Published: 8 November 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The images doing the rounds form a magnificent piece of visual communication. The top picture is an eloquent Holocaust photograph, showing four women at the front of a massive queue of concentration camp inmates, their eyes averted and their despair obvious.
The lower picture shows four young Israeli women, strong and smiling, looking boldly into the camera as they tote their combat gear and machine guns with the ease of fashion models displaying the latest handbags.
The kicker is in the comment: the young soldiers are the granddaughters of the women in the concentration camp line.
Like so many, my instinct was to “like” and share it – but I didn’t. On principle, I don’t share images that glorify the military – any military – however much I accept the justness of their cause, however moved I am by their emotional content.
I derive this principle from an experience that still chills me, though I was no more than 10 years old and as safe and protected as any Jewish child has ever been. I found myself humming a tune I did not recognise, a melody that had insinuated its way into my head. I’m not very musical so it took me some time to identify its source.
I work in a communications team and I’ve spent most of my life in the media. I have no doubt the IDF media gurus put considerable effort and expertise into the creation of this double image.
The previous night, I had watched an episode of the British television documentary The World at War, which showed German troops parading through the streets of Berlin, accompanied by the Horst Wessel Lied. I am still appalled to think that I was humming a Nazi anthem.
The earworm, of course, had nothing to do with ideology. If I knew more about music, I could probably identify the particular musical relationships that ensured its stirring and satisfying shape and the addictive rhythm which, even now, I find hard to resist. Composers of commercial jingles use the same tricks.
The eyes are equally susceptible. Note the dull flat Holocaust picture and the high contrast light-filled Israeli image; the low depth of field which gives the soldiers a hyper-real definition, the corps de ballet effect of uniforms and synchronised movement.
I don’t know exactly how this image came about. The post I saw was, somewhat ironically, shared by the Jerusalem Channel, a Christian “media ministry”, in whose demographic I am emphatically not. But I work in a communications team and I’ve spent most of my life in the media. I have no doubt the IDF media gurus put considerable effort and expertise into the creation of this double image.
No question, it’s a great story. You have to love the phoenix effect of young life rising from the ashes of the Holocaust, a resonant synecdoche for the entire enterprise of the State of Israel. If the young women had been shown walking along the shores of a Tel Aviv beach in shorts or strolling the old city of Jerusalem in Israeli fashion, I’d have shared it in a flash.
Of course, there might be no Jews in the old city of Jerusalem nor on the beaches of Tel Aviv were it not for the IDF. I’m not questioning the moral right of Israel to defend itself, the need for these young women to be drafted, nor the sacrifice that many have made and continue to make for the country’s security.
War isn’t smiling girls with clean faces and healthy bodies. It’s blood and dirt, maimed limbs and dead children.
But when we aggrandise a tragic necessity, we make war more acceptable. War isn’t smiling girls with clean faces and healthy bodies. It’s blood and dirt, maimed limbs and dead children.
The great English World War I poet Wilfrid Owen expressed it most eloquently when he wrote, “If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/ Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs… you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory/The old lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.”
I learned enough Latin at school to translate the old lie: “It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland”. Then I went to Israel and learned enough Hebrew to translate the words on the memorial to the pioneering Zionist Joseph Trumpeldor. Tov Lamut L'artzeynu: It is good to die for our country.
If it wasn’t true for Owen, it wasn’t true for Trumpeldor. It may be necessary for some to die in defence their home or to protect their freedom. Maybe. But it is never good.
Countries elevate the military because it makes young men (the image notwithstanding, it is usually men) willing to fight and because it eases of the pain of the families left behind. Peace has a much better chance if we don’t think there is anything about war that makes it worth glorifying.
