The Transition of the Israeli Soldier's Media Image from the Collective to an Individual (original) (raw)
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Modern society recognizes individuals as worthy of consideration each in their own right. The modern individual chooses to join a collective as a way to satisfy needs, but no longer sees him-or herself as obligated to sacrifice in the name of a higher collective good. Yet, while we live in a world that no longer asks what we can do for the collective, but what the collective has done for us lately as individuals, the collective has not entirely lost its importance. This article will look at the complex idea of identity and examine the transition from collective to individual representation through the media image of soldiers in Israel. Soldiers, and the Israel Defence Force (IDF) in general, enjoy a uniquely central position in Israeli society, as will be described at length below. Civil-military scholars in Israel agree that soldiers are a source of public pride and national ethos. Few images in Israel attract as much public attention as soldiers do. For this reason, examining the identity of soldiers is telling of social trends in Israeli society at large and can serve as a litmus test for more general changes in Israeli identity.
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In this article we examine the representation of combat soldiers in Israel through their media image. Using two major national Israeli newspapers, we follow the presentation of the Israeli combat soldier over three decades. Our findings indicate that the combat soldier begins as a hegemonic masculine figure in the 1980s, shifts to a more vulnerable, frightened child in the 1990s, and attains a more complex framing in the 2000s. While this most recent representation returns to a hegemonic masculine one, it includes additional, 'softer' components. We find that the transformation in the image of the Israeli soldier reflects changes within Israeli society in general during the period covered and is also indicative of global changes in masculinity to a certain extent. We conclude by analyzing two possible explanations: the perception of the threat and changes in the perception of masculine identity.
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So, diaper your son with uniforms, give him an antipyretic, anti-innocence military suppository, so that he falls in love with his penis, with the nation's penis, the army's, so that he'll be aroused by the smell of gun powder _. Hey cute victim, what will you be, if you get to be, when you're older? A man and a soldier. And later? A grave.-Yitzhak La'or, Yeru, Yeru, Yerushalayim The Zionist revolution that aimed to create a new people fit for a new land had a unique bodily aspect. Zionism was not just a political and cultural movement of liberation, but also a 'carnal' revolution. For central Zionist thinkers at the beginning of the century (such as Max Nordau or A. D. Gordon), returning to the land of Israel and becoming involved in agriculture would restore the health of Jewish bodies. The Zionist revolution involved a 'return' to Zion, to nature, and to the body. Agriculture, land, territory, and military power were seen as an antidote to what was perceived as the passivity and 'spirituality' of Jews and Judaism in the diaspora. In Max Nordau's term, coined as early as 1898, Zionism was to be 'Judaism with muscles'. The 'muscle Jew' was to replace the pale-faced and thin-chested 'coffeehouse Jew', and to regain the heroism of his forefathers. These themes were commonly cherished rather than criticized in Israeli society and by Israeli sociology, which for a long time has taken an active part in the Zionist project of nation building (see Ram 1989). The same themes, in contrast, have been on the critical agenda of Jewish-American observers. They are, for example, at the heart of