Investigating the Israeli Soldier’s Guilt and Responsibility: The case of the NGO “Breaking the Silence”

While technologies of war reporting have been constantly improving, media images have been proliferating but also suffering from increasing lack of credibility. The Israeli NGO “Breaking the Silence”, created a few years ago, tries to answer this challenge by documenting the daily life of soldiers in the occupied territories. The organization proposes filmed testimonies/confessions, which highlight the double role of the soldiers in Tsahal’s military system, both persecutors and as victims. This double role, and this conception of the responsibility of the Israeli soldier, seems to have been the ethical basis of recent Israeli movies dealing with the first Lebanon War: “Beaufort”, “Waltz with Bashir”, and “Lebanon”. It offers the intellectual infrastructure to a denunciation of the military manipulation of young men in the name of patriotism. This is why the documents of “Breaking the Silence” must be interpreted as acts of political resistance.