תמורות במתחם המצבה בבתי הקברות הצבאיים כראי לשינויים בחברה הישראלית

What has always made military cemeteries in the Western world unique is that they are a creation of the state, and have honored the demand for uniformity in graves and tombstones. A military cemetery conveys the state's collective identity as well as its myths and ethos. This article surveys the dramatic change that has taken place in the scenery of the Israeli military cemeteries since the establishment of the state and until today — the scenery has been transposed from a "collective scenery" to an "individualistic scenery." The article argues that these changes reflect the deep shifts in Israeli society — from a previously collective society to the current individualistic society. One could have expected that in such a hallowed institution for Israeli society as the military cemetery — an institution that constitutes a building block of Israeli identity — the collective universal Israeli character, which finds expression in the uniformity and the equality of the tombstones, would have been preserved over time if not in perpetuity. This did not prove to be the case. The embellishments in all their variety on the tombstones, the changes in the uniform inscription, the legal recognition of the families' right to a personal inscription, the phenomenon of substituting compatible stones for the gravestones, and the placement of the fallen soldiers' portraits on the tombstones — all this in contravention of the law — constitute expressions of the transition to individualism in this sphere as well. From a physical and visual standpoint, the individualization processes in the military cemeteries have turned the Israeli military cemetery from a mono-hued scenic element, as until and through the 1970s, into a multivariate scenic element. This compares with the military cemetery in North America and Western Europe, where the mono-hued scenery has been preserved.