Lyrics of Conflict: How Israeli Soldiers’ Songs Reframe the Palestinian Enemy

Introduction

How does the cultural framing of “war” as an existential threat to the nation justify violence against the Palestinian Other? This question is central to understanding the transformation of Israeli military violence across successive Palestinian uprisings. The meanings attributed to conflict, whether labeled “civil disturbance,” “armed conflict short of war,” or “total war” are not merely descriptive but performative: they authorize particular repertoires of violence and construct the enemy as a specific kind of threat requiring corresponding measures of control or elimination. The shift from framing the First Intifada (1987–1993) as civil unrest requiring policing, to the Second Intifada (2000–2005) as “armed conflict short of war” legitimizing aerial assassinations and extrajudicial killings, to the current war in Gaza (2023–2025) as a total existential struggle, reveals how escalating war frames progressively license more extreme forms of violence.

These shifting frames correspond to transformations in how the Palestinian enemy is perceived, valued, and treated within what might be termed Israel’s militarized cultural field—a space where state institutions, military practices, political discourse, and civilian society are deeply interconnected and mutually reinforcing. By examining soldiers’ songs across these three historical periods, this article traces how the Palestinian enemy has been culturally constructed and reconstructed within this field, where military and civilian logics are deeply intertwined.

The analysis reveals a trajectory from ambivalent proximity during the First Intifada—when Palestinians appeared as internal security problems still imagined within Israel’s system of colonial governance—to systematic dehumanization during the Second Intifada, when they became remote targets of assassination and airstrikes, culminating in the eliminationist logic of “there are no innocents” that characterizes the current war in Gaza, where Palestinians are positioned as an existential threat whose very presence is framed as incompatible with Israeli survival.

Central to this trajectory is what this article terms perceptual elasticity: the capacity of enemy images to oscillate between two poles; contempt (the enemy as inferior, weak, beneath serious consideration) and apocalyptic threat (the enemy as civilizational danger requiring elimination) without those positions being experienced as contradictory. Settler-colonial logic does not fix the Palestinian Other in a single stable category. When justifying routine domination, the enemy is contemptible. When justifying extreme or eliminationist violence, the same enemy becomes an existential menace. Soldiers’ songs perform this oscillation collectively and repeatedly, making the switches feel not arbitrary but necessary, the natural response to a threat that is always already both beneath contempt and overwhelmingly dangerous.

The term elasticity is doing specific conceptual work. It implies that the perceptual framework stretches rather than breaks accommodating radically different, seemingly incompatible images of the enemy within a single ideological system. This flexibility is precisely what makes it effective as a mechanism of violence justification: responsive to escalating war frames, tightening or loosening as political and military circumstances demand, authorizing at different moments humiliation and control, targeted killing, and finally mass destruction and expulsion.

As Memmi (2013 [1957]) argues, the attribution of hostility to the occupied is an inherent feature of colonial domination, allowing the colonizer to frame aggression as self-defense and thereby reduce moral discomfort. Yet this general structural logic does not determine the specific cultural forms that enmity assumes. The historical variation in how Israeli soldiers perceive Palestinians—from proximate subjects requiring discipline, to distant targets requiring elimination, to existential threats requiring extermination—demonstrates that enemy-making is neither automatic nor static, but historically contingent and culturally mediated. War framing operates as a crucial mediating mechanism: each escalation in how conflict is defined (riot → armed conflict → total war) authorizes a corresponding intensification in how the enemy is imagined (security problem → military target → apocalyptic menace) and what forms of violence become legitimate.

In this process, soldiers’ songs function not as mere reflections of the conflict but as active participants in the cultural production and transformation of enmity. Music within the military does not simply mirror pre-existing enemy categories; it actively contributes to their social ordering, emotional resonance, and moral justification. Through collective performance, songs create what Collins (2004) terms “interaction rituals,” shared emotional experiences that generate solidarity, establish boundaries, and produce collective representations of who deserves violence and why. Each time soldiers sing about Palestinians as stone-throwers, terrorists, or vermin, they do not merely express attitudes but performatively constitute the enemy as a particular kind of figure requiring particular forms of response. Songs thus serve as emotional technologies through which abstract war framings become visceral, embodied commitments and through which extreme violence becomes not only thinkable but emotionally compelling.

Current research on enemy-making exhibits several significant limitations. First, existing scholarship often privileges victims over perpetrators, examining consequences rather than the cultural processes through which violence becomes meaningful to those who enact it (Knittel and Goldberg, 2020). Soldiers’ own narratives, their justifications, performances, and emotional frameworks—remain understudied despite their crucial role in rendering morally troubling actions both comprehensible and necessary. Second, the literature remains heavily psychological (Grossman, 2014; Shalit, 1988; Shay, 2010), with mainstream sociology comparatively silent on enemy-making despite fighting and killing being inherently social phenomena (Malešević, 2022; Sion, 2017). This individualistic bias obscures the collective, performative dimensions through which enmity is culturally produced and sustained. Third, existing work often treats enemy construction as static rather than dynamic, failing to explain how the same adversary can be radically reimagined across time.

Against this backdrop, this article argues that enemy-making constitutes a dynamic and performative cultural process. The enemy is not a fixed category but a continuously reconstituted figure, enacted through cultural practices that integrate emotion, meaning, and collective identity. Drawing on performance theory (Butler, 2004; Schechner, 2002) and Collins’s (2004) interaction rituals model, the analysis treats soldiers’ songs as cultural performances that establish collective effervescence and both express and constitute social reality. Songs function as emotional technologies that generate solidarity, channel affect, and produce shared interpretive frameworks. They transform abstract political conflicts into visceral, embodied experiences and render extreme violence emotionally resonant and morally coherent.

War songs constitute particularly revealing cultural artifacts because they occupy a liminal space between official military discourse and grassroots soldier culture. Unlike formal military briefings or political speeches, songs are composed and performed by soldiers themselves in semi-autonomous collective settings—barracks, bases, rallies, and informal gatherings. They reveal what soldiers actually think, feel, and value, not merely what they are told to think by commanding officers or politicians. As performative texts, songs do not simply reflect pre-existing attitudes but actively produce attitudes through repetition, ritualization, and collective participation. Each performance reinforces particular ways of seeing the enemy and particular affective orientations toward violence.

This article contributes to cultural sociology by shifting analytical focus from official discourse to grassroots performance, from institutional structures to cultural enactment, and from static representations to dynamic transformations over time. War songs, the analysis demonstrates, do not merely accompany violence, they help constitute it as meaningful collective action. They serve as cultural media through which enmity is staged, rehearsed, embodied, and transmitted across military generations, creating emotional communities bound by shared frameworks of interpretation and affect.

More broadly, the article advances understanding of how cultural performances function in contexts of political violence, revealing the micro-mechanisms through which abstract political conflicts become emotionally resonant personal commitments. By examining how enemy figures are culturally produced and transformed across three distinct historical periods, it contributes to theoretical discussions about the role of culture in reproducing and legitimating systems of domination and exclusion. The analysis demonstrates that culture is not epiphenomenal to violence but constitutive of it that understanding escalating brutality requires attending not only to strategic calculations or institutional arrangements but to the emotional and symbolic infrastructure through which violence becomes thinkable, legitimate, and emotionally compelling.

The article proceeds in three sections. The first establishes the theoretical framework, integrating performance theory, interaction ritual theory (Collins, 2004), and scholarship on music, war, and the military to theorize enemy-making as cultural performance and music as a dynamic medium of social ordering. The second section addresses methodology and positionality, explaining my approach to analyzing soldiers’ songs and my relationship to this material as a researcher. The third section—the analytical core—examines soldiers’ songs from each period, tracing transformations in how Palestinians are depicted, valued, and positioned within moral frameworks.

Theory: Music, War, and the Military

Recent work in the sociology of war has opened important directions, yet the exchange between war sociology and cultural sociology remains limited. Approaches that highlight “narrative-in-the-margins” have drawn attention to civilian and refugee experiences, everyday practices, and emotional textures, but the figure of the soldier has gradually faded from cultural analysis. This gap reflects a broader difficulty in defining “culture” and “cultural sociology” as historically shifting and contested categories. It is within this conceptual space that cultural forms such as music become especially important for understanding how war is experienced, narrated, and felt.

Research across a wide range of fields has examined the relationship between music and conflict (Millar and Chatzipanagiotidou, 2021; O’Connell and Castelo-Branco, 2010), music, violence, and trauma (Bergh and Sloboda, 2010; Daughtry, 2015; Eyerman, 2002; Pieslak, 2009), music in post-conflict renewal, empathy, and collaboration (Clark, 2024; Rice, 2014), music and hyper-violence (Gautier, 2006), and music in conflict transformation (Montero-Diaz and Wood, 2021). This scholarship highlights music’s ambivalent role. It can degrade marginalized groups, serve as propaganda, or justify collective violence, yet it can also facilitate cohesion and emotional processing among military personnel and civilians. Music has long been used to belittle or dehumanize during wartime, but also to cultivate heroic narratives. Patriotic songs and anthems often reflect societal self-justification by promoting war ideologies, while state actors deploy music to reinforce authority and regulate dissent.

There are many complex and multi-layered linkages between music and war. Far from being an aesthetic form, music can become an instrument of symbolic violence that legitimizes hostility and supports physical aggression (Sion 2026). The Rwandan genocide offers one of the starkest examples, where musicians actively incited hatred and encouraged violence against Tutsi civilians, as Parker (2015) documents. A comparable dynamic emerged during the Bosnian war, where songs were mobilized to degrade, humiliate, and incite combatants against specific ethnic groups, as shown by Baker (2013). These cases demonstrate how music can function as symbolic capital that authorizes or normalizes acts of physical harm.

Furthermore, music plays a central role in defining social boundaries, helping to determine who belongs and who is excluded. This dynamic underscores DeNora’s (2004) argument that scholarship has shifted from treating music as an autonomous object to understanding it as a medium of social ordering. In this sense, music contributes to the construction of hierarchies and to practices of exclusion, belonging, and control. Wartime contexts further show how music is used to belittle, dehumanize, and delegitimize targeted groups, embedding sonic practices within broader systems of symbolic domination (Clark, 2024; Shekhovtsov, 2013; Sion 2026).

This article seeks to contribute to the literature on music and violence, and to broader discussions of music as a dynamic medium of social ordering (Chung, 2021; Mundici, 2022), by drawing on Collins’s (2004) theory of interaction ritual chains. Collins integrates Durkheim’s (1995 [1912]) insights on collective symbols and effervescence with Goffman’s (1967) micro-sociology of situations to show how rituals synchronize participants’ attention, behavior, and emotion. When individuals become entrained—speaking, moving, or vocalizing together—they experience a momentary sense of acting and feeling “as one,” producing emotional energy that can endure long after the encounter.

Interaction rituals require four elements: physical co-presence; clearly marked boundaries of inclusion and exclusion; a mutual focus of attention; and a shared mood. Soldiers’ songs exemplify this ritual structure. They are performed collectively, often in confined military spaces where bodily proximity intensifies the experience. Participation is bounded: although I documented the singing, I remained outside the soldierly in-group that defined the ritual. The songs orient collective attention toward shared objects—military life, desire, boredom, camaraderie, and at times Palestinians. They cultivate and reinforce a shared emotional atmosphere, whether humor, frustration, fear, or aggression.

Seen through this lens, soldiers’ songs are ritualized performances that produce and circulate the emotional infrastructures of war. Through repeated enactment, they help construct the enemy, rehearse violence and vengeance, and consolidate internal solidarity. These performances reveal that enmity is not simply experienced but actively produced, embedded in the rhythmic, embodied, and affective practices that constitute military culture.

Singing in the Israeli Military

As an institution deeply embedded in society, the Israeli military functions as a quintessential people’s army. Military service—three years for men—is not only compulsory but widely perceived as both a national right and a moral obligation. It forms a central axis of Israeli political culture and serves as a primary rite of passage into full citizenship (Ben-Eliezer, 1995; Kimmerling, 2001).

Combat units do not merely develop their own rituals; they work deliberately to transmit them to future generations of soldiers through the creation of unit-specific symbols, flags, names, and mascots. One example of this intergenerational transmission is the practice known as the ben–abba–saba (son-dad-grandpa) chain, in which veteran soldiers approaching discharge may become a saba mesaye’at, or grandfather of the support unit. This title signifies an honorific responsibility to pass on the unit’s culture, practices, and narratives to the incoming cohort.

These cultural practices often crystallize around tangible objects that accrue symbolic meaning over time. One well-known example is the patchuli, a small jug that fighters in a certain combat unit have worn around their necks as a talisman. Other units maintain their own material symbols, such as distinctive tattoos or animal mascots (Ziton, 2012).

Yet no ritual is as widespread or as central to Israeli combat culture as singing. Songs, known as shirei rova’it or squad songs, occupy a pivotal position in the cultural world of combat units (Sion, 1997).

Public sing-along events have been a significant part of the Zionist experience since before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (Eliram, 2006). Rooted in earlier traditions of communal prayer, these gatherings fostered national togetherness through songs about the Land of Israel, homeland, loss, and hope. They played an important role in shaping collective emotions within the Zionist movement and in consolidating a shared national identity. From the state’s founding to the present, public sing-alongs have remained a central feature of Israeli national culture (Bensimon, 2012; Eliram, 2006), reflecting the changing spirit and evolving identity of Israeli society.

Squad songs differ in the sense that they are written by soldiers, often anonymously. These songs typically adapt familiar popular melodies while introducing new lyrics that reflect the experiences, humor, tensions, and anxieties of military life. They are created by soldiers for soldiers and serve as a shared expressive language within and across units. Unlike formal music, these songs are rarely recorded, published, or officially archived. Instead, they circulate orally, passed from cohort to cohort during training, deployment, and downtime.

The rise of smartphones and social media has transformed this landscape. Israeli youth are among the most hyper-connected populations in the world, spending up to a fifth of their waking hours engaged with social media (Kuntsman and Stein, 2015: 112). This culture of digital hyper-connectivity does not pause with mandatory conscription; rather, it permeates the military sphere, reshaping how songs are shared, preserved, and repurposed and extending their circulation far beyond the intimate spaces of the squad.

These songs are performed especially during military Friday night dinners. These gatherings feature energetic singing, dancing, and table-jumping, creating a liminal space in which group identity and morale are affirmed and intensified. Songs in this context operate as vehicles for what Collins (2004) terms interaction rituals, emotionally charged encounters that generate solidarity and reinforce symbolic boundaries between friend and enemy. They are sung collectively, with no distinction between performer and audience, and this shared performance deepens unit cohesion and reinforces group identity (Milo, 2016; Sion, 1997).

Group singing is often accompanied by rhythmic, tribal-style performances that fuse military discipline with ecstatic release. Soldiers clap, chant, stomp, and shout, transforming collective performance into a ritual of identity formation and morale building. One common form is the Os, a short chant. In the first line, a soldier calls out a verse they composed about someone present; the group responds with a collective “Os.” The second line typically offers exaggerated praise, which is then subverted by a third line that twists the meaning and concludes with the shouted refrain “Eize balagan,” or “What a mess.”

In recent years, as the military has become more conservative due to demographic changes (Levy, 2012a), attempts to suppress certain songs, especially those containing vulgar language or sexual innuendo, have provoked frustration and resistance. “A new commander came in who wants to change all the unit’s traditions,” one soldier explained. “He decided we’re not allowed to sing songs that soldiers here have been singing for many years, just because they include bad language” (Levy, 2012b).

The military’s efforts to censor sexual songs stand in sharp contrast to its tolerance, and at times tacit encouragement, of songs that glorify violence against Palestinians. While sexually explicit squad songs are banned or punished, songs promoting the eradication of the Palestinian enemy are increasingly circulated online, often proudly, by both soldiers and commanders. This trend has intensified since the outbreak of the war in Gaza in October 2023, when such performances proliferated across social media. In this sense, the asymmetry of censorship reveals how music can belittle, dehumanize, and delegitimize targeted groups, embedding sonic practices within broader systems of symbolic domination (Clark, 2024; Shekhovtsov, 2013).

This selective regime becomes even more apparent when considering the divergent trajectories of sexual songs and songs about Palestinians. Sexual songs have changed very little since the late 1980s, maintaining similar themes, humor, and forms of transgression. Songs about Palestinians, by contrast, have undergone a profound transformation. During the First Intifada (1987–1993), when the military still framed the uprising as a civilian disturbance rather than an existential threat, soldiers’ songs depicted Palestinians as criminal, duplicitous, or unruly, but calls for annihilation were less pronounced, and the tone of incitement remained relatively muted. By the Second Intifada (2000–2005), as the conflict became more militarized and Israeli casualties increased, the cultural register of military song shifted decisively. Lyrics turned toward vengeance, eradication, and sacrificial masculinity, reflecting both escalating violence and deeper institutional changes in the military’s self-understanding.

Indeed, as Memmi (2013 [1957]) argues, racism against the occupied is an inherent feature of occupation, since attributing hostility to the colonized allows the dominant group to frame its own aggression as self-defense. At the same time, shifts in how soldiers perceive Palestinians indicate that this process is neither automatic nor static, but historically contingent and culturally mediated. In this context, music within the military does not merely mirror the conflict; it actively contributes to the social ordering of enmity. By normalizing dehumanizing depictions of Palestinians, squad songs reproduce a hierarchy in which Palestinian lives are symbolically devalued and violence against them becomes thinkable and even desirable. The post-2023 moment should therefore be understood not as a rupture, but as the culmination of a longer cultural trajectory in which music has served as a powerful vehicle for affective mobilization and symbolic warfare, embedding enmity deeply within the emotional and performative structures of military life.

Methodology

This research employs a multi-sited and longitudinal ethnographic approach (Hannerz, 2003; Marcus, 1995), integrating in-person and digital fieldwork. Drawing on hybrid ethnographic methods (Liu, 2026), the study extends across physical and virtual domains. It is informed by a larger, multi-year, sequential mixed-methods project (Greene et al., 1989).

The core dataset comprises 118 war songs composed by Israeli infantry soldiers from 1988 to 2025. These original lyrics, often set to familiar melodies, circulated informally within military units. The majority of the songs focus on daily life in military service—commanders, routines, sexuality, and camaraderie. However, 24 songs specifically address the enemy, including four that cross traditional narrative lines. These songs form the analytical core of this study.

From 1988 to 2006, 110 songs were gathered using a combination of autobiographical material, retrospective interviews with 10 ex-soldiers (1995), 12 yearbooks from the First Intifada, six soldier-produced books from the Second Intifada, and fieldwork with three reserve units (1996–1998), supplemented by interviews with 10 soldiers in 1996 and again in 2007 (Ben-Ari and Sion, 2005; Sion, 1997, 2025, 2026; Sion and Ben-Ari, 2009).

Songs from 2023–2025 from the current Gaza War were collected through digital ethnography on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and X, focusing on soldiers’ personal accounts. These platforms present new challenges and possibilities for ethnographic research (Hase et al., 2023; Schellewald, 2023), including questions of data ownership, representation, censorship, and methodological ethics. Commanders have traditionally censored vulgar or sexual content; however, during the Gaza war, expressions related to the conflict were often encouraged, marking a notable shift in military media culture.

Triangulation included open-source verification through media reports, social media accounts, published soldier testimonies, and contextual sources. This ensured a thick description of the socio-political conditions in which the songs were composed, circulated, and consumed.

The First Intifada (1987–1993)

Since the conquest of the West bank and Gaza in 1967, Israeli military rule over the Palestinian population has often been portrayed as a normal and unremarkable feature of political life. The occupation is depicted as a distant, exceptional, and isolated reality that stands apart from the geography, history, and values that constitute the dominant Israeli narrative. Within this framing, Palestinians are largely erased from public discourse, yet they continue to shape it as an absent but defining Other (Friedman and Gavriely-Nuri, 2017).

The First Intifada, a mass Palestinian uprising characterized largely by unarmed resistance brought the Palestinians into the public discourse. The uprising was shaped not by overwhelming military power, but by the adoption of police-style tactics aimed at controlling a rebellious civilian population. Then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s infamous directive to “break their arms and legs” encapsulated a strategy of calculated brutality. Soldiers were equipped with clubs rather than rifles and instructed to use methodical, non-lethal violence. This approach was designed to project an image of restraint while maintaining coercive control and suppressing civil disobedience (Gordon, 2008; Ron, 2003).

The enemy in this context was marked by profound ambiguity: not a uniformed combatant, but a child, a teenager, a civilian. While Hezbollah fighters on the Lebanese frontier were consistently labeled mehablim (terrorists), Palestinian demonstrators were more often referred to in softened terms, noar or tsayir (youth) in Hebrew, and shabab in Arabic. These linguistic distinctions reflected not only the nature of the adversary but also the intimate and fraught character of the confrontation.

The uprising brought Israeli soldiers into constant, close-quarters engagement with Palestinian civilians. Daily interactions in streets, alleys, and homes made face-to-face confrontation routine. In this environment, the performance of dominance became central to the construction of military masculinity and soldierly identity. Soldiers internalized informal norms that demanded immediate responses to defiance, the rejection of humiliation, and conspicuous displays of authority, even when these took the form of excessive or disproportionate force. The violence enacted was not only disciplinary but performative, shaped by peer dynamics, the spatial intimacy of occupation, and the ambiguous figure of the civilian enemy.

These confrontations were emotionally and socially demanding. One soldier recalled being struck by a stone and resisting the urge to show pain:

I got hit in the leg by a large stone. The boys who threw it watched from a distance, I felt intense pain, and they laughed. But I held back and didn’t limp [. . .] Only once I was back in the jeep did I allow myself to writhe in pain. (Alkavatz, 1988)

Such moments as those described by a soldier reveal the emotional labor required to maintain dominance in the eyes of both comrades and adversaries.

Soldier-composed songs offer a cultural lens into the shifting construction of Palestinians as enemies. These songs occupy a volatile space between aggression and familiarity. Their affective force lies in what can be described as “narrative crossing”: soldiers inhabit the voice of the Palestinian Other not to humanize, but to ridicule and control. As Rutherford (2009: 4) argues, empathy is closely linked to colonial rule, where sympathy “can spawn hostility as easily as love.” This form of mimicry collapses the boundary between Self and Other, rendering the enemy grotesquely intimate rather than wholly foreign. One example of such narrative crossing appears in a 1989 version of the song Rona, based on the melody of an Egyptian tune and originally sung in Hebrew by a Palestinian singer to his daughter, Rona. The soldiers’ version adopts an exaggerated “Arab” accent:

Come, homo soldier.

Come, soldier son of a bitch, I’ll screw your mother.

Come, coward soldier.

Come, I will screw your mother.

Rather than depicting Palestinians as distant or abstract antagonists, the song rendered them hyper-proximate domesticated through ridicule and controlled through parody. The Palestinian figure becomes both threatening and mockable, an enemy whose imagined voice can be occupied and degraded at will. This performance enables soldiers to channel resentment by projecting volatile emotions onto a caricatured Other, turning the enemy into a vessel for managing hostility. Through this act of mimicry, the soldier both appropriates and belittles the Palestinian voice, constructing the enemy as an object of contempt and as a necessary counterpart in the formation of his own identity.

Another striking example is the song “Two Fingers from Sidon” from a 1986 Israeli film, set against the backdrop of the First Lebanon War. This version was documented in the Givati infantry brigade, known for their purple beret. Its lyrics narrate a series of attacks from the imagined perspective of a Palestinian fighter:

Two fingers from Haifa

I throw a grenade

Two Jews are injured

Four are killed.

Suddenly the Shin Bet arrives

And I flee.

Two fingers from Sderot

I am surrounded by girls

They don’t know that I am Arab

Dressed like a Jew.

I enter a club

And there, I throw a grenade.

Two fingers from my home

The Purple caught me

They beat me hard

And hit me with clubs.

The song adopts an ‘Arab’ narrative voice, creating a situation in which the singer is simultaneously himself and the Other he imitates. Such performances generate a form of ambivalence: empathy strives toward identification, yet it does so while reproducing radical alterity. The paradox of this tactical empathy lies in its capacity to construct an Other through imaginative inhabitation while being driven by the desire to eliminate that same Other.

The song’s structure relies on oscillation. It moves from infiltration to attack, from elation to fear, and finally from escape to punishment. In doing so, it allows soldiers to explore emotions they are otherwise discouraged from expressing: vulnerability, uncertainty, or even the thrill of transgression. Yet each of these emotions is contained within a broader framework that ultimately restores the hierarchy between Israelis and Palestinians. The act of singing becomes a controlled experiment in which empathy operates through imitation and projection while remaining fundamentally instrumental. The performer does not identify with the Other but uses the Other’s imagined experience to fortify the distinction between them. The beating at the end restores order and symbolically purges the dangerous proximity that the song momentarily created.

Crucially, the song offers both an outlet for anxiety about infiltration, disguise, and the porousness of ethnic boundaries and a ritualized reassurance that such threats can be subdued. The Palestinian is simultaneously close enough to impersonate and distant enough to be punished. This combination of proximity and violence lies at the core of the song’s affective power. By staging a brief collapse of identity boundaries, only to reassert them through force, the song reinforces a worldview in which the enemy’s destruction is both necessary and inevitable. In this sense, the song not only reflects but actively produces a militarized imagination in which empathy becomes a tool for domination rather than a path to recognition.

As Bar-Tal et al. (2010) argue, such portrayals operate as psychological defense mechanisms: by displacing violent fantasies—rape, killing, abduction—onto the Palestinian Other, the soldier deflects moral responsibility and preserves a sense of self-righteousness. Acts of military violence are thus recoded as preemptive defense, legitimized by the presumed savagery of the enemy.

At the same time, the mimicry’s power lies in its unsettling intimacy. The enemy is not represented from a distance but ventriloquized in Hebrew, through gestures and routines shaped by the occupation itself. The Palestinian is not terrifying because he is radically Other, but because he is disturbingly familiar. As Taussig (1997) notes, the most frightening enemies are those who mirror us—distinguished only by symbolically loaded markers such as religion, accent, or ethnic background.

Yet even as these songs assert symbolic superiority, they betray the instability of that distinction. Drawing on Butler’s (1988, 2004) theory of performativity, one can view these repeated acts of singing as central to the ongoing construction of the Palestinian enemy. The enemy figure is not stable or pre-given, but gradually assembled through stylized performances imbued with affect and routine. As Skradol (2012) emphasizes, enemy-making unfolds over time through embodied practice, rather than ideological decree.

Scholars have long noted that soldiers may experience moments of empathy toward the enemy when they recognize themselves in similar situations (Bourke, 1999; Malešević, 2022). Yet empathy is not necessarily a moral virtue, nor does it reliably produce compassion. As Hollan and Throop (2008: 389) argue, empathy can also be mobilized to harm others, whether by causing pain or by humiliating, shaming, embarrassing, or violating them. It is therefore possible to empathize with someone while remaining indifferent to his suffering. This tension underlies Wispé’s (1986: 319) observation that there is an interesting and unresolved question about the relationship between empathy and hostility. Empathy operates through mechanisms of imitation and projection, but it does not entail identification, fusion, or similarity. What is distinctive about empathy, as Throop and Zahavi (2020) emphasize, is precisely that the felt experience is attributed to the other and not to oneself.

The Second Intifada (2000–2005)

The Second Intifada marked not only an escalation in physical violence but also a profound cultural transformation in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. One of the most consequential shifts was the reconfiguration of Palestinian identity within Israeli military discourse and the broader cultural imagination.

Whereas the First Intifada had been met with club-wielding soldiers and a policy of “breaking bones,” the early days of the Second Intifada saw the Israeli military fire over a million bullets (Pressman, 2003). As Gordon (2008) shows, Israeli rule shifted from a principle of colonization—managing Palestinian life while exploiting labor and land, to a principle of separation that withdrew responsibility for the population while maintaining spatial control. This transition enabled practices such as remote lethal force, infrastructural destruction, and the transformation of Palestinians into homo sacer, life that can be killed without legal or moral consequence (Agamben, 1998).

Israel became invested in controlling Palestinian space rather than Palestinian lives, a shift encapsulated in the paradigmatic formulation “we are here, they are there,” with the “we” referring to Israelis and the “they” to Palestinians (Gordon, 2008).

The language of separation and the appearance of distance served to obscure ongoing processes of reorganization and intensification of control. Framing the uprising as an “armed conflict short of war” legitimized large-scale violence, including aerial assassinations, extrajudicial killings, and near-total immunity for soldiers. Military tactics aimed to minimize direct contact, relying on Palestinian Authority security forces as proxies (Gordon, 2008), redesigned checkpoints and curfews, and remote strikes via drones and air attacks.

This shift marked a profound change in Israel’s approach: from viewing Palestinians, at least rhetorically, as potential peace partners to perceiving them as existential enemies. This reconceptualization went hand in hand with growing emotional detachment among soldiers. Palestinians were increasingly seen not as individuals but as undifferentiated threats, a process of dehumanization that, as soldiers’ testimonies indicate, enabled a more extreme and morally unencumbered use of force.

Soldiers articulated this moral rupture in stark terms. “They are all potential danger,” one explained. “They don’t have the status of human beings [. . .] I don’t think about their feelings [. . .] only about the danger they may impose” (Nizan, 2006). Another remarked that Palestinians were “like decoration. A dangerous decoration [. . .] but they are not in the center.” These statements reveal a systematic cognitive disengagement. The use of the term “Arab” functions not as a national or ethnic designation, but as a de-individualizing abstraction that strips Palestinians of identity, personhood, and moral claim. This psychological distance allows violence to be carried out without the ethical hesitation that typically arises when harming other human beings (Dower, 1986; Smith, 2021; Stollznow, 2008).

Yet this moral distancing is not purely rational, it is saturated with affect. One soldier admitted: “There is something in the conflict, the kind of relations between Jews and Arabs [. . .] that makes them disgusting (ichsa), and you do not touch disgusting” (Nizan, 2006).

As Douglas (1966) notes, disgust is not simply a bodily reaction but a cultural mechanism for organizing symbolic boundaries between purity and danger. In Israeli military slang, the term “dirty” (meluchlach) operates as a euphemism for “armed,” collapsing physical threat into notions of moral contamination. Such language draws on longstanding tropes of Arab “dirtiness” rooted in colonial imaginaries of primitiveness and barbarity, positioning Palestinians as simultaneously dangerous and defiling within a civilizational hierarchy.

The songs of this period dramatically turn away from Palestinians and toward the soldier’s own suffering, endurance, and bravery, while marginalizing, distorting, or erasing the Palestinian presence altogether. When Palestinians do appear, they surface mainly as caricatured, faceless, or menacing figures, reinforcing their depiction as a source of danger rather than as a community of people with recognizable lives or identities.

One example is an adapted version of Harel Moyal’s ballad In the Middle of the Night in the Village, which originally expressed the soldier’s isolation and moral exhaustion. In the adapted version, the scene is moved to Jabalia and Khan Yunis. Palestinians are absent until the final verse, when “some kind of Muhammad” appears with a missile launcher. The song’s narrator a weary soldier laments:

It is the middle of Jabalia and it is cold.

Turning on the air conditioner to warm up.

I snore and wait for the night to descend.

Just before entering, checking that the Book of Psalms is in my pants . . .

It is the middle of Jabalia and it is useless.

Because the artillery brigade can erase the entire village.

Look, an RPG missed us. This is our luck.

It is the middle of Khan Yunis,

The commander wakes me up.

I destroy another building.

Shortly before going back I see black.

Some kind of Muhammad appears with a shoulder-fired missile.

It is the middle of Khan Yunis and maybe it is useless.

Because the air force will bomb here tomorrow.

Look what a beautiful flare coming towards me.

Our luck has run out, our luck has gone.

The figure of “Muhammad” is not portrayed as a fully formed character but as a symbolic cipher anonymous, interchangeable, and perpetually armed. His sudden appearance affirms the soldier’s exhaustion and latent fear, casting Palestinian presence as nothing more than a spectral threat. The song captures a broader shift in Israeli military culture during and after the Second Intifada: a move from direct confrontations with civilians to the imagined ubiquity of the armed, faceless enemy. This transformation, rooted in affective registers of fear and disgust, reinforces a militarized worldview in which violence is not only normalized but rendered morally imperative.

The narrative pivots around the soldier’s emotional vulnerability, physical fatigue, and quiet heroism, while the Palestinian landscape is stripped of complexity and rendered as a theater of danger. The enemy is not individualized but referred to vaguely as “some kind of Muhammad,” a phrase that signals both disposability and generalized threat. Resolution arrives through the promise of superior firepower: the air force “will bomb here tomorrow.” This gesture affirms a preference for remote warfare, where technological distance coincides with emotional detachment.

A similar affective structure underpins another adapted soldier’s song, set to the melody of Flowers in the Barrel, a tune originally composed after the Six-Day War to express the euphoria of military victory and the hope for peace. In its repurposed version, the mood darkens considerably. The lyrics chart the psychological disintegration of a soldier stationed in Gaza, revealing the emotional toll of occupation and the normalization of violence.

In the ambush, I fall asleep.

Crying from depression.

When will the last missile arrive already?

In the morning, I feel good.

Everyone is going to sleep. . .

The unit will burn Gaza and Rafah.

We shall ascend two by two to the north.

A bullet in the barrel and action full of soot.

The unit will return. And conquer Lebanon.

In the military position, I fall asleep.

Crying from depression.

Imagining like a fool and armed within a dream, But it’s real.

Suddenly, a whimper is heard.

I am left without an ear. I want to die.

This version reconfigures the original anthem of national triumph into a dirge of despair and moral collapse. The enemy is mentioned only once, in passing, as “armed” a military shorthand for “armed terrorist.” This linguistic shorthand depersonalizes the Palestinian subject, reducing them to a functional role within the soldier’s traumatic narrative. The emphasis is squarely on Israeli suffering, leaving Palestinian lives outside the song’s moral horizon.

These songs function as affective tools that reinforce the emotional world of the soldier: fear, exhaustion, camaraderie, and disillusionment. But they also obscure the humanity of Palestinians, constructing a narrative universe in which the enemy is either absent, degraded, or merely a threat to be eliminated. By foregrounding soldierly emotion and framing violence as necessity or fate, such songs normalize a worldview in which moral complexity is erased, and empathy foreclosed. Through repetition, melody, and collective performance, they help solidify the affective boundaries that sustain the symbolic and at times literal erasure of the Palestinian Other.

The War in Gaza (2023–2025)

The Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 exposed a profound Israeli strategic miscalculation rooted in modes of enemy perception. For years, Israel treated Hamas as a manageable actor requiring only periodic containment. This logic often described as “buying quiet” through economic incentives and improved living conditions reflected not military calculation but a governing strategy premised on Hamas’s presumed cultural inferiority. The failure to anticipate 7 October thus reveals how contemptuous perception itself became a strategic liability: the colonial gaze that rendered Palestinians legible as inferior simultaneously made their capacity for organized military action unimaginable.

Israeli officers routinely described Hamas fighters using the derogatory term *ars*, a racialized slur historically directed at working-class Mizrahi men and associated with delinquency, ostentation, and cultural backwardness (Shenhav, 2006). Applied to Palestinians, the term enacted a double racialization: it orientalized Palestinians while drawing on intra-Jewish hierarchies in which Mizrahim occupy an ambivalent, boundary-blurring position between European and Arab identities. This contemptuous gaze denied Hamas professional competence or strategic capability. Prime Minister Netanyahu reinforced this framing by claiming that Hamas attacked Israel “wearing flip-flops and carrying cheap Kalashnikovs” (Azulai, 2025), while a brigadier general dismissed Hamas as “a few pathetic Palestinians” (Bar-Kimon, 2024). The designation *ars* thus placed Hamas beneath even the standard category of enemy, situating it instead within a register of racialized social contempt that collapsed military threat into cultural caricature.

The shock of 7 October—an abrupt and deeply humiliating loss of control—shattered this contemptuous framework and triggered an immediate affective transformation. From the earliest days of the war, rhetoric of revenge saturated Israeli public discourse, flowing seamlessly from senior political leadership to grassroots arenas and military units themselves. What distinguishes this moment is not simply the intensity of calls for vengeance, but the near-total collapse of boundaries between military, political, and religious registers of violence. Revenge discourse merged professional military objectives with theological narratives of divine retribution, biblical references to Amalek, and explicitly exterminatory language positioning Palestinians as existential threats requiring elimination rather than defeat.

This escalation cannot be explained as a natural or automatic response to trauma and loss. As Alexander (2004) argues in challenging the “naturalistic fallacy,” the relationship between suffering and subsequent violence is culturally mediated rather than psychologically determined. The shift from contemptuous dismissal to exterminatory rage thus reflects not an inevitable human reaction, but a culturally constructed process through which 7 October was collectively narrated as an apocalyptic rupture demanding total response.

In the aftermath, what has emerged is not merely a military campaign to defeat Hamas, but an intensified desire to erase Palestinian presence from Gaza, articulated through the language of justice, purification, and historical redress. Violence is no longer framed as tragic necessity but as righteous imperative—celebrated, demanded, and sanctified. The deliberate invocation of biblical texts in operational briefings exemplifies this shift: posters distributed by the military rabbinate featuring verses such as “I will pursue my enemies and overtake them” (Psalms 18:38) transform military installations into ritualized theaters. Bases, barracks, and rallying points become performative arenas in which soldiers act as both participants and audience in a dramaturgy that fuses national trauma with redemptive violence. These performances do not merely provide moral justification for military operations; they consecrate them as sacred duty.

This ritualization of violence corresponds to a profound affective transformation documented by soldiers themselves. According to Hazani (2025), who recorded his experiences during the war’s opening weeks, the army’s initial professional shame—the shock of having failed to prevent 7 October—was swiftly displaced by emotional rage directed at Palestinians. This affective shift reshaped the operational response: early combat operations were characterized by overwhelming firepower deployed across all levels of engagement, driven not by tactical doctrine but by the emotional imperative of revenge. The professional military framework gave way to what can be termed militia-like conduct, in which informal practices, loosened discipline, and affect-driven violence superseded institutional norms.

Among rank-and-file soldiers, this psychological state is expressed through collective performance. One of the most emblematic examples is the popular combat chant “Ani Meshuga” (“I’m Crazy”), whose recent version reflects both a celebration of hyper-masculinity and a subtle acknowledgment of systemic collapse. Sung ecstatically in groups, it blurs the lines between bravado and breakdown:

I’m a psychopathic Golani

More messed up than the brigade commander

I’m strong and lethal

Crazy Golani—that’s me

I want to be a fighter

To fight the terrorists

To come home safely

To the brigade that is a dream

Who is crazy?

I’m crazy. . . ¹

As Klusemann (2012) argues, this self-arousal performance helps soldiers overcome fear in confrontational encounters and sustain a sense of emotional dominance. In this context, such chants operate as expressions of post-victory elation but also as mechanisms for generating and maintaining emotional energy through the degradation of victims. In Collins’s (2008: 23) terms, they keep the collective arousal alive by drawing emotional strength from the enemy, transforming violence and humiliation into sources of shared excitation and cohesion.

As Dower (1986) argued in other wartime contexts, casting the enemy as an absolute Other suspends ordinary moral boundaries, rendering violence not only imaginable but necessary. In the Israeli case, the recurring invocation of Amalek—the biblical archetype of the enemy marked for total destruction—collapses distinctions between enemy combatants and civilians. The slogan “There are no uninvolved” exemplifies this flattening: Palestinians are not recognized as differentiated human beings but reframed as a singular, existential threat. Within this symbolic framework, their annihilation is not only permitted but required. Squad songs condense and intensify this logic. Consider the following refrain:

I come to conquer Gaza

And destroy the Hezbollah

And to one command adhered

To wipe out the seed of Amalek

I left my home behind

And until victory, I will not return

Everybody knows our motto

There are no uninvolved.

Here, personal sacrifice, national duty, and genocidal command converge. The soldier’s departure is cast in sacrificial terms, but its aim—eradicating Amalek, now symbolically identified with Palestinians—is framed as both sacred and inevitable. The performance binds the intimate (home, departure, return) with the collective (nation, unit), and channels both toward exterminatory violence. Sung in unison, the lyrics function not merely as expression but as ritualized commitment, aligning the soldier’s private world with the ideological imperatives of the state.

Another example records vulnerability as martial resolve:

I shiver but I’m not afraid

I tremble from strength

For when this nation stands together

I am not afraid of war

I march forward now

And I’m not just marching here for nothing

I won’t stop; tell Mom

That I won’t return until I’ll finish them.

This song inverts fear: trembling becomes evidence of strength. The maternal reference, “tell Mom,” is mobilized not for comfort, but to witness sacrifice and vengeance. The soldier’s vow never to return until the enemy is destroyed fuses familial love with national duty and sacred violence. Fear is refigured as fuel; destruction, as destiny.

The current war in Gaza thus signals more than a military campaign. Under the most right-wing and religious government that Israel ever had, it reveals a cultural transformation in which violence is no longer a reluctant strategy but a moral imperative, an existential obligation, and at times a sacred act. Violence is not only carried out; it is sung, ritualized, filmed, and circulated—performed as collective truth.

Conclusion

This article has examined Israeli soldiers’ war songs as cultural performances through which the Palestinian enemy is continuously produced and transformed within Israel’s militarized cultural field—a space where state institutions, military practices, political discourse, and civilian society are deeply intertwined. Drawing on songs spanning three decades—the First Intifada (1987–1993), the Second Intifada (2000–2005), and the Gaza war (2023–2025)—the analysis traced a trajectory from ambivalent proximity and ironic familiarity, to systematic dehumanization, and finally to the eliminationist logic condensed in contemporary claims that “there are no innocents.” These shifts demonstrate that extreme violence is normalized not only through strategy or policy, but through grassroots cultural practices that embed enmity in the everyday rituals of military life.

Transformations in soldiers’ representations of Palestinians closely track escalating cultural framings of war. During the First Intifada, framed as civil disturbance, Palestinians appeared as internal security problems—subjects of policing within a colonial order. The Second Intifada’s designation as an “armed conflict short of war” repositioned Palestinians as military targets subject to remote killing, increasingly dehumanized yet still partially bounded by operational constraints. In the Gaza war, framed as a total existential struggle, these boundaries collapse altogether. Palestinians are rendered apocalyptic threats whose presence is cast as incompatible with Israeli survival, licensing unlimited violence and reframing civilian death as inevitable or necessary rather than tragic.

This escalation exposes a paradox central to settler-colonial enemy-making: perceptual elasticity. The same population oscillates between contemptuous dismissal—Hamas as ars, incompetent and primitive—and apocalyptic demonization, cast in biblical and exterminatory terms. Soldiers’ songs play a crucial role in managing this elasticity, enabling rapid shifts between ridicule and annihilation while maintaining moral coherence within the military collective.

Theoretically, the article contributes to cultural sociology and to scholarship on music and violence by conceptualizing songs as interaction rituals in Collins’s (2004) sense. The songs analyzed here are not reflections of attitudes or epiphenomena of war; they are performative practices that generate shared emotion, stabilize moral boundaries, and produce collective identity. Through repetition and embodied participation, they transform abstract political conflict into emotionally compelling personal commitment and render violence meaningful collective action.

Methodologically, focusing on soldiers’ songs redirects attention from official discourse to peer-generated culture, and from top-down indoctrination to horizontal transmission. Songs circulate informally through barracks, transport vehicles, social gatherings, and increasingly digital platforms, operating through a form of cultural contagion. Emotions, narratives, and moral scripts travel across military cohorts, shaping perception and action beyond specific operations. This perspective underscores the limits of approaches that reduce enemy-making to institutional command or individual psychology, revealing instead how enmity is sustained through everyday cultural labor performed by soldiers themselves.

Recognizing enmity as cultural work foregrounds both its durability and its contingency. If violence can be ritualized, normalized, and transmitted through song, affect, and performance, it follows that it is neither natural nor inevitable. Enemy-making is produced through repeated cultural enactment and is therefore, at least in principle, open to disruption. This recognition does not mitigate the scale or severity of current violence. Rather, it clarifies that what culture makes possible, culture can also unmake. This approach connects cultural sociology with the sociology of violence, revealing how abstract political conflicts become emotionally compelling through repeated, embodied performance. Rather than viewing culture as epiphenomenal to war, the article argues that culture plays a constitutive role in how war is experienced and morally justified.