Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
The October 1973 war was not just a military
collapse on the Israeli frontier; it was a psychological and existential earthquake that shattered the myth of the “Invincible Army”.
When the Israeli military and political
establishment could not absorb the shock of the surprise attack and the Egyptian crossing, the film industry stepped in to piece the collective
consciousness back together.
The job of this industry was to craft a new
image that could salvage some dignity for Israel that had grown arrogant through sheer force.
The strategy in this respect was clever. It did
not deny the defeat, but tried to reframe it. It did this by shifting the focus from intelligence failure and strategic incompetence to the human frailty of the Israeli soldier.
In this new narrative, fighters are not seen
responsible for national humiliation. They are rather victims who suffer.
The real aim was to domesticate the defeat,
turning a heavy military disaster into an epic of steadfastness and sacrifice that both the Israeli public and the outside world could swallow.
Israeli cinema after 1973 changed direction
completely. The post-1967 films had shown Israeli soldiers as brave, effortless, almost superhuman.
The post-trauma films lingered on fear,
confusion, and weakness. Cameras fixed on panicked eyes in trenches under relentless shelling. The film’s message was clear: Israeli soldiers did not lose because they were inadequate, but because they faced conditions beyond human endurance.
Simply surviving, or standing by a comrade,
became a kind of humanitarian victory that washed away the shame of military failure. The war was stripped of its political and geographic meaning as a battle for land and reduced to individual tragedy and personal salvation.
Israeli films leaned hard into military
fellowship, being keen to showcase shared tears over fallen friends, the messy details of pulling the wounded to safety, the torn feelings of families.
At the same time, a new strand of cinema emerged around the post-traumatic stress disorder, the care of widows, and the injured,
generating collective solace at home and sympathy abroad.
All that emotional weight was meant to drown out the fundamental questions people were actually asking: How did these losses
happen? Why? And who was responsible?
Before the cameras even started their repair
work, the military and security establishment, working with military censorship, built a thick wall of silence and disinformation.
In the first days, after the Bar-Lev Line
fortifications were stormed and destroyed and the number of prisoners became shameful, an absolute blackout was imposed.
Vague statements claimed attacks were being
successfully repelled. Fake reports suggested Israeli forces were approaching Cairo and Damascus.
The public shock was enormous when the real
facts began to surface. The army’s media apparatus then seized on the later breakthrough – the gap in the lines – and inflated it into a decisive victory that supposedly cancelled out the earlier defeat, papering over how close the entire entity had come to collapse without outside help.
The official version, and later the Agranat
Commission, pinned everything on individual intelligence failures by a few commanders.
The message was that the military system itself
remained structurally sound. Pseudo-heroic icons were manufactured around battles like the Chinese Farm or the Golan Heights, complete with epic stories about fragile victories designed to stir pride in the fighting spirit and distract from leaders who fled and from catastrophic strategic mistakes.
This partnership between military deception and cinematic humanisation did not fade. In the new millennium, it became an institutional habit, using modern visual technology and global streaming platforms to push the Israeli version of events with multimillion-dollar
productions.
Amos Gitai’s Kippur (2000) is the purest example of chaotic humanism. Viewers are dropped into mud, blood, and the screams of a
rescue helicopter crew. War becomes a natural disaster that happens to powerless soldiers, with almost no reference to plans or movements on the ground.
The series Valley of Tears (2020) poured on
emotional intensity through highly specific characters, a brilliant autistic recruit and a father searching for his son, so the audience bonds with individuals instead of examining the system.
The Stronghold (2023) reworks the humiliating
siege of Port Said, the moment of military surrender is presented as a doctor’s ethical decision to inject blood and protect the sanctity of life, turning defeat into something almost noble.
And Golda (2023) extends the humanisation
upward, dwelling on Golda Meir’s physical suffering – cancer, cigarettes, and nightmares of guilt – so she appears as a tormented mother and grandmother rather than a leader who ignored clear intelligence warnings.
Egyptian cinema, on the other hand, took the
opposite path. It did not humanise the occupier. It dismantled the military and psychological myth by sticking to the facts of the victory and the crossing.
Early films like The Bullet Is Still in My
Pocket and The Great Fulfillment showed Israeli soldiers as dependent on machines, technology, and the concrete of the Bar-Lev Line.
Once forced into direct confrontation with
Egyptian fighters, these soldiers collapsed and panicked – proof that the “Invincible Army” doctrine was hollow.
Later films pushed further, highlighting the
aggressive ideology and sadism towards civilians and prisoners.
In Song on the Passage and the 2019 film The
Passage, the arrogant officer David takes open pleasure in torture; the war ends only when his military pride is broken, stripping the occupier of any claim to moral restraint on the battlefield.
In the end, military propaganda and cinematic
humanization formed a single defence system for absorbing defeat.
Israeli cinema turned human weakness, tears, and the admission of fear into a soft shield that protected fighters and commanders
from real historical accountability while securing lasting international sympathy.
Egyptian cinema kept its eyes on the major
results on the ground, including the breaking of arrogance and the recovery of the land.
Israeli cinema chose the psychological interior
and the culture of denial, manufacturing a directed human tragedy out of its own collapse.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
[email protected]
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