`Ahmed, my son, how they killed you´; Israeli combat soldiers sing about Palestinians
Liora Sion
The Department for Cross Cultural and Regional Studies
The University of Copenhagen
liorasion@hum.ku.dk
During a fieldwork in 1996, I witnessed a skirmish in the outskirts of Ramallah between Israeli combat reserve soldiers who shot rubber bullets at Palestinians who threw stones and Molotov cocktails. Later, the soldiers gathered in a room, drank coffee and exchanged a rather emotionless account of the event when suddenly they started singing in an exaggerated Arab accent:
Come homo soldier
Come soldier son of a bitch
I’ll screw your mom
Come coward soldier
Come I will screw your mom.
This phenomenon that I coin as narrating the enemy was quite common among infantry combat soldiers in Israel in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was characterizes by ambivalent empathy towards Palestinian insurgents. In the songs, soldiers adopted the voice and perspective of the Palestinians, yet mocked them at the same time. In other versions, the songs ended with the death of the Palestinian. The song above, although adopts the Palestinian voice, ridicules him at the same time by "adopting" an Arab accent which is a marker of low class and ridicule.
How can we analyse these songs especially in light of the current academic literature?
After all, there is almost a consensus among researchers that maintaining a physical separation between soldiers and their opponents is vital for effectively killing enemy combatants. The process of creating a divide between soldiers and enemies, "enemy making," describes the process by which individuals or groups develop hostile attitudes or view others as enemies.
By creating a sense of distance or otherness between themselves and the enemy, soldiers may be more willing to engage in violent acts and less likely to feel empathy or compassion for their opponents. Thus, the social dynamics of face-to-face violent confrontation, argues Malešević (2022), is still largely under-analyzed, under-theorized, and not well understood. Furthermore, there is neither much scholarly attention to enemy making in the context of the Israeli Palestinian conflict in particular nor on neighbouring ethno-national communities in intractable conflict in general.
This paper focuses on face to face fighting and empathy by examining how Israeli combat soldiers perceive the Palestinian Other during three periods of time: the first intifada (1987-1991), the second intifada (2000-2005), and the last two decades. Based on fieldwork, interviews and war songs analysis, I argue that there is a correlation between the intimacy of violence and the perception of the enemy. In other words, face-to-face fighting is characterizes by soldiers´ empathy towards their enemy, while remote fighting leads to mechanism of distancing and hatred.
While the first intifada was largely characterized by mass protests, boycotts, stone throwing and civil disobedience to the Israeli occupation, the second intifada was marked by more intense and sustained violence. While the First Intifada is best remembered by the minister of defense, Yitzhak Rabin, who instructed soldiers to break Palestinians’ arms and legs, the second uprising was characterized by suicide bombings, rocket attacks, and other acts of terrorism by Palestinian militant groups, as well as by Israeli military incursions and targeted assassinations.
I argue that the face-to-face, almost intimate violent confrontations during the first intifada triggered empathy among combat soldiers. This empathy is based on some sort of similarity. To empathize with someone is to put oneself in his place. Yet, this form of empathy is based not necessarily on categorical identification, but on some sort of comparable experience.
Narrating the enemy is not that rare and definitely not unique to Israeli soldiers. According to Hogan (2001), adopting a “victim perspective” can be found in the Iliad, the Japanese Tale of the Heike, India’s Sanskrit epic, Mahabharata, and the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh. In these heroic tales, the author’s sympathy may go to the victim of the principled action. These heroic tales include an odd ending, “epilogue of suffering” which involves a turn from the triumph of the hero to the sorrow of those who have been defeated.
In my presentation I shall analyze Israeli war songs from the first intifada, continue with the second intifada and culminating with the last decade. I shall follow the image of the Other from first to third person and then to its disappearance. To compliment these songs, I shall also utilize the biblical song of Deborah and verses by the biblical Samson.