When do wars end? When cease-fires are signed? Maybe when peace treaties are signed? The TV series ‘Shaat Neila‘ (Closing Hour, alluding to the prayer that concludes the Yom Kippur ceremonies in synagogues) or ‘Valley of Tears‘ once again demonstrates that wars continue to accompany those who took part as soldiers or whose lives were affected long after diplomatic actions led to the cessation of hostilities. The political consequences are long-lasting, even peace is sometimes apparent, and for those who participated as soldiers, who witnessed or were victims of violence, wars never end. Thus is one of the messages of these series produced by the Israeli public television station CAN 11, a spectacular and relatively expensive production (23 million shekels), for Israel in any case, which deals with the events of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. 47 years passed since this war, a controversial and problematic war in the saga of Israel. It was the first time Israel was caught by surprise in a coordinated attack by Egyptian and Syrian forces, it was a war in which more than 2,600 Israeli soldiers lost their lives, and thousands more were wounded, a war that produced or perhaps only accentuated a deep political and social crisis that led to large-scale protests, the resignation of Golda Meir as Israel’s prime minister, and a few years later the political changes that brought the right wing to political leadership for the first time in this country in 1977. Soldiers, wounded, prisoners of war 47 years ago, those who survived the traumas of the battlefields and the suffering, who keep the memories of their fallen colleagues of generation and comrades-in-arms, have now relived their traumas when reviewing these series. Every evening, after the broadcast of the weekly episode, there were debates on television, which continued in the night on the public radio station. It is clear that for these veterans the Yom Kippur War is not over. And probably neither for us, the rest of Israeli society.
The action of the series takes place on the northern front of the war, where Syrian forces surprised the Israeli army and occupied in the early days of the war part of the territory of the Golan Heights that had been conquered by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. During the ten episodes (the first and last being double) the spectators were able to follow the soldiers from three military units: a command center where the activity of the fighters was coordinated, an intelligence unit located on a mountain top that was captured and conquered by Syrians and from which only two soldiers survived, and a tank unit that, after suffering heavy losses in the early hours of the war, managed to regroup and block out enemy forces that were overwhelmingly superior numerically, and eventually turn the fate of the war on this front. For the most part, the facts correspond to the historical truth, but there are also many inconsistencies and more or less plausible elements of fiction, as it resulted from the many comments and discussions arising from the series in Israel. This is not a documentary, and not even a docu-drama, because the characters are imaginary. The perennial discussion about how faithful a historical reconstruction on screens must be and what freedoms are allowed in adaptations is valid and open in this case as well. My impression is that the authors of the script made reasonable choices, but that does not mean that there was no room for more boldness and originality. The roots of the war are not discussed and the question whether the war could have been avoided is not asked. The film is about the low rank officers and the soldiers caught in the middle of a bloody conflict. There are some personal emotional stories – that of the father who went to the front in search of the estranged son, or a love story interrupted by the war. Other threads of the story have political connotations. Some of the soldiers come from Sephardic Jews families who considered themselves socially discriminated against and participated in Black Panther protest movements, and ethnic tensions are not completely eradicated by the military service, at least until the start of the war. From the various gallery of characters, I noticed two: that of Meni Ben-Dror (Lior Ashkenazi, the only established actor in the cast), a famous journalist and writer in search of his son, and that of the young nerdy young man in the intelligence service (played by Shahar Tavoch), the only character who seems to understand what is happening and who tries to prevent his superiors. Both start as pacifists and become war heroes in the whirlwind of events.
Unlike other war series and docu-dramas (with the notable exception of Amos Gitai‘s ‘Kippur‘ from 2000), the heroes are not in the ‘Valley of Tears‘ politicians or generals, but officers and soldiers from front. The quality of the series consists in the fact that it accurately and realistically reproduces the surprise and the lack of material and moral readiness of the soldiers in the first days of the war, the violent chaos of the situations in which they are placed, but also the resources of heroism that they find in themselves to resist and turn the situation around. The producers have invested heavily in reconstituing the battles and the atmosphere in bunkers and commands, in the trenches and on the battlefields. The results are spectacular, we are immersed in an extremely realistic war action. Spectators are not spared of watching violent scenes on the battlefield, in bunkers, or in the prisons and interrogation rooms where those who have fallen prisoners end up. Human stories manage to create interest and emotion, although some are a bit prolonged, somewhat inevitably in a series of such magnitude. We can see some clues about the consequences of the war, but they are not very consistent. The story ends at the point when the fate of the war is reversed at the cost of immense sacrifices. A speech by one of the commanders promises a better world and a fairer society after the war, but the rhetorical words sound empty, especially since we know what followed. The series are distributed internationally by HBO and it will be interesting to watch how it will be received and understood by the international public, perhaps less informed and certainly less involved than the Israeli audiences with the Yom Kippur war, another war that has not ended.