ABSTRACT
During the years of the uprising, Israeli soldiers often found themselves in the role of policemen repressing a civilian population rather than fighters against an armed enemy. These soldiers-some of them older civilians, doing their duty as army reservists; many, young soldiers on their three-year compulsory army service-came to the land of intifada carrying (in various degrees) the stereotypes of the other side as violent, dehumanized, sometimes even demonized. Even as observers of everyday life in the Arab towns and villages the Israeli soldier cannot be thought to have an unmediated view of the other. Their view is heavily mediated, of course, by the prior internalization of “them” through the outlook of parents, peers, schools, and the image of Palestinians on television news, as filtered by their surrounding social networks. In the field, these soldiers’ views are also mediated by the role they are playing, which means seeing the Palestinians while in uniform and behind the helmets of a conquering army. Nevertheless, at least some of them struggled with the dilemma of fitting the Palestinians they encountered-children, adolescents, and families-with the images of the other side they had internalized.
