be done. Before we headed out on an important operation he would tell us: “I want bodies full of holes.” And if we returned with someone we had, let’s say, killed, he was pleased. That was how it was.

Interviewer. How did he show it?

Ex-soldier. When we came back from an operation he would congratulate us because we had killed someone.⁹

This typical account exposes the post-traumatic reaction by showing the ex-soldier’s belated verbal repetitions. The total collapse of the father figure as a moral figure trusted by the foot soldier and relied upon during operations in the chaotic new war leads to an identity crisis (a theme that also appears in the autobiographical docu-novels analyzed below). The commander’s profound racist attitudes and breaking of taboos in regard to the dead intensified the trauma of this, and other, combat soldiers. In many accounts, therefore, the abject is represented as having a constant presence, the “incontestable reality of the body” (Scarry 1987), one which becomes a substitute for the unpresence of the military father figure. This missing figure eventually becomes a negative though still powerful phantom.

Lifton claims, “Recognizing that atrocity is a group activity, one must ask how individual soldiers can so readily join in? I believe they undergo a type of dissociation that I call doubling – the formation of a second self. The individual psyche can adapt to an atrocity-producing environment by means of a sub-self that behaves as if it is autonomous and thereby joins in activities that would otherwise seem repugnant” (2006). As the representative interview cited above shows, the subversive voice of the confession is complex. On one hand, it is a double voice because the interview format is based on latent sharing, similar to the Foucauldian contract:¹⁰ the organization’s volunteer interviewers, themselves ex-soldiers who were involved in wrongdoings, interview other ex-soldiers on their personal experiences. The total anonymity promised to the confessors by the volunteers facilitates their willingness to talk; however, it is the presence of the interviewer that makes the talk at all possible. In taking upon themselves the role of initiator, the interviewers embody profound sharing with the interviewee’s fears and hesitations and acknowledge the courage needed to face past deeds and uncover truth. On the other hand, only the interviewers are willing to be identified publicly. This form of dissent against the (primarily right wing) Israeli consensus is revealed to be ambiguous: although the post-traumatic perpetrators (volunteers and confessors alike) are motivated by their common ethical impulse to break the silence, the interviewees, like most of the male soldiers in the new wave of documentaries, remain anonymous.¹¹ This limitation, which Paul de Man (1979) defines as de-facement in regard to claims of secretive authorship, stands in contrast to the volunteers’ willingness to be exposed. As Thomas Goodnight (2007) contends, it is clear that “at times, telling the truth to power is a powerful personal gesture;… in times of war, it also reveals the very heart of democratic struggle caught up in debate.” The political debate in Israel during the very days the book was being published reached new heights with a government decision to propose a law authorizing an ongoing audit of the source of funds donated to human rights and leftist organizations (including Breaking the Silence), making the activism of the volunteers (as editors and publishers of the ex-soldiers’ accounts) quite hazardous, a Foucauldian (symbolic) death game.¹²

In a political situation that is in desperate need of moral and social principles, the literary and phenomenological impulse in these writings shows evidence of self-guilt while simultaneously attempting to break hegemonic processes of silencing. Therefore, in spite of the anonymity of the confessors, Breaking the Silence’s published confessions can be defined as parrhesiastic. According to Foucault (2001):

Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy (19–20).

In his analysis of parrhesia as a figure of “fearless speech,” Foucault (2001) emphasizes that he is not interested in the issue of truth but rather in truth-telling as an activity. Etymologically, he explains that the Greek word parrhesiazesthai comes from pan (“everything”) and rhema (“that which is said”), and means “to say everything” (12). In parrhesia, as Foucault contends, the speaker emphasizes that he is both the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciandum – that he himself is the subject of the opinion to which he refers (13). Similarly, the circularity implied in knowing the truth about oneself in order to know the truth is characteristic of parrhesiastic practice. In this regard, I suggest that the question and answer format of dialogue, typical of parrhesia since ancient times, offers a format that might, at least partially, transcend these inherent limitations and assist the subject in uncovering the truth, especially when it is intermingled with trauma.

An essential characteristic of Athenian democracy, parrhesia distinguished the good citizen. Foucault stresses the distinction between parrhesia and athuroglossos or athurostomia (“mouth without a door”), which is a blunt figure of speech that refers to someone who is an endless babbler, who cannot keep quiet, and is prone to saying whatever comes to mind (Foucault 2001, 69). But, whereas athurostomia speaks frankly in the vernacular with untrained excess, speaking truth to power, the parrhesiastic act, as exemplified in the published confessions of Breaking the Silence, is the product of minimalist, unvarnished directness.

Foucault (2001) stresses that parrhesia is a “completely natural” mode of discourse (21). Devoid of aesthetic manipulations, it is based on long time opposition to rhetoric, one that was obvious in the fourth century BC throughout Plato’s writings, and lasted for centuries in the philosophical tradition. The seminal question Foucault raises about the activity of truth-telling is the one raised powerfully in Euripides’ Ion (a play entirely devoted to the problem of parrhesia): who has the right, the duty, and the courage to speak the truth? Moreover, Foucault calls upon the speaker to examine what s/he believes and therefore demands a closer scrutiny of her/himself.

Drawing on his analysis, I suggest that the post-traumatic perpetrator’s confession is in fact a parrhesiastic confession (revealed also in newspaper interviews and soldiers’ blogs¹³). If it is true that the interviewer’s symbolic voice stands in for the interviewee, Breaking the Silence’s literary works as parrhesiastic confessions pave the way for a slowly growing corpus of largely autobiographical perpetrator trauma documents.

In contrast to the anonymity and fragmentary nature of Breaking the Silence’s literary works, Liron Furer’s Checkpoint Syndrome (2003) and Noam Chayut’s My Holocaust Thief (2009), the most prominent documentary novels published during these years, offer an opportunity to probe the limits of secrecy and constitute a unique genre of autobiographical “aftermath literature.”¹⁴ Exposing the evils of the Occupation, both are parrhesiastic works, although Checkpoint Syndrome is closer to the Foucauldian ideal of parrhesia’s “degree zero” in terms of its rhetoric than is My Holocaust Thief. It is obvious that by basing their narratives on evidence, both docu-novelists are striving to attain historical authority.

The inevitable tension between self-representation and trauma representation and the ethics of self-transformation define the nature of the works. The two novels were written in India during the authors’ de rigor after-army-service-transition-to-real-life trips abroad before attending university; that is, while they were in a liminal space, outside the Territories. Both present deep crises in regard to their protagonists’ Jewish/Israeli/Zionist identities and express concern about social-cultural belonging. These crises are intensified because the confessions, retrospective attempts by ex-combatants to construct a meaningful narrative of their war experiences, were written while the Intifada was still taking place. Unlike modern war-based literature, in new war literature the experience of war is felt both in retrospect and in the present. Thus, like Breaking the Silence’s confessions, their works ceaselessly emphasize the chronic nature of evil and of trauma as they are reflected, intermingled, and absorbed in each other.¹⁵

Most post-traumatic Intifada documentary narratives, especially if they are autobiographical in nature, are inclined to be subjective inquiries into the social, political, and psychological roots of the Occupation’s violence; the chronic nature of evil; and the nature of trauma. Although in terms of format and genre there is a gap between accounts delivered in interviews and in autobiographies, by spotlighting the police-ization of the military, both Breaking the Silence and the autobiographical works delve into the roots of violence and the identity crises of soldiers. Prior to new war, the military and the police traditionally acted under different operational and philosophical principles: the military was almost exclusively trained to kill external enemies in times of war through the use of overwhelming force; the police were, and remain, under formal legal obligation to keep the peace and protect life using minimal force. A clear differentiation between the police and military has been considered a preeminent feature of the modern nation-state (Giddens 1985; Kaldor 2001/2007) and the failure of a government to clearly differentiate between the two is seen as an indicator of repressiveness and lack of democracy. Indeed, it has been described by many scholars (e.g., Kaldor [2001/2007], Kraska [2007], McCulloch [2004] and Cunneen [2001]) as typical of new wars. The line between military and police action and law enforcement and war began to collapse in the post-Cold War period. As McCulloch suggests, “A close operational and ideological relationship between the police and military… was considered a hallmark of more totalitarian or authoritarian regimes… The break down of the boundary between the operations of the state’s coercive agents – the police on the inside and the military on the outside – is primarily a product of the changing nature of global capitalism; the ascendancy of global corporations and the decline in the power of the nation state” (311–14).

Israeli documentary literature sheds light on a unique facet of this process, revealed in the Israeli context but – as films on US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, show¹⁶ – is not limited to it: the link between the police-ization of the military and a propensity for (direct and indirect) perpetration. This has special significance as part of the ideology of security. In the context of a society that places great emphasis on security, it is successfully marketed and rebranded as the new law and order. Exposing the false dimension of this process, Agamben (2001) claims that discipline “wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder” (2). Therefore, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What was until the first half of the twentieth century one among several decisive measures of public administration becomes the sole criterion for political legitimation. Because they require constant reference to a state of exception, security measures work towards a growing de-politicization of society. In the long run, Agamben further claims, they are irreconcilable with democracy: “A state which has security as its only task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to turn itself terroristic” (3). The soldier-turned-cop turning into a perpetrator is presented in the documentary works as a process which, from the post-traumatic perpetrator’s point of view, is inescapably entailed in army service and security authority in the Occupied Territories during the Intifada. Documentary literature uses the figure of the soldier-as-cop to demonstrate the interconnectedness of issues such as historical and structural conditions of colonialism (many of which still exist in almost original form), social and economic marginalization, systemic racism, and the resulting perpetration.

The process of a soldier-turned-cop turning into perpetrator is portrayed in these works as the heart of confronting the civilian other. Though their military status’ and roles were totally different (Furer was a foot soldier and Chayut a commander), both protagonists describe the identity crisis caused by the soldier becoming a cop as the starting point of a degradation process that leads to perpetration. Wrongdoings are revealed to be the result of this severe, and for both, totally unpredictable identity crisis.

In the following, a description of the major characteristics of Checkpoint Syndrome and My Holocaust Thief serves as a background for analyzing their similarity and differences in regard to the major new war burden their protagonists portray: the rapidly and uncontrollable blurring of (traditional) distinctions between military/police, war/law enforcement, and internal/external security; a progression which transformed them into violent and at times racist perpetrators.

Perpetrator Trauma Autobiographical Docu-Novels

Liron Furer’s Checkpoint Syndrome

Checkpoint Syndrome describes the routine procedures at a Gaza checkpoint where Furer and his fellow soldiers check Palestinian ID cards and vehicles during eight-hours-on, eight-hours-off shifts. The docu-novel concentrates on a life of surveillance and discipline at the checkpoint (machsom), an ever-present system of closures and traffic restrictions, and – except for a short description of two weekend leaves in Tel Aviv (devoted mainly to Furer’s sexual relations with his girlfriend) – out-of-the-Territories space is hardly related to. The topography of the war zone, not less than the human enemy, acts as the primary antagonist in the perpetrator-trauma narratives and in many respects serves as one of the major sources of the physical struggles and ethical-psychological crises of soldiers; the landscape absorbs or even replaces the human enemy, and in the case of the checkpoint – the soldier-cop himself. The checkpoint’s closed, monitored space becomes for Furer the only actual, mental, and symbolic relevant referent.

Because the novel concentrates on life at the checkpoint, even after reading it, Furer remains relatively unknown to the reader, almost anonymous, somewhat like the interviewees in Occupying the Territories.¹⁷ On one hand, the absence of biographical details makes the docu-novel’s voice even stronger, becoming an all-identity, a representative of the corrupted identity suffered by an entire generation (or even of all generations of IDF soldiers who served from the beginning of the first Intifada in 1987 until 2011). On the other hand, it reproduces an unfathomable dimension to the enigma of the perpetrator’s character, although as new war literature, it offers, as demonstrated below, a clear militarist-socio-political explanation for this enigma (certainly one that is different from the explanations that characterized the perpetrator of the twentieth century’s total wars, beginning with Arendt [1963/1994], Milgram [1974], and Browning [1992]).¹⁸

The blurb on the cover of Checkpoint Syndrome says:

[This is] a challenging book, one that describes the process of moral deterioration and loss of humanity in an IDF soldier at the checkpoints of the Gaza Strip. The descriptions of abuse and cruelty, even including brutal fantasies, are rendered directly, devoid of self-reflexivity or any critical consciousness on the part of the author. As a result, the decision to publish the book did not come easily, but the publisher decided that these very points are the strength and importance of the book: it shows, in an almost clinical manner, the development of a syndrome of racism… Only… during his stay in… India, does the author realize what he has been through and what his service in the Occupied Territories turned him into: a violent and brutal thug, abusive, much like a rhinoceros.

The question of Checkpoint Syndrome’s self-reflexivity or critical consciousness, as of any other perpetrator-trauma novel, is crucial to comprehending this new literary sub-genre. Checkpoint Syndrome’s form (more than that of My Holocaust Thief) divulges the major challenge it proposes for its Israeli readers, who embody its imagined community of complicit perpetrators. On one hand, a very careful plan of the parrhesiastic act is revealed through the novel’s form and style; its precise form, organized around a day-by-day confession of wrongdoings, proves it is a work of chrono-logical self-acknowledgement. On the other, the harsh style of the entire novel (but particular the two chapters¹⁹ that describe fantasies involving the serial rape of a young Palestinian woman by Furer and his comrades, and the violent abuse of a mentally retarded sixteen-year-old Palestinian man for no reason), raises several questions: Intended to preserve the immediacy of the perpetration experience, do these two chapters still involve the author’s critical introspection? Do they turn the readers’ participation into a sado-masochistic activity, compelling them to confront the soldiers’ internalization and eroticization of patriarchallic subjugation, racialized discourse, and ethnic-gendered stereotypes? Do they thus interfere with acknowledgment by the imaginary community?

I contend that this duality of the psychological (acting out of the traumatic experience of perpetration) and the epistemological (acknowledgment of the atrocious deed) registers within the confessional act is a major characteristic of the perpetrator trauma autobiographical docu-novel, and points to the complexity of the (individual and collective) acknowledgment process. Though the reader of the fantasy chapter inevitably faces a sado-masochistic form of participation (which might be even more unbearable in the case of a female reader), the preface and the “reality” chapters provide a clue to the author’s preference for the epistemological rather than the psychological register. The preface, written in Goa, India, presumably under the influence of drugs, is based on an interior monologue that proclaims Furer’s after-service recognition of the truth about his corruption during service. The organization of the novel into parts that create an epistemological gap between “reality” and “fantasy” appear to demand the reader’s hermeneutic activity. But in fact the comparison between the abusive routine rendered in three “reality” chapters (Gaza ‘97, ‘98, ‘99), and the two intermediate chapters (“Action” and “Fantasies Help Pass the Time”) above all exposes the complexity of the foot soldier-turned copturned perpetrator and the deep transformative process this entails, and therefore demands, moral acknowledgment.

The organization of the chapters around the passing of time and the emphasis placed on the distinction between reality and fantasy not only attest to a clearly conscious and defined form, but point to the novel’s multiple functions: acting out traumatic memories; criticizing Israel’s and the IDF’s ideology and regime in the Territories; and refusing to reconcile with either the personal past, the IDF, or Israel as homeland. Desiring a parrhesiastic act, Furer provides his post-traumatic account with a force which, through this precise, complex, form and a free, un-literary style, is performative in impact.

Both the works published by Breaking the Silence and the autobiographical docu-novels demonstrate that the post-traumatic confession is characterized by a hybrid style meant to accurately grasp the perpetrators’ exceptional experience. This includes their seeming to address an (actual or imaginary) interlocutor. Though the interviewers for Breaking the Silence mediate this false addressing, all the confessions keep the imaginary audience at a distance, concentrating instead on the immediate listener, the interviewer. However, because the interviewers are ex-perpetrator themselves, addressing them never reaches the threshold of catharsis, demand for forgiveness, or hope for reconciliation. The same is true of Checkpoint Syndrome (and My Holocaust Thief, described below). Furer identifies different audiences in the preface, mainly other soldiers and the IDF:

Hello to you all human beings little slaves… its been two months in which I wrote nothing but took pictures and “trips” all the time now finally I am free and far away from all the shit you have in your damn country… now I am free the crazy energies of Goa opened my mind… I see your plans how you cheated me… you brainwashed me with your rifles… you used me like a robot… I am free and do not fall into the trap you planned I see the truth and will never never never come back! (3–4)

Beginning with its preface, Checkpoint Syndrome fulfills the parrhesiastic act through a full confession of both realistic and fantasmatic truths. Furer’s self-inquiry through an inner dialogue with himself itself validates emotional response but does not give preference to the act of literary creation at the expense of the parrhesiastic confession. In the preface, an apparently “pre-speech” monologue renders the nonverbal content of the mind, but even the associative sequence of thoughts seems rational in terms of the author’s relation to the trauma of becoming a vicious perpetrator. In the chapters that follow, this acknowledgment becomes part of the readers’ response, though Furer uses various techniques to elevate the present tense and the routinization of time, including providing graphic details of sadistic atrocities.

The first-person reflected mind ruptures the span of time that separates the narrating self from the experiencing self, and combines the inner and outer worlds in a way that repels the potential denial of the readers. Eliminating any distance between the narrator and his character, two linguistics levels become one: the inner speech with its idiosyncrasy and the author’s report on (checkpoint/Intifada) reality. Capturing the spirit and style of the immediacy of the present by using material as if it were taken directly from the consciousness or the psyche of the speaker, the moment of narration with its expression in emotive modulations (questions, exclamations, repetitions, and so forth) creates the illusion that the future (of acknowledging himself as a brute perpetrator, and his post-service identity crisis) is unknown to him. The destructive consequences of the soldier-cop’s endless routine is emphasized because there is no evolution in the narration technique: fantasies are rendered in the same vulgar, un-educated, slang-filled language as the “reality” events. These techniques plunge the reader (and imagined perpetration community) into the here and now of perpetration.

The author’s deliberate avoidance of any sort of stylization and his adherence to prose written like an un-rhymed poem intensify authenticity and freedom from constraints, even in writing. In other words, describing the detailed ordinary routine in a harsh soldierly style indicates a conscious elevation of perpetration’s distance from narrativity. According to Young (1987):

For upon entering narrative, violent events necessarily reenter the continuum, are totalized by it, and thus seem to lose their “violent” quality. Inasmuch as violence is “resolved” in narrative, the violent event seems also to lose its particularity – that is, its facthood – once it is written. In an ironic way, the violent event can exist as such (and thus as an inspiration to “factual” narrative) only as long as it appears to stand outside of the continuum, where it remains apparently unmediated, unframed, and unassimilated. For once written, events assume the mantle of coherence that narrative necessarily imposes on them, and the trauma of their unassimilability is relieved (404).

Furer’s experiences “somehow force themselves directly into language as unvitiated facts” (Young 1987, 405); however (although we are conscious to the attitude Furer expresses in the preface), we cannot imagine an appropriate autobiographical literary response to the violent rape, murder, abuse, and mutilation fantasy rendered from the perpetrator’s post-traumatic point of view. Needless to say, colonial and postcolonial literature dealing with these subjects from Said, Bhabha, and Fanon to Morrison and Kincaid is written from the victims’ and subordinated peoples’ point of view, with the aim of recognizing their suffering to “engrave the event in the deepest resources of our amnesia, of our unconsciousness.” (Bhabha 1994, 26) The chapter entitled “Fantasies Help Pass the Time,” which in many respects describes the culmination of the author’s becoming a brute soldier (and the novel’s harsh style as well), brings to the fore the pathologization of the soldier-cop-perpetrator transformation.

As described in detail by Furer (as well as by Breaking the Silence’s interviewees and Chayut), when the military/police dichotomy breaks down, the bulk of security work becomes routine/patrol surveillance operations, house-to-house searches (including no-knock raids), and arresting law breakers; that is, military operations came to resemble police work more than warfare. For these soldiers, the operation model of the IDF, which has always represented constraint; discipline; honor; control; competence; and a type of patriotism, had changed drastically and now stands for tyranny; state violence; human rights abuse; arbitrariness; and an ideology that sees the other’s social problems (movement, economy, housing, etc.) as best handled through force. For Furer (and Chayut), the progressive and accelerating collapse of the line between police and military activities has sabotaged “warrior’s honor.” Describing himself at the checkpoint as a castrated combat soldier, Furer points to arbitrary, capricious abuse, and creation of false emergencies as two main strategies for coping with the displacement of traditional soldierly action in battle to an ad infinitum routine police-like control of a civilian population. Both ways of coping erupt in extreme fashion in his interracial rape fantasies, a horrific culmination in this displacement by which conquering the other’s body is a substitute for a battle over space. According to this metonymic fantasy logic, rape is the border-crossing practice par excellence of a soldier who, like his victims, is stuck at the checkpoint.

In the first fantasy, the soldiers enter a house in a refugee camp, serially rape a young Palestinian woman, cruelly murder her during the rape, and mutilate her body. In the other fantasy, he rapes a pregnant Palestinian woman and another soldier steps on her belly. As Diken and Bagge (2005) suggest, “War rape is perhaps the clearest example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape, the enemy soldier attacks a civilian (not a combatant), a woman (not another male soldier), and only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The prime aim of war rape is to inflict trauma and thus to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. Apart from demoralization of the enemy, war rape can also become an integral aspect of ethnic cleansing” (111). Furer’s personal voice is transformed into a collective one when he describes this perverted fantasy of brotherhood in perpetration:

We want to hurt her, I / hold the knife and pull her / hair cut across / the forehead, to scalp her, / I put down the coal-colored hair, she faints, / dawn / I come we change places, / blood on / the floor, on the tiles / on the kitchen utensils, we cut / her nipples it is / easy.

We butchered her completely. / It tired us out, now we / take a rest, we finished with her, / we leave the house, someone sets fire one of the rooms / we ride away, the fire reaches / to the sky (73).

At the end of the fantasy chapter, Furer returns to the first person and says

What madness I did. / Dana and I fucked / at her place yesterday, / and when she turned around / so I could go in the back way, I pushed / my dick / really hard into her ass. / She screamed from pain / and I pulled out straight away / and started to ask / forgiveness. She cried / and was confused, / and I felt like / some sort of rapist. I don’t know / what I was thinking about (82).

As I described in an earlier chapter, interracial rape is remarkably limited in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in comparison to other ethnic-religious-political conflicts, despite widespread violence against civilians.²⁰ Furer’s images, totally different from those described in the near-rape fantasy with his girlfriend, are an exception and, taking place after two years of service, point to a major turning point in the deterioration of his humanity. As Žižek (2000) suggests, “The images of utter catastrophe, far from giving access to the Real, can function as a protective shield against the Real. In sex as well as in politics, we take refuge in catastrophic scenarios in order to avoid the actual deadlock (of the impossibility of sexual relationship, of social antagonism)” (34). Although fictional rape fantasies force us to confront the function of their fictionality, that is, to conceive them as meta-fantasies, Furer’s realistic style sharpens what is revealed underneath – the fantasies prove prevalent conceptions regarding sexual violence during war: it is considered a tool for assertion of militaristic masculinity; a means to control ethnic purity; an attack on the ethnic, religious, and political group in an attempt to destroy its institutions, mainly the authority of the family patriarch and acceptance by the community; it masculinizes the identity of the perpetrator and feminizes the identity of victim (Skejlsbæk 2001);²¹ it imposes an ultimate humiliation, a stamp of total conquest (Diken and Bagge 2005, 118); it is a way “to display, communicate, and produce or maintain dominance, which is both enjoyed for his own sake and used for such ulterior ends as exploitation, expulsion, dispersion, murder” (Card 1996, 7);²² and is “a castrating experience aiming to illustrate the impotence of the enemy” (Brownmiller 1998, 38). As scenes of excess and transgression of social roles, norms and laws, Furer’s fantasies reproduce widespread patriarchal mysoginist cultural stereotypes – a dominant male taking a woman by force, her wishing to be raped, her pleasure during the event; and ethnic ones – by invoking the brown body of a “fat Arab woman,” as he calls her, he enacts a complex system of signs that depends upon the reader’s automatic complicity in stereotypical thinking about Arab women. This allows him an easy image without the responsibility of specificity, accuracy, or even a narratively useful description. The totalizing descriptors deny heterogeneity and show the degree to which the author’s manly virtues are built on the ubiquitous presence of those he considers racial inferiors and over whom he can have, gain, or exercise power. Furer unconsciously negotiates his identity only in relation to the Palestinians and the way his comrades in arms regard the Palestinians.

However, beyond this extremely racialized and xenophobic discourse, which shows ethnic-racist violence as deep-rooted in the national imagination, Holocaust-like and genocidal images (scalping) seem to dominate these fantasies. Do they occupy the unconscious of the second generation Israelis in a perverse way, ready for use? In contrast to the figure of the persecuted perpetrator depicted in the interviews of Occupying the Territories, here the Holocaust-invoked atrocities are described with no historical-cultural reference. This (deliberate?) ignorance makes Furer, in the ecstatic act of mutilation which is combined with perverted necrophilic jouissance, the agent of his own desubjectivization. He fantasmatically executes a perverse ritual aimed at destroying his dignity and feeling of moral worth. Are the genocidal hints characteristic of new war’s lack of doctrine, and not only of the second generation’s perversion of Holocaust post-memory?

The two rape fantasies and the scene with his girlfriend reveal, on one hand, the degree to which after only two years of service Furer had unconsciously internalized the role of the dominator. Ironically, the ceaseless act of separating Palestinians from Israelis, the checkpoint system,²³ is revealed to be ironically destructive in terms of the soldier-cop’s identity through the sexualized fantasmatic projection of his “new” manhood on his girlfriend. On the other hand, depicting the fantasmatic events (the Palestinian woman and his girlfriend) one after another reveals that Furer understands he has become a mental rapist and a perpetrator. Rupturing the horrific seduction embodied in his permissive lawless fantasies, after the two acts of rape and his girlfriend’s fantasmatic abuse he inserts an exceptional insight interwoven in the stream of fantasies: “I should not do/ something like this again, must/ control myself, should not let/ evil control me” (78). Whereas the relationship between the author and his reader varies throughout the reading of this (non)combat narrative, this statement is a reminder of Furer’s parrhesiastic attitude. By returning to the checkpoint in the next chapter, Furer keeps both himself and the reader within the unrelieved chaos. Israel itself is so remote to be almost nonexistent.

Checkpoint Syndrome defines the checkpoint’s geography of anger²⁴ as symbolizing the soldier-turned-cop-turned-perpetrator’s post-traumatic syndrome. As the docu-novel shows, the syndrome, expressed also in Breaking the Silence pamphlets and Occupying the Territories, is characterized by six crises: of purpose and mission, of lack of combat action, of the collapse of a moral command system, of the comrades-in-arms moral system, of body-space relations, and of humaneness towards the civilian ethnic other. The consequences, respectively, are: demasculinization of the combat soldier and castration of the combat spirit; arbitrary and capricious abuse of military-civilian routines;²⁵ loss of trust in the higher ranks; brotherhood in perpetration; dissolution of the soldierly body and subjection to the new war zone as an all-encompassing mental space; projection, scapegoating, and negative identity dialectics with the ethnic other.

How does Chayut’s autobiographical docu-novel deal with these crises and their costs? How does it define and characterize the figure of the perpetrator/of himself, the soldier-cop duality, and the transformation to perpetration?

Noam Chayut’s My Holocaust Thief

Furer and Chayut represent two different military perspectives on new war ethics (Furer as a foot soldier and Chayut as a commander), and though they describe common evils typical to the perpetrator in the Territories, there is a conspicuous contrast in the novels’ description of both post-trauma and ethics. The difference between these two types of autobiographical docu-novels raises the question of the relation between the perpetrators’ impulse to express their post-trauma and their cognitive work of coming to terms with themselves. Furer’s account gives more space to his post-trauma as a soldier-turned-cop-turned-perpetrator, that is, to the violent personality he has adopted, than to the long processes of uncovering ideological lies (both those he told himself, and those taught by various educational institutions that reproduce and maintain Israel’s Zionist hegemonic ideology). Chayut gives center stage to the lies and denial of truth involved in his wrongdoings in the Territories as a major part of his trauma. Uncovering the lies in which he had considered himself a humanist combat commander serving in “the most moral army in the world” (160) motivates the painful processes of consciousness and acknowledgment. He keeps reciting this phrase in a sort of traumatic repetition compulsion similar to Furer’s repetition of the checkpoint’s routines.

In contrast to Furer’s constricted description of three years’ service at Gaza checkpoints, Chayut’s book is wide-ranging, describing his entire life. As post-traumatic confessions, though both works focus, as mentioned, on the process of becoming a perpetrator, the reader of Checkpoint Syndrome is not made familiar with Furer’s pre-army, pre-perpetrating self. Chayut’s main interest, in contrast, is to decipher the identity transformation he underwent through a retrospective look that delves into the major stages of the formation of his Zionist-Jewish-Israeli identity. Thus, My Holocaust Thief invites the reader to a four-year voyage intérieur, a psycho-geographic as well as political-ethical reflection on the author’s life, beginning with childhood and ending as he is writing his book in India.

Furthermore, and consequently, in contrast to Furer, whose imaginary audiences are Israelis and the IDF (though he directly addresses them only once, in the preface), when Chayut was taken over by frustration, rage, and other intra-psychic processes he addresses a Palestinian girl. Cast as his imaginary audience, she becomes the symbol through which he organizes his feelings and growing awareness. In this, My Holocaust Thief as autobiographical perpetrator-trauma docu-novel not only confesses the author’s offenses but opens an imaginary dialogue with the next generation’s other. In fact, Chayut confesses his wrongdoings and wakefulness to long-time Occupation evils through this imaginary dialogue with her. By addressing the girl, far from Furer’s fantasies, he imposes on the reader empathy that, together with his activism in Breaking the Silence (described in the last part of the novel), offers a wide ethical imperative. However, his inability to meaningfully address other systems that previously constituted his identity (Zionism, Israeliness, Jewishness, the Holocaust) points to an irrecoverable identity void. Addressing the Palestinian girl represents, that is, not only an imaginary dialogue with the symbolic victim, but this void as well. Furer represents the Israelis who decide to disconnect from the homeland and “never ever ever ever come back,” as he declares in the preface, while Chayut represents the Israelis who consciously throw away their Israeli/Jewish/Zionist identities without replacing them with others.

Both novels mark the Intifada’s generations of perpetrators as lost and suffering from severe, uncured, identity crises; but My Holocaust Thief as new war autobiographical novel, is not about constructing an identity (as Eakin [2008 esp. 22–51] and others suggest in regard to this genre), but rather about losing one. In writing about the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq (and especially on Haditha), Lifton (1973; 2006) has pointed to the soldiers’ effort to form a new version of self, one which would incorporate something of the past. Furer and Chayut represent a different trajectory. Both mourn the loss of their pre-war selves that existed prior to immersion in evil; however, this bereavement does not extend to a wish to return to the naivete that they now see was essentially flawed (Flynn 1999, 53–5; Lifton 2006). As Lifton contends (in Flynn 1999):

What we call the mourning process and the work of mourning is inseparable from the meaning that a person has developed in his or her life prior to, and in the wake of, that loss. The… veterans I worked with had their sense of meaning shattered because they had lost buddies, because they had killed people, and had been part of a killing process for a cause they could not justify and came to denounce. So the inability to mourn was bound up with the world being turned on its head and their entering into a counterfeit universe (50).

Moreover, a deep gap between mourning for oneself and mourning for the other makes Chayut (like Folman in Waltz with Bashir), a typical persecuted perpetrator with an impaired sense of mourning.²⁶

Though being active in Breaking the Silence and sharing the parrhesiastic act with other ex-soldiers keeps his personality as an ex-perpetrator “alive,” it is only to the extent of being embodied in this mission. My Holocaust Thief, above all, demonstrates that Chayut is identity-less. An inevitable identity void has characterized the perpetrator who decides to give a full account in the current symbolic agora, the Breaking the Silence internet site:

Since the early 1980s, mounting unease and uncertainty about “who we are” and “who ought to become” – Israelis or Jews, Western or Eastern, victims or victimizers, Zionists or post-Zionists, a Jewish state or a “state for all its citizens” – uncovered growing reservations about the centrality of the Shoah in Israel’s national life and political culture (Arad 2003, 5–6).

In the final pages of the novel Chayut confesses the extreme of this process:

[I] am today free and happy, because I don’t have my Holocaust [Shoa] any longer. I am no longer planted like a tree in this awful soil, I can go away from here. Choose a wife from another culture and teach my children another language. I will never hold a gun and never govern over the will of another people (223–4).²⁷

The result of Chayut’s “conversion” from faith in Israel’s raison d’être to doubt and dissolution of his pre-war identity places him in a post-identity stage. The question still remains if his (Breaking the Silence) social activism might become a means for regaining an identity, or as the new wave of films; fragmentary parrhsiastic literature; and Furer’s docu-novel show, if a new, damaged generation of (ex-) Israelis will make itself self-persecuted; guilty; and beyond repair. Should we call the perpetrators’ identity void a post post-Zionism? In order to answer that, we should begin by delving into Chayut’s change of attitude towards the Holocaust.

As the book’s title indicates, the complex identity process Chayut has undergone was deeply and unconsciously rooted in Holocaust remembrance. He describes how, upon entering one of the villages in Territories with his unit, he saw a group of Palestinian children playing, and smiled at one girl:

The girl did not return my smile as I have been used to since adopting the smile typical of a youth group leader. No, she froze where she stood, went pale, and looked terrified. She did not scream and did not run, she just stood in front of me with a horrified face and gazed at me with her black eyes… And I don’t know why she is the one who stole my Holocaust… [this girl] took from me the belief that there is absolute evil in the world and the belief that I am avenging and fighting it. For this girl, I am absolute evil. Though I was not as cruel as the absolute evil I was nursed on, grew up with, and matured on. No… but despite this… the moment I internalized that I myself was the absolute evil in her eyes, the absolute evil that had governed me until then began to dissolve. And since then I have been bereft of my Holocaust, and since then everything in my life has taken on new meaning: the feeling of belonging is blurred, pride is missing, belief is weak, remorse is intensified, forgiveness is born (59–73) (emphases in the original).

Belonging to the second generation of a family in which many first-generation members were exterminated during the Holocaust, Chayut comes to terms with himself as a persecuted perpetrator through his confrontation with the Palestinian girl’s black eyes, an image which he repeatedly recalls, and through which he also interpellates the reader. Her look is the embodiment of all wrongdoings he carried out during his service in the Occupied Territories, most of which he had not identified as such at that time. This nameless, petrified, look resembles an historical and national icon well-known to every Israeli – the Ghetto Warsaw child photographed holding his hands up like a criminal, looking with big black eyes at the Nazi soldier.²⁸ This look, presumably, together with the girl’s, had haunted Chayut for years. The Warsaw photograph is emblematic of the unbearable tension between being an object and a subject, between being gazed-at, in a pre-total objectification, that is, death, and being one who (even for a short while) still owns the look, is a subject. Because Chayut’s rifle was directed at the girl, for him the Holocaust child stands as a relevant post-memorial icon, a means of objectification.

Chayut is aware of the difference between himself and the Nazis, of course, but as a persecuted perpetrator, that is, one who until that very moment had taken upon himself the historical-national and familial Holocaust imperatives to remember the dead, on one hand, and not to allow “a second Holocaust,” on the other, gives the gaze-look encounter a highly symbolic meaning. During the process of retrospection, he acknowledges he is a perpetrator and gives up the Holocaust as “his,” or as he ambivalently phrases it – it is stolen from him.²⁹ The Holocaust, being his ultimate identity justification since childhood, is transformed into a memory that can be erased and replaced. But his experience, following his brief encounter with the Palestinian girl, does not concern erasing his post-memory, but rather erasing what he came to accept as the far-reaching legacy of the Holocaust. When the two images of the look half-consciously intermingle and he sees himself as incarnation of “absolute evil” or “circumstantial evil (roa mizdamen),” as he calls it in the final pages of the novel, the ethics of remembering imposes on him post-post-memorial conscious oblivion. Instead of grasping the Holocaust as the reason for every act, thus defining them acts of defense, and instead of adopting the attitude of a righteous victim, Chayut sets down an alternative – a post-identity combined of abandonment of the Holocaust legacy, of being an ex-perpetrator turned social activist, and a man of the world. This means that for him – and by implication his generation – the legacy of Israel’s intergenerational post-memory is ruptured. The encounter with the Palestinian girl shows the second generation’s tragedy of not being able to live according to the trauma of the Holocaust and that the third generation will not be entitled to one of the nation’s most important legacies. This unintentional submissiveness is especially true for children of survivor families (like Chayut and Folman). In other words, Chayut’s autobiographical novel offers a destruction of the legacy of being a “candle for the dead.” Jewish “memory work” has been described as creating a meaningful fusion of past and present, in which Holocaust representation and commemoration present an especially complex and ethically loaded case. The cultural “re-negotiation” of the master narrative of the Holocaust does change dramatically in this novel. The symbiotic, overly enmeshed child/adult relationship is turned on its head when separation and individuation take the form of disidentification.

The autobiographical works (of Chayut and Furer), and even the small fragments of personal military stories (Breaking the Silence) show that the psychosocial profile of the second generation is wounded by other traces of evil. The vicarious generational wound, symbolically shared by all its members, has become a direct one. The future collective role this documentary literature suggests is to break the perpetrators’ co-presence of the traumatic past and present within themselves. The formative events that solidify collective self-definition do not constitute a narrative of shared vicarious suffering, part of identity-memory work, but a narrative of parrhesiastic confession, and unfinished, impaired, mourning.

A Monster in the Mirror

After forty-four years of Occupation, the Intifada period marks a cultural-social turning point in terms of revelations of atrocities. As both the fragmentary parrhesiastic confession and the autobiographical docu-novel demonstrate, the perpetrators’ confessional literature constitutes a narrative which, breaking social silence and denial, embodies both an uncathartic confession and a critical view, and thus negotiates the relationship between the perpetrators and the society that sent them. The ability to threaten and use force, lethal if necessary, to accomplish State objectives becomes the focus of the ex-soldiers’ accounts. The emergence of documentary literature (as well as the cinematic new wave), attests to a decline in ideological commitment to Israel/Zionism/the IDF, especially the nation-building rhetoric of the first generation of Zionist settlers. Revealed by new war’s emplotments of the self, this “new” interest in the perpetrators’ mental structure has been stimulated by the collapse of traditional war concepts, as well as the Jewish-Israeli legacy of victimhood concepts, including those of the Holocaust. In other words, the first decade of the 2000s has proved to be a period in which subversive personalized ideals and activist performances took priority over public denials.

A result of widespread disillusionment with the prospects for change through political action, the documentary literature, similar to the new wave of documentary films, marks a sudden upsurge in interest in moral matters and, therefore, also a change in the nature of the questions being asked in relation to the Intifada scene of the 2000s. The questions being asked by the “new” perpetrators relate to the nature of power; the moral authority of military leadership; the strength and meaning of wrongdoings as ways of binding the military unit as a community; the relation of political institutions to value systems and codes of conduct; attitudes towards the ethnic other; causes and effects of wrongdoings; the strength and direction of the subversive act; the means, possibilities, and limitations of social confession; and the options for personal and collective recovery from trauma. All these burning issues recapture something of the outward manifestations of the mentalité of the soldiers’ lives – perpetration in the age of the Intifada is defined as the horrific intimate juxtaposition of history, new war doctrine, and colonialism.

There are four common characteristics to these perpetrator trauma stories: First, they are almost without exception concerned with the lives, feelings, and behavior of the guilty and broken soldier; second, the confession tends to switch, a little awkwardly, from one mode to the other; third, under the influence of the modern novel and Freudian ideas, they gingerly explore the subconscious rather than sticking to plain facts; and fourth, they tell the story of a person or a dramatic episode not for its own sake, but to throw light on the internal workings of new war doctrines and atrocity-producing situations.

By their parrhesiastic nature, the “new” docu-novelists mark the end of an era: victimhood has collapsed and a full-blown model based on self-inquiry and moral obligation has emerged to take its place. Unable to produce a coherent explanation for the change to perpetration, but nevertheless being “multifunction objects” (Toker 1997, 187), these works call the readers’ attention to the Occupation’s long years of racist pathology. Thus, the points of conjunction between the literary and historical imaginations emphasize the crucial role played by Israeli hegemonic ideology in conceiving, selecting, and shaping the imagined world which is projected in the text.

Blurring the difference between testimony and confession will be unavoidable if the (Palestinian) witness does not testify. In fact, in order to avoid an exchange of subject positions, the perpetrator confession, as claimed earlier, should not replace testimony taken from the victim. This should not be interpreted to mean that without testimony from the victim the perpetrator will be unable to confess; rather, that in a climate of denial, perpetrator trauma literature sets a clear demarcation between disparate traumas, and the moral responsibility they entail. The works of these docu-novelists show, for instance, that they did not succumb to reducing the problems of perpetration into easily manageable proportions dictated by the Occupation’s “banal” routines. Similarly, they did not shift the political issue into the sphere of clinical descriptions of post-traumatic stress disorder, therefore refraining from eliciting a more conciliatory response to their behavior.

Even when the perpetrator’s trauma impaired his memory and led him to the sphere of (racial) fantasy, the “new” (war) conventions of the genre promoted these fantasies as part of the uncertainty about what this new war means for the perpetrators’ sense of identity. Undoubtedly, the confessions of ex-soldiers expand the parrhesiastic scene typical to present new war situations.³⁰ In this regard, Chayut’s activism shows how to move beyond an individual identity founded in negative disparity and kept isolated by political, social, and militarized circumstances, towards a multiple identity constructed from reimagined and renegotiated “encounters and interactions” with “the others within ourselves and the others outside ourselves.” The literature emphasizes, as Kaldor (2001/2007) argues, that new war is above all a political rather than a military challenge, and that the direct perpetrator of new warfare who has succumbed to evil and its limitlessness is also capable of becoming committed to the act of truth-telling. Wishing to retain the power and verisimilitude of the documentary mode, these novelists strengthen their claims to truth and thus construct new positions for the authorial subject. Thus, most of these texts do not make use of veiled references to actual persons and events to make them more historically believable and do not benefit from either an illusion of factuality or advantages of imaginative re-creation. As Philip Lejeune has made clear in his study, it is not actual fact that separates autobiography from fiction, but the right to claim experiences as one’s own: the right to invoke the empirical bond that has indeed existed between writers and the events in their narratives. For even as we acknowledge that, like “documentary fiction,” diarists and memoirists construct their narratives, we must also insist on maintaining the ontological differences between them.

Israeli documentary perpetrator-trauma literature exposes both the epistemic and the political roles of the truth-teller in society. As described above, these works set parrhesia as a crucial component of the civic processes any society trusts to create a culture of truth-telling. In a complex reality where hegemonic literature denies colonialism, adheres to a double moral standard, endorses a reduction to the popular, and presents false compassion towards the other and false or impaired mourning, the power of parrhesiastic truth-telling sets a new relation between truth and reality, and between literature and reality.

CONCLUSION

THE PERPETRATOR COMPLEX

Any truly viable reconciliation on a collective level depends not only on such processes as empathy and mourning but also on concrete economic, social, and political reforms in a larger context in which mourning itself has a broader, indeed a political, meaning. Dominick LaCapra¹

Waltzing with Bashir offers a cinematic route different than the one adopted by either the documentary or the trauma traditions. As the films (and literature) analyzed in this book prove, the perpetrator trauma paradigm hereby introduced into the studies of trauma and cinema relates to a new kind of film and documentation that go beyond victimhood. A result of drastic transformation in the nature of current twentieth-first century war, especially the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier-turned-cop-turned-perpetrator. Thus, a major shift has been rendered: from the victim’s testimony to the perpetrator’s confession and from belated psychological reflection on past catastrophe to post-traumatic ethical commitment to “speak truth to power.”

By breaking the repression of perpetrator trauma in trauma cinema studies, the new paradigm clears center stage for the excluded, unimaginable, and unseemly figure of the perpetrator. Conjuring this abhorrent phantom, however, is not meant to replace the privileged status of the victim in society and culture. Testimony and the social figure of the witness emerged from the shadows of the Holocaust to become a significant force in contemporary culture; culture as well as world cinema will undoubtedly maintain the preferred stand of the victim, especially as an expression of deep social concern for the victims of war and trauma. Delving into cultural symptoms common during the first decade of the twenty-first century, then, does not negate our humanistic duty to ongoing comprehension and recollection of past testimonies that are by now part of our oral and written history. It therefore should be the pledge of perpetrator trauma research and culture, devoted to healing both victim and society, to redefine the boundaries between these subject positions through a new epistemology. In the constantly changing reality of new war, which, lacking closure, is continuously unstable vis-à-vis the nature of the conflict, perpetrator trauma research and culture should persistently impede any cultural slippage between the two subject positions, whether performed unconsciously or deliberately.

As contemporary victim trauma theories tell us, the repetition of traumatic memories may paradoxically widen the epistemological gaps, and thereby leave us haunted by the constant un-utterability of the traumatic event. In contrast, as the theorization of contemporary perpetrator trauma theory proposed by this book suggests, post-traumatic perpetrators’ confessions strive to surmount moral contradictions and epistemological impasses. Contrary to the victim’s testimony, based paradigmatically on the emotional truth of an unrepresentable event – as exemplified, for instance, in Dori Laub’s well-known story of a Holocaust survivor describing the destruction of four chimneys instead of one – the perpetrator’s confession of a traumatic event should be both representable and historically accurate. Accentuating the evidentiary of the physical space over the volatility of time and memory makes an account of “being there,” at the site of atrocities, the root of the process of acknowledging one’s deeds. The uncathartic confession, which triggers this social process, is deliberate in not appealing to audience participation with, and compassion for, the confessor; rather, as the documentary works unfold, the perpetrator mobilizes his/her postwar “weapons” – shame, guilt, and self-denouncement – toward an unsettled empathy with and deep commitment to the (usually ethnic) other. The objective of both docu-activists and docu-novelists is to portray the long, excruciating process of assuming personal responsibility, one that entails various degrees of acknowledgment of agency, autonomy, intent, and choice. The post-traumatic perpetrator invests the vast effort needed to enrich and expand the domain of society’s moral and political responsibility, and thus might also pave the way for society to break the simultaneity of denial of perpetration and ideological justification. The post-witness era’s new epistemology, stemming from these works, is the polar opposite of the (victim’s) subjection to belatedness and incessant tragic acting out. However, despite, or rather because of, the huge difference between these two subject positions, the perpetrator shares a common end with the victim in his/her claim to inclusion in the social agenda.

As I hope this book demonstrates, Israeli cinema is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled. I contend that the rise of the new wave demonstrates a remarkable cultural maturity. It is illustrated first of all in relation to Jewish history and the significant role the Holocaust plays as a constitutive trauma in Israeli socio-cultural life, which for decades blocked any option other than victimhood.² Both the significant number of Holocaust films still being produced each year (representing second- and third-generation devotion to the legacy of the Holocaust),³ and the figure of the persecuted perpetrator emerging in documentary cinema and literature reflect a complex, persistent, socio-cultural challenge. As the perverse Holocaust-like post-memory rape and torture fantasies in documentary literature (Checkpoint Syndrome) and suicidal fantasies in films (The Bubble) show, deep processes of fantasmatic violent projection interwoven with the persecuted perpetrator’s guilt are still present under the surface of the Israeli-Jewish imaginary unconscious, threatening to erupt. Moreover, as the films and literature show, the emergence of the new wave was triggered by the unique junction of Holocaust legacy with the almost total collapse of the IDF’s claim to morality and “just” war in the Territories during the second Intifada. The new wave has the courage to suggest that the ongoing Occupation has by and large turned Israelis from symbolic and/or actual victims into symbolic and/ or actual perpetrators.

Second, the new wave’s emergence after a period of extreme victimhood – masses of terror attacks – in which anti-memory and the time trap endured trauma chronicity with no foreseeable transition to the post-traumatic stage, demonstrates its remarkable cultural maturity.

Third, the new wave provides an exceptional opportunity to probe the attenuation of responsibility and guilt; as well as an equally exceptional opportunity to probe the growing processes of (male and female) confessional docu-activism.

Fourth, by proposing a competing representation of trauma to the one presented widely in narrative cinema and right-wing public discourse, and partnering it with Breaking the Silence, the new wave creates a cultural phenomenon that the current Israeli regime cannot altogether deny.

In Essays on Otherness (1999), Laplanche, differentiating between enigma and riddle, contends:

An enigma, like a riddle, is proposed to the subject by another subject. But a solution of a riddle in theory is completely in the unconscious possession of the one who poses it, and thus it is entirely resolved by the answer. An enigma, on the contrary, can only be proposed by someone who does not master the answer, because his message is a compromise-formation in which his unconscious takes part (255: note 46).⁴

Following this assertion and his further suggestion “to move from the enigma of, to the enigma in, and then to the function of the enigma in” (255),⁵ the question is, what is the function of the enigma in new war perpetration? Should this function be defined similarly to Laplanche’s definitions of the enigmas of femininity (“what does a woman want?”) and of mourning (“what does the dead person want? What does he want of me? What did he want to say to me?”), for instance? If the enigma leads back to the otherness of the other, as he claims, and if “the otherness of the other is his response to his unconscious, that is to say, to his otherness to himself” (255), then the function of new war enigma in perpetration involves a complicated “guessing.”⁶

As described extensively in this book, Israeli perpetrator trauma documentary cinema and literature provide its readers with thorough access to the enigma of perpetration as defined in the context of new war: the major frames of thought suggested are Lifton’s multi-causal explanation (“atrocity-producing situation” and “double self”) and/ or my perspective of the soldier-turned-cop-turned perpetrator in new wars’ blocked and lawless space symbolized by the checkpoint. Paradoxically, however, it is the trauma of the perpetrator and the crises of evidence, disclosure, gender, audience, and narrativization it entails that lead us back to the perpetrator’s “otherness to himself/ herself” and to the otherness of the other. Here, the function of the enigma in perpetration, as depicted by the new wave from within a reality that refuses to maintain a dialogue with the Palestinian other, is to support an inner, incessant dialogue with this other – whether it takes the form, like in the docu-novel, of an imaginary dialogue with a Palestinian girl; or, as in No.17, Moments, Z32, and To See if I’m Smiling (and in Dreams of Undercover Soldiers, One Shot, After Shock, and Concrete) of a permanent closeness to the corpse. These works indicate that the basis for accepting the other is the perpetrator’s willingness to be contaminated by the corpse. In this, the new wave clearly demonstrates that Israel has reached a phase in its psycho-political life that tolerates the production of this type of film (and literature).

Beyond this remarkable maturity, the deep tensions and crises characterizing Israel’s new wave of documentary perpetrator trauma films together with the unpredictable ecology of trauma, that is, the environment in which trauma is recognized and the traumatic and non-traumatic backdrop, should lead us to finally consider perpetrator trauma as a complex. This means, first of all, accepting that the perpetrator’s relationship with society is inherently irresolvable. In contrast to a victim’s testimony, which is meant to address an imaginary supportive community, the perpetrator’s confession, as these films and literature prove, takes a different, double, path. The post-traumatic perpetrator simultaneously addresses his or her guilt as well as society’s indirect complicitous guilt, thus defining the conflictual character of the complex. Moreover, as the ex-soldier’s subjection to post-memory in Waltz with Bashir and the imaginary transference of guilt in Z32, The Bubble, and Checkpoint Syndrome indicate, there is a gap between addressing society in psychological as opposed to ethical terms. To See If I’m Smiling, My Holocaust Thief, and to a lesser degree the other films, demonstrate that only by maintaining a permanent division between a perpetrator’s trauma and his or her deeds (though both relate to the same event), by giving a full account, and by relating to the trauma in ethical – rather than psychological – terms, will the perpetrator cause society to accept that he or she was sent at its behest.

Second, this means that while guilt raises spectatorial identification that might serve to weaken common processes taking place on the collective level (denial, justification, evasion, projection, displacement, and universalism),⁷ an intense identification with the psychological level of the confessor, as Waltz illustrates, blocks this necessary weakening. This instability characterizes the perpetrator complex. Third, the complex involves an ambiguous relationship between the psychological and ethical levels of perpetrator trauma, so that by definition it includes the propensity of perpetrator trauma to remain on the periphery of collective moral responsibility. This becomes more acute if we accept the view that society’s responsibility “has three integral and essential components: not just the responsibility to react to an actual or apprehended human catastrophe, but the responsibility to prevent it, and the responsibility to rebuild after the event” (ICISS, 17).

The perpetrator complex is determined by the irresolvable relationship between perpetrator and society; the unpredictable ecology of perpetrator trauma; instability in relation to guilt, and the propensity to remain on the periphery of collective moral responsibility. The above analysis has presented two types of perpetrator trauma: direct or (complicitous) indirect participation in atrocities, and involvement in murder; the complex becomes overwhelming when murder is committed.

As Breaking the Silence discourse shows, other fields in the public sphere concerned with the uses and effects of confession, such as human rights organizations, can strengthen the legitimacy of the perpetrator’s voice. The works analyzed here strive to initiate an affective engagement that can enhance critical reflection. The uncatharthtic confessions illuminate socio-political processes at work, provide the images and narratives for confronting issues sometime in the future, and gradually build a discourse valued by society. This is crucial because old war precedents have become inappropriate, and new war culture has only begun to develop its narratives and myths – and they are not necessarily those of the perpetrator.

The differentiation between twentieth-century and new war perpetrator traumas should guide research on this subject. Recent world cinema dealing with twentieth-century perpetrator trauma does not follow the inner logic of new war films. For instance, Vladimir Perisic’s Ordinary People (France/Switzerland/Serbia, 2009), follows a twenty-year-old soldier in an unspecified war meant to evoke the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Using a harsh quasi-documentary style, the film shows a young soldier’s evolution into a murder machine, killing civilians from morning till night. The film is of course critical of the genocide, but fails to relate to any conscious account by the protagonist, who is portrayed as numbed. Thus, though many years had passed since the end of the conflict, the film demonstrates far less maturity than is required for ethical confession. Similarly, in the documentary film Enemies of the People (Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, UK/Cambodia, 2009), Lemkin follows Sambath during his ten-year search for perpetrators who survived the Pol Pot regime and hid in rural Cambodia. The film depicts a unique juncture between the victim haunted by his desire for recognition and revelation concerning his country’s past and its perpetrators. Part of Cambodia’s coming to terms with its memories thirty-one years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian director deals with the complexity of telling his own autobiographical victim story as it is interwoven with his search for perpetrators, and these perpetrators’ confessions. This is “aftermath cinema” of totalitarianism, with an exceptional subject position of the survivor-perpetrator interviewed by the second generation of victims. However, the confessors do not initiate the confessions, and lower-rank perpetrators, still in hiding, give only partial accounts, and do so only because of their long-time relationship with Sambath. Though in both films, the space of atrocities has a profound role as a mute witness, especially Enemies’ bubbling swamps into which many bodies had been thrown, the basic context does not allow adoption of the paradigm offered by this book.

Israeli films and literature indicate that many factors need to be taken into account when defining perpetrator trauma in a specific context: the type of war being waged, the nature of the regime, the length of the conflict, the choice of weapons, the tactics used, the nature of the space and security apparatus, and the structure of command. No less important are the degree of derealization of the ethnic other, the extent of dehumanization and moral indifference already at work, the scale of atrocities and human rights violations, the degree to which emergency becomes the rule, and the degree of public complicitness. Taking all this into consideration, I finally venture to suggest that perpetrator trauma, the perpetrator complex, the crises in representation of perpetrator trauma, and the characteristics of major genres of documentary literature (the fragmentary parrehsiastic confession and autobiographical docu-novel) discussed in this book are not limited to the Israeli case. Rather, they can characterize, in various degrees of maturity, any cinematic new-war text that struggles to conjure this ghost and represent his or her trauma, as films like Standard Operating Procedure and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib so amply illustrate. The question is whether in the age of new war, documentary cinema is capable of liberating world audiences from trauma envy and thrusting trauma culture into the realm of ethics.

NOTES

Preface

1.Palestinian uprisings.

2.The “Day of Catastrophe.”

3.Major dates: wars – War of Independence/Nakba (1947–9), Sinai War (1956), Six-Day War (1967), War of Attrition (1968-70), Yom Kippur War (1973), First Lebanon War (1982), Second Lebanon War (2006); Intifadas – First Intifada (1987), Second Intifada (2002); armed confrontations – Operation Defensive Shield (2002), Operation Cast Lead (2008). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_operations_conducted_by_the_Israel_Defense_Forces#Additional_Israeli_military_operations_3.

4.First found in Jean le Fèvre’s 1376 poem (‘Je fis de Macabré la danse’), danse macabre’s provenance remains obscure. John Cohen (1982) indicates a scholarly disagreement regarding the origins of the word “macabre”: some suggest it is derived from the Arabic magbarah (“churchyard”) while others prefer the Hebrew kabran, meqaber (“grave-digger”) (36).

5.In 1919 in The Waning of the Middle Ages. In Mackenbach (1996, 1285).

6.See Sophie Oosterwijk (2004).

Introduction

1.Quoted in Flynn’s An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton (1999, 53).

2.Waltz was the first animated film to have received a nomination for either an Academy or a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language film. It was also the first Israeli film since 1971 to be awarded a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language film and was the first documentary film to win the award. Waltz also won an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97 per cent of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 117 reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 91 out of 100, based on 37 reviews. indieWire named the film the tenth best of the year, based on the site’s annual survey of 100 film critics.

On Waltz as an “event movie” see, for example Mark Schilling in Variety (2008); Tim Mcgirk in Time (2008); Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times (2009); Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times (2008); Jonathan Curiel in the San Francisco Chronicle (2009); Dina Kraft in The Village Voice (2008); J. Hoberman in The Village Voice (2008); and A. O. Scott in The New York Times (2008).

3.Because Holocaust survivors and witnesses are diminishing in number, the twentieth-century archive stands as a living memorial to counteract forgetfulness, ignorance and malicious denial.

4.In this book I use the term Holocaust rather than the Hebrew word Shoah, although, as most French writers on the subject note, it translates as “burnt sacrifice.”

5.Like Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Wieviorka (2006) stresses that testimony would have to become relevant beyond its personal meanings, and that its importance especially in terms of pedagogic and emotional value would have to be recognized by society. She maintains that the pivotal role the Eichmann trial played in legitimating testimony as a form of “truth telling” about the past has gone unrecognized. Victim testimony acquired an “extraordinary force” in the Eichmann trial due to the judicial setting, which “lent it all the weight of the state’s legitimacy and institutions and symbolic power” (84). Moreover, as a result of the Eichmann trial, the witness acquired a new socially recognized identity as a “survivor,” which gave rise to a “… new function: to be the bearer of history” (88).

6.See e.g., Susan Sontag (2003), Luc Boltanski (1999), and Lilie Chouliaraki (2004).

7.See discussion in Chapter 1.

8.See Chapter 1; Butler (2004; 2009).

9.“Both of these Iraqi events, like My Lai, are examples of what I call an atrocity-producing situation – one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can commit atrocities. A major factor in all of these events was the emotional state of U.S. soldiers as they struggled with angry grief over buddies killed by invisible adversaries, with a desperate need to identify an ‘enemy’” (Lifton 2006).

10.“The notion of individual responsibility of both perpetrators and commanders was developed over several centuries in both European and American treaty and domestic law and is no longer disputed. But if we consider responsibility for what happens before and after incidents of military atrocity (prospective responsibility and retrospective responsibility), the locus of moral responsibility widens beyond the individual on the battlefield” (Crawford 1989, 191).

11.See, for instance, Errol Morris’s blog in The New York Times (Morris 2008). Morris interviews Sabrina Harman on her photograph with the dead taken at Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003. In his conclusions regarding the death of Manadel Al-Jamadi, suspected of exploding a bomb, who died because of “Palestinian hanging” (“an O.G.A. interrogating an O.G.A.”) and abuse, but officially called a heart attack, he states: “Fuzzing it up is a common practice in government. You hide intention and responsibility. You have one person say one thing, and another person the exact opposite. You create a blizzard of paper, so much paper that actual evidence is lost in the glut. And of course, you deny anything and everything you can deny – particularly the obvious. (Denying the obvious is always popular.) You produce noise, distraction and confusion. People rarely think of this as a well-established bureaucratic technique, but it is a tried and true methodology… It is the story of the blind men and the elephant. Each is given a piece of an elephant to examine, and then asked to infer the nature of the beast. Not surprisingly, they can’t piece together a conception of the whole from the individual parts.” According to Morris, “The C.I.A. and various associated groups are referred to in the military as O.G.A. – Other Government Agencies. Curiously, ‘O.G.A.’ also refers to prisoners not ‘logged’ into the system, prisoners without identification numbers. The fact that they are not logged into the system rendered them officially ‘not there,’ even though they were. Another term captures their status of ‘being there’ and ‘not being there.’ They are called ‘ghosts’ – ghost detainees and ghost interrogators”.

12.Trauma envy is one sided – the perpetrator envies the victim but not vice versa. I claim that the victim’s position under captivity, known in clinical research as the Stockholm syndrome – and yet untheorized in cultural trauma research – does not subvert this asymmetry. Empathizing with the perpetrator under conditions of – real or symbolic – captivity, being daily supervised, controlled, and punished by the victimizer, is not analogous to the post-event desire to eliminate one’s subject position as a perpetrator in favor of the victim’s. Both the difference in the constitution of the apt subject position (during the traumatic event or during its aftermath) and the nature of the emotion involved (empathy vs. envy) defines this un-exchangeability. See the analysis of Waltz in Chapter 4.

13.Beginning with Lewis-Herman, through Felman and Laub (1992), Felman (2002), LaCapra (2001), and Agamben (2005).

14.See Tristan Borer’s “A Taxonomy,” (2003 table no. 1).

15.Taken as a series of genealogical works that follow from Precarious Life (2004) (and in some sense also from Antigone’s Claim [2000]), Butler’s works form a kind of tetralogy, in which Frames of War (2009) is an extension and deepening of her poetics of the grievable. Therefore, although Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) stands as a broad contribution to contemporary moral and political philosophy, it will be read as a more direct political intervention in new war morals.

16.For example, see Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz’s The Turn to Ethics (2000).

17.I do not refer here to post-conflict classification like the one taken by the South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee. See Tristan Borer (2003) on post-apartheid South Africa (esp. p. 1116).

18.Proliferated to the point of false traumatization, as in Binjamin Wilkomirski’s (1996) case. See, for example, Michael Bernard-Donals (2001) and Dominique LaCapra (2001, 207-19).

19.On survivor guilt see Robert Jay Lifton’s “Home from the War” (1991) and “Survivor Experience” (1979).

20.See discussion of the perpetrator complex in the Conclusion of this book.

21.Caruth’s “double story” of the victim (1996, 7).

22.See Judith Butler on recognition vs. apprehension in Precarious Life (2004).

23.For a different formulation see John Durham Peters (2001) esp. the table on p. 721 and his analysis of the witness’ veracity gap. Peters claims that “to be there, present at the event in space and time, is the paradigm case” (38). That is to say, one’s physical presence in space and time are the condition for true witnessing. Peters, however, does not refer to perpetration.

24.For discussion of the term “empathic unsettlement,” see Dominique LaCapra’s Writing History (2001, 214-16).

25.See Judith Butler (2005, 135).

26.Crawford emphasizes, for instance, that “the responsibility of states for their behavior in war is not well established since most of the laws of war focus on individual accountability” Crawford (1989, 201).

27.On confession as opposed to testimony, see Thomas Günter (2009). During the twentieth century, the perpetrators of major catastrophes, in particular the Holocaust but also those conducted by other totalitarian regimes, did not confess their guilt. In fact, the convoluted and unstable relations the Germans, for instance, have with their past (i.e., the Historian debate of 1986, the Wehrmacht exhibition of 1995, Goldhagen’s book Willing Executioners (1996), and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film The Downfall [2004]), show that in a century dominated by totalitarian regimes, an ethical confession was unimaginable. Laub, Dori and Susanna Lee (2003), for instance, claim that, “Memories… in perpetrators… merely serve a defensive function by replacing unbearable conflict or glaring dissonance with a more tamed and acceptable version of experienced events or perpetrated deeds. Such tamed versions may be concurrent… in particular with the perpetrator’s evil deeds, as illustrated by the Germans’ use of deceptive euphemisms while carrying out mass murder” (438). The case of Albert Speer, which Laub and Lee discuss, is a prime example of the creation of distorted truths in order to mask an extremity of evil.

28.Susan Bauer’s illuminating work The Art of the Public Grovel (2008) explores the rhetorical genre of Protestant-style confession, and tracks the Protestant influence on secular American public culture. Her examination begins with the fourth century and ends with televised confessions made by American public figures in the twenty-first century. Bauer demonstrates how confessions broke forth from the sacred, private confessional booth and gradually became public and secular, compelling key figures to repent their sins publicly, following the disclosure of their (mostly) sexual misconduct in order to elicit forgiveness from the public. This confessional mode stands in complete contrast to the confessional mode of perpetrator trauma. See also Eva Illouz’s Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (2003) esp. pp. 156-77.

29.See Peter Brooks (2000).

30.On the survivor-perpetrator, see my book Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (2009), esp. the discussion of New German Cinema, pp. 33-150.

31.See for instance two major television documentary series Pillar of Fire (Producer: Ygal Lusin, 1981), and Tkuma: The First Fifty Years (Producer: Dina Tzvi Riklis, 1998).

32.A pioneering work, Ram Levy’s Barricades (1969), which stages the encounter between two families, Israeli and Palestinian who had lost their sons in 1948, was banned and screened only three years later.

33.In films such as Danny Vaxman’s Hamsin (1982), Uri Barabash’s Beyond the Walls (1984), and Haim Bouzaglo’s Fictitious Marriage (1988). See Shohat’s Israeli Cinema (1989); and Gertz, Lubin, and Ne’eman’s Fictive Looks (1998) on the Palestinian Wave of the 1980s.

34.See Elhanan Yakira (2010).

35.Liebes and Kampf’s (2009) analysis of Israeli news photos and television representations (2000-5) points to the reasons to the second Intifada transformation in representation of the Palestinian and in breaking the previous binarism of the good Israeli soldier vs. the bad terrorist: the changes in the international media environment, in the journalistic professional norms, and in Israeli society and public discourse. The authors claim that a constant stream of images showing Palestinian suffering, acknowledgment of emotional involvement, more tolerance to the enemy’s suffering, and weakening of ideology in Israeli society have transformed Israeli public discourse.

36.See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin (1993; 1994). See also Nurith Gertz (2004).

37.Ido Sella’s Testimonies: Israeli Soldiers on the Intifada (1993) is one of the first films to document soldiers’ accounts after the eruption of the first Intifada. It took another fourteen years, and the eruption of a second Intifada for the new wave to emerge. See also Irit Gal’s Our Troops Did Not Come Back (1999). This documentary presents confession of soldiers during army service. For a brief history of documentary production in Israel, see Moshe Zimerman (2003) esp. pp. 89-114.

38.See discussion of victim drama in Chapters 1 and 2.

39.See Chapter 3.

40.See Chapter 6.

41.It is significant that the common use of this term in Hebrew does not refer at all to the 1948 occupation, but represses it.

42.Both of these words have religious connotations. Meavel is associated with the biblical approach toward unjust acts, and the word mecholel is even more closely associated with hilul hashem (desecration of the name of God) and hilul Shabbat (desecration of the Sabbath).

43.Thanks to Yeshayahu Nir for this insightful suggestion.

44.An analysis of Waltz with Bashir in Chapter 4 takes up this subject.

45.Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Hebrew are my own.

46.This description is taken is from the home page of their website at http:// www.breakingthesilence.org.il/about/organization. See the website and my discussion in Chapter 6. The organization publishes the soldiers’ accounts both on the website and in print.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Intifada and as part of the organization’s wider goals, Breaking the Silence released a new publication entitled Occupation of the Territories – Israeli Soldier Testimonies 2000-2010 (2010). The 431-page volume is made up of testimonies from 101 male and female soldiers who served in the Territories during this time period, and is organized according to the four fundamental terms that serve as a framework through which Israeli policy in the Territories is conducted by the Israeli military: Prevention, Separation, Fabric of Life, and Law Enforcement. In contrast to the organization’s use of the word testimony to refer to the soldiers’ accounts in the title of the book and other publications, I refer to them as confessions. I believe that although the accounts have a dual function in the absence of Palestinian testimonies and ongoing colonization (as confessions of the perpetrators as well as testimonies on the behalf of the Palestinian victims), their tone and form of addressing adhere to most of the characteristics of perpetrator trauma as defined by this book. This is, of course, a unique case of the perpetrator’s voice breaking both his/ her silence and the victim’s. Written from the perpetrator’s point of view, the accounts are, above all, confessions.

47.See Iris Milnar (2008).

48.See http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/.

49.See http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/.

50.…and documentary literature exemplified by the acclaimed The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk about the Six-Day War (1968), which discussed the IDF’s doctrine of “purity of arms” and the price of war, written to counteract the plethora of coffee-table books published glorifying the victory.

51.“The Day of Catastrophe.”

Chapter 1. The Body as the Battlefield

1.In In Fear of Small Numbers (2006, 77-9).

2.This chapter focuses on the years 2002-4, which were the peak years of the second Intifada terrorist attacks. The use of the term “terrorist” to describe suicide bombers of civilians is morally loaded. As hopefully will be demonstrated in this chapter, this use is part and parcel of foregrounding a “two-sided” position that does justice to the complexity of the political (and discursive) conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. According to data from B’tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, there were 137 suicide bombings during the second Intifada. The number of Israeli civilians killed in the attacks by suicide terrorists came to 635, 110 of them children. The data are from the period September 29, 2000 to September 15, 2004.

3.This chapter will deal with the most common form of terrorist attack – namely, one carried out by a suicide terrorist acting alone, entering Israel from the Occupied Territories in disguise, wearing an explosive belt or carrying a booby-trapped parcel, and choosing a crowded urban setting for his attack.

4.See, for example, Yeud Levanon’s Islands on the Shore (2003) or Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water (2004).

5.See also Geoffrey Hartman (1995), Ian Hacking (1995; 1996), and Bessel Van Der Kolk and Onno Van Der Hart (1995).

6.The book was released in Hebrew in 2004.

7.In this regard, see Hannan Hever (2007).

8.In the book the guilt is more clear-cut. The bakery owner is described as an old man with a different perspective towards injustice because of his age. In the film, Riklis makes the guilt murkier.

9.Among the important films that deal with the terrorist attacks are: Closed, Closed, Closure (Ram Levy, 2002); My Terrorist (Yuli Gerstel-Cohen, 2002); In the Name of God: Scenes from the Extreme (Dan Setton and Tor Ben-Mayor, 2003); Life for Land (Tamar Wishnitzer-Haviv, 2003); The Skies are Closer in Homesh (Manora Hazani-Katzover, 2003); Putting the Roof Aright (Michael Lev Tov, 2003); Channels of Rage (Anat Halachmi, 2003); Beyond the Dark Mountains (Tzach Nussbaum, 2004); Lullaby (Adi Arbel, 2004); Arna’s Children (Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel, 2004); Blues by the Beach (Joshua Fauden and Pavela Fleischer, 2004); True Kindness (Nitza Gonen, 2004); One Widow, Twice Bereavement (Orna Ben-Dor Niv, 2005).

10.The film Lullaby presents the personal testimonies of eleven Palestinian and Israeli mothers who lost their children during the Intifada. The film is unusual in the cooperation surrounding the tragedy. Motherhood becomes the central subject position.

11.During the post second Intifada period, the films To Die in Jerusalem (Hilla Medalia, 2007), One Day after the Peace (Erez Laufer, 2012), and In the Eyes of the Storm (Shelly Hermon, 2012) present the personal stories of Palestinian and Israeli mothers and fathers who lost their children during the Intifada. One Day after the Peace presents the story of a mother who strives to establish a reconciliation dialogue with the imprisoned Palestinian sniper who killed her son. Both In the Eyes of the Storm and One Day after the Peace are still in production. My distinction is based on reading the films’ scripts, watching a few scenes from each, and talking with the directors.

12.On the changes that have occurred in the television coverage of the terrorist attacks in Israel, see Tamar Liebes (1993).

13.For a discussion of the relation between the visible and the audible in this context see Chapter 2.

14.This chapter demurs from the wide use of the term “postmodern war” in this context, both because it is a term much abused intellectually and because post-modernism, á la Lyotardian tradition, for example, assumes a-referentiality, whereas exactly the opposite is assumed. Contemporary war appears to be a transition stage or a clash between the wars that characterized the twentieth century up to the 1990s and those that so far have characterized the twenty-first. Apart from the varieties of their definitions, all the authors mentioned here note that conventional/traditional/modern war has entered a new epoch.

15.Most of the researchers discussed here are unexceptional in that they do not distinguish between terror as a mode and other modes of “new” war. The American Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder’s redefinition of PTSD makes no distinction between modern war and new war, and only counts terror among the “traumatic events” (2000).

16.In Cyborg Citizen (2001), Gray basically defines the cyborg as: “[A] self-regulating organism that combines the natural and artificial together in one system” (2). Like all the writers on postmodern war, he does not relate to terrorism in this context but mainly to “smart war,” the infowar or nanowar of the future.

17.Since every terrorist attack creates an abject, it should be emphasized that the terrorist attack constructs a special relation between repression and exclusion. Repression, of course, is not conscious, while exclusion is.

In almost absurd fashion, repression of the trauma and exclusion of the abject are inextricably bound up with a different return of the repressed to the center of public discourse concerned with terror, the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jew. In 1995, the ZAKA Rescue and Recovery Organization was established (the Hebrew acronym stands for “Identification of Disaster Victims”). It is well known to the Israeli government as a voluntary organization for the collection and removal of corpses, while strictly preserving the honor of the dead and bringing them to Jewish burial. ZAKA members, who are part of the separatist, anti-Zionist haredi minority in Israeli society, have become, as a result of their role after terrorist attacks, an inseparable part of the rescue and security forces of the State of Israel. A discussion of this “return of the repressed,” with its pre-/anti-Zionist nature, is beyond the scope of the present work. In terms of visibility, ZAKA operatives are part of the mainstream iconography of the terrorist attacks.

18.The suicide-bomber video recordings that were broadcast after terrorist attacks on Israel’s Channel 1 television during 2002-4 were presented in almost uniform, standard format: the suicide bomber faces the camera in military attire, brandishes his rifle, wearing a headband that identifies him with his organization. He gives his name and place of birth, and makes a speech largely based on the Koran that he holds in his other hand (or that he points to). The text of the speech has already been prepared and is not improvised, and it is brief: “I, so-and-so… from such-and-such organization… take revenge for such and such…” Sometimes the videos contain enlarged photographs of shahids being held by young people during demonstrations. Instruction videos for suicide bombers disseminated by the Hezbullah during this period also include photographs of the mothers in their mourning, holding stills of their sons. Apart from the onetime broadcast on the foreign channels immediately after an attack, the bombers’ videos have a long broadcast life on the Islamic channels.

I thank Oded Granot, principal Arab affairs analyst for Israeli TV Channel 1, for his help on this topic.

19.In the description of the characteristics of the crisis, following Kristeva’s style, “I” and not “one” will be used in order to emphasize in the most intimate manner the possibility of any and all Israeli citizens being the victim of a terrorist attack.

20.This cartography has at least two aspects. For one thing, the city map, for example, of Jerusalem, is “marked” according to the places where terrorist attacks have occurred. The attacks have fostered a remapping that has become part of the local language. The second aspect is related not to the stationary space but instead to the mobile one. The buses that are “designated” for attacks “mark” the mobile urban space and it is they that make its boundaries “fluid,” rapidly changing ones.

21.See also Vivian Sobchack (1984).

22.See Chapter 4 and 5 of this book and Borer (2003, 1101-2).

23.Eliko is an Oriental Jew from what in Israel is called a development town in the South, the most underdeveloped part of the country. Although the targets of suicide bombing attacks are arbitrary (any Israeli is a potential victim), there is evidence that most victims of attacks on buses and in open markets are Israelis from the lower socio-economic classes (many of them Oriental Jews, and some foreign workers) who don’t own cars and therefore use public transportation.

24.Most scholars point to the entry of women into combat roles as a key characteristic of “new” war.

According to Spivak (2004), “Suicide bombing… is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself – the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing oneself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object, capable of destruction, in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of the self.”

25.According to Israeli (2003), shahid can have three different meanings: a martyr who died for the sake of Allah, the fallen in the jihad, or a Muslim who experienced suffering before a tragic death. Despite the various nuances attached to each meaning, they are all based on a religious concept involving death while performing a worthy act recommended by the Faith. The Holy Book of Islam, in fact, attests to such a death, even if the use of the term shahid often refers there to a “witness” of all sorts (74). See also the ongoing debate on the “culture of martyrdom” in Adam Dolnik (2004a; b; and c) and in Kimhi and Even (2004).

26.In this regard, the terrorist who wears the invisible explosive belt on his body is more the “perfect” detonatorg, than the one who carries a booby-trapped parcel. Early in September 2004 at the Erez Junction, the terrorist Muhammad Manasi was caught before carrying out a suicide bombing he had planned. He was wearing underpants into which plastic explosives were stitched, and a triggering device was implanted in his wristwatch (Haaretz 2004). So far this is the most extreme example encountered of a total detonatorg, beginning with the destruction of sexuality. In this case the integration between the body and the explosive substance takes on clear symbolic meanings, which reinforce the meaning of the entire process – both self-annihilation and recorporealization.

27.A different approach is proposed here than that of most scholars who deal with the issue, who see the videocassettes as a merely institutional response or as “suicide notes,” a sort of testament that plays an educational role for the suicide terrorists of the future (e.g., Rafael Israeli [2003, 73]).

28.“This masculine, Jewish, Ashkenazi, perfect, and wholesome trope is what I call… the chosen body… Since the early days of nation-building (the 1900s through the 1940s), the Israeli/Zionist body has been regulated to form a ‘new person.’”

29.See, e.g., an article by then Knesset Member Yossi Sarid (2004), entitled “Death That Hurts More,” which was published in the Haaretz daily after the death of thirteen soldiers in the Gaza Strip. The author wrote, “When soldiers are killed, it’s an earthquake; when civilians are killed there is much less emotion… civilians here, without uniforms, are human dust… by definition soldiers are not murdered (unless they are victims of a terrorist attack in a bus or restaurant)… presenting them as soldiers who were killed as terror victims harms their memory. Soldiers are killed as fighters on the battlefield… soldiers are also symbols of the state, and when a soldier is harmed the symbol is harmed too.”

30.Among the films mentioned above, only one, the family video by Manora Hazani-Katzover (daughter of Benny Katzover, one of the founders of Gush Emunim and a leader of the settlement movement in the Occupied Territories), The Skies Are Closer in Homesh, recreates the link to the soil. Filmed in two settlements in the northern West Bank where terrorist attacks had occurred, it is clearly an almost didactic, right-wing film. The sites of the filming and the ideology of the spokeswoman alter, of course, a considerable part of the basic assumptions on which this chapter is based. The approach to trauma and to the abject is different in this context.

31.The reference here is to Francis Ford Coppola’s well known film and to the name of the Israeli extra-parliamentary movement whose agenda is “swaying popular opinion and convincing the Israeli government of the need and possibility for achieving a just peace and an historic conciliation with the Palestinian people and neighboring Arab countries; this in exchange for a territorial settlement based on the formula of ‘land for peace.’” (http://www.peace-now.org.il/site/en/peace.asp?pi=43.) Suleiman’s Divine Intervention also alludes to the movement in an ironic manner: the marksmen practicing on the silhouette target of the Palestinian woman are all wearing Peace Now t-shirts.

32.Here it should be noted that this would be a very rare sight in Israel. Such a large group of paratroopers would almost never, if at all, be traveling together on public transportation; they would usually travel on army buses. From this aspect, it is clear that Abu-Assad’s choice in the matter is an attempt to place the scene in the “traditional”, modern, war, against a regular army, and not relate it to terror against civilians.

33.See also Chapter 3.

34.In Kristevian parlance (1982), closeness to some who is a deject: “An exile that asks, ‘where’? [since] the one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays… For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. The deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines – for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject – constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh… the deject is in short a stray” (8).

35.Baudrillard (2002) points to the motivations of suicide bombers as being personal and carried out in broad daylight in response to the humiliations they have experienced: “It is a misunderstanding to see in the terrorist act purely destructive logic. It seems to me that their own deaths cannot be separated from their act (it is precisely this connection that makes it a symbolic act) and it is not at all the impersonal elimination of the other. Everything resides in the defiance and the duel, in a dual, personal relation with the adverse power. Since it is the one that humiliates, it is the one that must be humiliated – and not simply exterminated. It must be made to lose face. This is never gained by mere force or by the suppression of the other. The other must be targeted and hurt in the full light of the adversarial struggle” (412). For discussions regarding the typology of suicide terrorists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, see for instance Kimhi and Even (2004), Pedahzur (2004), and Dolnik (2004). Said typifies both the prototypes of the “exploited” and the “avenger.”

36.In the Israeli film Fictitious Marriage (Haim Bouzaglo 1989), made at the height of the first Intifada, the protagonist is an Oriental Jew who impersonates a Palestinian Arab, a passing in which the ultimate test is terror.

37.According to Baudrillard (2002), “Thus, here, everything is played out on death, not only because of the brutal irruption of death live, in real time, but because of the irruption of a “more than real” death: the symbolic and sacrificial death. This is the absolute event that does not tolerate any appeal. Such is the spirit of terrorism… The terrorist’s hypothesis is that the system itself will commit suicide in response to multiple challenges posed in terms of death and suicide, for neither the system nor its power can escape the symbolic obligation” (408-9).

38.The final scene depicts the fantasy of the protagonist, in which his girlfriend peels herself off the silhouette target Israeli marksmen are using for practice, transforms into a female ninja, and kills them all except for the commander, after which she rejoins the target.

39.Hany Abu-Assad’s present film is not satisfied, as was his earlier docudrama Ford Transit (2002), with showing the horrors of the Occupation through a closed space that must be breached again and again. In Paradise Now as well, the protagonists are symbolically tied to space (and to the subjugation symbolized by traffic) through their profession as car mechanics. Hany Abu-Assad, however, is not discussing ways (circumventing/bypassing) to change space, as he did in Ford Transit, but (direct) ways to change the body; not through a journey that repeats itself, but a journey from which there is no return.

40.According to Leys: “From the turn of the century to the present there has been a continual oscillation between [the two theories], indeed that the interpenetration of one by the other or alternatively the collapse of one into the other has been recurrent and unstoppable… The concept of trauma has been structured historically in such a way as simultaneously to invite resolution in favor of one pole or the other of the mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy and to resist and ultimately to defeat all such attempts at resolution” (299).

41.“Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the core… is… a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival” (emphases in the original).

42.“The systematic effort to undermine and destroy a person’s values and beliefs, as by the use of prolonged interrogations, drugs, torture, etc., and to induce radically different ideas” (Webster’s 896).

43.The documentary film by Nitza Gonen, True Kindness, shown on Israeli television primetime after four years of the Intifada, is probably the first film to be made about ZAKA. Because of its close focus on the work of the ZAKA people, the film reveals abject dimensions that normally are hidden from view, such as, for example, their “work tools”: the plastic bags that are used for the corpses as opposed to those used for collecting body parts, the “scraper” and the ways of using it (scraping things from walls), and so on. Their experiences at the sites of terrorist attacks are also described in detail, which is exceptional in the discourse. However, this extreme and exceptional focus on the abject is anchored in contexts of Halakhic repression.

Chapter 2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror

1.In Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek’s The Jacqueline Rose Reader (2011, 327).

2.In “On Traumatic Knowledge” (1995, 537).

3.This type of attack is of course different than the one on the World Trade Center. In this chapter, however, I would like to discuss one comparable aspect: how society copes with terror as continuing trauma occurring on a daily basis as opposed to terror that was a one-time event. As an example, I will discuss the attack of September 11, 2001, as an illuminating test case for analysis of the perception of time.

According to data from B’Tselem, the independent Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 271 Israeli citizens (94 in the Territories and 177 within Israel) were killed by Palestinians during the first Intifada (December 12, 1987 – December 9, 1989) and 696 (234 in the Territories and 462 in Israel) were killed during the second Intifada (September 9, 2000 – July 15, 2006). (http://old.btselem.org/sta-tistics/english/Casualties.asp.) According to the IDF spokesman, however, between those dates, 397 Israeli citizens were killed by suicide bombers, and 15 more by explosive vehicles. In all attacks (including stabbing, drive-by shootings, etc.) 677 Israeli citizens were killed. See the IDF Spokesperson’s website at http://idfspokesperson.com/about/.

4.Only a few autobiographical documentaries were made during these years: Yuli Gerstel-Cohen’s My Terrorist, Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel’s Arna’s Children, and Joshua Fauden and Pavela Fleischer’s Blues by the Beach.

5.See the Introduction.

6.On the tradition of the victim see Brian Winston’s (1988) pioneering work, “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary.”

7.See Idith Zertal (2002).

8.Although Brown discusses the relationship between trauma and hegemony from a feminist perspective, I find it pertains to other perspectives in society.

9.According to this perception, questions regarding false memory, for example, are clearly part of the politics of the past. See Janet Walker (2005).

10.On one hand, the arbitrariness of the terror attack in the public space affects all the participants without regard for socio-economic level as potential victims. On the other, most bus passengers belong to the lower socio-economic levels. That is, Oriental Jews, new immigrants by large from the CIS, and the elderly.

11.In Distortion and Avanim, the attack has a more prominent place as a pretext. This may account for their failure at the box office. Distortion drew an audience of 1,400 (for a public investment of NIS 860,000) and Avanim drew 1,500 (for a public investment of NIS 220,000). For the sake of comparison, the most popular film of 2004, Turn Left at the End of the World (Avi Nesher), drew an audience of 500,000 and the most popular film of 2005, The Syrian Bride (Eran Riklis,) drew 100,000. See Haaretz (Pinto 2006).

12.See Ruth Leys (2000) and Cathy Caruth (1996).

13.I consider the episode made by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu as exceptional, mainly due to its unique structuring of image-sound relations.

14.Ned Schantz (2003) describes all sorts of “classical” telephonic sophistications: the fantasy of limitless self-extension through the phone, the opening of the whole body to an unpredictable world, telephonic coincidences, etc.

15.See Chapter 1.

16.See the discussion of Paradise Now in Chapter 1.

17.“The play of ‘deceit’ producing a kind of seesaw effect between the two events” (1970, 41).

18.See Mary Ann Doane (1980, 44).

Chapter 3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror

1.In Genet: A Biography (1993, 383-4).

2.The original title is Yawmiyat Ahir. The term ahir appears here in its masculine form, which is not standard Arabic. It usually takes the feminine form.

3.The most expensive film in Arabic cinematic history, Marwan Hamed’s The Yacoubian Building (Egypt, 2006), presents the world of Cairo homosexuals and met success throughout the Muslim-Arab world. On the other hand, Parvez Sharma’s documentary, A Jihad for Love (USA, 2007), describes the underground lives Muslim homosexuals and lesbians are forced to live in twelve countries around the world. In contrast to Hamed’s film, as will be described below, Abu Wael’s undermines all familiar representations of Islamic homosexuality. In contrast to Sharma, who produced his film in exile from within an activist homosexual community, Abu-Wael works in his homeland as a Palestinian director, cut off from community and institutional affiliation.

The circumstances surrounding the production of Diary illustrate, among other things, the director’s complicated situation. During a discussion I had with Abu-Wael in September 2008, he explained that after many reversals, he finally financed the film himself. Many Israelis volunteered their services for the production.

4.Diary alludes to Padre Padrone (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Italy, 1977) in terms of its style and narrative structure, and especially in its portrayal of early sexual experiences involving animals (sheep). See also the reference to Genet’s film below.

5.See Lee Edelman (1994). Both he and Silverman emphasize the multiplicity of identifications, the almost queer identification of the infant witnessing the primal scene. In contrast, see Kevin Ohi (1999) and Kaja Silverman (1992).

6.The rape takes place, as mentioned, during the period of the Nakba. To the best of my knowledge, such rapes by Israeli soldiers only occurred before the Nakba and the establishment of the State of Israel and shortly afterward; that is, until the mid-1950s. See Tal Nitzan’s The Borders of Occupation (2006). According to Benny Morris (1999), during the 1929 riots, “leaflets, which seem to have been printed before August 14 [1929] were distributed by Husseini activists in nearby Arab towns and villages… One flyer… declared: ‘the enemy… violated the honor of Islam and raped the women’” (113, 700).

In Checkpoint Syndrome (2003), Furer, a twenty-six year old ex-Israeli soldier, gives a detailed description of his army service in the occupied territories. Two rape fantasies appear in the book: one is a gang rape that ostensibly took place in a refugee camp and ends with the brutal murder of the young Palestinian woman being raped (70-3); the second occurs at a checkpoint and includes torture (75-7). See the analysis of Checkpoint Syndrome in Chapter 6.

7.“By locating the origin of fantasy in the auto-erotism, we have shown the connection between fantasy and desire. Fantasy, however, is not the object of desire but its setting. In fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object, but is himself represented as participating in the scene… On the other hand… [the fantasy] is a favoured spot for the most primitive defensive reactions, such as… projection, negation: these defenses are even indissolubly connected with the primary function of fantasy, to be a setting for desire” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1986, 26-7).

8.In this context, see Raz Yosef (2002; 2004). He does not discuss Arab sexuality from a non-Western perspective.

9.In direct translation from the Arabic, The Barefoot Bread. It is common knowledge that the blatant descriptions of sex made finding a publisher in Arabic very difficult. The book was published in Arabic only in 1982, after it had already been translated into English (by Paul Bowles) and French (by Tahar Ben Jelloun).

10.This is a translation from the Hebrew edition of the book.

11.“In order to use the term ‘denial’ to describe a person’s statement ‘I didn’t know’, one has to assume that she knew or knows about what it is that she claims not to know – otherwise the term ‘denial’ is inappropriate.” Cohen (2001, 5-6).

12.Reference to this is made several times. Despite her request, the group does not join Lulu’s mother, a Machsom Watch activist, when she takes her turn monitoring a checkpoint.

13.See also Ella Shohat (1989).

14.Israelis are forbidden by law to enter Nablus. During the Intifada, Israelis who lost their way in the territories were at risk of being on the receiving end of riots by the local population.

15.In this context, it is interesting to recall that the term passing may be derived from “pass,” the slip of paper that granted slaves permission to move about the countryside without being mistaken for runaways (Bennett 1998).

16.In comparison, see Nissim Mossek’s Israeli film Citizen Nawi (2007), which documents the tumultuous life of Ezra Nawi, a Jewish-Israeli plumber and political activist for Palestinian rights as he engages in a personal battle for his partner Fuad, a Palestinian illegal resident. The film uncovers the deep-seated racism and homophobia that is common in Israeli society. Also see Joseph Massad (2007, 188, note 103).

17.See Rebecca Stein (2010).

18.For a discussion relating to the 1980s see Yosef (2002).

19.In this regard, see Eytan Fox’s declaration during an interview with Merav Yodilovitz (2006): “[Yousef Sweid] was amazing, I am completely in love with him and I think he is brave. No one speaks about it, but he is the first Arab teen idol. He makes 16-year-old girls admire him and not say: ‘Disgusting Arab.’ That is power and it couldn’t have happened in the Israel I grew up in. I am very proud of him because of this achievement.”

20.The dialogue contains jokes about this: “If a homo becomes a jihad, who awaits him in heaven, seventy virgin twinks or seventy muscle hunks?”

21.We should also interpret in this way the films of Elia Suleiman, including The Time that Remains (2009), and those of Michelle Khleifi, Rashid Mashrawi, Ali Nacer, and other prominent directors. In their book, Gertz and Khleifi (2008) discuss the presence of trauma in some Palestinian films, but do not refer to it as a post-traumatic corpus by definition. Analysis of this subject is beyond the scope of this book.

22.See Chapter 1.

Chapter 4. New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator

1.In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003, 8).

2.Z32 won first prize at the Gijón International Film Festival, Spain (2008).

3.See an analysis of Tamar Yarom’s films in Chapter 5. See also Dreams of Undercover Soldiers (Yehuda Kave, 2004), made for Israeli Television (First Channel). It describes the nightmares still suffered by soldiers who served in special units in the Territories impersonating Arabs in order to interfere during riots, identify local leaders, and arrest them; One Shot (Nurit Kedar, 2004), which describes IDF snipers; After Shock (Yariv Horowitz, 2007), which, years after their release, traces soldiers who participated in atrocities; and Concrete (Nurit Kedar, 2011), which presents soldiers’ accounts on the 2008 war on Gaza. In order to demonstrate the huge personal and moral transformation these soldiers have undergone during service, the latter film stages in between their confessions young Israeli high school students standing still, embodying the unexpected future ahead of them.

4.The perpetrator trauma trend emerged during a period of havoc in the Israeli political situation that motivated the 2008 war in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead). A few major political events dominated the societal-cultural climate and public discourse during these years: Hamas assumed administrative control of Gaza and defeated Fatah; rocket and mortar attacks on Israel escalated during 2006-8; and the second Lebanon war took place from July-September 2006, creating an atmosphere of public distrust.

5.See Tristan Ann Borer (2003).

6.“Statements of denial are assertions that something did not happen, does not exist, is not true, or is not known about” Stanley Cohen (2001, 3). Cohen differentiates between literal denial (“it did not happen”); interpretive denial (“it happened, but its meaning is different than it appears”); and implicatory denial (“it happened, but its significance is different than it appears”). In the case of terror, the literal denial has a unique overtone since it is a cyclical denial, emphasizing the “denial paradox” described by Cohen.

7.Since 2004, out of tens of thousands of soldiers who served in the Occupied Territories since the beginning of the second Intifada, 650 have anonymously confessed to committing atrocities.

8.See the table in the Introduction.

9.The film also refers to the Warsaw Ghetto through the famous picture of the child raising his hands, and to the Nakba through its well-known iconography of Palestinians getting on crowded trucks. This layering of distinct traumas contributes to further ambiguity. See Gertz (2009).

10.Here I use “loss” in contrast to absence, following LaCapra’s (2001) definition of loss as an event of historical trauma that can be worked through and mourned (43-85).

11.On Stockholm syndrome see, for instance, James T. Turner (1985) and Judith Lewis-Herman (1992a). According to Hirsch (2001), “Postmemory… is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences – and thus also the memories – of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story” (10).

12.The film describes him in heroic terms as someone indifferent to fear: “They started to shoot from the higher floors of the hotels and we could not recognize where it comes from, who is shooting… in the middle of the junction our wounded soldier was lying, but we could not come closer because we were scared to death… And in the midst of this hell this television reporter Ron Ben-Yishai walks straight between the bullets like a superman.”

This description adds a tier of another latent Israeli trauma to the film by being a hommage to Ben-Yishai’s previous actions during the Yom Kippur War, when as a military correspondent he found himself at the midst of a battle and helped the wounded. He later received a medal of honor. Ben-Yishai also testified against Arik Sharon, then defense minister, in front of the Cohen Committee, established on November 1, 1982, to investigate Israel’s involvement in the genocide in the camps.

13.This and all following quotations from the films under discussion are taken from their English subtitles.

The Cohen Committee, formally known as the Commission of Inquiry into the Events at the Refugee Camps in Beirut, declared that Yaron should be dismissed from any operational position, and denied promotion within the IDF.

14.See Tom Gunning (2007) for a different interpretation of the index that stresses that movement is crucial.

15.Some of the images have no basis, of course, in photographable reality; for instance, the scene on the Beirut beach (the “super scene”), the scene at the junction, and most scenes taking place during the Lebanon War. Moreover, the Beirut promenade is designed like the one in Tel Aviv. Each linkage to the photographable-referential strengthens the preferred status Folman assigned to the archival footage.

16.We know Carmi Cna’an and Boaz Rein-Buskila only by their voices. The actors Yehezkel Lazarov and Mickey Leon (respectively) play their roles because the two refused to appear in the film.

17.At only one point during his entire confession did the perpetrator mention his first name, Ronny. This is hardly noticeable. The spectator’s feeling of watching an anonymous figure regardless of this mention is, of course, an outcome of the mask.

18.The title Z32 is taken from the case number assigned the confession by Breaking the Silence. It also might be a hommage to the Cambodian director Rithy Panh whose S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) exposes the perpetrators’ stories.

19.See Mograbi’s film Avenge but One of my Eyes (2005).

20.See Neta C. Crawford (1989).

21.On the relationship between the three in the context of IDF soldiers involved in atrocities see Ariel Handel (2008) in which he analyzes testimonies given to Breaking the Silence.

22.A conspicuous example is the constant discursive references that replace exact descriptions of offenses with generic names, thus serving as a tactic for blurring the nature of the wrongs. According to Marion Owen, the formulation “sorry about that” can be regarded as another tactic for evading full responsibility for an offense (1983).

23.Although Foucault traces the genealogy of confession as a religious ritual but changes his view on the subject in his later writings, I find his suggestion relevant here.

24.Freud has suggested that guilt is not only a deep-seated, intractable form of aggression, but also the height of civilization. See Sigmund Freud (1930, 134; 1916).

25.For example, back in his living room after a visit to Deir as-Sudan, Mograbi, accompanied by a small band and chorus, sings his wife’s arguments: “Why help him find his way? It’s a filthy fable not a three penny musical! She says: This is not material for a movie! He’s playing the repentant sinner, and you’re in the role of the supposed observer, He’s purging himself through you. And you’ll cash in on another profound film.”

26.Mograbi’s conflicts are heightened because he not only directs the film in a docu-activist manner, directs himself, writes the songs, and performs them, but he is a co-writer of the script (with Noam Enbar), as well as the film’s editor.

27.Lifton (1973; 1979; 1988; 1991; 2006) analyzes Nazi doctors, Vietnam War veterans, My Lai, and the Iraqi events. Although he depicts some differences, especially in regard to the Holocaust (i.e., level of denial, the belief system [anti-Semitism], the re-integration of the self), the structure of an atrocity-producing situation and the form of dissociation he calls “doubling” appear in all. Stanley Cohen (2001) describes twentieth century’s repertoire of perpetrator denials of responsibility: obedience to authority, conformity, necessity and splitting (esp. 76-116).

28.“What is perverse is that one must impose death on others in order to reassert one’s own life as an individual and group. And the problem is that the meaning is real. It’s perceived as meaning. And it’s perverse in the way that in all psychological judgment there has to be ethical judgment… We reassert our own vitality and symbolic immortality by denying them their right to live… by designating them as victims” quoted in Caruth (1995). (Emphasis in the original.)

29.Avi Mograbi, Z32 (Film script, in Hebrew).

30.On Breaking the Silence’s publications see Chapter 6.

Chapter 5. New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator

1.In Giving An Account of Oneself (2005, 136).

2.Women took part in guerilla warfare in previous eras, of course, most notably during the Vietnam War; however, terror and other characteristics of new war make a distinction. I regard the Vietnam War as an intermediate stage between modern and new wars. See my book Defeated Masculinity (2009).

Oliver (2008) analyzes the common femme fatale characteristics latent in these destructive roles.

3.Emphasis in the original.

4.See Mark Godfrey et al. (2010).

5.I differentiate in the following between female soldiers who are drafted into the IDF by law and guerrilla warfare warriors and suicide bombers.

6.See also Women Breaking the Silence: Female Soldiers Testify on Their Service at the Occupied Territories (2009). Thanks to Avichay Sharon for assisting me with this material, and the video testimonies.

7.Sob’ Skirt won the award for Best Drama at the Haifa International Film Festival (2002). Smiling won the Audience Award and Silver Wolf at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival (2007), Best Documentary at the Haifa International Film Festival (2007), and Best Documentary in the Israeli Academy Awards competition, Ophir (2008).

8.The name means in Hebrew either “I have a song” or “sing to me,” which is ironic under the circumstances. See below analysis of the scene in which the male soldiers sing to Shirli.

9.This information is based on a talk I had with Tamar Yarom on December 30, 2010. After reading the script, the IDF refused to assist her with the production, which significantly added to the film’s cost. Lucky enough, while shooting the outdoor scenes on location near an IDF training zone the photographer managed to take a few shots of an IDF helicopter. These shots undoubtedly contribute to the film’s authenticity.

10.Based on my talk with Tamar Yarom on December 30, 2010, I believe that a dramatic process caused Yarom’s personal experience to undergo a change in the script, testifying to how years later, in this case twelve, a post-traumatic experience can shape personal memory. During her military service she was shocked to discover the disparity between the soldiers she knew (and loved) and the deeds they carried out – causing her to lose her faith in human nature. The film, in contrast, describes how her personal need to be accepted led to denying the violence and racism of her soldiers and to her complicit cooperation in atrocity. It is as if her post-traumatic memory made the soldiers’ verbal violence towards her take on more vibrant colors; that is, it made her unwilling to see that the soldiers she felt for and took care of had a dark side. In the film, the shocking and traumatic incident in Gaza is the outcome of the soldiers’ behavior towards Shirli, which foreshadows the horror. On one hand, formulating the screenplay in this manner mitigates Yarom’s experience by showing that it was complex, multi-dimensional, and shocking; on the other, precisely for this reason her sense of guilt is stronger because of her denial and willingness to ignore the incident.

11.In our talk, Yarom told me that she was obsessive in writing the film script, providing the producers with endless drafts. After all these years, she still feels the film is an open wound; she relates this obsessive writing to coming to terms with the trauma.

12.See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1995) and Paul de Man (1979).

13.When she visits their tent, for example, they are in their underwear but she nevertheless enters and sits down. Upon leaving, one of them tells her: “Did you know that when a female chimpanzee is in heat, her ass swells up and turns red. It’s a sign for the male to go in. Isn’t that interesting?” (Film script, 10, in Hebrew).

14.Although Sasson-Levy’s research (2003) deals with women in combat roles and does not refer to perpetration of wrongdoings during the Intifada, I find her claims regarding sexual harassment relevant to Yarom’s representation in both films:

The women’s “masculine” roles allow them to be “mini-men” – almost “one of the guys” (as they told me) – whereas sexual harassment relates to them as sexual objects. If they react to sexual harassment by being insulted and hurt, they confirm the discourse that the harassment itself is trying to create, which constitutes women as sexual objects. Thus, when women ignore the insulting character of the “jokes” and refuse to be offended, they do not allow the harassment to attain its intended exclusionary power. Moreover, if they label the event as sexual harassment and act upon it as such, they are seen as constituting a “gender problem” within the army and will therefore not be treated as an integral and equal part of it. The concept of a “gender problem” belongs to the discourse that naturalizes gender differences, and thus could prove to be counterproductive to these soldiers’ interests within the army. Furthermore, an awareness of sexual assault would associate these soldiers with the identity of the victim. In their eyes, the victim is defenseless and vulnerable and has no place in an army (455).

15.Dani Gibor, by Miriam Yalan-Stekelis. Yalan-Stekelis’ children’s poetry first appeared in the Hebrew children’s newspaper Davar li-Yladim and was followed by many children’s books. She was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for children’s literature in 1957. According to Celina Mashiach (2005), “Indeed, the development of children’s poetry in Israel would have been inconceivable without the… achievements of Yalan-Stekelis.”

16.From the film script, 29-30 (in Hebrew).

17.In Yalan-Stekelis’s poetry, “The child is poised on the edge of the adults’ awareness, questioning their norms of behavior… In adopting such a stance, Yalan-Stekelis placed herself squarely at the head of the avant-garde stream of both Palestinian and European children’s poetry. As early as the 1930s, she challenged one of the central conventions of modern children’s literature – the ‘happy ending’ that paints the child’s world in shades of unmitigated joy” (Mashiach 2005).

18.Later, in the 1950s, the poem was put to music.

19.See Anita Shapira (1997), Benjamin Harshav (2003), and Oz Almog (2000, 23-72).

20.See Natan Alterman’s poem dedicated to Kovner’s story (2010).

21.See also, for instance, Lena Kuchler-Silberman (2004) and Sara Shner-Nishmit (1977).

22.“Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?… What makes for a grievable life?” (Butler 2009, 20) (emphasis in the original).

23.Though the circumstances are totally different, of course, see, in contrast, Lynndie England’s account of her participation in abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (USA, 2008). Linda Williams’ (2010) seminal paper, “Cluster Fuck,” argues that England was subjected to an unethical situation. See also the controversy over the film in Jump Cut 52, especially Bill Nichols’ (2010) letter to Morris. In his article in the same issue, Jonathan Kahana (2010) discusses confession as an excuse. Analyzing the differences between the Israeli and the American films are beyond the scope of this book.

24.During a talk we had in December 2008, Yarom told me that she interviewed one hundred ex-soldiers for the film. After finishing Sob’ Skirt, she still felt the story of female perpetrators had to be told. The production took four years.

25.Rotem, for instance, talks about the first time she had to give testimony regarding the children she identified throwing stones on soldiers during her shift as a video surveillance officer. Suddenly the small unrealistic figures she was used to watching from afar, on the screen, became live human beings. She confesses that she became very uncertain, and asked the commander “What if it did not happen? Do you let them go if they do not admit it?” She was answered, “They will admit it.” “And if they didn’t do it?” “They will admit it.” And she says to the camera: “What does it mean ‘they will admit it’? In what way they will admit it?… But you are back on your shift; you must go on with your duties.”

26.See Zohar Kampf (2006), in which he analyzes another example from the Christian scriptures that also reveals the connection between blood and guilt: the hands of Pilate: “And Pilate seeing that he prevailed nothing, but that rather a tumult was made; taking water washed his hands before the people, saying: I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it. And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and our children” (Matthew 27: 24–25). He claims, “The prevalence of the ‘blood on the hands’ image in Western culture was probably the reason for the Time magazine and the BBC internet site to choose the lynch photo [in which the image of blood-stained hands appear] as one of most prominent images of 2000. On the BBC site it was second only to that of the Mohammad al-Dura’s killing” (271).

27.See Anat Zuria’s review of the film in light of Levinas’ book (2007).

28.As Michael Taussig (2008) claims regarding the photos of Abu Ghraib (103).

29.The smile is conventionally regarded as a woman’s means of temptation. See as a comparison, Linda Williams’ analysis of Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and especially the photo of masturbation, in which, she claims, England, the female soldier, “performs her job as a female humiliator” (2010, 46). See also Julia Lesage (2009).

Chapter 6. New Wave of Documentary Literature

1.In “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940/1988, 352).

2.This is from a pamphlet produced by the organization in 2009.

3.In the original Hebrew, the ex-soldier uses the expression “I saw movies,” (ra’iti sratim), a slang expression meaning “I had an awful experience, beyond reality, and its images keep haunting me.”

4.Defined by Foucault (2001) as “fearless speech.” See detailed analysis below.

5.See, e.g., Yuval Harari (2007) and Jonathan Bolton (2006).

6.For Maurice Halbwachs (1925/1992), memory is collective in that it is supra-individual, and individual memory is conceived in relation to a group. In his classical account, memory is always group memory, both because the individual is derivative of some collectivity; family; or community, but also because a group is solidified and becomes aware of itself through continuous reflection upon and recreation of a distinctive, shared memory. Individual identity is negotiated within and through this collectively shared past.

7.See, e.g., A.B. Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem (2006), discussed in Chapter 4 in this book; and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (2010).

8.The section dividers are printed on black paper. The book’s color design is reminiscent of memorial books usually published after war. Mourning dead Israeli soldiers becomes indirect mourning of dead Palestinians.

9.Breaking the Silence: Male Soldiers Testify on their Service in Hebron 2005-2007: 87. This is from a pamphlet published by the organization in Hebrew.

10.“Thus the parrhesiastic contract is subverted: the one who was granted the privilege of parrhesia is not harmed, but the one who granted the right of parrhesia is – and by the very person who, in the inferior position, was asking for parrhesia. The parrhesiastic contract became a subversive trap.” See Michel Foucault (1983).

11.“Thus the proper name becomes the mediating term between the text and the referential world that lies beyond it.” See Paul Eakin (1989, x).

12.See, for instance, articles in the Haaretz daily regarding a bill tabled by Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu party and voted on by the Knesset. According to the bill, a parliamentary panel will be formed to investigate leftist organizations. On January 11, 2001, Mazal Mualan and Yohanan Lis wrote: “Lieberman on left wing NGOs: ‘Supporters of terror, net’”; on January 24, 2011, Gideon Sapir and Daphna Erez-Barak wrote: “Transparency, Not Investigation. Protests against investigative panel”; On January 17, 2011, Akiva Eldar wrote: “President Peres Warns: ‘Investigation of the Left will Harm Democracy.’ In a conversation with Haaretz the country’s president calls to cancel the commission investigating funding sources of human rights organizations. ‘Investigation of right wing and left wing organizations should be left to law enforcement agencies,’ he said; on January 6, 2011, Gideon Levy wrote, “Making the Left Illegal”; and on February 2, 2011, Johanan Lis wrote: “Knesset nears final hurdle in forming panels of inquiry into left-wing NGOs. The Knesset House Committee on Wednesday approved the composition of two parliamentary panels to investigate the funding sources of human rights organizations. Most of the opposition parties have decided to boycott the committees. The motion passed the House Committee by a majority vote of 10-7.” http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/knesset-nears-final-hurdle-in-forming-panels-of-inquiry-into-left-wing-ngos-1.34079.

13.See Kari Andén-Papadopoulos (2009).

14.“The definition of autobiography would be: Retrospective prose narrative by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality… In order for there to be autobiography (and personal literature in general), the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical” (Lejeune 1989, 4-5). (Emphases in the original). As Eakin (1989, viii) rightly claims, this definition expresses Lejeune’s orientation toward prose, one that as I see it does not fit the unstable nature of Furer’s work.

15.This stands in contrast to twentieth-century war, in which memoirs were different from diaries, letters, and other eyewitness accounts written in the midst of war, like the flood of military memoirs written in the wake of the First World War. See Yuval Harari (2007).

16.See, e.g., Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, USA, 2008); Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007); Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory Kennedy, 2007); The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008); and The Messenger (Oren Moverman, 2009). Mark Boal wrote the screenplay of The Hurt Locker based on his personal experiences when in 2004 he worked as an embedded journalist with a US bomb squad in Iraq.

17.The only personal information given is that he served in Shimshon, a special unit founded for service in the Territories.

18.See also K. Steven Baum (2008).

19.“Fantasies Help Pass the Time,” and “Action.”

20.See analysis of Diary of a Male Whore in Chapter 3.

21.See also Elisabeth Jean Wood (2006, esp. 314), who defines patterns of, variations on, and causes for sexual violence in times of war, but – although she relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (by declaring the absence of sexual violence) – does not take into consideration the nature of war.

22.Emphasis in the original.

23.See “Checkpoints: The Split Sovereign and the One-Way Mirror” in Weizman (2007).

24.On this term see Appadurai (2006).

25.Kaldor (2001/2007) emphasizes what she calls the change in the mode of the warfare – “the means through which the new wars are fought” (8).

26.However, in contrast to Waltz, he fully confesses his acknowledgment over his deeds, and denial of truth. See Flynn (1999, 48).

27.According to Lifton, “Our underlying love for it [the country] can still exist in some strange way; but if you have been uncritical of it and you suddenly find it radically dishonored in your eyes – it sent you to fight a wrong, even evil, war and then treated you badly when you came back– your love has been annihilated by the war and you are in deep trouble. There is a real loss here and it is not just the loss of blind patriotism, which might be a welcome and needed loss. It is a loss of love of one’s people and of one’s nation” (Flynn 1999, 54).

28.See analysis of Waltz with Bashir in Chapter 4.

29.In Hebrew the connotation is not of a criminal act, but of an unintentional happening revealed much later. Language uses like “steal one’s mind” or “steal one’s heart” – gnevat da’at – emphasize an invisible and indecipherable process, similar to theft by its secrecy.

30.Analyzing post-9/11 parrhesiastic acts in the US, Jonathan Simon (2005) claims, “Today, victims have emerged as perhaps the most important source of parrhesia. By reproducing the violent emotions they have experienced, victims who choose to speak parrhesiastically can destabilize political and legal authority. For much of the past two decades, this practice has been directed at the criminal justice system, as violent-crime victims have spoken out against the courts, parole boards, and other decision makers whose management of dangerous criminals has failed them. With the 9/11 families and their alliance with the 9/11 Commission, parrhesia has moved out into a far more general critical engagement with government” (1422).

Conclusion

1.In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001, 215).

2.It is worthwhile to recall at this point Edward Said’s famous phrase regarding the Palestinians being “the victims of victims.”

3.Conspicuous among them are autobiographical documentaries by second generation directors (like Yair Lev, whose Hugo part I [1990] and II [2008] deal with his father’s survival and his own post-memory), and third generation directors (like Arnon Goldfinger, whose The Apartment [2010] renders the negative symbiosis between his grandparents and a Nazi couple after the war). See also Netalie Braun and Avigail Sperber’s The Hangman (2010), which offers a sensitive portrayal of the man who hanged Adolf Eichmann and how he has coped with his post-trauma; and Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010), which features a recently found public relations film made by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto – to name but a few of the documentaries that prove the power of this cinematic tradition.

4.As part of this differentiation, Laplanche also indicates mystery, which he leaves to the theologians.

5.Emphases in the original.

6.The German term Rätsel, as Laplanche indicates, is not a simple riddle (devinette, from the verb erraten: deviner, to guess) but is more complex.

7.See Kiyoteru Tsutsui (2009).

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Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000.

———. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

Zuria, Anat. “A Group Portrait with a Scar.” Eretz Acheret (A Different Country) 42 (2007). In Hebrew.

FURTHER READING

Arthur, Paul. “Extreme Makeover: The Changing Face of Documentary.” Cineaste 30, no. 3 (2005): 18–23.

Ashuri, Tamar. “I Witness: Re-presenting Trauma in and by Cinema.” The Communication Review 13 (2010): 171–92.

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Belton, John. “Digital Cinema: A False Revolution.” October 100, Spring (2002): 98–114.

Bordwell, David and Carrol, Nöel, ed. Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Brockmeier, Jens, and Donal A Carbaugh, Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam: John Benjamin SC, 2001.

Bruner, Jerome. “Life as Narrative.” In The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community, by Ann Haas, 28–37. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994.

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

de Duve, Thierry. “Art in the Face of Radical Evil.” October 125 (2008): 3–23.

de Man, Paul. “Excuses (Confessions).” In Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1979.

Delumeau, Jean. Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th-18th Centuries. Translated by Eric Nicholson. New York: St. Martin Press, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text”: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing: Revenge of the Aesthetic. Edited by Michael P. Clark, 180–207. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Eakin, Paul John. “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12, no. 2 (2004): 121–32.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary World Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13–42. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma and Collective Memory.” In Cultural Trauma Slavery and the Formation of African-American Identity, 1–22. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood. Translated by Rachel Gomme. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Foley, Barbara. “Review: Fact, Fiction, and ‘Reality’.” Contemporary Literature 20, no. 3 (1979): 389–99.

———. “History, Fiction and the Ground between: The Uses of the Documentary Mode in Black Literature.” PMLA 95, no. 3 (1980): 389–403.

Folman, Ari, and David Polonsky. Waltz with Bashir: A Graphic Novel. Or Yehuda Israel: Dvir, 2009.

Foster, Hal. “Death in America.” October 75 (1966): 36–59.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.

———. “Espace, Savoir et Pouvoir.” In Dits det Ecrits, 270–85. Paris: Gallimard, 1982.

———. “Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia.” Michel Foucault, info. 1983. http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia.

———. “Des Espaces Autres.” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite 4 (1984): 46–9.

Geimer, Peter. “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm.” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 7–28.

Gitlin, Todd, and Liel Leibovitz. The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. New York: Simon & Shuster, 2010.

Gray, Chris Hables. Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict. London: Guilford, 1997.

Hirsch, Marianne, and Leo Spitzer. “What’s Wrong with This Picture: Archival Photographs in Contemporary Narratives.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2006): 229–52.

Hodgkin, Katharine, and Susannah Radstone. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge, 2006.

Kampf, Zohar. “Public (non-) Apologies: The Discourse of Minimizing Responsibility.” Journal of Pragmatics 41, no. 11 (2009): 2257–70.

Kubany, Edward S. “A Cognitive Model of Guilt: Typology in Combat-Related PTSD.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 7, no. 1 (1994): 3–10.

Labov, William. “Some Further Steps in Narrative Analysis.” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1997): 395–415.

Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1970.

Lehman, Daniel W. “Mining a Rough Terrain: Weighing the Implications of Nonfition.” Narrative 9, no. 3 (2001): 334–42.

Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Mellard, James M. “Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Hart’s Damage, Lacanian Tragedy and the Ethics of Jouissance.” PMLA 113, no. 3 (1998): 395–407.

Miriam Yalan-Stekelis. Poems and Stories. Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1996. In Hebrew.

Modan, Ruth. Exit Wounds: A Graphic Novel. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2008. In Hebrew.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Nahla, Abdo, and Ronit Lentin. Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Narratives of Dislocation. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002.

Neisser, Ulric. “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge.” Philosophical Psychology, 1988: 35–59.

Osborne, Peter. “Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives.” October 62 (1992): 102–13.

Peters, John Durham. Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

———. “Pity, Terror, and the Enigma of the Virtual Killer.” In Laterreur Spectacle. Terrorisme et Télévision, by Daniel Dayan. Paris: INA/De Boeck, 2006.

Prince, Stephen. “The Emergence of Filmic Artifacts: Cinema and Cinematography in the Digital Era.” Film Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 24–33.

Radstone, Susannah. “Trauma and Screen Studies: Opening the Debate.” Screen 42, no. 2 (2001): 188–93.

Renov, Michael. “Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Verité Age.” Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/7/box7–1-e.html.

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Rosenthal, Leslie H. Gelb and Justine A. “The Rise of Ethics in Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs 82, no. 3 (2003): 7.

Rotman, Brian. “Ghost Effects.” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 53–86.

Sanyal, Debarati. “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism.” Representation 79 (2002): 1–27.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Foreword.” In The Thief’s Journal, by Jean Genet, translated by B. Frechtman. Paris: Olympia Press, 2004/1949.

Shapiro, Ann-Louise, and Jill Godmilow. “How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film?” History & Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 80–101.

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White, Rob. “Make-Believe, Memory Failure.” Film Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2008–9): 4–7.

Williams, Carolyn. “Genre Matters: Response.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 2 (2005): 295–304.

Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1993): 9–21.

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Yacobi, Tamar. “Fiction and Silence as Testimony: The Rhetoric of Holocaust in Dan Pagis.” Poetics Today 26 (2005): 209–55.

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———. “The Anatomy of the Nonfiction Novel.” In The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 68–89. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1976.

Zilliacus, Clas. “Radical Naturalism: First-Person Documentary Literature.” Comparative Literature 31, no. 2 (1979): 97–112.

Żylicz, Piotr Olaf. “Guilt in Psychotherapy: Ideological Connection.” Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy 2 (2009): 5–11.

FILMOGRAPHY

11’09”01-September 11. Produced by Alain Brigand. 2002.

A Film Unfinished. Directed by Yael Hersonski. 2010.

A Jihad for Love. Directed by Parvez Sharma. 2007.

A Love Song. Directed by Jean Genet. 1950.

After Shock. Directed by Yariv Horowitz. 2007.

Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 1979.

Arna’s Children. Directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel. 2004.

Atash-Thirst. Directed by Tawfik Abu Wael. 2004.

Avanim. Directed by Raphaël Nadjari. 2004.

Avenge but One of My Eyes. Directed by Avi Mograbi. 2005.

Barricades. Directed by Ram Levy. 1969.

Beaufort. Directed by Joseph Cedar. 2007.

Beyond the Dark Mountains. Directed by Tzach Nussbaum. 2004.

Beyond the Walls. Directed by Uri Barabash. 1984.

Blow Up. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1966.

Blues by the Beach. Directed by Joshua Fauden and Pavela Fleischer. 2004.

Broken Wings. Directed by Nir Bergman. 2002.

Channels of Rage. Directed by Anat Halachmi. 2003.

Checkpoint. Directed by Yoav Shamir. 2003.

Citizen Nawi. Directed by Nissim Mossek. 2007.

Close to Home. Directed by Vidi Bilu and Dalya Hager. 2005.

Closed, Closed, Closure. Directed by Ram Levy. 2002.

Concrete. Directed by Nurit Kedar. 2011.

Diary of a Male Whore. Directed by Tawfik Abu Wael. 2001.

Distortion. Directed by Haim Buzaglo. 2004.

Divine Intervention. Directed by Elia Suleiman. 2002.

Dreams of Undercover Soldiers. Directed by Yehuda Kave. 2004.

Dreams. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1990.

Enemies of the People. Directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambeth. 2009.

Fictitious Marriage. Directed by Haim Bouzaglo. 1989.

Florentin. Television. Directed by Eytan Fox. 1997.

Ford Transit. Directed by Hany Abu-Assad. 2002.

Frenzy. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1972.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Directed by Rory Kennedy. 2007.

Hamsin. Directed by Danny Vaxman. 1982.

Hoping for the Best. Directed by Raed Al Helou. 2004.

Hugo Patt I. Directed by Yair Lev. 1990.

Hugo Part II. Directed by Yair Lev. 2008.

In the Eyes of the Storm. Directed by Shelly Hermon. 2012.

In the Name of God: Scenes from the Extreme. Directed by Dan Setton and Tor Ben-Mayor. 2003.

Inside the Mind of the Suicide Bomber. Directed by Tom Roberts. 2003.

Islands on the Shore. Directed by Yeud Levanon. 2003.

Just Not Another Suicide Bombing. Directed by Amit Drori. 2004.

Lebanon. Directed by Samuel Maoz. 2009.

Life According to Agfa. Directed by Assi Dayan. 1992.

Life for Land. Directed by Tamar Wishnitzer-Haviv. 2003.

Lullaby. Directed by Adi Arbel. 2004.

My Terrorist. Directed by Yulie Gerstel-Cohen. 2002.

Nina’s Tragedies. Directed by Sabi Gabizon. 2003.

No. 17. Directed by David Ofek. 2003.

One Day After the Peace. Directed by Erez Laufer. 2012.

One Shot. Directed by Nurit Kedar. 2004.

One Widow, Twice Bereavement. Directed by Orna Ben-Dor Niv. 2005.

Ordinary People. Directed by Vladimir Perisic. 2009.

Our Troops Did Not Come Back. Directed by Irit Gal. 1999.

Padre Padrone. Directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. 1977.

Paradise Now. Directed by Hany Abu-Assad. 2005.

Pillar of Fire. Television. Produced by Ygal Lusin. 1981.

Putting the Roof Aright. Directed by Michael Lev Tov. 2003.

Restless. Directed by Amos Kollek. 2008.

Ringtones. Directed by Dov Gil-Har. 2004.

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Directed by Rithy Panh. 2003.

Security Groove. Directed by Idan Alterman. 2002.

Sob’ Skirt. Directed by Tamar Yarom. 2002.

Standard Operating Procedure. Directed by Errol Morris. 2008.

Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 1976.

Taxi to the Dark Side. Directed by Alex Gibney. 2007.

Testimonies: Israeli Soldiers on the Intifada. Directed by Ido Sella. 1993.

The Apartment. Directed by Arnon Goldfinger. 2010.

The Bubble. Directed by Eytan Fox. 2007.

The Downfall. Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel. 2004.

The Hangman. Directed by Netalie Braun and Avigail Sperber. 2010.

The Human Resources Manager. Directed by Eran Riklis. 2010.

The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. 2008.

The Messenger. Directed by Oren Moverman. 2009.

The Skies are Closer in Homesh. Directed by Manora Hazani-Katzover. 2003.

The Syrian Bride. Directed by Eran Riklis. 2005.

The Time that Remains. Directed by Elia Suleiman. 2009.

The Yacoubian Building. Directed by Marwan Hamed. 2006.

Three Minutes to Four. Directed by Eliav Lilti. 2002.

Tkuma: The First Fifty Years. Television. Produced by Dina Tzvi Riklis. 1998.

To Die in Jerusalem. Directed by Hilla Medalie. 2007.

To See If I’m Smiling. Directed by Tamar Yarom. 2007.

True Kindness. Directed by Nitza Gonen. 2004.

Turn Left at the End of the World. Directed by Avi Nesher. 2004.

Walk on Water. Directed by Eytan Fox. 2004.

Waltz with Bashir. Directed by Ari Folman. 2008.

Yossi and Jagger. Directed by Eytan Fox. 2002.

Z32. Directed by Avi Mograbi. 2008.

INDEX

9/11, here, here

11’09”01-September here, here

Abu-Assad, Hany, see Paradise Now; Ford Transit

Abu-Wael, Tawfik, see Diary of a Male Whore; Atash (Thirst)

After Shock, here

Agamben, Giorgio, here, here, here

Alterman, Idan, see Security Groove

Antigone, here–here

Antonioni, Michelangelo, see Blow Up

Apartment, The, here–here

Apocalypse Now, here, here

Appadurai, Arjun, here

Arbel, Adi, see Lullaby

Arna’s Children, here, here

Atash (Thirst), here

Avanim, here–here

Avenge but One of my Eyes, here

B’Tselem, here, here

Barabash, Uri, see Beyond the Walls

Barricades, here

Baudelaire, Charles, here

Baudrillard, Jean, here–here, here, here

Beaufort, here

Benjamin, Walter, here, here–here

Bergman, Nir, see Broken Wings

Beyond the Dark Mountains, here

Beyond the Walls, here

Bhabha, Homi K., here–here, here, here

Bigelow, Kathryn, see Hurt Locker, The

Bilu, Vidi and Dalya Hager, see Close To Home

Blow Up, here

Blues by the Beach, here, here

Bohrer, Karl Heinz, here–here, here

Braun, Netalie and Avigail Sperber, see Hangman, The

“Brave Danny”, here–here

Breaking the Silence, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, see also Occupying the Territories

Women Breaking the Silence, here, here, here, here, here, here

Brigand, Alain, see 11’09”01-September here

Broken Wings, here–here

Bubble, The, here, here–here, here, here

Butler, Judith,

and the body and the self, here–here

and the grievable, here–here, here, here–here

and responsibility, here–here, here, here

Buzaglo, Haim, see Distortion; Fictitious Marriage

Caruth, Cathy,

and latency and memory, here, here–here, here, here, here–here

and the second self, here

and trauma discourse, here, here

Case of No. here, The, here–here, here, here, here

Cedar, Joseph, see Beaufort

Channels of Rage, here, here

Chayut, Noam, see My Holocaust Thief

Checkpoint Syndrome, here–here, here–here

Chion, Michel, here

Choukri, Mohamed, see For Bread Alone

Citizen Nawi, here

Close To Home, here–here

Closed, Closed, Closure, here

Concrete, here, here

Confession, here–here, here–here, here–here

vs. Testimony, here–here, here, here–here, here–here

Coppola, Francis Ford, see Apocalypse Now

Crawford, Neta C., here, here, here, here

Creed, Barbara, here–here

danse macabre, here

Dayan, Assi, see Life According to Agfa

denial and perpetrator trauma, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here

in documentary cinema, here–here, here, here–here

in literature, here–here, here–here, here, here–here

in narrative cinema, here–here, here, here, here–here

and passing, here, here–here

and the persecuted perpetrator, here

detonatorg, the, here–here, here–here

Diary of a Male Whore, here–here, here, here, here–here

Distortion, here, here

Divine Intervention, here, here, here–here

Doane, Mary Ann, here–here, here

Downfall, The, here–here

Dreams, here–here

Dreams of Undercover Soldiers, here, here

Drori, Amit, see Just Not Another Suicide Bombing

Eakin, Paul John, here–here, here

Enemies of the People, here–here

Enloe, Cynthia, here, here

ethics of trauma, the,

and the autobiographical pact, here–here

body/corpse/ethics, here–here

double ethics, here

and the female perpetrator, here–here

and the fragmentary parrhesiac confession, here, here, here–here

and the Holocaust, here, here

and new war, here, here–here, here–here, here–here

and the perpetrator complex, here–here

in trauma research, here

Fanon, Frantz, here

Fauden, Joshua and Pavela Fleischer, see Blues by the Beach

Felman, Shoshana, here

female soldier, the, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here here–here, here here–here

and motherhood, here–here, here–here

Fictitious Marriage, here, here–here

Film Unfinished, A, here–here

Florentin, here

Folman, Ari, see Waltz With Bashir

For Bread Alone, here

Ford Transit, here, here

Foucault, Michel, here, here, here, here–here

Fox, Eytan, see Bubble, The; Walk on Water; Florentin; Yossi and Jagger

Frank, Anne, here–here

Frenzy, here

Freud, Sigmund, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here

and the father figure, here–here

Furer, Liron, see Checkpoint Syndrome

Gabizon, Sabi, see Nina’s Tragedies

Genet, Jean, here; see also Love Song, A

Gerstel-Cohen, Yuli, see My Terrorist

Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi, here

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, here, here

Gibney, Alex, see Taxi to the Dark Side

Gil-Har, Dov, see Ringtones

Girard, René, here–here

Goldfinger, Arnon, see Apartment, The

Gonen, Nitza, see True Kindness

Goodnight, Thomas, here

Gray, Chris Hables, here

Grosz, Elizabeth, here, here, here

guilt,

and confession, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here

colonial guilt, here–here

guilt feelings, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

latent guilt, here–here

in narrative cinema, here–here, here, here–here, here–here

and the perpetrator complex, here–here, here

and revenge, here

sense of, here–here, here, here, here, here

survivor guilt, here–here, here–here, here, here

transference of, here–here, here

Hack, Daniel, here

Hacking, Ian, here

Halachmi, Anat, see Channels of Rage

Halberstam, Judith, here–here

Halbwachs, Maurice, here

Hamed, Marwan, see Yacoubian Building, The

Hamsin, here

Hangman, The, here–here

Hartman, Geoffrey H., here

Hazani-Katzover, Manora, see Skies are Closer in Homesh, The

Heidegger, Martin, here–here

Al Helou, Raed, see Hoping for the Best

Hermon, Shelly, see In the Eyes of the Storm

Hersonski, Yael, see Film Unfinished, A

Hever, Hannan, here

Hirsch, Marianne, here–here, here–here

Hirschbiegel, Oliver, see Downfall, The

Holocaust, the,

and fantasy, here

and identity crisis, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here

and perpetrator trauma, here–here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here

and postmemory, here–here, here–here

and victim trauma, here–here, here, here–here

Hoping for the Best, here–here

horeg(et) bishgaga, here–here

Horowitz, Yariv, see After Shock

Hugo, here–here

Human Resources Manager, The, here–here, here

Hurt Locker, The, here

hysteria, here–here

In the Eyes of the Storm, here

In the Name of God: Scenes from the Extreme, here

Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber, here–here

Intifada, the, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

First Intifada, the, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here

Second Intifada, the, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here

Islands on the Shore, here

Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here

Jameson, Frederic, here

Jihad For Love, A, here–here

Just Not Another Suicide Bombing, here–here

Kaldor, Mary, here, here, here

Kaplan, Ann E., here

Kave, Yehuda, see Dreams of Undercover Soldiers

Kedar, Nurit, see Concrete; One Shot

Kennedy, Rory, see Dreams of Abu Ghraib

Khamis, Juliano Mer and Danniel Danniel, see Arna’s Children

Klein, Melanie, here

Kolk, Bessel Van Der and Onno Van Der Hart, here, here

Kollek, Amos, see Restless

Kovner, Abba, here

Kristeva, Julia, here, here, here, here

Kurosawa, Akira, see Dreams

LaCapra, Dominique, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here

Laplanche, Jean, here–here, here–here

and J.B. Pontalis, here–here

Laqueur, Thomas W., here

Laub, Dori, here

and Shoshana Felman, here

and Susanna Lee, here

Laufer, Erez, see One Day After the Peace

Lebanese films, here, here, here

Lebanon, here

Legend of the Sad Lakes, The, here–here

Lejeune, Philippe, here–here

Lemkin, Rob and Thet Sambath, see Enemies of the People

Lev, Yair, see Hugo

Lev Tov, Michael, see Putting the Roof Aright

Levanon, Yeud, see Islands on the Shore

Levinas, Emmanuel, here, here, here–here

Levy, Itamar, see Legend of the Sad Lakes, The

Levy, Ram, see Barricades; Closed, Closed, Closure

Lewis-Herman, Judith, here–here, here, here, here

Leys, Ruth, here, here–here

Life According to Agfa, here

Life for Land, here

Lifton, Robert Jay,

and the atrocity-producing situation, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

and forgiveness, here

and mourning, here, here

and survivor guilt, here, here–here, here, here, here

Lilti, Eliav, see Three Minutes to Four

Love Song, A, here

Lullaby, here–here

Lusin, Ygal, see Pillar of Fire

Maoz, Samuel, see Lebanon

Massad, Joseph, here–here, here–here

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, here

Medalie, Hilla, see To Die in Jerusalem

Messenger, The, here

Mograbi, Avi, see Z32; Avenge but One of My Eyes

Moments, here–here

Morris, Errol, see Standard Operating Procedure

Moskos, Charles C., John Allen Williams and David R. Segal, here

Mossek, Nissim, see Citizen Nawi

Moverman, Oren, see Messenger, The

My Holocaust Thief, here–here, here, here, here–here, here

My Terrorist, here, here

Nadjari, Raphaël, see Avanim

Nakba, the, here, here–here, here–here

and Palestinian masculinity, here–here, here–here

and war rape, here–here

narrative cinema, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here

Nesher, Avi, see Turn Left at the End of the World

New Jew, the, here, here–here

new war,

and atrocity, here–here

and the body, here–here, here–here, here–here

and characteristic trauma, here–here, here–here

definition of, here–here, here–here, here–here

and the enigma of perpetration, here–here, here

and feminist critique, here–here

and the soldier-turned-perpetrator, here, here–here, here, here, here

new wave of documentary films, the, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here

and the female perpetrator, here–here, here–here

and the male perpetrator, here–here, here

new wave of documentary literature, the, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

autobiographical docu-novels, here–here

the fragmentary parrhesiastic confession, here–here

Nichols, Bill, here, here–here

Nina’s Tragedies, here–here

Nussbaum, Tzach, see Beyond the Dark Mountains

Occupying the Territories: Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000–2010, here–here, here

Ofek, David, see No. here

One Day After the Peace, here

One Shot, here, here

Ordinary People, here

pacte autobiographique, see Lejeune, Philippe

Padre Padrone, here

Palestinian Wave, the, here–here

Panh, Rithy, see S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

Paradise Now, here–here

parrhesia, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here

passing, here–here, here–here, here–here

Perisic, Vladimir, see Ordinary People

perpetrator complex, here, here–here

perpetrator, the,

direct, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

indirect, complicit, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here; see also perpetrator trauma and complicity

perpetrator trauma,

and absence of moral father figure, here–here

and acknowledgment, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here

and atrocity-producing situations, see Lifton, Robert Jay

and “Being There”, here, here, here, here

characteristics of, here, here

and complicity, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here

and crisis of the audience, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here

and crisis of disclosure, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

and crisis of evidence, here, here–here, here, here, here, here–here, here

and crisis of gender, here, here–here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here

and crisis of narrativization, here, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here, here

definition of, here–here, here–here

and the female perpetrator, here–here, here–here

and guilt, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, here–here

and the male perpetrator, here–here

and trauma research, here–here, here–here, here

persecuted perpetrator, the, here–here, here–here, here

Peters, John Durham, here–here, here

photo-animation, here

Pillar of Fire, here

post-Zionism, here, here

Puar, Jasbir, here

Putting the Roof Aright, here

rape, here–here, here–here, here–here, see also war rape

Restless, here–here, here, here

revenge, sub-plot of, here–here

Richter, Gerhard, here

Riklis, Dina Tzvi, see Tkuma: The First Fifty Years

Riklis, Eran, see Human Resources Manager, The; Syrian Bride, The

Ringtones, here–here

Roberts, Tom, see Inside the Mind of a Suicide Bomber

Rohy, Valerie, here, here

Rose, Jacqueline, here

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, here

Scarry, Elaine, here

Scorsese, Martin, see Taxi Driver

Security Groove, here–here

Sella, Ido, see Testimonies: Israeli Soldiers on the Intifada

Setton, Dan and Tor Ben-Mayor, see In the Name of God

shahidism, here–here, here–here, here–here

Sharma, Pavez, see Jihad for Love, A

short-short films, here–here

Silverman, Kaja, here–here, here

Skies are Closer in Homesh, The, here, here

Sob’ Skirt, here–here

Sontag, Susan, here, here, here

South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, here

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, here here

Standard Operating Procedure, here, here–here, here, here

Suleiman, Elia, see Divine Intervention; Time that Remains, The

Syrian Bride, The, here

Taussig, Michael, here

Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, see Padre Padrone

Taxi Driver, here

Taxi to the Dark Side, here

terror, see victim trauma

Testimonies: Israeli Soldiers on the Intifada, here

Time that Remains, The, here

Three Minutes to Four, here–here, here

Tkuma: The First Fifty Years, here

To Die in Jerusalem, here

To See If I’m Smiling, here, here, here–here, here–here, here–here, here

trauma and masturbation, here–here, here–here

trauma ecology, here, here, here–here

True Kindness, here, here–here

Turn Left at the End of the World, here

vagina dentata, here–here

Vaxman, Danny, see Hamsin

victim trauma/terror trauma,

and the body as battlefield, here–here, here–here, here–here

characteristics of, here–here

as chronic, here–here

definition of, here–here

and the flâneur, here

and pre-memory, here–here

and sound, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here

and the suicidal mirror image, here–here

and the time trap, here–here, here–here, here–here, here

Walk on Water, here–here

Walker, Janet, here, here–here

Waltz with Bashir, here-here, here–here, here–here, here, here, here

Walzer, Michael, here

war rape, here–here

Weizman, Eyal, here–here

Wishnitzer-Haviv, Tamar, see Life for Land

Woman in Jerusalem, A, here–here

Yacoubian Building, The, here–here

Yarom, Tamar, see Sob’ Skirt; To See If I’m Smiling

Yehoshua, A.B., here–here, see also Woman in Jerusalem, A

Yossi and Jagger, here

Z32, here, here, here–here, here–here, here, here

Zionism, here–here, here, here–here, here, see also post-Zionism

Žižek, Slavoj, here, here

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International Library of the Moving Image 11

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