IDF Forces Return to Beaufort, Reopening an Old Story
1 Popular culture is one of the most effective mechanisms societies have for dealing with the trauma of war. It translates trauma into books, series, and films, turns horror into an aesthetic object with a beginning, middle, and end, and in this way allows the war to be placed on the shelves of the archive, with everyone thinking the wound has healed. ● 100 years since the musical genius who taught an entire industry to leave its comfort zone ● We all need grace: on the bottom line of the Book of Ruth
Beaufort is an example of this interplay between culture and war in Israel. For decades, several works shaped the way this ridge was seen, trying to give it meaning. The actual explosion of the outpost on the night of the withdrawal in 2000, along with the film’s arrival in cinemas and at the Oscars ceremony, was felt as a kind of closure offered by art to a generational trauma. The reports from last week, which announced the physical return of IDF forces to that same mountain, seem to reopen what had been closed.
2 This coping mechanism is not new. Its clearest model was formulated in Hollywood and in American literature after the Vietnam War. For two decades, popular culture in the United States moved along a path meant to tame trauma. It began by examining the wound at home in films such as “The Deer Hunter” (Michael Cimino, 1978) and “Coming Home” (Hal Ashby, 1978). It then plunged into the Sisyphean jungle of “Platoon” (Oliver Stone, 1986) and the urban jungle of “Full Metal Jacket” (Stanley Kubrick, 1987) in order to fence in the horror.
Beaufort followed a similar evolutionary path. The first station was marked by the publication of Rubik Rosenthal’s book, “Beaufort Family” (1989), written after the death of his brother in the battle on the first day of the First Lebanon War. Popular culture then focused the gaze on the Israeli home front. The story was experienced mainly through monologues by parents, siblings, and other family members. Rosenthal’s Beaufort served as an anchor for a broader social debate, and the mountain was seen as a weight resting on the shoulders of Israeli society as a whole. The central questions that emerged were questions of cost, meaning, and national consensus.
3 Two decades later, the cultural gaze evolved. Ron Leshem’s book “If There Is a Heaven” (2005) erased the home front, the families, and the Israeli living room completely from the frame. The major public and political debate was taken over by an inward turn into the sweaty military reality of the outpost. The story was written entirely in an internal military language, rhythmic, with the smell of diesel and gunpowder, and with intense comradeship among fighters that creates a complete separation between those on the mountain and those who are not. Beaufort changes from a national strategic objective into a sealed-off entity. A physical labyrinth in which a group of young people are not interested in ideology or victory, only in how to get down the mountain alive.
4 The move from the page to the film frame in 2007 turned realism into abstraction. In “Beaufort,” Joseph Cedar distilled the book’s tangible reality into a rather radical choice, a war film with no visible enemy. The move echoes films such as “Hamburger Hill” (John Irvin, 1987), in which the fighting is not between soldiers but a Sisyphean climb against a mountain from whose trees fire bursts forth. The fire in “Beaufort” also comes from the sky, like fate or a higher power. Missiles fall, explosives detonate, and there is no front line or target to storm.
The main difference is that Hollywood defined this horror through wild landscapes, mud, and endless nature that swallows human beings, while Cedar’s film trapped its heroes in an alien concrete box. Perhaps this contrast reveals a fundamental gap between American and Israeli anxieties. American cinema dealt with the trauma of movement and invasion into a foreign space that ends in flight, while Cedar presented a uniquely Israeli anxiety of entrenchment. Fighters who become psychologically and physically captive inside fortified walls our forces poured.
5 This abstraction made the work a universal text, and it is probably also the key that carried the film to the shortlist of five nominees for the Foreign Language Oscar. Hollywood, which was then occupied with processing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, recognized in “Beaufort” the modern formula of anti-war films. Without flags or the enemy’s face, only a portrait of human helplessness in the face of an alien mechanism, a move that reached its peak a year later with Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir,” which took the same war into the realms of surreal and psychedelic animation.
The way culture fenced in trauma was by removing it from its political context and turning it into an international spectacle about existential loneliness. The delicate balance between the abstract and the universal reaches its peak in a scene that serves as a link between the gaze of the 1980s and that of the 2000s. In the dark bunker, the soldiers watch television, which mediates for them what is happening on the home front. On the screen, the father of one of the newly fallen soldiers beats his breast and confesses that he failed to warn his son about the mountain, as one warns a small child not to run into the road. In this scene, Cedar brings the “living room conversation” from Rosenthal’s book, the therapeutic language of bereavement of the parents’ generation, into the soldiers’ space. It is a beautiful representation of the gap between the generation that sought social meaning and the generation that had to cope with the arbitrariness of danger. Death in battle is already stripped of ethos, becoming an accidental event to be guarded against.
6 The explosion of the Beaufort outpost on the night of the withdrawal in 2000 was then felt as an absolute ending. The monster was defeated, the fighters came down, and the generational trauma was officially filed away in the archive, ready to be revisited in the cinematheque, the living room, or the library. But the news from this week proves, for the umpteenth time, that the mountain refuses to remain an artistic object. It forces us to acknowledge that our foundational cultural texts will probably never be closed. They will only wait for the next generation to read them under fire.
