From cultural agents to policy designers: Bereaved parents, the 'Lebanese experience' and the politicization of Israeli military loss

This article examines the circumstances in political culture for the reversal of orientation among bereaved parents of fallen Israeli soldiers with regard to their support of government military policy beginning in the early 1980s. Prior to this period, the Israeli establishment targeted and mobilized bereaved parents to speak for the fallen in terms of sacrifice for the state and to conjure up the heroic circumstances of their deaths. A panoply of cultural artefacts associated with remembrance and commemoration of soldiers who died in Israel's military campaigns was employed in the mobilization of this parental support. A change in parental response took place during and following the First Lebanese War (1982) which entailed a transformation of their status from providers of legitimacy for security policy to critics who sought to influence that policy and limit the scope of operational violence managed by its formulators. To the extent that some of the cultural elements were intractably linked with the establishment, they were abandoned, but many remained and took on new social and ideological forms to suit the critical stance of the parents toward military policy. The phenomenon is being analyzed as moving from de-politicization to politicization of bereavement and loss.