Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 15 2. Many of the characters in these texts lose their minds, get hospitalized in institutions for the mentally ill, or otherwise disappear from society. For example, in Ta’atu’on a strange and noisome odor comes from Holy, the protagonist, who serves as an Israeli soldier in the Palestinian territories which Israel occupies. Only after he is forced to take a shower it is understood that this smell – symbolizing the situation as a whole – cannot be changed, and he is hospitalized in an institution for the mentally ill. Shortly afterward, another soldier from his unit, Michael, is also hospitalized there. The other two main characters of the novel have no better future: Holy’s father disappears, while the forth character gets fired and his end is likewise unknown. A few other examples of the same phenomena are: Chava and Kita, a daughter and her mother, both lose their minds and die in A Good Arab ( Aravi Tov ) by Kaniuk (1984). In almost every movie about the Lebanon war, like Ricochet ( Shtei Etzbaot mitzidon ) and Time for Cherries , some of the Israeli soldiers become mentally unstable. In The Smile of the Lamb the Arab Hilmi completely mixes fiction and reality, he lives in an almost imagined world of his own, which distances him from his society. But this made-up world of his is the reason that the Israeli officer Uri tries to connect with him and learn how to leave in a world that is detached from reality. Based on Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965), Benziman (2011) claims that the societies that continue to function despite painful conflicts should be questioned, and not the characters who are unable to live a normal life in them: the mentally ill, who are removed from them, seem to be messengers of the insight that it is the conflict itself that is insane and that people cannot contain it. The fact that these societies seem to function in the midst of the conflict and to expel those who try to convey a message about its terrible effects can provide better testimony about the conflict than about the characters that, understandably, cannot live in a reality full of hatred and violence. Therefore, the majority of texts dealing with the conflict at the 1980s, while presenting characters that lose their minds, actually tell us something about the conflict which is crazy, illogical, and not understandable, in which normal people cannot live. This, once again, is in contrast to growing tendencies in Israel at the time to understand the conflict, put sense into it, rationalize it, and understand how it can be solved in a logical and rational way. 3. The texts tell a story in which the conflict is not only tragic but also offers no optimistic future hope. All these texts have bad, tragic and unhappy endings. In almost every text that deals with the conflict in the 1980s, death is an important