UCLA Center for the Study of Women

On the day that the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was released and returned to Israel after five years of captivity, posters across the country welcomed home the nation’s “lost son,” a title bestowed upon him by public relations experts hired by Shalit’s family. Live coverage of his release received record ratings. Activists, with the help of experts, advanced a sophisticated campaign to secure Shalit’s return, which included national and international rallies, enlistment of celebrities, and wide scale diplomatic efforts, emphasizing Shalit as the son of all Israelis. According to surveys conducted at the time, 80 percent of Israelis supported the prisoner exchange deal that led to Shalit’s freedom. The staging of the return of Israel’s lost son speaks volumes about the ways Israelis want to see themselves and how they view the country’s military body as a site of national agency. Using the Shalit Affair as a pivotal event, I examine Israeli society’s preoccupation with, and exhaustion from, ideologies of war, the military, and a heroic form of masculinity. I utilize three methodological frameworks to reveal how intense interest in the construction of masculinity (as choreographed in Israeli Army training manuals and the media) produces a complex sense of military fatigue. I first conduct a historical reading of Israeli theories of embodied masculinity and I investigate the spread of these codes from the army to Israeli social, cultural and political life. Such an approach lays the groundwork for an analysis of the release of Gilad Shalit in October 2011. I read the Israeli soldier-civilian body as a contested site that challenges, resists, and advances existing concepts of masculinity and nationality. Through an investigation of individual and social agency in the embodiment of ideologies, this presentation questions the role of nationalism in the staging of Shalit’s heroism, and in performing a sense of Israeli national exclusiveness and moral superiority.