| This dissertation heeds the experience of Israeli battle-shock. The project renders side by side my prior professional experience as an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) nurse along with my later readings in performance studies, focusing primarily on Walter Benjamin's writing.; Next is a roadmap of the chapters, proceeding from historical to theoretical. The Introduction offers a view of Israeli actuality as it gleans from recent media accounts collective Israeli perspectives on battle-shock. Also presented here are excerpts from interviews I conducted with IDF veterans, most of whom I met during the Lebanon War. Chapter I undertakes a historical as well as phenomenological dissection of military society. Preparing to discuss battle-shock as the malfunction of the military, this chapter submits that the modern (Western) military is paradigmatic for historical study. Chapter II registers the historiographical authority of battle-shock. Surveying disciplines such as medicine and psychiatry, the chapter dictates that battle-shock reproduces war. Furthermore, here is profiled this experience of war. Next, Chapter III states the particular Israeli crisis wherein the 1982 Lebanon War culminates in “an age of disbelief.” A by-product of the post-'82 discourse, the written form of helem-krav (previously applied to battle-related trauma) has been expelled from the lexicon and is now denied entry into discourse. Materializing as the repercussion of the Israeli crisis, Chapter IV (tangentially) undertakes to theorize Israeli battle-shock from the unrelenting distance of a diaspora by way of introducing the nascent discipline of trauma studies. Chapter V charts Benjamin's conceptualization of correspondences. These alliances form by means of a transparency in the original which dictates that the latter be read indirectly. Regardful of the inaccessibility by which phenomena disclose themselves to understanding, Benjamin's thinking reaffirms the possibility of historical cognition. This chapter proclaims the promise of a historiography of Israeli battle-shock. Finally, the Conclusion assesses the odds of a historiographical account by debating the idea of diaspora. Offering the notion of diaspora as one which is not necessarily propagated by a physical removal from a homeland, this last section marks the promise of diasporic writing. |
