On the Unknown Soldier Symbol in Israeli Culture

The “unknown soldier” symbol in Jewish Israeli commemorative discourse was referred to first by veneration in Avraham Stern’s poem “Unknown Soldiers” (1932) and then by negation, such as in the popular Yehuda Amichai poem “We Do Not Have Unknown Soldiers” (1969). It is often cited and read in commemorative ceremonies. In negating this category, I argue, cultural strategies of remembrance and forgetting were used as recruiting mechanisms for missions of nation building, which demanded various forms of sacrifice that favor the collective over the individual. Reading the ways in which the “unknown soldier” symbol had been used in the Yishuv Jewish community and in Israel, I suggest that until the 1970s, losing one’s life in battle was a way to regain one’s name as an individual, while afterwards, the use of the symbol, whether negated or revered, points to the anonymity of an individual within a fragmented collective that does not necessarily venerate national sacrifice.