Trauma, guilt, forgiveness: The victimizer as witness in the cinematic and televisual representations of conflict in Israel

Abstract

This article deals with the cinematic and televised representations of the Israeli victimizer. The authors seek to examine the political and cultural meanings of these representations in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They consider the evolving changes in the testimony of the victimizer as they have emerged in major works produced by and broadcast on Israeli television during the past two decades. This change has been expressed primarily in the transition from direct testimony about horrors or atrocities to a reflective process that takes into consideration the testimony’s validity, its evasiveness, its aesthetic nature and perhaps even whether the testimony itself is a matter of aesthetics. The article focuses on a number of case studies through which the authors seek to examine the boundaries of the witness’s trauma and the possibilities for the forgiveness he seeks. These cases offer an in-depth look at the collective Israeli psyche, which is haunted not only by the desire to glorify the victim but also includes a narrow space in which the victimizer is able to maneuver. Documentary and semi-documentary works such as these portray the naked Israeli psyche, revealing its repression, its ethical self-flagellation and its strong desire to build a humanistic discourse that takes into account the inability to achieve complete absolution and atonement.