This article examines the changing roles and perceptions of female soldiers in Israeli cinema, from the traditional stereotypes of the early years to the response of young Israeli women filmmakers in the 2000s to the gender inequality and violence that is an integral part of any military systems. After a survey of the traditional representations of women soldiers and the minor roles they played in early Israeli cinema, we discuss two films by Israeli women filmmakers—Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hager’s fiction film Close to Home (2005) and Tamar Yaron’s documentary To See if I’m Smiling (2007)—which depict the challenges faced by young women who join the IDF aspiring to equal military service. Both films explore the inherent gender bias they encounter and the inevitable moral decline of women soldiers as they are plunged into the violent reality of military occupation.

The Israeli television drama Fauda (Arabic for ‘chaos’) has attracted wide and unprecedented interest in Israel and worldwide. It is an action series about Israeli undercover soldiers (mista’arvim) operating in the occupied territories that charts new ground by revealing the human dimensions of the men and women who grease the war machine in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast to successful Israeli television dramas such as In Treatment (Betipul, Hagai Levy, 2005–2008) and Hostages (Bnei Aruba, Rotem Shamir and Omri Givon, 2010–2012), the plot of Fauda is set far from Israel’s recognizable landscapes, venturing into the territories known to Israeli audiences only from news coverage. Looking for ways to re-humanize the enemy, scriptwriters Lior Raz and Avi Issacharoff turn to melodrama. This article contends that although Fauda may be seen as radical because of its bold dramatic choices, the melodramatic infrastructure tones the show down and imposes a certain aura of conservativeness. As film historian Thomas Elsaesser has observed, ‘the persistence of melodrama might indicate the ways in which popular culture has not only taken note of social crises, but […] has also resolutely refused to understand social change in other than private contexts and emotional terms’.

In the Israeli collective memory, the Yom Kippur’s battles in the Golan Heights have become synonymous with a long lasting national scar that fails to disappear. Interestingly, until the release of Yaron Zilberman’s recent television series Valley of Tears (She’at Ne’Ila, 2020), this war, which was traditionally associated with the pictured northern landscape, had appeared in few documentaries, but was almost absent from Israeli feature films. This article analyzes one of the very few attempts to deal with this memory, Ari Folman’s feature film Made in Israel (2001). Using a science fiction narrative structure, Folman adopts historian Anita Shapira’s contention about the link between this war and the Holocaust, because both confronted the Jewish people with its fear of extermination. His narrative invites the viewer to participate imaginatively in a road movie set against the snow-covered landscapes of the Golan Heights, where a number of hitmen attempt to catch the last surviving Nazi and bring him to trial in Jerusalem. Interestingly, what begins as a Zionist mission in the hegemonic spaces of the State of Israel gradually transforms into various European landscapes as the snow piles up and the Nazi feels increasingly at home.

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, they are quite dissimilar, in that one is a religious command, while the other is an ideological imperative. Both instruct the individual to opt for the obliteration of his past. However, this system does not apply to the protagonists of Three Mothers, a film which follows the extraordinary trajectory of triplet sisters, born to a rich Jewish family in Alexandria, who are forced to leave Egypt after King Farouk’s abdication and immigrate to Israel. This article will demonstrate that Three Mothers represents an outstanding achievement, because it dares to deal with its protagonists’ longing for the world left behind and the complexity of integrating the past into the present. Following Nicholas Bourriaud’s radicant theory, designating an organism that grows roots and adds new ones as it advances, this article will argue that, although the protagonists of Three Mothers never avow their longing for Egypt, the film’s narrative succeeds in revealing a subversive démarche, through which the sisters succeed in integrating Egypt into their present.