The Giver of Life and the Griever of Death: Women in the Israeli TV Coverage of the Second Lebanon...

Communication, Culture & Critique ISSN 1753-9129

ORIGINAL ART ICLE

The Giver of Life and the Griever of Death:Women in the Israeli TV Coverageof the Second Lebanon War (2006)

Hagar Lahav

Program of Journalism, School of Communication, Sapir College, D.N. Hof Ashkelon 79165, Israel

This article discusses gender aspects of the journalistic coverage of the Second LebanonWar by Israeli TV. The findings reveal that, in the social reality presented in the TV newsduring the war, women were relegated to the periphery by a complex process of exclusionaryrepresentation. Three primary subprocesses produced this exclusionary representation ofwomen: concealing, transparency, and constructing women’s presence and gendered images.This representation framed the war as ‘‘men’s business,’’ and unjustly legitimizes as well asnormalizes their marginal position in the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict. An analysisof the symbolic reality devised by the media exposes the gender and ethnic components ofIsrael’s inclusion (and exclusion) regime.

doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2010.01069.x

The Second Lebanon War (2006), like other wars, was deeply gendered. Not only didmen and women differ in the ways they participated in the war and in the ways theywere influenced by the war—the war also served as a focal point for the discursiveconstruction of gender order and the understanding of manhood and womanhoodin Israeli society. This situation is clearly illustrated in the symbolic reality of newsmedia. News reports are not a simple reflection of reality. Rather, ‘‘news is a culturalproduct that reflects the dominant cultural assumptions about who and what isimportant, determined by ethnicity, gender, class, wealth, power and nationality,and about what social relations and arrangement are deemed normal, natural andinevitable’’ (Gill, 2007, p. 114). Thus, media news is a vibrant arena for the discursivebattle over social power.

This article analyzes women’s representation in the TV news broadcasts duringthe Second Lebanon War to examine the social dynamics of gender perceptionsand their relationship to the discourse of national security and citizenship in Israel.This analysis is based on the assumption that the classifications of masculine and

Corresponding author: Hagar Lahav; e-mail: [email protected]

242 Communication, Culture & Critique 3 (2010) 242–269 © 2010 International Communication Association

H. Lahav The Giver of Life and the Griever of Death

feminine do not represent a preexisting reality, but rather their meanings are sociallyconstructed. Thus, what seems to be a simple and natural biological division isactually ‘‘an ongoing process of learned sets of behaviors, expectations, perceptions,and subjectivities that define what it means to be a woman and what it means to be aman’’ (Lemish, 2008). This process is based on patriarchal ideology, which ascribes‘‘masculinity’’ to the male and ‘‘femininity’’ to the female, while assigning a highervalue to male/ness. Thus, gender is not simply a form of difference but a form ofpower. At the same time, the hegemonic1 patriarchal ideology denies the politicalmeaning of gender, as well as its relevance to social order, and undermines therelevance of these classifications to the understanding of phenomena such as wars,nationality, and citizenship.

The mass media, like all cultural products and producers, is actively involvedin the process of producing gender understandings. As Theresa de Lauretis (2004)commented, the media is a ‘‘technology of gender’’ that constructs gender order byrepresenting it. The study of gender representation is therefore central to under-standing a society’s gender order. This article aims to examine those conceptionsas they were manifested in the Israeli TV news during the Second Lebanon War.As a theoretical background, I will start with a general presentation of the gendereddiscourse of citizenship that has been created in Israel amid the Israeli–Arab conflict.I will then examine the gendered aspects of the Second Lebanon War, on genderrepresentations and women’s images in media news, and on studies of Israeli mediaduring wars. I will then show how during the war the TV news presented a socialreality in which women were relegated to the periphery via a complex process ofexclusionary representation that included concealing, transparency, and gender blind-ness. Thus, women were relegated to the private sphere and portrayed as victims, asthe TV news emphasized their caregiving and mothering roles, and minimized theirroles as agents in the public sphere.

Gender and citizenship in Israel

Israeli society is characterized by a triple connection between nationality, the military,and gender, which centered the (Jewish) male, leaving only a marginal place forwomen, both Jewish and non-Jewish (as well as non-Jewish men; Berkovitch, 2001;Lomsky-Feder & Ben-Ari, 1999; Sasson-Levi, 2007; Yuval-Davis, 1997). In theearly decades of Israel’s statehood, the attitude toward (Jewish) women’s roles wascharacterized by the ‘‘myth of equality,’’ according to which Jewish women andmen shared equal rights and obligations in the Zionist collective (Herzog, 2000).Despite this myth, women were in fact firmly marginalized (Kamir, 2004). At thesame time, women’s social roles in Israel were assigned according to their ethnic andnational identities: A hierarchical separation was constructed between Jewish andArab women, as well as between Ashkenazi women (Jews of American and Europeanorigin) and Mizrahi women (Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin)(Dahan Kalev, 1999). Within this social order, the Ashkenazis held and still hold

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The Giver of Life and the Griever of Death H. Lahav

the central social position, whereas Mizrahis were and still are located in the middlesocial position, and the Arabs are marginalized.

Sasson-Levi (2007, p. 32) suggests that, in Israeli context, three social componentscombine to create an institutionalized patriarchal gender regime: (a) cultural imagerylinking Zionism and masculinity; (b) a citizenship discourse consolidated aroundmilitarism, nationality, and ethnicity; and (c) gender stratification in the Israeliarmy itself. The first component refers to the view of Zionism as a movementdesigned to restore masculinity to the Jewish man. This view is based on Europeananti-Semitic imagery that was absorbed by Zionist (male) thinkers (Alboim-Dror,2001; Boyarin, 1997; Gluzman, 2007; Kamir, 2004), and which depicts the Jewishmale as effeminate, weak, and dependent. This view, which was articulated withinthe dominant Ashkenazi group, lays the ideological foundation for the centrality ofAshkenazi men over Ashkenazi women.

The second component, citizenship discourse, was analyzed by Shafir and Peled(2001). They suggested that the main perception of citizenship in Israel is not theliberal perception of citizenship as a universal bestowing of formal rights, but ratherthe republican perception, whereby rights are granted according to each individual’scontribution to the Jewish community. In the Israeli inclusion regime, this republicancitizenship discourse is supported by two other discourses—the liberal discourse andthe ethnonational discourse. The liberal citizenship discourse distinguishes betweenIsraeli citizens (both Jews and Arabs) and noncitizens (Palestinians in the West Bankand Gaza) and excludes the latter. The ethnonational discourse distinguishes betweenJews and Arabs and excludes the latter. Finally, the republican citizenship discoursecreates social hierarchy among Jews, with the central position reserved for those whocontribute the most to the collective. In this context, military service is perceived asthe highest contribution to the collective and the ultimate manifestation of patriotism(especially service in elite units and in high-ranking positions, which are occupiedmostly by Ashkenazi men). This hierarchy creates a political culture that marginalizeswomen and Mizrahi men whose contribution to the nation is considered less central.It also creates a militarist society, in which the army is central and military servicedefines the connection between the citizen and the state.

The gendered nature of armies was studied by feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe(1993, 2000), who suggested that military establishments are key players in theconstruction of patriarchal ideology and the justification of male superiority. On theone hand, the ethos of power, competitiveness, fighting, and wars are central inthe traditional perception of masculinity. On the other hand, preservation andglorification of those ethoses enable the army to mobilize the human power it needs.Because an ‘‘army’s mobilization demands gender ideology that presents the militaryas the ultimate test of maleness’’ (Sasson-Levi, 2007, p. 14), the army ‘‘exercisespolitical power to construct gender in such a way as to ensure that militarizationstays firmly on the rails’’ (Enloe, 1993, p. 51). In the Israeli context, Kimmerling(1993) suggested that the military is basically a macho and androcentric subculture,and Sasson-Levi (p. 3) defined it as ‘‘the contact link between masculinity and the



state.’’ This has resulted in the marginalization—via the military—of the feminine.And because this androcentric culture ascribes masculinity to male and femininityto female, it also resulted in the marginalization of Jewish-Israeli women throughoutsociety and particularly ‘‘their exclusion from the most important societal discoursein Israel, that of ‘national security’’ (Lomsky-Feder & Ben-Ari, 1999, p. 6). Thus,the army in Israel is an active player in the construction of gender inequality(Helman, 2007).

The combination of the cultural assigning of masculinity to Zionism, the militantcitizenship discourse, and the gender stratification in the army creates a linkagebetween masculinity and the ‘‘nation’s good.’’ Because masculinity is assigned only tothe male, this perception basically leaves Jewish-Israeli women with two central socialroles: they can either be lesser men, or second-rate men, who hold secondary maleroles; or they can be mothers, the wombs of the nation, responsible for reproduction(Lemish & Barzel, 2000; Kamir, 2004, p. 165–170). As several studies reveal, the stategenerally emphasizes the latter option, adopting ideology that constructed womenas ‘‘the national reproducers’’ (Yuval-Davis, 1989, 1997) and equated womanhoodwith motherhood (Berkovitch, 2001). Wars and security crises intensified this trend.

From the mid-1980s through the 1990s, many scholars claimed that the centralityof the army, the national security discourse, and the republican citizenship discoursein Israeli society was declining (Ben-Eliezer, 2004; Ram, 2005; Shafir & Peled, 1998).They suggested that more new-liberal and individual values, such as self-fulfillmentand financial success, made Israel a nonideological society. On the other hand, themilitarist-collective characteristics of Israeli society had not disappeared completely.Peled (2004) suggested that the change should be understood as a process in whichthe republican citizenship discourse had declined whereas both the ethnonationaland the liberal discourses had strengthened, creating a new combination betweenindividualism and nationalism, between the civilian and the militaristic. Thus, Israelisociety today is characterized by privatization and individualism on the one hand,but still retains collective-militaristic features on the other hand, especially in wartime.

Presumably, those changes also influence gender conceptions. Almog (2000)suggested that they caused a transformation in the image of the (Jewish) Israeliwoman, who developed from a halutza (Zionist pioneer) to a housewife and from ahousewife to a Yuppie.

Israeli women and the Second Lebanon War

The Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah lasted from July 12 toAugust 14, 2006. During this war, Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel withmissiles and Israel bombed Lebanon and sent ground forces into south Lebanon,where confrontations occurred (Levi, Nachum, & Buchbut, 2006). Lebanon reported1,181 Lebanese fatalities, most of them civilians. Associated Press estimated that 845Lebanese were killed—732 civilians, 34 soldiers, and 68 Hezbollah fighters (Levi,



Nachum, & Buchbut, 2006; The Associated Press, 2006). According to Israeli officials,162 Israelis were killed in the war—43 civilians and 119 soldiers.

From Israel’s perspective, the war’s main threat was the over 4,200 Katyusharockets that were launched against Israel’s northern cities, and most of Israel DefenseForces’ (IDF) actions were aimed at destroying Hezbollah’s rocket launchers. For thisreason, national security researcher Major General Yitzhak Ben-Israel (2007) calledthe Second Lebanon War ‘‘the first missiles-war.’’ More than 1 million Israelis, andeven more Lebanese, fled their homes and became refugees, or spent over a month inshelters (Ben-Israel, 2007).

The constant bombardment of civilian population centers and the high proportionof civilian casualties compared to those of military personnel (over 25% of the deadand 75% of the wounded were civilians; Levi et al., 2006) meant that women facedequal danger to men2 on the home front.3 It has also been suggested that women(and the poor, among whom women are the majority) were especially vulnerable tothe harsh economic (Svirsky, 2006) impact of the war, especially because the state’ssupport systems (schools, welfare offices, sexual assault aid centers, mental healthclinics, etc.) in the north were closed because of the war (Buxbaum, Abramovitz, &Dagan, 2007; Isha L’Isha [Women to Women], 2007).

In this war women also served in combat and combat support positions, and onefemale soldier, Sergeant Major Keren Tendler, was killed in battle. The IDF did notpublish data on the number of women who were sent to the front lines, but therewere only a few. Although there has been a gradual increase in the number of womenin combat units in the IDF over the past decade,4 in 2007 there were an estimated1,500 women combat soldiers (Harel, 2007), or about 2%–3% of all combat soldiers(Sasson-Levi, 2007, p. 43). During the war, women were among those called up inthe massive mobilization of reserve soldiers (IDF, 2007), but here too, the army didnot release information about numbers and positions. Despite the lack of statisticaldata, it is safe to assume that, compared to previous wars, women were more highlyinvolved in military operations during the war.5

Women also played a central role in diplomatic activity during the war. IsraeliForeign Minister Tzipi Livni was a member in the small interministerial committeethat approved every major military move, and U.S. Secretary of State, CondoleezzaRice, was actively involved in the diplomatic efforts to achieve a cease-fire (WinogradCommission, 2008). In addition, women were very dominant in the small movementthat protested against the war, organizing demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem(Safran, 2006; Shem-Tov, 2006).

Finally, the Second Lebanon War was covered extensively by the media (Kalb &Saivetz, 2007; The media in the 2006 Lebanon War research paper series, 2006–2008),and Israeli women were highly involved in producing this coverage. Women servedas journalists, editors, and spokespersons, including IDF Spokesperson, Brigadier-General Miri Regev, Israel Radio war correspondent, Carmela Menashe, and TV newsanchors, Miki Haimovitch and Yonit Levi, who broadcast from northern Israel.



The information about women’s social involvement in the Second Lebanon Waris obviously partial and incomplete. In the absence of solid studies on women’s placein the war, it is impossible to assess the extent of their involvement. Because Israelihistoriography tends to ignore the issue of women and war, it is also difficult tocompare the Second Lebanon War to previous wars.6 Still, the information availableclearly indicates that women took part in the war on various levels, in both the publicand private spheres. It also suggests this involvement was greater than in past wars.With this background in mind, I now move to women’s representation in the news.

Gender representation and women’s images in news media

A critical approach to media studies suggests that news is ideological.7 Rather thansimply reflecting reality, news production is a complex process of selection, com-position, promotion, and concealment that produces constituted understandings,subjectivities, and versions of the world (Allan, 1999). This constructed reality isconnected to patterns of inequality, domination, and oppression. Thus, from agender-sensitive perspective, news is a focal mechanism legitimizing the hierarchicalgender order in society (Lemish & Barzel, 2000).

Feminist studies about news texts in mainstream media suggest that the texts aresystematically patriarchal. In general, such texts create a picture of a world in whichmen are central (the ‘‘norm,’’ and the ‘‘standard’’). The appearance of women in thetext is relatively rare and is often relegated to the sidelines, defined on the basis oftheir relation to men, restricted to a limited number of ‘‘feminine’’ roles, and rarelygranted the right to speak on their own. Hence, few women’s activities, insights,worldviews, or sensitivities are given expression in the news (Byerly & Ross, 2004;Gill, 2007; Lemish, 2008; Rakow & Wackwitz, 2004a, 2004b).

In Israel, feminist media studies have found that women are excluded from medianews texts (or ‘‘symbolically annihilated,’’ in the well-known words of Gaye Tuchman(1978)), both in quantitative and qualitative terms (Lemish, 2004). Quantitatively, astudy of prime time news broadcasts on Israeli Channels 2 and 10 in 2004 revealedthat only 20% of the persons referred to in the news were women, which meansthere were four times as many references to men as there were to women (Laor,Alpert-Lefler, Avraham, & First, 2004; Lemish, 2006). Furthermore, a vast majority ofthe women in the news were Jews, with Arab women barely mentioned. In addition,women’s voices are seldom heard. In newspaper coverage, 14% of the sources citedin the news are women, whereas men are cited 86% of the time. When women arequoted, they are usually speaking as witnesses to events or as representatives of theexperiences of the ‘‘person on the street.’’ Rarely are women called upon to offerexpert opinions as professionals or official spokespersons (Lemish, 2006)

Women presented in the Israeli media are nearly always younger than the menpresented, and are more likely to appear in visual contexts than in verbal ones.Furthermore, women are the main focus of only 10% of news items, and these usuallyappear at the end of a news broadcast or on the back pages of newspapers. Rarely are



women referred to in headlines. Thus, not only is it rare for women to appear in thenews; when they do appear, their inclusion is in a ‘‘marginal,’’ ‘‘less important,’’ or‘‘spectacle’’ context (Lemish, 2006).

In many cases, journalistic coverage in Israel also associates women with specificqualities and roles. Women are presented as passive, emotional, subjective, soft,visceral, dependent, and so forth. Men, on the other hand, are associated with theopposite qualities. Women are presented mainly as family dependent: as mothers,daughters, and wives of the male subject of an article. Thus, for example, familystatus is mentioned in association with 15% of the women, but with just 6% of themen mentioned in the news. Women are nearly always represented in traditionalcaregiving feminine roles: as housewives, nurses, caregivers; as victims (18% ofreferences to women mentioned in the newspapers dealt with them as victims vs. 9%of the references to men); or as sexual objects, designed to stimulate sexual arousal.There is also an imbalance in the representation of women in the context of specificsocial spheres. Only 13% of the news items covering the political arena, for example,refer to women, whereas 36% of the articles on poverty and welfare focused onwomen (Lemish, 2006).

All told, these different forms of representation, or lack thereof, in the Israelinews media seem to function according to an exclusionary logic whereby men arethe majority and represent the ‘‘norm’’ in society, whereas women are presented asthe minority, the ‘‘other’’ (Lemish, 2007); in the private sphere; on the periphery ofpublic events; as acted upon rather than as actors; as objects not subjects; as emotionalrather than rational. According to Lavie (2006), in the gendered character of Israelimedia ‘‘men are the discourse, women only give it color.’’

In recent years, feminist media scholars developed a special interest in the issueof media, women, and war.8 This interest is not surprising, considering the ongoingwars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the growing understanding in the intellectualcommunity that ‘‘war is the most intense social instant in which the individual andthe collective are interpellated’’ (Hever, 1999). Another cause for this interest couldbe the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security (2000),which states that ‘‘civilians, particularly women and children, account for the vastmajority of those adversely affected by armed conflict,’’ and that ‘‘an understandingof the impact of armed conflict on women and girls . . . can significantly contributeto the maintenance and promotion of international peace and security.’’

Basically, two central findings are offered by studies that examined the genderaspects of war coverage in the news around the world. The first is that ‘‘world mediaportrayals of war and conflict are heavily dominated by patriarchal logic’’ (Lemish,2005). Barker-Plummer and Boaz (2005) suggest that war news is a masculinistdiscourse that is characterized by framing that draws upon and reproduces key ways ofthinking that are more closely associated with male than with female observers.9 Warnews, they claim, tends to include elements such as reverence for power and authority;a focus on strategy (rather than morality); a lack of interest in the points of view ofthe less powerful (who are often women); an almost exclusive use of male sources for



commentary (both military and civilian); and an abundant use of sports and huntingmetaphors. The second finding is that women are cast in war coverage mostly in therole of victims (Lemish, 2005). In their passive roles in the war, narrative womenare portrayed as ‘‘simply regrettable victims—incidental, unavoidable casualties . . .

lumped together with children, homes, personal belongings, a church, a dike, awater buffalo, or next year’s crop’’ (Brownmiller, 1975, p. 32). Such representationgives the ‘‘male soldiers the special duty to protect them . . . . Women, incapable ofprotecting themselves, serve as the grounds on which to persuade men to exert theirmasculinity’’ (Kumar, 2004).

In Israel, a handful of studies examined women’s representation and images duringnational security crises. Lachover (2009), in her study on women’s representation inthe press during the Six Day War (1967), found that women were underrepresented inthe news reports and that most of the stories about women were anecdotal and servedas an ‘‘ornament’’ in the coverage. Women were presented in traditional but positivegender roles, in a way that emphasized qualities that are culturally understoodas feminine strengths, such as fertility, sacrificing, and volunteering. ‘‘The maincharacteristic of women’s representation during the Six Day War was the presentationof the women in the collective context and abstention of their presentation in theprivate context,’’ Lachover concluded. Women’s suffering disappeared in the newscoverage along with their existence in the private sphere. Examining the media duringthat war, Shachar (2005) offered a more radical interpretation, suggesting that duringthe war women were ‘‘defined by their wombs,’’ as the motherhood of Jewish-Israeliwomen was represented as a strategic weapon in the ongoing conflict between Israeland the Arabs. The press discourse, she concluded, implied that the Israeli womanfulfills her duty to her people by mothering soldiers and encouraging them intobattle. (The same tendency has been identified in Lemish and Barzel’s (2000) studyon the press coverage of Israeli women’s peace movement.)

Women’s representations in the press during the Yom Kippur War (1973) werestudied by Gavriely-Nury, Lahav, and Topol (2008). They concluded that the mediaadopted several discursive strategies that served to justify women’s exclusion fromthe public arena during a time of a grave crisis. Women’s activities as volunteers onthe home front were trivialized and ridiculed; their work was devalued; and womenwhose contribution to the collective did achieve respectability were portrayed asunique individuals. A great many of the women presented in the press were soldiers’relatives, especially soldiers’ wives, who were portrayed as bravely supporting theirfighting husbands. The writers demonstrated how women who favored their privatefamily interests and stocked food in fear of a shortage were described as hysterical, asthreatening national morale and even as ‘‘an enemy from within.’’

Studying television news coverage of the first intifada, at the end of the 1980s,Tidhar and Lemish (1993) offered the first systematic quantitative data on women’srepresentation during a security crisis. They found that only 5% of the persons whoappeared on the screen in connection with the armed conflict were women, withanother 18% appearing in mixed-gender groups. The majority of women interviewed



in the news programs appeared in dependent roles (the mother of . . .), whereas menwere mostly introduced by their professional identity. The writers noted that thecoverage tends to show women engaged in displays of emotion (and men engagedin displays of violent actions), but they did not elaborate which kind of emotionsthe women displayed. These scholars noted that Palestinian women were presentedslightly more often than Israeli women and were presented as armed and involvedin violent rioting or as mourners. All of the women who appeared on TV (bothPalestinian and Israeli) represented extreme political views on both sides.

Considering the changes in Israeli society (and the Israeli media) since the laststudy, as well as the unique character of the Second Lebanon War, it seems appropriateto study the representation of women and gender roles during that war. Studyingthe existence of women as subjects in the news in a heavily reported war can enrichour knowledge about the coverage of women in the news and women in war newsin particular. It can also enrich our knowledge about women’s positions in today’sIsraeli culture and track changes in a gendered citizenship regime in the context ofthe ongoing armed conflict.

The study

The present study is based on textual analysis of the news items that appeared inthe main news broadcasts on the three national TV channels in Israel—Channel 1,Channel 2, and Channel 10. The broadcasts were at 8:00 p.m. (Channels 2 and 10)and 9:00 p.m. (Channel 1). Normally the news programs last an hour, but during thewar they were extended to keep up with developing events. This study began on July12, 2006, the day Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers (the incident that sparkedthe war) and ended on August 15, 2006, the day after the declaration of the end ofthe war. The texts studied were all the news items broadcast in those newscasts andwhich appeared under ‘‘War in Lebanon’’ in the Television Archive of WisconsinUniversity (in collaboration with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).10 The corpusconsisted of 1,714 items.

A three-step analysis was conducted, integrating both quantitative and qualitativemethods of content analysis. First, I counted the number of references to womenversus men (head-counting methodology) and examined other quantitative charac-teristics of the texts, based on the following questions, to provide systematic data onpatterns of representation:

1. How was each figure mentioned? Was the person mentioned by the anchor inthe TV studio, as an introduction to a full report, or only in the report itself?

2. Where was the reference in the broadcast lineup? Was the figure mentioned inthe first or the second half of the TV broadcast?

3. How was the figure referred to? Was the person only seen in the report? Did thereporter talk about the person? Did the person speak?



In the second step, I conducted a thematic critical analysis of the news itemsin which women had appeared, using five parameters to examine the discoursesthat were constructed around the ideology of femininity and the values that wererepresented in those items11:

1. What was the subject to which the reference of the female figure is connected inthe news report?

2. In which sphere did the woman appear—the public or the private?3. What was the role attributed to the woman in the report?4. How did she exercise herself? What did she talk about? Did her words focus on

feelings or on events?5. Could other components of her social identity, apart from her gender, be

identified by her name, accent, the way she looked, etc.?

In both the first and the second steps, two levels of analysis were used: analysis ofthe complete item and of the ‘‘lead’’ (the anchor’s introduction from the studio). Theseled to the third step of the analysis, in which the content of the leads was compared tothe content of the photojournalistic report. This methodology investigates possiblediscrepancies between the facts and frames presented by the broadcasting reporterson the one hand and the editor’s introductions on the other, and is a comparison ofthe news representations in the interior dimensions of the text itself. Studies usingthis methodology have found that reporters frequently provide varied, elaborate,and relatively complete information about reality. On many occasions, however, theediting process produces a one-dimensional, unelaborated text (Dor, 2005a, 2005b;Lahav, 2006).

An investigation of the possible gap between the facts in the body of the texts andthe final message produced by news editors enables me to examine the ideologicalmeaning of the representation created in the apparently ‘‘objective’’ media news.This phase of the analysis facilitated the transition from ‘‘women’s representations’’to ‘‘representation of ‘the feminine,’’’ by studying the characteristics that wereemphasized as connoted with the sign ‘‘woman’’ in the items’ leads, as well as thecharacteristics that were omitted from the leads (Rakow & Kranich, 1991). Thus,the construction of ‘‘ideal womanhood’’ was studied by analyzing the discursivemechanism through which the texts ascribed particular forms of ‘‘femininity’’ toparticular females.

Exclusionary representation

The findings of this study reveal that in the social reality presented in the TV newsduring the war, women were relegated to the periphery by a complex process ofexclusionary representation. Three primary subprocesses produced this exclusionaryrepresentation of women: concealing, transparency, and constructing women’s presenceand gendered images. Concealing refers to the lack of women’s visibility; transparency



refers to gender blindness—the lack of awareness of the special interest in womenas a social group—which makes gender seem an irrelevant category in the warreality. Constructing gendered images refers to the characters and roles ascribedto women when they did get visibility, and to the differentiation created in thetext between women of different nationalities and ethnic origins. Thus, journalisticrepresentations of women during the war were not simple and one-dimensional, butrather a ‘‘complex game of concealing and promoting’’ (Dor, 2005b) of differentcultural components.

ConcealingThis refers to the appearance, or more accurately, the absence of women in the newscoverage. Women were the majority of figures mentioned in only 91 news items,or 5% of the corpus. This means that 1,623 out of 1,714 news items focused moreon men than on women, or were only about men. Furthermore, the experiences ofwomen and their activities were presented in only 27 reports (less than a third of the5% of the reports in which both genders received equal mention or in which womenwere prominent). In other words, only 1.5% of the items featured women as themain focus of the news story. In addition, the overwhelming majority of these reportswere presented in the second half and often in the final part of the broadcast. Suchpresentation not only presents viewers who do not watch the whole broadcast frombeing exposed to women’s presence but also frames women’s presence as less central.As I will demonstrate below, this positioning toward the end of the news broadcastsis an important framing mechanism in women’s representation.

In only 15 instances were women mentioned in the ‘‘leads’’ from the studio.Quantitatively, less than 1% of the anchors’ introductions referred to women. Thus,even in the few cases in which women were the principal figures of a report, they wereusually not included in the lead. For example, a report about a woman psychologistwho was helping children in the shelters began with the following introduction:‘‘Some people have been living in the shelters for a month, and adjusting to thissituation is hardest for children’’ (Channel 2, August 8). Even the report about awoman suffering anxiety attacks after her home was destroyed was introduced with(my emphasis) ‘‘What does a person feel, whose house suffered a direct hit and hehad to be evicted from his home? Some find this very hard to overcome’’ (Channel10, July 24). Hence, the woman disappeared from the headlines in favor of a so-called‘‘universal’’ presentation, produced through the use of the masculine linguistic form.

In contrast, male appearances were produced in two ways. First, directly, as inthe following examples: ‘‘Interview with M.K. Benjamin Netanyahu’’ (Channel 1,July 12); ‘‘Nasrallah’s news conference’’ (Channel 10, July 12); ‘‘Who are we fightingagainst? An interview with Yossi Peled’’ (Channel 1, July 12); and indirectly, withoutreference to women or to gender: ‘‘Government conducts special meeting’’ (Chan-nel 1, July 12); and ‘‘Kiryat Shemona residents12 ordered to shelters’’ (Channel 10,July 12). As noted earlier, since men are perceived as ‘‘the standard’’ human beings,a seemingly genderless reference to people is essentially a masculine reference.



This numeric diminution of women’s representation is striking, consideringthe fact that the Israeli media devotes about one-quarter to one-third of the totalvolume of the war coverage to civilians (Keshev, 2006),13 whose numbers areequally divided between men and women. This emphasis on the Israeli home front,however, can explain the fact that the very limited coverage of women was nearlyentirely devoted to Jewish women. Only four non-Jewish women appeared in theheadlines—Condoleezza Rice and three nameless Israeli Arabs, who were killed byHezbollah fire. No items that focused on Lebanese women were found in the corpus.

Constructing women’s presenceThe second process determines how women are presented in news coverage, when theywere presented: the realms within which they are represented, their characteristics andthe roles ascribed to them within the framework of the coverage, the nature and anglethrough which they are viewed, etc. The analysis of the television coverage during thewar revealed that the overwhelming majority of coverage featuring feminine figureswas confined to three domains: ‘‘human interest’’ stories about Israeli citizens onthe homefront, stories about families of Israeli soldiers, and the diplomatic effortsto end the war. Other domains, such as military operations, the economic outcomesof the war, the institutional handling of home front activity, and the place of themedia in the war, excluded women almost entirely. I will address each of the threeprominent domains as well as the handful of references to women who appearedin other domains. As we shall see, women’s representation was restricted not onlyto particular domains but also to certain roles within those domains. Almost allthe feminine figures in the coverage were confined to three (sometime overlapping)roles: victim, mother, and professional caregiver or supporter. Other roles such assoldier, expert, commentator, politician, or local/national leader, to name just a few,were reserved almost exclusively for men.

Women civilians on the homefrontThe focus of the missile attacks on civilian targets during the war (as well as thecentrality of the media and the fact that it was not a war between two statesbut between a state and an armed organization) marked the Second LebanonWar as a ‘‘postmodern war’’ (Ben-Israel, 2007). ‘‘If conventional war tends toclearly differentiate between the geographical and social positions of the sexes, thenpostmodern wars tend to confuse and baffle conventional categories. In the caseof such wars it is unclear where front and rear are; who are the warriors on the‘battlefield and who are the supporters at ‘home’’’ (Lomsky-Feder & Ben-Ari, 1999,p. 23). The Israeli media, however, rarely articulated this situation and kept a decisivediscursive separation between ‘‘the front’’ and ‘‘the home front’’ (Liebes & Kampf,2007). The home front, where women and men faced equal danger, was framed notas an integral segment of the war but as its outcome, whereas the front was framed asthe place were IDF (characterized with male dominance) operated, where ‘‘the realbattles’’ occurred (Keshev, 2006). A salient example of this tendency was Channel



10’s headline throughout the war ‘‘Fighting in the North,’’ which completely ignoredany aspects of the war apart from the fighting itself. This discursive move meant thatthe vast majority of women were left outside of what was conceptualized as the mainarena of activity. As Cynthia Enloe explains: ‘‘Women as women must be deniedaccess to ‘the front,’ to ‘combat’ so that men can claim a uniqueness and superioritythat will justify their dominant position in the social order. And yet, because inpractice women are often exposed to frontline combat, the military has to constantlyredefine ‘the front’ and ‘combat’ as wherever women are not’’ (Enloe, 1983, p. 15).

Thus, in a circular discursive move, the home front was the domain in whichmost of the women figures appeared, making it the home front by their appearancein it. In this domain, most of women’s appearances were in the framework of civilianinjuries sustained on Israel. Typical leads included ‘‘15-year-old girl killed in missileattack’’ (Channel 1, July 24); ‘‘Shelter wedding—love is the victor’’ (Channel 10,August 10); or ‘‘Northern families flee to the south’’ (Channel 1, July 28); Womenappeared here in two primary roles—as victims and as caregivers.

As victims of the situation, reports emphasized women’s emotions, suffering, andmisery. For example, during the report from Kiryat Shemona, Alsie Zewigi stated,tearfully, ‘‘it is stress, fear, the flies that are all over the place, it is everything . . . ’’(Channel 1, July 30); or the following report in which a woman described a missileattack in which men were killed:

Women talking, crying: We sat down, and we did not know what to do. So wejust hugged and kissed, there was nothing else to do. And there were noisyexplosions, eight or nine Katyusha missiles. I heard my neighbor and I could notanswer her. She crawled to my house and shouted ‘‘Esther, Esther, my daddy isgone’’ (Channel 1, August 18).

As caregivers—primarily of children but also of the ill and the elderly—womenappeared in their familial dependency role, as the mothers, daughters, wives, and soforth of other (male) citizens. Here too the framing emphasizes emotions—fears,stress, and pain. For example, Gila Tapiro is quoted saying: ‘‘The children are startledevery time there is a boom, ‘Mommy, Mommy, the house is moving’’’; or, in hershelter in Kiryat Shemona, Rachel ben Shitrit says: ‘‘my son wants to take a shower,but there is no shower here. There are small children here who need to play, all kindof things, the children need all manner of things . . . ’’ (Channel 10, July 14).

Most of the TV reports in which women appeared as either victims or caregiversin the familial domain were filmed in three private or semiprivate locations: inthe women’s homes, in shelters in apartment buildings, and in a refugee camp insouthern Israel. In the homes, the women mostly appeared either alone or withfamily members, many times presented as totally helpless. In the shelters womenwere photographed mostly in the company of family members and neighbors, manyof them were children, and were presented as both caregivers of the weak and asvictims. In the refugee camp, which was established by an Israeli philanthropist onthe beach, women were photographed mostly surrounded by family members and



friends. In many of these reports, they were dressed in swimsuits, with the sea andplaying children in the background, which made the scenes look a little bit like familyvacation scenes. As in reports from the shelters in the north, reports from the refugeecamp also framed the women who appeared as both caregivers of the weak and asvictims.

These types of representations, as victims and as caregivers due to women’sfamilial role, are based on—and therefore reinforce—the patriarchal tendency tosee women as weak, passive, emotional, familial, and active solely in the privatesphere (Lemish, 2002). As this tendency is well documented in previous feministmedia studies in the last 15 years in Israel (Lemish, 2007), it is not surprising. Itssignificance rises, however, in a comparison of the representation here and in theprevious wars I discussed earlier. This comparison exposes the deep cultural changesin Israeli society: from hardly any mention of women’s existence in the privatesphere in 1967 (Lachover, 2009), through condemnation of this existence in 1973(Gavriely-Nury, Lahav, & Topol, 2008), to a sympathetic highlighting of women inthe private sphere.14 The once-emphasized national-collective context is replacedwith the private context of the familial and the domestic sphere. With this change,the position of the woman helpless victim, once absent for the sake of the collectivestrength and morale, is now appearing. The emphasis on mothering still exists, but itsobject has changed: The children here are kids, not soldiers (although, as I will showbelow, the ‘‘mother of the soldier’’ figure did not disappear). Together those changesdemonstrate the changing Israeli civic discourse, which became more individualoriented and less collective oriented.

A few women functioning in their professional capacity as caregivers were alsopresented. For example, a psychologist involved in assisting children in the shelters(Channel 2, August 8), nurses in a hospital (Channel 1, August 8), and even thedirector of the Haifa Zoo and its (female) veterinarian, who spoke about caring foranimals during the war (Channel 1, July 27). Although these caregivers were acting inthe public sphere, and not in the framework of their familial relations, in a majorityof the news items they were presented as an extension of the feminine familial role,rather than in institutionalized care network. This discursive expression was created,among other things, by presenting those women as if they were acting on their own; byignoring or reducing the prominence of female caregivers’ organizational affiliation;and by presenting the women as if they acted out of emotional motivation (they needme, so I feel I have to be here) more than out of formal motivation (its my job). Thistendency was very prominent in the leads, in which women’s activities as caregiversin institutional frameworks appeared only twice. In all of the other instances, womenfunctioning in their professional caregiving roles were only mentioned in the body ofthe report. The story of Janet Camry (Channel 1, July 25) exemplifies this situation:

Anchor (in the studio): More than anyone else, the old people in the north arethe victims of the war. Here is the story of Janet, an 80-year-old woman,



confined to her bed, whose caregiver (feminine) fled to the center of the country,and Janet is now literally fighting for her life.15

Yet, in the full report we learn that Janet Camry actually was being cared for, albeitto a minimal extent, through the activities of women who are members of the AmalCare Network that provides care for the elderly in Kiryat Shmona. A representative ofthe network, Nurit Chen, stated:

A woman talking: Luckily, dedicated caregivers (in Hebrew this expressed in thefeminine form) have remained and they go from house to house in KiryatShmona and do whatever is important at the time—personal care, cleaning,food preparation.

The full report also stated that not only did her caregiver but also ‘‘Janet’s children’’flee to the center of the country. Neither this fact nor the names of caregivers such asNurit Chen and many others who were acting tirelessly, as required by their jobs, onbehalf of those injured during the war, were cited in the story’s lead. In other words,the media had information about the many activities of women in the professionalpublic support systems, but did not cite these facts in the stories’ leads.

The representation of women from different social groups in the ‘‘home frontdomain’’ was not identical. First, there was almost exclusive coverage of Jewishwomen. The Lebanese home front as a whole, and Lebanese women in particular,were hardly ever shown on Israeli TV. Israeli–Arab women were mentioned onlywhen they were killed by Hezbollah missiles. The representation of women as victimsand as caregivers in the familial sphere was reserved primarily for Mizrahi women,whereas both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi women appeared as professional caregivers.

Women in dependency roles vis-a-vis soldiersThe second domain in which women appeared quite often was in the context ofIsraeli’s soldiers’ families, stories about dead soldiers, and reports of funerals. Herewomen appeared in their dependency roles (as mothers, wives, daughters) in relationto Israeli soldiers, primarily those killed during the battles. For example, leadsincluded such statements as:

Anchor (in the studio): Alex Kushnishki and his girlfriend, Shir, were to bemarried following his discharge from the army. Today she spoke about the lastmoments when he thought about her and when she tried to pass along a messageof love to him (Channel 10, July 13).

Other leads of this kind were, for example: Amit Farkash, sister of Tom Farkash whowas killed in a plane crash, wrote a song in his memory; (Channel 10, July 20) andVicki Falachei, whose son Itai served in Lebanon, was quoted as saying: ‘‘I have neverbeen so afraid in my entire life. This is a type of fear that is so very difficult to explain.As I speak, my eyes tear up. Such fear overcomes you’’ (Channel 2, August 13).In both cases the women were photographed in their homes (in Farkash’s case,



she was sitting on her bed in her bedroom), either alone or surrounded by familymembers. As in the first domain, the emphasis is on women in the private sphere—asvictims and dependents. However, in this framework, they did receive the right tospeak and to act, on certain occasions, beyond the private in the public sphere. Forexample, in a story about the fallen soldier Jonathan Hadasi:

Reporter: Now his mother Miri wants to strengthen and support the fighters.Hold on, she is saying to them, keep on fighting for the country we deserve, keepon protecting us, because there is no other choice (Channel 10, July 20).

The most prominent example of this situation was the coverage of Karnit Goldwasser,wife of captured soldier, Udi Goldwasser. For example:

Reporter: Don’t be mistaken about Karnit—who has had her moments of crisis.Overnight this young woman, who was transformed from a carefree student intothe wife of a captured soldier, transformed her home into a war room, activelyinvolved in returning Udi from captivity. . . ‘this is a national goal,’ she said(Channel 1, July 18).

This structure of coverage reinforces the conception according to which the principallegitimacy for women to act in the public sphere and to participate actively incollective decisions is via their connection with men in the army. Referred to as‘‘womb discourse’’ (Lemish & Barzel, 2002), this connection allows them to act dueto their dependency and familial relations as well as their feelings. However, suchframing does not emphasize their legitimacy to speak and to act as citizens. Thisframing is in line with the well-known analysis of the position of Jewish women inIsraeli society, as noted earlier in this article, as well as with the findings concerningwomen’s images in the media in previous wars. Thus, it is not surprising that thisrepresentation was also found during the Second Lebanon war, and that it wasreserved solely for Jewish women.

Two findings merit special attention. The first is the image of the soldier’s motherin the news coverage. Whereas in 1967 and 1973 the mother was portrayed as brave,courageously sending her son into battle (Shachar, 2005), in 2006 her fears and painwere emphasized. Again, the representation reflects the changes in Israeli culture,from the collective to the individual. In addition, it is important to note that thisrepresentation of the soldier’s relative was restricted primarily to Ashkenazi women.As there is no data about the ethnicity of the IDF soldiers who fell in Lebanon, oneshould be very cautious in the interpretation of this finding, but it might reflect thestill-existent centrality of the Ashkenazi in Israel’s cultural order more than the realdistribution of the dead soldiers’ origin.

The overwhelming majority of the reports in the two domains discussed untilnow—the home front and the soldiers’ families—were presented mainly in thesecond half, and often in the final part, of the broadcasts. In other words, tele-vision broadcasts focused primarily on military actions, the diplomatic process,political activity, and the economic aspects of the war—all of which included few



women—and only then did they report on the domain reserved for women: humanproblems of life on the homefront and the status of those whose roles were soldierdependent. This type of organization of the news broadcasts transmits the mes-sage that only the public (that is presented as the male’s) sphere is ‘‘important,’’‘‘essential,’’ and ‘‘central,’’ and only after reporting on it, is there reasonable time todiscuss the private (which is presented as the female’s) sphere, which is ‘‘interesting,’’‘‘sensitive,’’ and ‘‘touching.’’ For the sake of argument, the organizing of the news inthe opposite order would frame the war as a humanitarian crisis in which women areamong its principal victims.

Women in the public sphereFinally, there was coverage of a few women who were active in the public sphereowing to their profession and position. Those women were not presented in theirdependency role or as caregivers. The main domain in which women were portrayedindependently was the diplomatic arena. In fewer than 10 reports women appearedas part of the coverage of military activities. There were also insolated reports aboutthe female general manager of a winery in the north, the Israeli minister of education,and female foreign correspondents who were stationed in Israel.

1. The diplomatic arena: The two most prominent women presented in the publicsphere were Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and U.S. Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice, who stood at the center of the diplomatic effort to reach acease-fire. Both women were interviewed several times and their actions werereported, although the diplomatic activity was regularly deferred until afterthe discussion of the military and its actions. Hence, here too, the diplomatic(constructed as a female’s) arena was given the appearance of being secondary tothe military (which was constructed as a male’s).

Anchor (from the studio): Tonight we ask: Where is Condoleezza? Is shecoming?

Reporter: She stopped in Beirut to offer her support to Prime Minister Seniora.This evening she will have dinner with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni hopesthat Rice will be able to hold on against the global pressure (Channel 11, July 24).

In contrast to this relative prominence of the institutionalized diplomatic channel,throughout the entire war there were only two reports of women who actedextrainstitutionally in civilian society to end or reduce the tensions of the conflict.Particularly conspicuous in their absence were the reports concerning women whoengaged in protest demonstrations against the war, in spite of the fact that womendominated the demonstrations and the organizations that organized the protests(Safran, 2006; Shem-Tov, 2006). This finding is in line with the observation, offeredin a study of women’s representation during the first intifada in the late 1980s, thatwomen’s voices are especially ignored when they develop an oppositional approachto a security crisis (Tidhar & Lemish, 1993). As Lemish notes, ‘‘many women’s



movements seek to offer alternative perspectives on issues of war and peace thatchallenge the dominant social order connecting patriarchy and political violence . . . .However, voices that might begin to challenge the dominant hegemonic militarizedmasculinity are mostly perceived as irrelevant or illegitimate to the central debatessurrounding violent conflicts, and therefore are excluded’’ (Lemish, 2005, p. 275).

2. The military: Women soldiers were the focus of just nine news reports, a verysmall number compared to the hundreds of news stories about men soldiersthroughout the war. However, the importance of the army in Israeli society as awhole, and particularly during wars, means that the image of the woman soldierhas unique significance. The two women soldiers who were mentioned mostoften were IDF spokesperson, Major Miri Regev, and Lieutenant Keren Tendlerwho was killed in action during the war. The references to them, however, werevery limited and basically included the mention of their names, and in the caseof Regev, one interview and citation of her formal press release.

The ‘‘human interest’’ stories about women in the IDF were much more meaningful.One of them dealt with an officer responsible for coordinating affairs for woundedsoldiers:

Reporter: Meet Liat Nefesh-Edri, only 26 years old, and head of the hospitalizedsoldiers department. Liat is responsible for all the hospitalized soldiers and theirrelatives. At the same time she is worried about her husband, a combat soldier inthe Golani division, who is stationed in south Lebanon.

Nefesh-Edri talking: ‘‘This is very taxing, emotionally. You see the wounded,you see the families. It is very hard’’ (Channel 10, August 1).

Another example of this kind of coverage is a story about the security coordinator ina kibbutz in the north:

Reporter: This is probably the only place in the country where the highestsecurity authority is called Vivian. But in Kibbutz Yiftach this looks like the mostlogical thing in the world . . . . Vivian Hirsh is the kibbutz’s security coordinator. . . she is also responsible for the hardest decision made here—to send thewomen and children south. Now she has to explain to her kids that they will goto the south of the country but mommy won’t come with them . . . with all theprofessional satisfaction, Hirsh is only hoping to be just a mother again(Channel 2, July 8).

And a story about women soldiers at observation positions in a military outpoststarted with:

Photograph of a male officer, his face hidden, talking: to concentrate on themission, to know that behind you there are people who count on you . . . .



Reporter: Captain N. can indeed be proud of his fighters, or, to be precise, of hiswomen soldiers, at the observation post on the northern border . . . they cannotrest. There are fighters in the field and someone has to take care of them.

A women soldier talking: When they are in the field it is our eyes that guardthem . . . we are a little envious. We know the area so well and they are goingthere and we are staying here. But there is nothing we can do about it (Channel10, July 27).

Other stories about women in the army included a story about a military doctor, astory about officers responsible for coordinating affairs for families of killed soldiers,and a story about a woman who was drafted to reserve duty with her husband.Although the stories dealt with soldiers, the prominent motifs in the examples, aswell as in the other reports on women soldiers, were the caregiving, the emotions,and the dependency roles. Not only did the presentation in the military domain notfree women from their traditional roles but also it seems that the representationhighlights exactly the same social positions that appeared in the coverage of civiliansociety—only stronger. The women soldiers were framed back into the spheresand roles of dependency, emotion, caregiving, victim, and the personal. These are‘‘human stories,’’ not social action. As Enloe puts it, women may serve in the military,but they can never be the military. They must remain ‘‘camp followers,’’ who performsupportive services and functions (Enloe, 1983).

Overall, these findings demonstrate the tendency of the Israeli media to circum-scribe women into traditional roles and images even when they act in the publicsphere. This representation is in line with other studies, which found that mediareporting on women in politics tends to focus on gender roles and domestic services,and that even female politicians are more often presented as emotional and sensitive,whereas male politicians are presented as serious, dominant, and prone to commit-ting violence (Ross, 2002). As in the other domain, in the coverage of the publicsphere women were often presented by their first name (recall Vivian, Liat, and evenCondoleezza), their age was emphasized, and every here and there a sexist remarkwas made. For example, in a story about Lara Logan, head of CBS foreign news desk,she was shown interviewing an Israeli major general. The officer commented thatforeign reporters have more dignity than Israeli reporters. In response the reportersaid: ‘‘It turns out that IDF major generals love blondes too, especially when they areasking questions’’ (Channel 11, July 22).

The media representation of women in the public sphere also reinforced theIsraeli inclusion regime, as there were no Arab female figures in the coverage of thepublic sphere, and the overwhelming majority of the Jewish women who appearedin this domain were Ashkenazi.

Gender blindnessThe third component in the process of the exclusionary representation of women inthe Israeli TV during the Second Lebanon war was the transformation of gendered



meanings of events to ‘‘transparent,’’ nonvisible. The point here is not the nonvisibilityof women, as discussed in the section on concealing, but the nonvisibility of thegender division as a social–political division that elevates different interests indifferent gender groups. The ‘‘blindness’’ is to the fact that, in a patriarchal socialregime, women are not only individual persons but also members of the ‘‘femininegroup.’’ As opposed to liberal approaches, which advocate individualistic attitudetoward persons and see gender blindness (as well as color blindness) as a positivephenomenon, here the blindness is understood as a discursive mechanism thatconceals the political meanings of the gender division. Gender blind presentation,then, presents the gender division as natural, apolitical, and as one that should betaken for granted (Lowe-Morna, 2002).

From this perspective it is important to acknowledge the unique influences thatwars have on women, which differ from their influences on men. For example, thefact that in Israeli culture women are the primary caregivers for the weak meansthat a situation in which there is an increasing number of victims imposes a greaterburden on women. Furthermore, women in Israel tend to be more susceptible thanmen to influence in situations of economic and emotional crisis.16 On the proactiveside, women tend to be more dominant in peace organizations than in militantorganizations.

In spite of these influences and forms of participation in social life, however,during the period investigated, the Israeli media ignored the gender dimensions of thewar, exercising ‘‘gender blindness’’ instead.17 Only one report was found that relateddirectly to the special situation of women and only one commentator addressedthis issue. In contrast, there were many reports that dealt with specific problems ofother social groups, such as children, elderly, small-business owners, farmers, andanimals. By ignoring women’s specific problems, the news coverage represents genderdifferences as nonexistent or transparent. Thus, events and experiences are presentedas ‘‘having an influence on everyone,’’ with the ‘‘everyone’’ being primarily men, orwhen it is clear that the influence is principally on women, the issue is ignored.

Here is a part of the single report that demonstrated awareness to the particularposition of women during the war.

Anchor (from the TV studio): Now here is the difficult dilemma facing workingmothers in the north. Summer camps and childcare centers have not beenfunctioning for 2 weeks, and in any case the mothers prefer—which is onlynatural—to keep their children at home, near the shelters. So, what should theydo when many employers demand that they show up for work and even threatento fire them?

Reporter: Hundreds of mothers have had to remain at home with their children,in spite of demands from their bosses that they return to work . . . familyobligations have fallen primarily on the mothers, who risk being fired . . . theyare paying the price economically . . . and soon they will have to pay with theirown money for the questionable right to be refugees in their own homes, in



conflict with their workplace, and primarily to serve as full-time entertainers forbored children (Channel 10, July 24).

This report reflects all too well the special difficulties of women during the war.However, it is the exception that proves the rule—as there were no other reports thatrelated to women as a special group with their own interests and unique difficulties.This is all the more prominent given the coverage of other economic aspects of theconflict, which were presented on a regular basis as a general problem for ‘‘residents(pronounced in Hebrew in a masculine form) of the north’’ and in which most ofthe characters that appeared were men.

The above report is also not without problems. First, it does not challenge theautomatic cultural imposition of parental responsibility on women. As Weiss notedwhen she studied the other homefront war, the Gulf War in 1991, working womenfaced an internal conflict that men as a rule do not face, between the contradictorydemands of being a mother and being a trained professional, and if they chooseto work they are accused of ‘‘forsaking’’ their children (Weiss, 1999). Second,the report represents the feminine figures as ‘‘mother’’ more than as ‘‘women,’’reinforcing the assumption that women’s rights are connected to their motherhood.Third, the report preserves the image of women as victims. And finally, it dealt onlywith Jewish women—most of them Mizrahi.

During the whole period studied, there was also only one instance in whichsome of the issues in this article were discussed openly—on Channel 10’s weekendmagazine, at the height of the war. The two anchors, Ofer Shelach and Raviv Druker,interviewed Ruth Calderon, the founder of Alma College in Tel Aviv, which isdedicated to the study of Hebrew culture. Here is how the interview began:

Anchor: It seems that in this war we concentrate on a consensus from whichthere is no escape. Is there room for other views? Another Israeliness? . . . . Arewe turning soft? And is it good? . . .

Calderon: Our society is still very masculine, militaristic, focused on soldiers andarmy . . . . For example, you are talking about ‘‘fighting,’’ but when so manycivilians have to stay in shelters it’s not ‘‘fighting’’; it is a war.

Anchor: The TV is also very masculine. You are the Friday news magazine’stoken woman.

Calderon: I’m the weekend magazine’s woman. The rest of the time there is ageneral sitting here.

Anchor: You are a ‘‘mascot woman,’’ but do you think a woman expresses adifferent understanding of reality? A different voice?

Calderon: I think that more feminine voices in the discourse would have createdbroader planning. We are operating based on a masculine insult: ‘‘They capturedour soldiers; we will hurt them back and show them that they had better notmess with us.’’ I can identify with those feelings, because I too have a masculineside, but it is not a wise place to act from (Channel 10, August 4).



Symbolically that interview was constantly interrupted by live reports of missileattacks on Israeli cities, and eventually cut short in favor of an interview with ageneral. And thus, the discussion about the gendered war’s culture was framed, onceagain, as less important and less central than the militaristic discourse of the fighting,that is, as something that can be discussed calmly, during the weekend, as long asnothing ‘‘really important’’ happens.

Summary

This article studies women’s representation in the news during the Second LebanonWar as a means to understanding how patriarchal discourse shapes understandingsof war and of manhood and womanhood in Israel. What form of agency was assignedto people from different social groups? How was suffering portrayed? And what arethe social consequences of the media news coverage? (Lemish, 2005).

The mapping of television news coverage of the month-long Second LebanonWar reveals that the coverage had risen out of ideological (not necessarily conscious)discursive definitions of the nature of the events (e.g., fighting vs. war), the geographicand social locations of the events (e.g., front vs. home front), and the roles of differentsocial groups in the events (e.g., central agents vs. supporters). The framing thatwas picked out by the media was only one possible definition of the events, and bychoosing it, the Israeli TV excluded alternative understandings of the situation. Forexample, the decision to understand the war first and foremost as a humanitariancrisis would have produced a very different kind of news coverage. Thus, the mediacoverage of the war was not a simple work of reality reflection, but an ideologicalwork of reality construction, in which certain aspects of reality were promoted andbrought to the center of the discourse, whereas others were marginalized and ignored.

Gendered social order construction stood at the heart of this discursive work.The news coverage of the Second Lebanon War demonstrated—and thus rein-forced—the understanding of war as ‘‘men’s business,’’ with women pushed to themargin and perceived as peripheral to the events. In this framework, the complexIsraeli gendered citizenship order, created in the context of the Israeli–Arab conflict,was revealed and thus reproduced. According to this order, women from Arabcountries were totally ignored in the coverage of the Lebanese war, treated as ifnonexistent. Arab–Israeli citizens appeared on the margin of the margins, only whenthey were killed as ‘‘Israelis’’ (i.e., by Hezbollah missiles), not when they lived asArabs (see also Keshev, 2006). Mizrahi Jewish women appeared almost exclusivelyin the private sphere, primarily as passive victims of the violence and/or within theframework of their family’s situation, and first and foremost as mothers of small chil-dren. Ashkenazi Jewish women were presented principally through their dependencyrole, or as relatively marginal activists in the public sphere, primarily giving supportservices or acting as an extension of the private familial sphere.

Thus, despite the gradual rise in the number of women in Israeli public life, itseems that at least in wartime the Israeli media is still presenting a very traditional



gendered reality. During the war, the news coverage withdrew into some of the mostbasic stereotypes associated with women in patriarchal culture: the stereotype of thehelpless passive victim; the stereotype of the caregiver, the helper, and supporter ofthe central human subject—the man; and of course the stereotype of the mother, thegiver of life, and the griever of death. As Lemish (2002, p. 91) puts it, the Jewish-Israeliwoman is still ‘‘fixed in the maternal role as the one who gives birth, nurses, sacrificesherself, and, finally, mourns her dead son.’’ The claims about the radical liberalizationand openness of the Israeli inclusion discourse (at least for the Jewish members ofsociety) hence get no support from the findings of this study, on the contrary.

On the other hand, a comparison of past representations of women duringwars does reveal an important change in the cultural attitude toward privatizationand individualization (versus collectivism). If in the past the media representationhid, dismissed, or criticized Jewish women’s existence in the private sphere andconcentrated on mobilizing them into the collective, the 2006 findings suggest thattoday this existence is acknowledged and even encouraged, especially for Mizrahiwomen. In addition, the findings demonstrate a change in the cultural approach topain and suffering caused by the war. As shown in the theoretical overview, studieson the journalistic presentation of previous wars found out that private pain wasdiminished in the interest of national morale. In the Second Lebanon War, on theother hand, the media prominently present individuals’ suffering—as long as thoseindividuals were Israeli Jews—although the task of expressing this suffering was givenmostly to women. Thus, from a self-image of strong united collective, Jewish-Israelisociety moved into a more fragmental self-image of strong, tough men and weak,soft women.

This gendered structure was mostly implied, and hardly ever declared or discussedopenly on the TV news. During the war, the gendered structure of Israeli society wasdisplayed again and again, while framed as if it was obvious, natural, normal, andsometimes as if it was irrelevant to the events. Thus, we see but do not see women;we see but do not see gendered interest groups; we see but do not see patriarchy. Thissituation affects not only the position of women in Israeli society but also negativelyimpacts the public discussion of war. The perception of war as a ‘‘men’s issue’’allowed the preservation of a conservative understanding of the war as an event inwhich forces are shooting at each other. However, wars are not only, and not evenmostly, militaristic events but also they have social, economic, cultural, political,and psychological significance that cannot—and should not—be ignored. In all ofthose domains, women are present, or a least should be present, as much as men.By presenting war as a men’s militaristic issue, television media neglected that war isa human and social issue that affects the lives of everyone.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Yizhar Beer, Shiri Iram, and Ofer Voldovsky fromKeshev—The Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel for their help in this



study. She wishes to extend special thanks to her mentor and colleague Dafna Lemishfor her help and comments. A preliminary version of this study was published inHebrew as a working paper by Keshev.

Notes

1 Hegemony is understood here in the Gramscian way, as an ideological and culturalpower that the dominant social group activates on subordinate groups not by coercionbut by acceptance of a certain world view as the ‘‘obvious,’’ ‘‘the taken for granted,’’ andthe ‘‘natural.’’

2 Israel did not release any information as to the gender identity of the casualties, whichgoes to show that the official authorities did not see gender as a relevant category in thewar.

3 See below for a discussion on the discursive meaning of the term ‘‘home front.’’4 Although women’s mobilization into the army is supposed to be obligatory in Israel,

only about two-thirds of the women of induction age are indeed recruited. The vastmajority serve as secretaries or hold other traditional feminine roles such as teachers andsocial workers. (Izraeli, 1997).

5 With the possible exception of the 1948 War of Independence.6 One important exception is Bar-Yosef and Padan-Eisenstrak (1993). The researchers

concluded that, during the Yom Kippur War (1973), women were excluded from thethree main spheres of the war’s activity: the fighting, the civil administrative, and thedefense production (military industries).

7 The term ideology is understood here as ‘‘meaning in the service of social power’’ assuggested by Thompson (1999, p. 7).

8 For example, two of the central journals on gender and culture published special issueson the subject: Women & Language, 27 (2004) (edited by Anita Taylor and M. J.Hardman) and Feminist Media Studies, 5(3) (2005) (edited by Dafna Lemish).

9 ‘‘Frames’’ are understood as ‘‘persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, andpresentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion’’ (Ryan 1991, p. 81).

10 http://www.clypt.com/InfoSite/Archive/index.php?MAJORID=39&MINORID=195.Based on the archive manager’s statement, it supposedly includes all the items that werebroadcast.

11 To validate the coding, the categorization of the news items in terms of subject matter;sphere (public/private); role; kind of reference (feelings/events); and ethnic, national,and economic social identity was done separately by people from Keshev organization(all Israeli Jews with a previous knowledge in media content analysis) and by theresearcher.

12 The Hebrew language requires precise denotation of masculine or feminine forms ofreference, except in the case of plural referents when the understanding is that themasculine form is to be used, even in situations when women are a majority of theparticipants. Such usage reinforces patriarchal structures. Editorial notations inparenthesis indicate gender denotation in the original Hebrew broadcast text.

13 On the coverage of the Israeli home front, see also Liebes and Kampf (2007).14 I refer to the term ‘‘private sphere’’ here not as the opposite of the Habarmasim ‘‘public

sphere’’ (i.e., ‘‘institutionalized arena of discursive interaction’’), but rather as the space



that separates from the state, the arenas of public discourse, and the official economy ofpaid employment (Frazer, 1992, p. 110).

15 Her full name, Janet Camry, was cited only in the body of the report.16 This observation should not be understood as an essentialist claim, for I do not suggest

that there is ‘‘a women’s nature’’ of some sort, but rather that the social position andcultural socialization of Israeli women make them more sensitive to these kind of crisis.

17 This finding is in line with findings of previous studies, which noted that both Israeli(Lemish, 2006) and Global (Gallagher, 2005) media tend to avoid direct discussions ongender and its ramifications.

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El Dador de la Vida y el Deudo de la Muerte: La Cobertura de las Mujeres en la Segunda Guerra del Líbano en la Televisión Israelí (2006)

Hagar Lahav

Resumen Este artículo discute los aspectos de género de la cobertura periodística de la segunda guerra del Líbano en la TV Israelí. Los hallazgos revelan que en la realidad social presentada en la noticias de TV durante la guerra, las mujeres fueron relegadas a la periferia por un proceso complejo de representación excluyente. Tres sub-procesos primarios produjeron esta representación excluyente de las mujeres: el ocultamiento, la transparencia, y la construcción de la presencia de las mujeres y las imágenes de género. Esta representación enmarca a la guerra como “un asunto de hombres,” e injustamente legitimiza así como también normaliza su posición marginal en el contexto del conflicto Israelí–Árabe. Un análisis de la realidad simbólica concebida por los medios expone a los componentes de género y étnicos de la inclusión (y la exclusión) del régimen Israelí.

生命的给予者与死亡的悲痛者：第二次黎巴嫩战争中以色列电视台的女性报道 Hagar Lahav

以色列Sapir大学传播学院新闻专业

【摘要：】

本文讨论了以色列电视台在第二次黎巴嫩战争新闻报道中的性别问题。结果显示，战争期间电视新闻所表现的社会现实中，女性通过一个排他表现手法的复杂过程被边缘化。这种对女性的排他表现手法通过三个主要的子过程产生：隐藏、透明度，建构妇女的存在和性别化的图像。这种表现手法将战争描绘为“男人的事情”，并且不公正地将她们在以色列和阿拉伯冲突中的边缘化的地位合法化以及标准化。本文通过以色列包含（和排斥）制度的性别和种族组成在媒体上的表现分析了象征性现实。

Celles qui donnent la vie et pleurent la mort : les femmes dans la couverture télévisée israélienne

de la deuxième guerre du Liban (2006)

Hagar Lahav

Cet article traite des aspects genrés de la couverture journalistique de la deuxième guerre du

Liban par la télévision israélienne. Les résultats révèlent que dans la réalité sociale présentée aux

nouvelles télévisées pendant la guerre, les femmes étaient reléguées à la périphérie par un

processus complexe de représentations excluantes. Trois sous-processus principaux ont produit

cette représentation excluant les femmes : la dissimulation, la transparence et la construction de la

présence des femmes et des images genrées. Cette représentation a cadré la guerre comme étant

l’affaire des hommes et légitimise injustement en plus de normaliser la position marginale des

femmes dans le contexte du conflit israélo-arabe. Une analyse de la réalité symbolique conçue

par les médias révèle les éléments de genre et d’ethnicité du régime d’inclusion (et d’exclusion)

d’Israël.

Lebensspender und Betrauerer des Todes: Frauen in der israelischen TV‐Berichterstattung zum zweiten Libanonkrieg (2006)

Hagar Lahav

Dieser Artikel diskutiert Geschlechtsaspekte in der journalistischen Berichterstattung zum zweiten Libanonkrieg im israelischen Fernsehen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Frauen in der sozialen Realität der TV‐Nachrichten während des Krieges durch einen komplexen Prozess ausgrenzender Repräsentation an die Peripherie verdrängt wurden. Drei primäre Unterprozesse führten zu dieser ausgrenzenden Repräsentation von Frauen: Verschleiern, Transparenz und die Konstruktion der Präsenz der Frau und geschlechtsspezifische Bilder. Diese Repräsentation rahmte den Krieg als „männliches Geschäft“ und legitimierte und normalisierte unberechtigterweise ihre marginale Position im Kontext des israelisch‐arabischen Konflikts. Eine Analyse der symbolischen Realität der Medien zeigt die ethnische und Geschlechterkomponente der israelischen Herrschaft der Inklusion (und Exklusion).

The Giver of Life and the Griever of Death: Women in the Israeli TV Coverage of the Second Lebanon War (2006) Hagar Lahav Program of Journalism, School of Communication, Sapir College, Israel 생명의 기부자와 죽음의 비판자: 두번째 레바논 전쟁에 관한 이스라엘 TV보도에서의 여성 본 논문은 이스라엘 텔레비젼이 두번째 레바논 전쟁을 보도하는데 있어 언론인들의 보도에 관한 젠더 측면을 논의한 것이다. 발견들은 전쟁기간동안 텔레비젼 뉴스에서 보도된 사회적 진실에서 여성들은 배제원칙의 복잡한 과정에 의해 주변인으로 격하되었다. 여성들의 배제적 대표성을 산출한 세가지 주요 하부과정들은 여성의 존재와 젠더화된 이미지들의 숨기기, 투명화, 그리고 구축등이다. 이 대표성은 전쟁을 남성의 비지니스로 프레임하였으며, 이스레일-아랍갈등의 문맥속에서 그들의 위치를 정당하지 않게 합법화하거나 일반화하였다. 미디어에 의해 고안된 상징적 실제의 분석은 이스라엘의 내연 (그리고 배제)체제의 젠더와 인종적 구성요소들을 노정하였다.

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