ABSTRACT
Yael Munk links the television series Hatufim (Prisoners of War) (2010–2012), as a notable event in Israeli television, to a specific trauma in Israeli history: the public and political discussions concerning the release of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been taken hostage by militant Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and held captive by the Hamas for a total of 1,934 days leading up to the prisoner-swap deal. Hence, a national trauma that haunts both collective and autobiographical memory, captivity of Israeli soldiers, was through this television drama openly discussed on the Israeli TV screen and in the public sphere. Whereas Gertz and Yosef discuss fluid identities of both Israelis and Palestinians in liminal territories and contested temporalities, Munk focuses on the Israeli post-trauma of coming home from captivity. Through the homecoming narrative of the series protagonists, she demonstrates how the series criticizes the normalization of the war discourse.
