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Providing a new angle on state control and political legitimacy, this book addresses the efforts of successive Israeli governments to establish their political dominance and legitimacy through the selective production and collective assimilation of cultural practices associated with bereavement and commemoration of those who fell on their country's behalf.

"Providing a new angle on state control and political legitimacy, this book addresses the efforts of successive Israeli governments to establish their political dominance and legitimacy through the selective production and collective assimilation of cultural practices associated with bereavement and commemoration of those who fell on their country's behalf"--

Individual behaviors, such as loss-coping and "grief work" are affected in organizational contexts. In everything pertaining to coping with trauma in general, and loss more particularly, the individual is "trapped" within a political psychology that enforces the habitus and expectations of institutional dominance on the ostensibly intimate and private response. Regimes have perceived bereavement over battlefield deaths as a form of social capital that can be mobilized to enhance national loyalty and political support. Employing both existential/hermeneutic and institutional analysis, this study examines three diachronic models of bereavement – hegemonic, political and civil – and their political ramifications in the Israeli context. Drawing on changing parental conceptual orientations towards fallen sons and their role as cultural and ideological agents in public sphere, the article traces the movement of bereavement from its capture by the hegemonic state institutions to its creations under the domination of others institutions: political and civic and ultimate use in critiquing the political and military echelon. The article indicates the powerful impact of the social institutional-organizational context on the intimate-psychological context of coping with loss, by illustrating this phenomenon in the Israeli society.

From its inception and throughout the military sovereignty era, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were endowed with a religious status. In Israeli society, bereaved parents of fallen soldiers enjoyed a special relationship with the army, and their bereavement afforded them a unique place in the shaping of public opinion about security policy. However, as this paper shows, after the first Lebanon War (1982) cracks began to appear in this special union. From the early 1990s, bereaved parents supported by new social movements and a symbiosis of the judicial arena and the media challenged the security-defense-military arena and its policies of commemoration of the dead, treatment of soldiers, accident prevention, secrecy, and even appointments. Using the High Court and the media to directly influence defense and security policy, civil society succeeded in changing the IDF's tactics, the treatment of Palestinian detainees, and thus elevated human rights and international law over security considerations.