The Linguistic Landscape of Israel’s Military Cemeteries as a Field of Symbolic Contestation1

Yael Guilat and Shoshi Waksman

The chapter focuses on the changing semiotic landscape of Military cemeteries (MC) in Israel as a text

embedded in a specific social-political context. The data consists of a two-year visual documentation of

military cemeteries in various places in Israel and interviews with relevant role holders and observations on daily-life practices in the cemeteries. Based on a mixed methodological approach, we

concluded that the early uniformity which characterized MCs until the last decades is giving way to a

more heterogeneous linguistic landscape. This heterogeneity is embodied in all aspects related to

scripts and multimodal resources. The MCs are overflowing with scripts, languages, genres, writing

platforms, artifacts, and landscaping styles that change the spatial design. Those changes were

interpreted as a shift from a production of a collective national place of commemoration towards a

production of a personal collected memories space, a process which is embodied in a dynamic

multimodal linguistic landscape that blends various languages and discourses.

1. Introduction

Israel’s military cemeteries (hereinafter, MCs) have been changing dramatically in the

past two decades. The changes include a variety of textual, visual and spatial elements

that had not been characteristic of the MC landscape until then. During the country’s

first four decades of statehood, all military tombstones were almost identical. Each

fallen soldier was commemorated in the same manner, by a two-line inscription in

Hebrew that summarized facts about his life as a soldier, his service, and the

circumstances of his death. The current MC, in contrast, offers a much richer and

more diverse linguistic landscape than the earlier one and than the one allowed by

law. Some bereaved families wish to express individualization by creating their own

inscriptions and texts, using different languages and mourning objects, and engraving

portraits. Others break up the ordered design de facto, in everyday practices. Apart

from these spatial practices, many families have petitioned the Israel High Court of

Justice to change the legislation. In the litigation that has taken place since 1991, the

main polemic concerned the authorization of personal plaques, a practice finally

allowed in 1995. Mass immigration to Israel since the 1990s (mainly from the

USSR/FSU) has given rise to the presence of fallen soldiers’ mother tongues in

authorized plaques as well as in unofficial ones, as well as mourning artifacts atop

gravestones (Ivdosin, Almog & Paz 2008).The memorial discourse community is far

from consensus about this shift in the MC landscape; indeed, some wish to maintain

the uniform design and orderly rows of the tombstones. The visible changes described

above is debated in press, in blogs, and in a small number of violent acts, such as the

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destruction of burial plots that showed engraved photos of the fallen, as occurred

twice in 2011 (Cohen 2012; Ofer 2011; Shetoker 2011).

This paper describes and discusses the current semiotic landscape of MCs. We

focus on changes that transcend the official patterns and the legislation, even in its

updated version, and that have created a contested and dynamic multimodal linguistic

landscape that blends various languages and discourses that emerge from the global

memorialization Zeitgeist (Grider 2007).

2. Military Cemeteries, Nationhood, and the Cult of the

Fallen

Mosse (1979) discusses the historical background of military cemeteries worldwide, a

heritage on which the MCs that Israel established in the 1950s were modeled. He

reveals some common ideas and features that characterize MCs as spaces distinct

from civilian ones. The shaping of MCs was closely related to the consolidation of

nationhood and the promotion of values of unity and equality, which were embodied

in the unified, uniformed, and ordered design of the cemeteries. This process

crystallized in Europe after World War I (Mosse 1991); in the United States, in

contrast, it was firmly entrenched by the second half of the nineteenth century,

following the Civil War (Gibson & Kingsley 1989; Rubin 1999).

The role of the fallen was manifested in their being represented and memorialized

not as individuals but rather as communities of partners in arms that sacrificed

themselves for the sake of the collective. The glorification of their death as a heroic

act served to attenuate the grief of parents and relatives and accented the patriotic

goals of the fallen and the supremacy of their mission to the nation. Thus, the heroic

perception of death has been emphasized as part of the timeless rhythm of life and

death beyond the personal lost. In a nutshell, says Mosse, “The war cemetery

symbolized the cult of the fallen soldier […] a place of national worship” (Mosse

1979: 7). As places of worship, military cemeteries and also military burial, plots

within civilian cemeteries had to be marked as separated spaces. They composed a

defined space in accordance with the principles of the “cult” of the fallen, and the

limits set were topographical as well as symbolic (Rubin 1999).

The MC became a spatialized manifestation of the “nationalization” of dead

soldiers (Yaacobi & Fenster 2011: 11), a process that paralleled the canonization of

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the nation-state (Bilu & Witztum 2000: 3). The MC was constructed as a space for

public commemoration rather than one for private bereavement. The articulation of

the fallen individual and the patriotic ethos of the modern nation-state recurred in both

the design of the individual gravestone and the overall organization of the cemetery,

as reflected in systematic representation in ranks. From this standpoint, one may say

that private bereavement was appropriated for the collective context and, as such, it

was conceptualized as the triumph of eternal youth: “Those who had made the final

sacrifice were not dead and gone, but instead continued to perform their mission of

national renewal” (Mosse, 1979: 16).

Several recurrent themes in the early design of the multimodal landscape of the

national military cemeteries all over the world contributed to the construction of these

meanings1:

a. Simplicity: the simplicity of the graves, the absence of ornamentation, and the

orderly rows conveyed a sense of harmony within an enclosed and defined space as a

memorial place in itself. From the national point of view, there was fear of the

trivialization of the heroic death, a fear manifested in the rejection of excessive

ornamentation and of the proliferation of mass-produced “war-kitsch”(associated with

objects of daily life) that could upset the sacred harmony of the memorial space

(Mosse 1979: 11; Mosse 1991: 7).

b. Values of equality: the standard design of the graves also reflected democratic

values of equality. This had not always been the case; in the past, only emperors,

imperators, or officials who died in a war were granted burial as fallen heroes. It was

the aftermath of the French Revolution that extended the idea of equality to the

standard design of MCs. Anderson (1991) discusses comradeship in the trenches;

since those in the trenches were thought to be a community of affinity, values of

camaraderie were represented as part of equality in the standard collective design

(Anderson 1991: 5-7).

c. Naturalization of the nation: another idea embodied in MC design was the

“naturalization” of the nation as a mythical Motherland that gives life, on one hand,

and buries her sons, on the other (Gough 2003). Thus, MCs emphasize the “natural”

setting as a symbol of the Eternal, stress the cycle of death and life, and create links

1 These themes are examined below in the context of MCs in Israel.

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between Nation and Nature. This paean to nature, in turn, advocated the use of natural

and local materials (Gough 2003).

3. The Israeli Military Cemetery

The first Israeli MCs were established in 1950. Although they followed the

perspective that had evolved in Europe and the U.S., they emphasized aspects of

Jewish burial and mourning patterns and the ideological use of the Jewish national

language, Hebrew. Those in charge of the matter linked commemoration and revival

with the Zionist meta-historical narrative of exile/captivity and redemption. The

renewal of the Hebrew language was one of the living symbols of this resurrection

and a part of the revival of the Jewish nation-state. The Israel Defense Forces played

an important role in the consolidation of the national identity, as a melting-pot locus

for Jews from different diasporas toward the creation of brave sabras (a colloquial

term for native Israelis as opposed to Diaspora Jews), native speakers of Hebrew, who

as a consequence of this status would be willing to sacrifice themselves for the

motherland. Thus the traditional Jewish martyrology (kiddush Hashem, lit. sanctifying

God’s name) was re-shaped and appropriated by the national one. The narrative that

accompanied this process was metaphorically termed Magash ha-kesef (the silver

platter – Alterman 1947), upon which the fallen sacrificed themselves to the nation

(Zerubavel 1994; Bilu & Witztum 2000).

The construction of the Israeli MC is historically connected with the country’s

War of Independence (1948) because the cult of the fallen was heavily influenced by

the mythical construction and reception of this war. As the war was fought, some

6,000 Jews (including 2,400 civilians) lost their lives for war-related reasons, out of

Jewish population of around 650,000. This very high casualty rate had a crucial

impact on the creation of the cult of the fallen.

The Military Cemeteries Law, passed by the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) in

1950, not only institutionalized the MCs but also gave bereaved families the right to

decide where to bury the deceased. Consequently, in addition to ten central MCs that

were established at that time, military graves could be seen in civilian cemeteries as

well (Azaryahu 1995).2

2 Today, there are forty-two MCs and ninety-three burial plots in civilian cemeteries countrywide.

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The military cemetery at Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem was assigned a special status as

the representative cemetery located in the nation’s capital. The proximity of this

facility to the tomb of Theodor Herzl, the iconic “seer” of the State of Israel, created a

dual structure of national cemeteries: one civilian, where Zionist and Israeli leaders

have been buried, and the other military, dedicated to fallen soldiers via monuments

that commemorate heroic Jewish sacrifice including that in the pre-state era and the

war against the Nazis.

The memorial landscape was shaped in the 1950s by the Department for the

Commemoration of the Fallen (hereinafter, DCF) – an exposed, uniform, readable,

tranquil, and placid landscape that emphasized the value of equality (Katz 2007),

camaraderie in arms, and male fraternity (Kaplan 2004), consistent with the heritage

of MCs elsewhere. The spatial array included a general memorial stone, a wall, a

fence, a plaque for those defined as missing in action, a central monument and a plaza

and stage for military ceremonies. The simple individual gravestones, arrayed in rows,

were all the same: horizontally mounted, made of “Jerusalem stone” (local limestone,

defined as “an authentic burial [marker] of the Land of Israel”), and bearing a

standard epitaph in Hebrew (minutes of the Judicial Committee for the Declaration of

Cemeteries 1949, in Azaryahu 1995: 181).

For non-Jews who fell – Bedouin or Druze3 – the possibility of an epitaph in

Arabic was also allowed, not in lieu of the Hebrew one but next to or under it (Avivi

3 Druze soldiers are drafted into the IDF; Bedouin soldiers, in contrast, are volunteers, and are rarely

buried in MCs. (Most are buried in family plots in Muslim cemeteries.) There is also a separate

collective military commemoration space for the Bedouin, with a main memorial monument and a

stone formal plaque for each fallen soldier. This commemoration place is bilingual (Arabic and

Hebrew).

The case of Druze military memorialization is different. A central Druze MC (designed in the exact

manner of all Israeli MCs) was established at Usfiyya, a village in northern Israel. It is an exceptional

site in reference to Druze beliefs. Notably, the Druze, unlike the adherents of other confessions, neither

mourn the dead nor observe laws of mourning. The seventh and final element of this faith is total

acquiescence in God’s decrees (Dana 2007: 15). The underlying concept of the Druze faith is the

concept of fatalism, i.e., blind faith in a predetermined and unalterable fate imposed on humans. In this

context, it is noteworthy that the Druze are strong believers in reincarnation; thus, they consider the

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2005; Saa’di 2005). The engraving of a religious symbol to identify the deceased’s

faith and the Hebrew and Gregorian dates of the deceased’s birth and death were also

allowed (Katz 2007: 124-126).

Until the 1970s, the overall framework was preserved even though minor changes

in the standard epitaph were allowed. In 1980, “maximum uniformity” was still the

rule. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, however, there was a proliferation of

petitions to the High Court of Justice to revise the standard wording, precipitated by

complex family structures, political controversies, and other factors. Several seminal

verdicts of the Court became landmarks in the MC legislation and discourse:

1990-91 – permission to add the Gregorian date for Jews.

1995 – authorization of personal epitaphs that allow families to express “[their]

own pain and grief” (High Court of Justice, 143891).

1996 – repeal of the compulsory marking of Hebrew dates on the tombs of non-

Jews.

From the second half of the 1990s onward, the legislator addressed itself to the

matter of personal epitaphs, allowing them but prohibiting political expressions,

symbols, pictures, and the like. Even then, personal epitaphs were limited in length,

content, and placement. The authorized “personal” plaque places the epitaph at the

bottom of the stone and limits it to a sentence no more than two rows long (48 words

in all) (Katz 2007: 243-279). From then on, the High Court of Justice faced a growing

tide of petitions to revise the standard personal epitaph.

In the past two decades, there has been an upturn in various “extras” and revised

inscriptions on graves. More and more visible supplements are being added to the

military burial plots and are being confronted by public debate on policy and

legislation (Buchbut 2010). Several discourse communities have become players in

the debate over the formulation of mourning and memorialization patterns: the DCF,

the Public Council for the Commemoration of the Soldier; bereaved families, the

High Court of Justice, the Ministry of Defense, and the journal Si’ah shakulim

‘Discourse of the bereaved’ (Katz 2007:282-313).The debate corresponds to, and

defilement of dead bodies a negligible matter. This also explains the signs of neglect found in Druze

cemeteries and the custom of burial in mass graves in many Druze villages (Dana 2007: 16).

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coincides with, a widening gap between the language of public commemoration and

that of private mourning. Specifically, private mourning has begun to gush out of

fissures that have erupted in the perception of homogeneous “Israeliness” (Naveh

1998; Katz 2007: 282-313).

In view of those changes, the aim of the study is to understand how the

production of the Israeli MC has become a symbolic construction of meanings

embedded in a public space—one enabled by various languages and systems of

signifiers.

4. The public space and the spatial construction of

meaning

4.1. Public Space and Practices

What exactly is the mode of existence of social relationships? [...] The

study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations

of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a

spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming

inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself. (Lefebvre,

1991: 129).

Lefebvre views space as a social product or a complex social construction that

affects spatial practices and perceptions. This argument implies a shift of the research

perspective from the space itself to the processes of its production and the embrace of

the multiplicity of spaces that are socially produced and made productive in social

practices. The production of space is described as a contradictory, conflictual, and

ultimately political process. Through this perspective, we may understand the

production of the MC landscape as the continual production of meanings in social

spaces. Lefebvre also argues that every society – and, therefore, every mode of

production – produces a specific space, its own space. By implication, the MC space

is a social product of the society of the nation-state.

The production of the space serves as a political instrument allowing society to be

controlled by the way the space is managed. Even though this production supports the

reproduction of relations of power, everyday practices may undermine and resist these

relations and the bureaucratic management of space and may suggest the sources of a

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“counter-space” (Lefebvre 1991: 402-403). In this sense, the concept of counter-space

may be an effective theoretical tool for the observation of current changes in the MC

landscape. This idea also connects with de Certeau’s analysis of the social practices of

resistance embedded in structures of power and order (de Certeau 1984). “Space is a

practiced place”, de Certeau asserts (1984: 117). Among the various ways of

operating the space, de Certeau distinguishes between strategies and tactics. In

general, the ability to apply strategies belongs to those who “run ahead of time by

reading a space […]; a certain power is the precondition” (de Certeau, 1984: 36).

Tactics, in contrast, are “determined by the absence of proper locus […]; a tactic is an

art of the weak” (1984: 37). Strategies are used by top-down forces; tactics are

employed by bottom-up actors.

An MC may be considered as a practiced space that different “users” operate in

different ways in order to design it through the use of rhetorical, tactical, and spatial

patterns.

4.2 Semiotic landscape and multimodal construction of meaning

The main underlying premise of this study is that a military cemetery may be

considered a system of signifiers, a text embedded in a public space. The MC is

designed as a text that mediates meanings for the discourse community, meanings

often designed as a “hidden curriculum” (Abousnnouga & Machin 2010). Following

this premise, we should examine the MC within the framework of semiotic/linguistic

landscape studies (Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Jaworski & Thurlow 2010).

This theoretical framework emphasizes the idea that language in public space

serves as a channel for the symbolic construction of social power relations and not

only as an information medium – “a symbolic system of signifiers with wide-ranging

affordances activated by social actors to position themselves and others in that

context” (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010: 6). Therefore, the way various representational

resources represent fallen soldiers is a medium with which a symbolic narrative is

constructed within this specific space as it developed historically (Mosse 1979).

Furthermore, according to linguistic-landscape (LL) studies, a public space is not

a neutral one because it is situated within a certain political/economic/social context

of power relations. Consequently, one may use the systems of signifiers to determine

how visible an attempt to establish and display a symbolic hegemony is. In the same

way, bottom-up actors may use the same LL arena to try to resist and contest the

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symbolic hegemony (Shohamy & Waksman 2009; idem 2012: in press). This sort of

contestation usually occurs between top-down forces (e.g., authorities or possessors of

political and or economic power) and bottom-up forces (e.g., the deprived or

excluded). Consequently, a MC may include not only signifiers that represent top-

down policies, agendas, and legislation, but also signifiers reflecting other agenda.

Thus, we may peer through the LL theoretical lens to observe the semiotic design of a

MC, its reorganization, and its modification as a reification of contestation and

contact between top-down and bottom-up actors in the discourse community.

Another theoretical idea that LL studies provide is that we may treat other

systems of signifiers that belong to the construction of meaning, such as visual

images, objects, and spatial arrangements, as texts designed in the contemporaneous

way, i.e., using multiple design resources (New London Group 1996) in a way that is

not instrumental but rather offers cultural arguments and interpretations (Kress & Van

Leeuwen 2001). Multimodal-meaning construction deals with the specific ways in

which various resources are used in the design of a product, a space, or an event and

the way the various modalities are combined to create the reification of a discourse

(Cope & Kalantzis 2009). The MC, as we explain below, is organized as such a text: a

multimodal one that includes linguistic representations, visual images, objects, and

flora. Thus, an examination of the MC from the LL perspective will take into account

all these modalities to observe the meanings and interpretations that the MC offers.

5. Research Questions and Methodology

By documenting the current linguistic landscape of the Israeli military cemetery in the

context of the relevant historical and theoretical background, we propose to answer

the following questions:

What visible characteristics of MC burial plots in the two past decades

deviate from the authorized design?

How may these visible characteristics be interpreted in view of the

theoretical framework?

What contact between languages and discourses is activated in the LL of

today’s MCs?

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Below we use a mixed methodological approach, combining historical,

qualitative, multimodal, and visual analyses (Rose 2008), triangulating various data

resources to analyze the themes and discourses that emerge.4

To address the research questions, we collected data from several sources. First,

we analyzed data from the media, the press, and blogs. Then we documented several

military cemeteries and military burial plots in various places in Israel, places that

represented a wide variety of population groups (natives, immigrants, Jews, non-Jews,

religious and secular Jews, etc.).We gave special attention to cemeteries that were

established after the War of Independence (1948) and still serve the community. In

examining burial plots, we focused only on those from the last two decades (1990–

2011).The specific military cemeteries chosen for this study were in Netanya (Central

District), Ashdod (Southern District), Kiryat Tivon (Northern District), Kiryat Shaul

(Tel Aviv), Mt. Herzl (Jerusalem), and Usfiyya (a Druze military cemetery in the

north). This selection represents diverse locations in the geographic center and

periphery. The data were collected over a two-year period, with each MC visited

twice so that cumulative changes during those years and tendencies to specific designs

could be observed. We also conducted three interviews: with a deputy manager of the

DCF between 1970-1984, who himself is a bereaved brother (Sh. S., July 8, 2010),

the gatekeeper of the Netanya MC along the 15 last years, who is very familiar with

the everyday practices in the cemetery (D.G., 17 November 2011), and the gardener

in charge of maintaining the authorized landscaping at the MC in Usfiyya, who is not

a Druze and also is in charge of other cemeteries in the area (B.G., 29 November

2009). Finally, we performed several observations on daily-life practices in the

cemeteries and a few brief interactions with visitors to the MCs during the

documentation process.

4 One quantitative study took place in 1994, when DCF researched the extent of the “deviations.” The

data were collected from 12,000 gravestones at ninety-six cemeteries and burial plots. The results

indicated that 964 gravestones had “serious digressions from the law’ (File 1994), although neither the

researchers nor the stake holders defined what a “serious digression” was. Katz (2007), documenting

the visibility of 1,000 gravestones in 2002-2006 and examining the development of the military

gravestone in Israel, states that the influence of the phenomenon exceeds its ostensibly small extent.

Moreover, according to Katz’s analysis of the DCF report, the results were not reliable because the

research overlooked variables such as when the gravestone was erected (in the early going or in recent

decades) and the type of cemetery at issue (an MC or a military burial plot in a civilian cemetery). For

example, while the “deviation” rate at Mt. Herzl (Jerusalem) was only 1%, a 23% rate was found in

Kiryat Shaul (Tel Aviv), and there is vagueness about whether this percentage relates to all plots or

not. Katz concludes by recommending a qualitative examination (Katz 2007: 312-313).

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6. Data and results: Visible characteristics of burial plots

in MCs

The documentation yields two types of visible characteristics: those that are part of

the linguistic design and those belonging to the multimodal-meaning construction.

6.1. Design and languages of scripts

According to the law, gravestone scripts should be designed and phrased in

compliance with the principle of a standard and ordered design. The law emphasizes

the need to satisfy this principle both in form and in content (see current legislation in

ITIM 2008). Consequently, the scripts should be designed as uniformly as possible in

shape, size, themes and phrasing of epitaphs, etc. As described above, even the

personal epitaphs that have been allowed since 1995 are restricted and limited in

terms of length, content, and placement. The authorized “personal” plaque places the

inscription at the bottom of the stone, limits it to one sentence no more than two rows

long, restricts its content to several possible themes, and forbids political statements.

The documentation, however, reveals that this principle of standard and ordered

design has been observed in the breach in the past two decades. We found a variety of

script designs, including multiple writing platforms, multiple font types and sizes,

diversity in graphical layout, variety of textual structures, a wide range of genres, and

additional languages.

The writing platforms varied and included marble plaques in all sorts of shapes

and colors, marble “books”, writings on pebbles, writings on seashells, etchings in

glass, life stories on papers offered for visitors to read, and the name of the deceased

in decorative stones. This richness and amplitude recurred in the typography, which

included various fonts in various sizes and different scripts forms: cursive, print, etc.

Another deviation from the formal and standard design was the overflow of the

personal epitaph from the authorized personal plaque; we found inscriptions that

spread all over tombs in various compositions and layouts. Significant diversity was

also observed in the richness in genres, registers, and writing styles. The writings

included excerpts of poetry, aphorisms, biblical citations, poems designed in acronym

form, national slogans, direct speech to the deceased, and political statements.

The linguistic repertoire brings together many discourses, themes, and structures.

Jewish sources are quoted liberally, e.g., “The beauty, O Israel, is slain upon thy high

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places; how are the mighty fallen!” (II Sam. 1:19) and descriptive language

concerning the virtues and qualities of the deceased is abundant: “beloved, loving,

cheery, good-hearted, virtuous.”

We also found the use of phrases taken from other contexts:

(1) Haver [friend], we will miss you. (The use of ‘haver’ as a way of addressing

someone who has died was borrowed from Bill Clinton’s eulogy for the

assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.)

Finally, poetic structures and metaphorical language were used:

(2) You slipped from our hands but remain engraved in our hearts

(3) We will remember you even if our souls surrender their hearts

(4) My princess

(5) You’re an angel

(6) A smile fit for a king

(7) The jewel in the crown

Although each example might be considered part of the authorized design of the

personal plaque, the accumulation of personal expressions creates a linguistic texture

that changes the main communicative function of the MC into a metafunction of

interpersonal communication (Kress and Van Leeuwen 1996), one that addresses and

emphasizes the connection between the deceased and his family and relatives. This is

manifested especially in the frequent use of direct speech to the deceased:

(8) We will remember you forever

(9) You are our soul

(10) You are missed

(11) You left behind a loving and warm family in sorrow and pain

It recurs in “signatures” that identify the authors, e.g.,

(12) We will remember you forever, the family

(13) You are missed, your wife

The net effect of all this is the redefinition and reinterpretation of the discourse

community, which is now deconstructed into many small discourse communities

instead of one big family. The authoritative design had intended to diminish this

function by maintaining the dominance of the representational metafunction, which

emphasizes the connection between the deceased as the son of the nation and attempts

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to minimize the visibility of personal contexts that are not related to the life of the

deceased as a soldier. Today, as the following example originally written in Russian

shows, the personal plaque frequently refers to civilian aspects of the deceased’s life

and qualities – aspects that configure his identity in the eyes of the bereaved relatives

first as a son, then a great musician, and only third as a soldier. The “signature” not

only identifies the authors but also allows the sister to be represented as part of the

bereaved family. In the official headstone, only parents’ names are inscribed.

(14) Якубов Дима (1971-1993) дорогому сыночку большому

музыканту, солдату. С любовью и скорбью мама, папа и сестра.

‘Dima Yakubov (1971–1993), to our dear son, the great musician, the

soldier. With love and much anguish, Mother, Father, and sister.’

This shift could be understood in line with the theoretical framework suggested

by Lefebvre (1991): “A social space is constituted neither by a collection of things nor

by an aggregate of [sensory] data nor by a void packed like a parcel, with various

contents and that is irreducible to a form imposed over phenomena, upon things, upon

physical materiality” (Lefebvre 1991: 27). In this respect, the MC space is social

production and as such, its linguistic texture is not an arbitrary collection of writings.

Another deviation from the standard form is the salience of other languages in the

linguistic textures of the MC. First, the visible hegemony of Hebrew is not always the

default option. Many scripts and sayings in Russian appear around the MC,

sometimes without a Hebrew version, especially in Netanya and Ashdod Mc's.

The semantic field of the commemorative phrases in Russian resembles that in

Hebrew as described above. The follow examples from the Netanya MC demonstrate

this:

(15) Скорбим, любим и помним! Любимому сыночку и братику. От

семьи!

‘We’re sorry you’re gone, we who love and remember you! To our

beloved son and brother, from the family!’

(16) Горе наше безутешно, любимый, родной наш мальчик.

‘Our sorrow is inconsolable, our beloved child.’

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Not all the cemeteries deviated from uniformity in the same ways. In Mt. Herzl

(the main Jerusalem MC), we found different patterns including other languages such

as French, Armenian, and Hindi, along with Hebrew, with Hebrew remaining the

main language. Another pattern surfaced in Usfiyya: most of the scripts, including

personal ones, are in Hebrew,5 even though most inhabitants of this place are Druze

and Arabic speakers and are allowed to use Arabic in their personal and authoritative

scripts.

To demonstrate how differently designed scripts change the semiotic landscape

of an MC, we should compare two design of graves. Figure 1a shows a burial plot

from Mt. Herzl (Zone D, Plot 3, from the 1950s to the 1960s), following the

authoritative design. The design includes a row of identical graves, flat rectangle

gravestones, and identical headstones, on which identical personal details about the

deceased are engraved in Hebrew. The solemn natural environment contributes to the

exaltation of the canonization of the place. The gravestone in Figure 1b is much

different. The marble is cut in the shape of a Star of David and positioned vertically,

as against horizontally in the formal design, and the personal script covers the entire

stone. The additional image of yellow car, is not a part of the formal design, and two

poetic personal sayings, one in Russian (17) and one in Hebrew (18), express personal

poetic sentiments that only the relatives can fully understood:

(17) Ты взошёл на не книжную ту высоту, под которой ты лёг.6

‘You climbed to the wrong summit and were made to lay under it.’

The commemorative phrases are not translations of each other; they are

completely different:

(18) : עליה שחלמו לאלה ניתנת התהילה

‘Glory is given to those who dream about it.’

5 As described in Note 3 above, this is a unique case because the Druze community, which believes in

reincarnation, takes a generally indifferent attitude to the grave. The Druze MC is actually consistent

with the Israeli national cult of the fallen rather than the Druze religious one.

6 Notably, the sentence should be rendered “Ты взошёл на не ту книжную высоту, под которой ты

лёг.”

15

In both languages, the scripts redirect the message from collective

commemoration to grief over the personal loss. They also suggest transnationalism by

placing the deceased in a cultural context that is located in a place other than where

the person died and was buried. The unusual usage of grammar is probably intended

as poetic-license. This phenomenon of t transnationalism was well described during

the interview with the gatekeeper of the Netanya MC. He said: “The families from

Soviet Union are used to visit the burial plots in Silvester's Day and they bring

offerings, decorations and flowers"(D.G., 17 November 2011). This practice reveals

the will to be included in the Israeli collective memory space on one hand and

maintaining signs of the culture identity on the other hand. This creates a hybrid type

of belonging.

Figure 1a: The authoritative design of a military burial plot from the 1950s to the1960s,

captured 21 November, 2011

16

As the description and the examples imply, uniformity is giving way to a more

heterogeneous LL in which heterogeneity is embodied in all aspects related to scripts:

themes, styles, writing platforms, typography, etc. Each of these elements contributes

to the dismantling of uniformity. Many voices are entering the space, claiming to

appropriate and/or share the way this space is produced. De Certeau would describe it

as a “tactic of the ‘weak’ within the order established by the ‘strong’” (de Certeau,

1984: 40). In other words, the MC linguistic landscape is in the throes of a symbolic

contest between forces that wish to maintain its uniformity and collective identity and

those attempting to reshape it in favor of more private voices and identities. In this

respect, the silent space of the MC is a symbolic field of contestation and struggle. In

some cases the contestation is overt, parents are aware that they are not obeying to the

authoritative design .For example, during the interview with the gatekeeper of

Netanya MC, he pointed out to the fact that the epitaph and design of several graves

creates imagined narratives of belonging which has nothing to do with the actual

circumstances of the death of the soldier. He gave as an example a case of a soldier

that committed a suicide after his desertion from the army and the bereaved family

demanded to 'be included' in the MC yet the design of the gravestone doesn't follow

the rules. (D.G., 17 November 2011) In many other cases, however, the contestation

Figure 1b: Gravestone from the

Netanya MNC, captured 16 March

2010

17

is covert and hidden; only the accumulation of signs can reveal its meaning in the

specific space, a notion based on the theoretical ideas of Lefebvre (1991).

Given the MC heritage (Mosse 1979), all the visible characteristics just described

may be interoperated as aiming at deconstructing the idea of the nation as one big

family of grief into a small intimate communities that use their codes, themes, and

idiosyncratic forms of expressions (as described in the last example). This invests the

grief with visibility but leaves the meaning expressed hidden from most MC visitors.

A similar phenomenon of separating onlookers into those who share only the visibility

and those who can share the meanings expressed is described by Conquergood in his

study on vernacular street literacy (Conquergood 1997).

Table 1 captures the ranges of designs of scripts, languages, and writing

platforms in MCs.

18

Table 1: Variety of scripts

Writing platforms Visibility of surface structures Structures and genres

Variety of languages

Marble

stones/plaques

(scroll shape)

Typography:

Combinations of different

fonts and modes:

handwriting (cursive) and

print

Variety of sizes

Quotations:

Popular literature

Biblical citations with/

without explicit

Poetry

Songs

Types:

Acronyms (from Psalms

and other Jewish

sources) Letters to fallen soldiers

Political statements

Directional signs

Biographic data

Slogans

Hymen

Personal utterances:

Person to person/

Group

Monolingual (Hebrew)

Bilingual:

Most bilingual

examples are

Hebrew and

Russian

Very small presence of other

languages:

English, French

Multilingual-

Multimodal Hybrid Modality:

Verbal-Visual

Design

Printed papers

Orthography

Inclusion of Hebrew vowel

marks, punctuation, and quotations marks

Pebbles

Wooden plaque

Etched glass

Seashells

Marble and glass

cases

Ceramics

Metal objects

Flags/military artifacts

Personal objects of

the fallen

Stickers

.

19

6.2. Multimodal construction of meaning

Beyond the scripts just described, various types of multimodal resources are

inherent in the linguistic landscape created in the MC, as in other contexts (Kress and

Van Leeuwen 1996, 2001; Shohamy & Waksman 2009). Iconic language seems very

central to LL in today’s MCs because it integrates and embeds many images into the

linguistic design. The most prevalent images are portraits of the deceased using

various techniques, e.g., laser etching in black marble, photographs, and pictures.

Figure 2 shows the placement of a laser etching with a portrait of the deceased over

the grave. In this example, the deceased is shown not as a soldier but as a civilian.

This design, very common in MCs, intervenes and interferes with the principle of

uniformity by adding aspects that are not part of the authorized design and themes and

atmosphere of personal and civilian nature. It clashes also with the main

representational metafunction (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996) of the authoritative

design to portray the deceased as a soldier only by presenting facts that are related to

his death in the context of the army and ignoring, as far as possible, his personal

identity as a human being. Yet the portraits seem to highlight another metafunction

that is not part of the authoritative design: an interpersonal one (Kress & Van

Leeuwen 1996) that, by demanding the observer’s full presence and offering a

moment of communion, intervenes in the representational Meta function. The

portraits seem to be an element that “breathes life,” as Barthes (1980) says; this

enhances the personal messages that also appear very frequently in the scripts, as

described in the last section. As Irena Stanislavsky, whose son David fell in 2002 and

is buried at the Netanya MC, told the Ha’aretz newspaper in 2004:

I often come and meet with him. A stone is just a stone and a picture is a

picture despite it all.

Miriam Katz, who lost her son Ariel in 2002, said something similar in the same

article:

To him, to talk with him, to give him best wishes from Grandma. Only

someone who’s abnormal talks with a stone. Now I come and talk with

him, I tell [him] how the week went and about the grandchild who

visited me. I see him smiling to me and I think, maybe the Messiah will

bring him [back] faster (As 2004).

20

Figure 2: Portrait over a gravestone, Ashdod MC

Another salient element in the semiotic landscape of the MC is the frequent

presence of objects everywhere: on the gravestones, between the rows, hanging in the

flora. The only object that is part of the authorized design is a small glass box for

memorial candles. In today’s MCs, however, objects that lie outside the formal design

and certainly disrupt its unified structure are ubiquitous. The repertoire includes some

that are explicitly related to the mourning praxis, such as “open books” of stone

engraved with words of mourning, and many others that do not necessarily belong to

the mourning and grieving praxis but are brought into this space and become part of

its discourse, such as hats, dolls, small sculptures, boxes, toys, fairies, and flags. They

may be personal belongings of the deceased or objects placed by relatives to express

feelings of loss and bereavement and find ways to cope with their profound grief. The

objects around the gravestone in Figure 3 create a kind of miniature world: a woman

sitting on a bench in a small garden, producing a scene that brings color, fantasy, and

pastoral atmosphere to the gravestone and camouflages its formal structure. This

example demonstrates the shift from uniformity toward a private, personal, and

intimate way to express and cope with the loss by transferring it to another sphere,

one of fantasy. Thus uniformity unravels and gives way to personal ways of sharing

this space.

21

Figure 3: A miniature “world” over the gravestone Ashdod's MC

This tendency is much enhanced by landscaping that serves as a medium of

expression. The rich flora and vegetation that surround the gravesite definitely

transcend the standardized and authorized gardening. We can observe a bed of

flowers and tropical plants, a profusion of flowers (real or artificial), specially shaped

hedges, artificial grass, and trees that fill up the burial plots and sometimes even cover

them completely. This landscaping enhances the aforementioned tendency to blanket

the uniformity of the landscape and change its appearance from an exposed and

unified standard to one that is diverse, rich, and abundant, camouflaging and

concealing the standard array and disrupting the ranks. In this respect, it is important

to note that officials from the Public Council for the Commemoration of the Soldier

noted individual landscaping as the first evidence of the ongoing change MCs (Seri,

2010). Everyday practices seem to enhance this tendency. One of the interviewees

(D.G., 17 November 2011) described this; he elaborated on the way parents and

relatives add different types of plants and how he actually offers them his services as

a gardener even though what they want is not part of the authoritative design. Even

so, it seems that not all cemeteries follow the same pattern of gardening; some are

more in line with the rules. In Usfiyya, however, the interviewee (B.G., 29 November

2009) pointed out that he takes care of the authoritative gardening in several MCs and

the tension between the official design and the others “more or less” characterizes

most of them, particularly in reference to burial plots in recent years. As the

documentation implies, both the linguistic and the multimodal resources create an

alternative LL that covers the infrastructure of MC and contests and intervenes with

the collective meaning that the formal design offers, leading to diversified meanings

22

of this space as offered by the various designs that do not follow the legislation. Table

2 captures the multimodal design that the documentation illuminates.

Table 2: Variety of Artifacts and Multimodal design

Gardening /

landscaping

Images Mourning and

praxis objects

Spatial Design Everyday objects

Flowerpots

Rich tropical vegetation atop

and around the

grave

Palm fronds

Artificial flowers

Artificial grass

Fences and gates

made of pruned

vegetation

-Engraved

portraits Portrait photos

Miscellaneous

images (e.g.,

yellow car)

Collections of stones left

on the grave by visitors (an ancient Jewish ritual)

Plaques in various shapes

(e.g., hearts)

Glass boxes (for

memorial candles, a

traditional Jewish ritual)

Memorial candles

Memorial “books”

Monumental

tombstone design Covering of entire

gravestone area

Objects in front of

and behind the

grave

Plaques and objects

that break up the

grid

Magical “worlds”

as fantasy spaces

Flowerpots,

weathervanes, flags (national and

of army units)

Personal artifacts

(caps)

Dolls

Statuettes

Stones with

inscriptions

Glass boxes

Letterboxes

Military symbols and artifacts from

the deceased’s army

service

Implements for care

of the gravesite

Personal artifacts

Toy cars

7. Discussion

The current MC linguistic landscape, just described, shows that despite the

authorities’ efforts to preserve the MC as an enclosed homogeneous and sacred setting

for the cult of the fallen, the Israeli national commemoration discourse is being

contested by personal mourning. The erstwhile principles of simplicity, equality, and

standard design, corresponding to the heritage of national cemeteries from the world

war, are losing their dominance and are almost concealed by the recent burial plots.

The visibility of this LL includes so many elements that “disobey” the formal

design, i.e., various scripts, languages, genres, writing platforms, artifacts, and

landscaping styles, that the unified design is certainly being interfered with and the

overall spatial design is changing.

Some of the visible characteristics that “violate” the national formal design are

very salient, as in the presence of languages in addition to Hebrew, mainly Russian,

and portraits etched into black stone. That change may be interpreted as a shift from a

23

monolithic identity to a multicultural or even transnational identity. Other changes,

while overt, are more implicit, e.g., the way the written language is surrendering its

hegemony as the main device for the construction of meaning to a multimodal design

of meaning. This happens, for example, when the design setting of the gravestone

includes meanings expressed by color, fantasy, quasi-imaginary spaces, and

miniaturized “worlds” that mediate the grief. This corresponds to the idea of the

decentering of the written language from its role as a central mode of construction of

meaning in recent writings (Iedema 2003). It also indicates a change in the task of the

script itself in MC's: from the construction of a static, eternal commemorative

meaning to a dynamic and unfinished processes of sharing and memorialization. This

denotes a shift toward a linguistic landscape that is increasingly becoming directly

referential (focusing on words and images of actual persons) and less symbolic of a

broader unitary conflict per se. The structure of today’s MCs still includes the formal

grid shape that underlies and unifies the landscape. This authoritative design,

however, is now a concealed by various forms, writings, and discourses.

These semiotic changes recur in processes of production. Evidently, the MC is

actually a practiced shared space in which ongoing processes of caring and sharing

take place. The practices include bringing together temporal artifacts, plants,

decorative objects, toys, offerings, photos, and images that reveal the participation of

many “users” (parents, relatives, wives, friends, etc.). Another remarkable

characteristic of the process is the interaction among different users. As one of the

mothers quoted above (Miriam Katz) explains, she became influenced by the practices

of other actors in the MC space. Although a religious woman, she decided to place a

black stone carrying an etched portrait of her dead son at the grave in order to “chat”

with the fallen.7In this example, the interpersonal metafunction is “borrowed” and

even surmounts the religious pattern of burial. The presence of images is obviously a

contestation between discourses: the national cult of the fallen, based on a Jewish

tradition that opposes the use of images, and the secular one, which borrows and

integrates patterns that identify East European traditions of Jewish burial that include

the use of portraits.

7 Jewish tradition condemns the use of graven images: “You shall not make for yourself an idol”

(Exodus 20: 4-6)

24

This design brings together different discourses: the private vs. the national, the

religious vs. the secular, and discourses that refer to local, global, or transnational

identities. Some of them have a shared repertoire of meanings; others may clash with

or contradict each other. For instance, signs of militarist discourse exist side-by-side,

or in contact with, the personal, intimate one. While the former is manifested in the

proliferation of Israeli flags, flags of military units, military artifacts, and patriotic

scripts and slogans, the “civilian” and personal discourse is embodied in domestic

mourning artifacts such as toys and small decorative objects, and belongings of the

deceased.

The process in its entirety may reflect the disintegration of the monolithic

national identity that was central in Israel until thirty years ago, reflected in changes

in MC design and other representations of commemoration – a process evidenced in

other similar contexts as well (Abousnnouga & Machin 2010).

We may construe all these daily-life practices and representations as

manifestations of resistance to the strong militarist repertoire of official strategies that,

even after death, do not “discharge” the personal memory from its induction for the

national mission. Said resistance may be either covert and explicit or overt and

implicit. A “counter space” (Lefebvre 1991: 402) of memorialization has been carved

out; it even threatens to replace the former one. It has transformed the gravestone into

a substitute for the absence and the private loss. The various artifacts and

representations have become “melancholy objects” in the psychoanalytical sense:

mediating objects that are related metonymically and metaphorically to the corporeal

absence of the deceased (Gibson 2004: 285).

The landscape of Israel’s MCs seems to become a space of personal collected

memories rather than a collective national place of commemoration. In this landscape,

the individual gravestone is lifted out of its context, producing a “counter space” on

the one hand and an inclusive space on the other. Concurrently, it is shifting the focus

from “hard” memory to “soft” memory (Etkind 2004): from official stone memorials

and commemorative objects to unofficial spaces and objects of mourning and loss.

The shift is being amplified by diversified patterns of landscaping, which is also

becoming “soft” and changing the means of memorialization.

This process may be explained by the drastic change in the national consensus,

which had begun to fissure due to the Yom Kippur War (1973). Witztum, describing

the rearrangement of collective narratives and the onset of flooding of the national

25

consciousness by hitherto repressed elements, adds, “The crisis recurred in relations

between personal mourning and public mourning.” For the first time, the restraints

that bereaved parents and the public had accepted were overtly ruptured (Witztum

2004: 120). The crisis has escalated since the 1980s due to other historical events –

wars and continuing military confrontations that failed to secure broad consensus in

public opinion. Thus, the response of the bereaved to the loss has emerged from a

non-consensual society.8

It may also be explained by mass immigration since the 1990s. Immigrants from

the former Soviet Union, in particular, maintained cultural and economic ties with

their homeland and constructed their identities as transnational ones by establishing

the visibility of the Russian language and Russian images in MCs – a phenomenon

that does not necessarily indicate refusal to be included into the national pantheon of

heroes but rather a demand for acceptance without the surrender of their previous

identity. It also reflects an attempt to change the flow of power relations from top-

down to bottom-up, i.e. the diverse participants in the bereavement community are

symbolically claiming the space. This interpretation squares with Grider’s (2007)

analysis of the “Faces of the Fallen” (Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, 2004-

2007):

[There] is change in the conception of war not as a mass effort but rather

as a traumatic individual experience […]. It is a turn towards the

individualized fragmented public memory and a turn away from the

collective experience of war […] into […] the […] image of those lost

not in a war but in “war” itself […]. War has been transformed from an

event into an environment (Grider 2007: 276-277).

When these changes are mentioned and debated via the press, they are often

categorized as a “privatization of memory” that reflects a post-modern cult of

individuality. Eli Ben-Shem, chair of the Public Council for the Commemoration of

the Soldier, relates to recent plots in MCs as “an amusement park […] it’s just

unbearable.” (Cohen 2012). When this judgment is applied, the construction of

8Events such as the First Lebanese War (1982), the First Intifada (1987-1991), the Second Intifada

(2000), Operation Defensive Wall (2002), the Second Lebanese War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead

(2008).

26

meanings multimodally produced in the current linguistic landscape is ruled out,

resulting in a hegemonic reading that resembles the fear of “war-kitsch” that

characterized Israel’s leaders when the first national cemeteries were established. The

more we analyze the multimodal text that emerges in the MC, the more it seems to

become a field of “silent” struggle between the national and the personal demands for

changing patterns of memorialization and remembrance. The uniform tomb “sealed”

the memories along the “correct” path, turning memorializing into indoctrination and

national consolidation by means of the fallen soldiers. The cult of the fallen created an

uniform space as a reflection of an “imagined community of equals.” The actual

process of remembering, in contrast, turns to the individual past in order to include it

in the present narrative and to contest it in different and changing ways.

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Yael Guilat

Head of the Art Institute

Oranim Academic College of Education

Tivon 36000

Israel

yguilat@gmail.com

Shoshi Waksman

Levinsky School of Education

12 Shabazi St.

Tel Aviv 65150

Israel

shoshi-w@inter.net.il

1 This paper must be cited: Yael Guilat &Shosi Waksman, "The Linguistic

Landscape of Israel's Military Cemeteries as a field of Symbolic Contestation" in

Amei Koll-Stobbe& Sebastian Knospe (eds.) Language Contact in Times of

Globalization ,Peter Lang Publication and Greifswald University, 2012