Gender and Sexuality in Israeli Graphic Novels

Matt Reingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how Israeli graphic novelists present depictions of masculinity and femininity that differ from conventional portrayals of gender in Israeli society, rejecting the ways that hypermasculinity and docile femininity have come to be associated with men and women.

The book is the first to explore Israeli graphic novels through the lens of gender. It argues that breaking down existing gender delineations with regards to masculinity and femininity is a core feature of the Israeli graphic novel and comics tradition and that through their works, the authors and artists use their platforms to present a freer and looser conceptualization of gender for Israeli society. Undertaking close readings of Israeli graphic novels that have been published in English and/or Hebrew in the last 20 years, the book's texts include Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds and The Property, Ari Folman and David Polonsky's Waltz with Bashir, Galit and Gilad Seliktar's Farm 54, and Asaf Hanuka's "The Realist".

This book is of interest to students and scholars in comics studies, Israel Studies, Jewish Studies, and Gender Studies.

1Complex masculinities and the not-so-macho man in Israeli graphic novels

Situated within a society that established its gender norms primarily with regards to how men should behave, Israeli graphic novels have offered a number of alternative constructions of masculine identity. In this chapter, I explore four graphic novels set during different periods of Israel’s history. What links them together is a consistent refrain that the hegemonic model that carried the country from its infancy through its first 65 years is no longer applicable or effective for understanding the myriad ways that men perform their body politics. Instead, texts that challenge the primacy of the narrative of the soldier who bravely sacrifices himself for the nation and of the strong and emotionally distant man are dismissed as irrelevant for today’s Israeli male. In their place are masculine constructs which recognize the importance of vulnerability, fatherhood, insecurity, and compassion. These texts depict men who grapple with what it means to be a man in the twenty-first century, and while they do not arrive at the same conclusions or identities, their results demonstrate the constructions of multiple sites of masculinity within Israeli society.

The four texts that I will be focusing on in this chapter are Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Waltz with Bashir, Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds, Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka’s Pizzeria Kamikaze, and Asaf Hanuka’s “The Realist”.¹ Waltz with Bashir is an autobiographical exploration of Ari Folman’s inability to remember his role as a soldier during Israel’s war with Lebanon in 1982 and his quest to recover his memories and discover whether he participated in a massacre against Palestinian civilians. Set against the backdrop of the Second Palestinian Intifada which occurred from 2000 to 2005, Exit Wounds is a story about Numi, a young Israeli woman who encourages her fellow Israeli Koby to try to determine whether his estranged father Gabriel was killed in a recent suicide bombing. Pizzeria Kamikaze is a story set in a fictional Tel Aviv necropolis where all of the city’s residents are individuals who died by suicide. There, Mordy first tries to find his former girlfriend Desiree, but eventually realizes that he is actually in love with Leehee, a woman that he has met in the afterlife following his suicide. Lastly, Asaf Hanuka’s “The Realist” is an editorial cartoon series that is published in the Israeli economic newspaper Calcalist. Each weekly installment addresses how Hanuka navigates an issue or challenge that is affecting his life. Sometimes these are national issues, like the schism between secular and religious Jews or the high cost of living, but oftentimes they are personal issues, like how to raise his children or how to communicate effectively with his wife.

Compassionate soldiers in Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir (2009) revolves around former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldier Ari Folman’s discovery that he possesses no memories from his time spent serving in Lebanon during the 1982 First Lebanon War. Among the texts considered in this chapter, it is the one that most directly questions the masculine nature of Israeli soldiers and the ways that young men are expected to perform heroic masculinity on the battlefield. Over the course of the work, Folman deconstructs many of the central tenets of Israeli masculinity, especially the ways that soldiers are lionized for their bravery and commitment to the country. Folman worries that he must have done something so terrible and awful that his mind has blocked out the memory in order to protect himself from his own violent crimes. In order to determine the truth, Folman meets with fellow soldiers with whom he served in Lebanon, a psychologist who specializes in recovering lost memories, and a television reporter who was on the scene in Lebanon during the war. The text rapidly cuts across time and space, creating a feeling of disambiguation that mirrors Folman’s own uncertainties. Eventually, Folman comes to learn that while he did not directly play a role in the deaths of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila he knew what was happening during the attacks. To his horror and shame, he remembers that he saw the crimes being committed because he lit flares so that the Christian Lebanese militia could see at night while they were murdering Palestinians.

Waltz with Bashir was originally released as an animated Hebrew-language film in 2008 and published as an English-language graphic novel shortly thereafter in 2009 by Metropolitan Books. Both the film and graphic novel were produced by the Israeli team of director Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky. The two have subsequently collaborated on an animated film about Anne Frank and a graphic novel adaptation of her famous diary. Waltz with Bashir has received considerable scholarly and popular attention. The film won the 2009 Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and its Israeli equivalent, the Ophir, in 2008. It was also nominated for dozens of additional awards at film festivals and ceremonies including the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, the 2009 Academy Awards, and the 2009 BAFTAs. Given Waltz with Bashir’s initial release in Hebrew, the text is primarily designed by Israelis and for Israelis. In the work, Folman draws a portrait of the Israeli soldier at his most vulnerable. While deeply personal, the text is also an indictment of the nation and its leadership for the way that it conducted itself during the First Lebanon War. Visually, the graphic novel is a collection of the stills from the animated film. Bodily depictions are raw and edgy, with dark and rough shading throughout. Folman and Polonsky employ a number of aesthetic features throughout the text. These include splash pages which highlight and emphasize certain actions and small, highly condensed panels which slow the pacing down, forcing the reader to carefully parse the events that took place in Lebanon.

In his depictions of soldiers and their experiences, Folman challenges hegemonic Israeli attitudes towards both the military and masculinity. In Folman, Yael Munk sees an author whose work is “unprecedented” in Israeli society for his willingness to “come to terms with a terrible, repressed traumatic past … and the atrocities carried out in the name of his country, the country that he as a soldier represented”.² Rachel S. Harris locates Waltz with Bashir as part of an extended Israeli creative process by filmmakers who challenge the nation’s foundational myths.³ As noted in the introduction, given that the military is the main way that socialization occurs for men in Israeli society, it therefore also creates the dominant construct of masculinity for the country. This masculinity is one that is aggressive and confident, and that is built on the backs of young men who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good of the nation. Philip Hollander identifies in the way that Folman speaks to his friends, listens to their words, and builds a community around empathy and nurturing a direct challenge to the ways that masculinity has been historically constructed in the state.⁴

A central feature of Waltz with Bashir’s critique of traditional Israeli masculinity is the way that the relationship between the soldiers is depicted as one where they care, and where they consider the psychological impact of their actions on each other. Hollander has noted how Waltz with Bashir “expands the masculine purview by stressing the importance of biological paternity and male nurturing”.⁵ Early in the text, Boaz Rein, one of Folman’s fellow soldiers, explains to him that during their encampment he was dispatched to kill a group of dogs that might alert the Lebanese to the Israeli soldiers’ presence. Boaz explains that he was chosen for this role because “[his commander] knew [he] was incapable of shooting people”.⁶ Despite being illustrated with eyes wide with fear, Boaz’s vulnerability and inability to fulfil a central component of soldierly duty, that is, shooting an enemy to kill him, does not earn him derision or scorn. Instead, his fellow soldiers find other, more palatable roles for him within the confines of the army. While the nature of brotherhood within the army is to be expected, that even someone who so clearly fails to live up to the hegemonic ideal is welcomed suggests an alternative understanding of what the bond that actually exists is.

What emerges most clearly from all of the soldiers’ wartime recollections is that Boaz is not an outlier. While other soldiers might have been more willing to pull the trigger than Boaz, each soldier fails – in some very real way – to live up to the hegemonic ideal. For example, Carmi worries that “everyone around [him] was screwing like rabbits while [he] was the nerd winning all the chess competitions”.⁷ Folman is angry his girlfriend has dumped him while he is a soldier away at war and he hopes he dies so that she feels guilty forever. The soldier sitting next to Ronnie Dayag was shot and Ronnie failed to return fire and instead ran away. In his moment of panic, he worries about his mom and what she will do without him. Ronnie eventually finds his way back to his platoon after wandering for miles around Lebanon’s beaches, and even though he “had the feeling they saw [him] as someone who’d deserted his friends”,⁸ this is not how his fellow soldiers treat him, as they welcome him back and celebrate that he is still alive. Even though Carmi notes that he thought he was “the only one with masculinity problems”,⁹ the platoon’s behaviors suggest that everyone struggles with the impossible expectations foisted upon them by Israeli society, and that they all know this on some level even if they fail to verbalize it and actively discuss it. Protecting Boaz and not shunning him, and welcoming Ronnie back and not humiliating him, reinforce the notion of militaristic brotherhood, but these incidents challenge the nature of that brotherhood as one not built on shared manly experiences but as one that recognizes the isolation that each feels and the need to protect each other from those outside of the troop who might question their masculine identities.

The ultimate failure to critically engage with their fears and worries is what leads to the lingering psychological wounds from their time in the army. Because of the weight of masculine expectations, no one spoke to Ronnie about how he was feeling about knowing he did not defend his fellow soldiers the way he was expected to, and as a result, he still feels guilty when he visits military cemeteries, and he ultimately still feels alone. In one of the most haunting images of the text, Ronnie is depicted as himself in the present, walking the deserted Lebanese coast of 1985, looking for his fellow soldiers (Figure 1.1). Despite the passage of time, Ronnie remains stuck in 1985. Similarly, everyone’s inability to remember where they were during the war’s most infamous moments outside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps reinforces the psychological wounds that the young men experienced. This inability to remember that they were perched atop rooftops lighting the night’s sky testifies to their unpreparedness for war and for serving as soldiers in a war that they neither understood nor wanted to be a part of. The platoon, suggests Folman, is not a group of macho men who have set out to defend the country. Instead, they are a group of young men who have been assigned a task that challenges their morals and ethics and for which they are unprepared.

Figure 1.1Ronnie walking on the Lebanese beach. Credit: Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with Bashir (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009): 45.

At one point, Folman and his fellow soldiers try to call attention to the massacre of Palestinians but are rebuffed by the Israeli political elite. Gorging on steak served on fine china, Israeli Minister of Defence Ariel Sharon is depicted as indifferent to both the physical devastation of Palestinian lives and also the psychological devastation of his troops who want to stop the massacre but are told to stay clear of it. Writing about this scene, Hollander persuasively argues that men like Sharon perform “amoral masculinity” through the “maintenance of outdated masculine standards”.¹⁰ Remaining committed to the hegemonic ideal of soldierly masculinity among Israeli soldiers obfuscates the reality of the soldiers’ experiences and ultimately comes to harm the soldiers, both affecting them when they are serving in combat and causing their inability to successfully navigate their post-army lives, given how deeply so many of the men featured in Waltz with Bashir remain psychologically wounded in the present. It is only through Folman’s willingness to talk to his fellow soldiers, to provide them opportunities to unburden themselves from their traumas and histories, that they are all able to collectively remember what happened and to begin the process of healing from the First Lebanon War.

Reconciling Romantics in Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds

Published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2007 and a recipient of the prestigious Eisner Award, Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds is a story set during the Second Palestinian Intifada which took place in Israel between September 2000 and February 2005. Modan is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and she serves as a professor in its communication department. Modan’s significance within...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Complex masculinities and the not-so-macho man in Israeli graphic novels
• 2 Outspoken and adventurous women in Israeli graphic novels
• 3 Gender, minorities, and the Hebrew graphic novel
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index