Fall from grace

Fall from grace http://www.haaretz.com/fall-from-grace-1.90476 In examining the photography of Israel's women soldiers, this study discovered how the laws of the state and the army distanced women from combat roles. By Ruti Glick Jun.05, 2003 | 12:00 AM Text size Comments (0) Print Page Send to friend Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share this story is by Ruti Glick When researcher Chava Brownfield-Stein wanted to examine the representation of women in Israel Defense Forces albums during the first decade of the state, she noticed a puzzling phenomenon: a plethora of photographs of women fighters in the ranks of the undergrounds and the Palmach, as compared to their disappearance after the establishment of the state and later in the Sinai Campaign albums. She went to the IDF Archive, the source of the photographs, and there in the cellars she found quite a different picture of reality: dozens of photos of women artillery officers, communications specialists and pilots taken during military activity in the company of male fighters. "Photographs in general, and victory photographs in particular, have become a basic image of the constituting events of Israel, but women soldiers have no visual presence at the climactic military moments of victory," says Brownfield-Stein. "In all the chapters that deal with the Sinai Campaign, for example, there is no trace of female representation, neither at the front nor in the rear, apart from one photograph. The women are cut off from the achievement, even though in fact women soldiers participated in the war effort - as fighters, too - and despite the existence of photographs that document this in the IDF Archive. The victory in the albums is attributed to men only and women's military service in this context remains invisible." Although her research ends at 1958, she also looked at the official albums about the victory and the war in June 1967. There too she found no pictures of women soldiers. The women fighters are absent not only from the victory albums, which were etched into the collective memory in the era before television and were to be found in every home. There were also no women soldiers there in contexts of military professionalism and prestige. While male soldiers are seen mostly in proximity to heavy, sophisticated weapons, such as artillery pieces, planes and ships, women soldiers were mostly photographed holding a rifle. The common image of a woman with a rifle aptly describes in visual language the double message the army sent to women: the creation of an illusion of equality (which for many years also fed into the myth of equality in society) and in fact the reinforcement of the difference and the inferiority of women in the military hierarchy. Thus the army obtained the woman soldier's identification with the military system despite her place on the margins. "A woman with a rifle ostensibly contradicts the stereotype of weak women," she explains, "but the rifle functioned as a less professional weapon, the symbol of the rear and self-defense. The woman soldier is perceived as a civilian in uniform with a rifle and, moreover, most of the photographs do not depict a situation of action, [rather] at the points of contact between the civilian and the military or at ceremonial parades." Clear dominance in the albums is earned by women soldiers serving in roles of care-giving and feeding, education and training, photographed alongside civilians: babies, children, new immigrants and sometimes also sheep and dogs. Even though women served in all the corps, most of them appear in separate chapters devoted to the Women's Corps or chapters with the title "The People's Army." And thus, the woman soldier plays the traditional woman's role in the military framework as well - preparing for a future career as mother, wife and teacher. All this was in accordance with the positions and declarations of the architect of the army and the nation, David Ben-Gurion, who said in his speech at the end of the women commanders' course in 1951: "And this emotion [motherhood] is inherent in the woman even before she becomes a mother - and the army needs this maternal feeling perhaps more than any other public body and organization." `Girls at the front line' This study by Brownfield-Stein, a doctoral student in the gender studies program at Bar-Ilan University, joins a series of studies over the past decade that deal with the critical analysis of the army and various aspects of the militarization of Israeli society. In recent years feminist scholars have also begun to deal with the gender inequality in the army. One recent study (by Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy) showed, for example, that even when women serve in "masculine" jobs, this does not afford them advantages, as it does for men, in civilian life. The pioneer in this research was the late Prof. Dafna Izraeli, who was Brownfield-Stein's supervisor for the study on the albums. The uniqueness of the study by Brownfield-Stein, an artist and art teacher at the Thelma Yellin School for the Arts in Tel Aviv, is the focus on the visual representation in the military culture and the analysis of photographs of women soldiers, an area that has not been researched in Israel until now. The study is interdisciplinary and tries to examine the photography of women soldiers in its ideological contexts, particularly in relation to the laws of the state and the army, which have distanced women from combat roles and channeled them to settlement and education missions, on the seam line between the civilian and the military. "I was interested in the moment of the establishing of the state and the institutionalization of the army," she stresses. "Who is in and who is out, and the changes that took place, as if they were obvious, in the agreement of the majority of the population. Why, for example, did women agree to be kept out of combat roles?" The critical interpretation of the album text also enabled her to follow this process. "A surplus of representations of women in the Palmach, beyond their relative weight, was aimed at reinforcing the myth of equality that had already ostensibly been achieved, and therefore there was no reason that it should cease to exist. Women had already fought and achieved equality. And now it is not the state that is not egalitarian, but the needs have changed, and therefore the women fighters need to do something else." The extent of the degree to which the message was internalized may be learned from the words of a fighter in the Lehi underground whose nom de guerre was Hissia: "The criterion is the ability to give," she wrote in her memoirs, "but it is true that today the demands have changed. There is a need for a lot of physical strength and knowledge, and there is no longer place for girls at the front line. Now our real women fighters are the mothers in the settlements under bombardment." But not all the messages were complex and two-faced, and not all of them are in need of interpretation. Sometimes the photographs simply express stereotypical approaches and perpetuate the image of the woman soldier as pretty and passive. In some of the photographs, she is aware of the camera and posed, and the photograph reflects stasis, inner quiet and beauty. "It's important to me to have her come out beautiful, even if she's a soldier, just to emphasize her beauty. To show that she's feminine," testified the mythological photographer of Training Camp 12, Aharonson. Sometimes the woman is presented as a sex object, with emphasis on her curves, as in a close-up of women's legs in a parade, with the caption: "A display of legs." Sometimes the captions themselves add the focus on the body and appearance ("Every woman wants to see and to be seen," and "Preparing for the enemy and no less important preparing for the beloved"), or the sexist spirit: "Whistle for me and I'll come," is the caption for a photograph of a woman carrying a rifle and emerging from a tent. The sophisticated use of the sense of authenticity in photography while camouflaging the ideological bias it contains has made the photographs of women soldiers into a tool of supervision and control, says Brownfield-Stein. "The albums embodied the inequality between the sexes in the army and made it more extreme through photography, layout, captions and the publication of a certain selection of representations of women soldiers, thus reinforcing the cultural patterns and the ideology that at the same time both included women and excluded them.