Silences and Silencing: Revisiting “Life-Stories of War Veterans” (vol. 11, 1997)

Revisiting the original article and its reception reveals how Israeli society addresses the threat to its self-image as a just society whose soldiers remain moral even under military conditions, shaped by the chief task: maintaining the occupation. The reflexive reading of the narratives of the Yom Kippur War’s veterans alongside new studies on other generations of combatants (those of the War of Independence, on the one hand, and those serving in the Occupied Territories, on the other) shows that among the strategies of contending with this threat are management of the soldiers’ emotions and development of silencing mechanisms that mediate the encounter between soldiers and military violence.