My heart belongs to Mama
While the tough Palmachnik was embarrassed by his mother and considered her a nuisance, today's soldier has no problem about going home to Mommy. How much did the Four Mothers organization have to do with the change?
The Israeli soldier leaving Lebanon also took his mother out with him.
"Mommy, we're out of Lebanon forever," soldiers were heard reporting
over and over again as they were photographed passing cell phones among
themselves. The exit from Lebanon revealed a new public image of mothers among
the military. In fact, those soldiers conferred legitimacy on a new aspect of
the Jewish soldier's image: the mama's boy.In recent years, mothers became an
integral part of the ongoing occupation in Lebanon. Every story of a soldier
going north to Lebanon was accompanied by a tale of his mother worrying, not
sleeping, waiting for a telephone call to hear that he was OK. Mothers - not
fathers or girlfriends waiting at home - represented the vulnerable side, the
human side of the soldier in Lebanon, the child in him. Worried fathers were
more or less left out of the story - perhaps because they too, in one way or
another, are also soldiers.
Mothers and fathers have always worried about their sons going away to
war. But until the last decade, their concern was not treated with much
empathy, neither in the youth culture nor in the IDF culture. The long road
traveled by the Israeli soldier's mother, up to the moment when her son is
photographed telephoning to say he was out of Lebanon, is reflected in the
youth culture of the last decades. One way to learn about this culture is to
look at the popular books that youngsters read over and over again.
Veteran army commanders, who were youngsters in the 1940s and '50s, grew
up with the image of a mother who was totally extraneous to the field of action
of the daring, adventurous sabra youth. War stories about the sabra-soldier
usually had no mother at all on the scene. Elik, the quintessential Palmachnik
from "Bemo Yadav" ("With His Own Hands," 1951) by Moshe
Shamir, one of the outstanding authors of the War of Independence generation,
"was born from the sea." Obviously he had parents, but even as a
child, he was teased by his family for his vagueness concerning his origins.
Like many literary heroes, Elik left home for the collective Hebrew experience
(an agricultural school) when he was just 16. His next stage in life was to
volunteer for the Palmach, a step that was taken for granted and did not entail
any display of emotional conflict with parents. Not only that: His becoming a
soldier made it almost compulsory for him to leave home entirely.
But the mother of the Jewish soldier was not always absent from the army
environment that the youngsters read about. Sometimes she turned up there,
looking absolutely ridiculous because of her over-anxiety - a "Yiddishe
mama" figure who simply did not understand that she did not belong there
at all. She symbolized, in fact, the boundaries of the Israeli youth collective.
One of the most popular books among youth in the late '50s and early
'60s was Puchu's "Havura Shekazot" ("A Gang Like This,"
1958). It describes one of the most blatant examples of the embarrassment and
scorn that can occur in a meeting between a mother and her soldier son. Out of
the blue, the mother of Yossinyu, a raw recruit in the gang's boot camp, shows
up one day. When she arrives, Yossinyu is not in the tent, and one of the gang
members (the narrator) goes out to look for him. Yossinyu is eventually found,
immersed in the urine pit in the cowshed. And when he hears that his mother has
come to visit him, the reaction is this: "I thought that he'd rather fall
back in the pit. 'What do you mean, she's here? Go and tell her to go away.
What am I, a baby? I told her not to come. Not to dare to come. Go and tell her
to go back. I don't want her - all the guys will laugh at me.'"
The dejected Yossinyu goes to have a shower. Meanwhile, his mother, who
hears that he had fallen into the pit, worriedly rushes to him, straight to the
shower. "The shout of 'Yossinyu' that broke forth from his mother shocked
him. He lifted up his head, and at the sight of the woman entering, he lost his
equilibrium. Instinctively he tried to hold onto his clothes that were on a
hanger, and for a moment managed to keep his balance, but the clothes were
dragged off and were pulled after him onto the damp floor. 'Yossinyu, are you
alive?' she called out joyously, hugging him without paying attention to the
stream of flowing water. He pushed her away from him and asked angrily, 'Why
did you come?'"
The comic climax comes in the next scene, in which the mother asks to
speak to the commanding officer. In order to prevent such an embarrassment,
Yoske dresses up as the officer and talks to her with due seriousness about her
needless worry over her son. "Before, I was like a friend for him, and now
he's ashamed of me. He's even stopped writing home," she complains in a
scene that, viewed though contemporary eyes, seems amazingly cruel.
Children's literature of that generation also willingly gave up on a
wise and sympathetic maternal presence. In total contrast to children's
literature of the last decade, every proper sabra adventure began in a place
where mothers were absent. That was the case of "Shomnah Be'ikvot
Ehad" ("Eight On The Heels of One," 1945) by Yemima
Avidar-Chernovitz, a tale of the semi-military adventure of a group of
children: The youngsters catch a German spy and thus assist in the defense of
the northern border in the first years of World War II. All this happens in a
setting that is parent-free and, above all, mother-free.
Hagai, a child from Haifa, goes to the kibbutz in order to escape the
Italian bombing of his city. There he joins up with the Ayala Group, and from
then on the way is open for adventure. At the height of the drama, when the
children in the group are energetically tracking Dr. Berg, Hagai suddenly
receives a message that his mother is meant to be coming to visit the kibbutz.
He is stunned. "What'll I do now? If my mother comes, everything's lost
... I'll have to quit the battle." In order to prevent the visit, Hagai
lies to his mother in a urgent telephone call. "What am I doing?"
Nothing ... sitting around ... learning a lot ... news? No, there's nothing new
here." From now on, the battle and the danger can carry on, involving,
incidentally, mortal danger.
In the 1960s as well, maternal worry was seen in total contrast to sabra
courage and adventurousness. The well-known song "Only My Haimekeh"
by Dan Almagor and Moshe Vilensky (1946, sung by Rachel Attas) is a comic play
on both images: A Yiddishe mama par excellence sings of her pride in her
soldier son, Haimekeh, who is actually not at all deserving of that pride. One
of the reasons she finds for his sudden shouts at her from the military parade
- while marching on the wrong foot - is that all the other soldiers hate their
mothers. "Only my Haimekeh, only my Haimekeh really loves his
mother."
A trace of this comic image of soldiers' mothers is the advertisement
for "Mother's Voice" that is still being broadcast on the army radio
station. "Gadeleh, you forgot your sock, and don't forget to drink a
lot," a woman orders her soldier son.
It is only in recent years, largely because of the public activity of
the Four Mothers organization, that the stereotype of the anxious mother has
undergone a qualitative turnaround. The women of the Four Mothers built their
argument on the stereotypical maternal traits of the previous generation. But
here it was no longer ridiculous, instead becoming a tool to promote values
that were in opposition to the security-minded Israeli consensus.
Much will certainly be written about the role of the Four Mothers in the
decision to leave Lebanon. Researchers of history, sociology and general
culture will try to examine the slow entry strategy (one that was hardly felt)
of the call to withdraw and its slow penetration into the stubborn, macho
Israeli national consensus. To put it another way, researchers will examine the
growing willingness of Israeli society to absorb into its consensus the call of
this women's organization - whose whole identity was that of soldiers' mothers.
Whichever phrasing is used, there is no doubt that the public legitimacy
conferred on this organization in recent years is part of the changed image of
the Israeli soldier and his mother in Israeli culture in general, and in
military culture in particular