“After 10 p.m., we weren’t allowed to go outside. It seemed as though the men’s quarters became an insane asylum. Loud screams echoed from the rooms and the corridors were permeated with the stench of urine.”
These words are narrated by Hillel Ben-Zeev Perlov in “Shivtown,” his short documentary film about the three years, starting in 2014, that he served as a conscript in the Israeli army. Perlov spent that time in the desert of southern Israel, at Shivta Base, a field artillery school for newly inducted soldiers undergoing basic training. But he was not a combat soldier. He served as an army photographer, whose job was to photograph live-fire exercises in the field.
Taking photographs for three years might sound like a desirable job for a physically slight, gentle, soft-spoken teenager with an aversion to loud noise. But, as Perlov shows, an artillery firing base is no place for a person who finds noise upsetting or is sensitive to aesthetics. From the moment he arrives, he is overwhelmed by the constant booms of artillery, the coarse yelling of the commanders, the ugliness of the buildings, the numbing routine (“every morning, I climbed the same 24 stairs that led to the terrace outside the office”) and the filth and disorder in the room he shared with three strangers — one of whom subjected him to unremitting physical bullying. “This,” he wonders, “is where I have to spend the next three years of my life?”
Listening to Perlov’s narration, I felt as though I understood for the first time the heavy impact of three years of mandatory military service on the mind and soul of a teenager just a few months out of childhood. “Shivtown” was screened in May at DocAviv, the annual documentary film festival in Tel Aviv, during the 20th month of the war in Gaza. Among the many observable effects of that war are widespread hypernationalism and a strong intolerance for questioning its rectitude. The soldiers fighting in Gaza have been portrayed as victims and heroes: victims because they have had to spend so many months in combat; heroes because they are protecting Israel from Hamas. In this oppressive atmosphere of angry binaries and amid a suspension of critical thought, “Shivtown” felt almost transgressive; it asks questions that have become all but taboo in the current Israeli discourse. After three weeks in Israel, watching it was a relief — like a sanity check.
Israel has always been a highly militarized society; no issue is more important than security. Armed soldiers are a common sight in civilian settings — in cafes, on public transportation, in shops — because, in a small country with a large standing army, plus thousands serving annual reserve duty or their required three years of service after high school, there are always crowds of people traveling between their home and their army base. It’s customary on one’s professional CV, alongside education and employment history, to include one’s army service and marital status (“Sergeant in a tank unit, married plus three children”) and common to form one’s closest, lifelong friendships in the army. But as much as I abhorred the groupthink, the underlying violence and the machismo engendered by the army’s influence on Israeli society, when I lived there, I was accustomed to it. I stopped seeing the guns.
I’ve lived away from Israel for 14 years now, so I have an insider-outsider’s eye for change. When I visited this spring, I was taken aback at all the guns — even in Tel Aviv, where carrying a weapon unnecessarily used to be seen as a bit embarrassing. Now, young men carried their combat weapons when they were in civilian clothes, on weekend leave from the army, in what seemed like a performative act of machismo. But what shocked me was the proliferation of handguns. Everywhere I looked, I saw men in civilian clothes with pistols tucked into the waistband of their trousers — the greengrocer, the curly-haired guy wearing Hawaiian shorts and carrying a surfboard, the tattooed barista at the cafe. This hypermilitarization and excessive masculine posturing were among the many effects of the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ongoing war in Gaza.
“Shivtown” is a small, deeply realized film that applies the personal lens of one man’s service in the Israeli army to the universal themes of generational trauma, political violence, emotional alienation and, perhaps most of all, the inevitability of history. With a very delicate touch, Perlov invites the viewer to interrogate why we agree to join armies, nurture hatred and fight endless wars. He accomplishes this by using a combination of sensitive narration and powerful still images to tell his story with compassion for his younger self but no self-pity. The touch of anger is not at what was done to him, but at our failure as a society to ask questions and take agency.
Numb and deeply depressed, Perlov spent most of his time at Shivta, when he was not taking photos, escaping into sleep. A striking image taken by one of his tormenters, who took his camera without his knowledge, shows him curled up on a filthy sofa, asleep but fully dressed in his oversized, rumpled uniform, one hand under his cheek, looking about 12 years old and shockingly vulnerable. The nights when he was required to do guard duty in one of the watchtowers on the camp’s distant perimeter were a welcome break. “I was forced to carry a weapon,” he says, “but I found some peace, photographing the nature around me.” The quiet, he says, “soothed me.”
Perlov explains that he began looking at the old negatives of the photos he took at Shivta when he found himself alone and cooped up during the lockdown at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. He was living in the small town of Arles, in France, and was suddenly overwhelmed with memories from his army service, which had ended more than three years earlier. His father, who had left Israel and relocated to Arles, had also been posted to a military base in the desert when he was drafted in 1973, before the war in October that year. Perlov’s father told him that when he arrived at the conscription office, he learned that the army had assigned him to a tank unit on the Suez Canal — this was when Israel occupied Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A photograph shows him at the age of 18, sitting atop a tank with his feet propped on the turret, looking down at a photographer on the ground and smiling gently.
In a voice-over, the father describes a friendly relationship with Egyptian soldiers on the other side of the narrow canal. (“Of course we saw them! We waved at them and they waved back. One would think we could have drunk coffee together.”) Then, suddenly, on Oct. 6, 1973, war broke out and he understood that he might die. Fighter planes streaked overhead, artillery shells exploded and his tank was hit. The noise, he says, was so intense that he went deaf. The impact had ruptured his eardrum. His tank was on fire and he somehow managed to pull himself out onto the sand. He immediately rolled over several times, he says, not because he had been trained to do so but because he had seen people do that in Hollywood movies. Decades after the war, the father suffered from delayed post-traumatic stress disorder, which made Israel’s highly militarized, increasingly violent society feel like a place in which he could no longer live.
A question delicately implied but not explicitly asked is why his father, who suffered lifelong trauma from his own army service, would then allow his son to be drafted into the same army. When I visited friends in Israel who opposed the war and whose children were approaching conscription age, they said their goal was to make sure they didn’t go into combat units, but almost none of them were trying to find a way for them to avoid service altogether. Refusing to serve is a very radical, rare act in Israel. It comes with jail time.
The father and son both describe their military service in a way that conveys innocence, a certain passivity and vulnerability. The father showed up at the conscription office and was assigned to tanks. The son arrived at Shivta Base, where a female officer, “smiling vacantly,” put a camera in his hands and told him to take photographs of artillery exercises. The father found beauty during his service in the Sinai, on the Suez Canal, in the mutually friendly relationship with the Egyptian soldiers. The sudden realization that they were enemies at war was an enormous shock that tore him out of his almost childlike innocence. The son found refuge from his deep misery at Shivta by photographing the desert during nighttime guard duty. Both men decided immediately after they finished their mandatory service that they would never go back to the army (for reserve service), and both realized only years later the extent of the trauma it had caused. I remembered sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe with an Israeli friend — a leftist activist who later left the country for political reasons — who said matter-of-factly that army service had created a society that suffered from mass PTSD. But very few people possess the ability to examine, dissect and express their feelings as Perlov does in his film.
The noise, the bullying, the loneliness and the ugliness of his service at Shivta were so all-consuming that Perlov did not realize until years later that the base was named for the ruins of a Nabataean town located 2 miles away. His camera takes us on a brief journey through an exquisite ancient archaeological site in the middle of the sprawling desert, stones bleached by the sun, a small pool filled with blue water and beautiful, still-intact stone arches over doorways. The ancient town feels abandoned and silent, except for the sound of a whistling wind and the distant booms of artillery from the nearby army base.
From a vantage point near the ancient Nabataean ruins of Shivta, Perlov’s camera lens goes wide to show the desert, beautiful and empty, then pans over to the ugly watchtowers and razor wire around the base, over to the blacktop road taken by the buses transporting soldiers from the train station to the base. It then rests briefly on the figure of a lone Bedouin woman dressed in a flowing black jilbab and niqab, the endless sand and the emptiness of the desert all around her. What lessons can or will we learn from this period of history in Israel, from the increasing violence and hatred, which the director says he finds so alienating that he now feels like a stranger in his own country?
In a striking image near the end of the film, the sound of the wind picks up speed and volume and the sand begins to whirl around the army base, obscuring it so that it is indistinguishable from the featureless desert that was once home to the long-disappeared ancient Nabataeans.
This is the first in a series of articles derived from the writer’s recent reporting trip to Israel-Palestine. The author applied for and received funding for her travel expenses from the Open Society Foundation.
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