At dawn on 6 June 1982, on what was ironically the 38th anniversary of D-Day, Israeli troops launched an invasion of Lebanon. Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets bombed Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) positions in South Lebanon, and then about 800 tanks and 60,000 infantry went forward in an operation known as Peace for Galilee. There had been tension in the region for many years, and a UN Peacekeeping Force had been inserted along the border, known as UNIFIL. The Irish troops that formed a large contingent of UNIFIL could do nothing but note the registration numbers of the tanks and military vehicles that passed them on their way into Lebanon to destroy the fighters and camps of the PLO.
In one of the Israeli tanks on that day was a 20-year-old gunner called Samuel Maoz. So influenced was he by the experience of fighting in the weeks that followed that he later said every day he was haunted by memories of the war. But, back home, no one was allowed to show signs of trauma. As he later told a journalist: ‘The older generation told us, “Say thank you that you are alive; we were in the Nazi concentration camps.”’ Years later, Maoz said he still felt like a ‘bad boy’ if he complained of or expressed the horror of what he had seen and done.
Some years after the war, Maoz began to study film in Tel Aviv. He started to write a script about his experiences in the Lebanese war but ‘the first memory that came was the smell of burning flesh’. He did not finish his script, fearing it would only add to his trauma.
