"Life After Reserve Duty": Israeli Soldiers Between Gaza, India and the Beach

The film opens with the testimony of a 25-year-old soldier from Jerusalem. He describes a night when he lay in bed in the dark: his whole body ached, the anxieties surged, his breathing went haywire, and a severe headache turned into a kind of hallucination in which all his memories and fears came flooding up. He says that for about four hours he sweated, shook, could not breathe and felt pressure in his chest. At first he told himself that this could not be happening to him.

He served a little over three years in the Paratroopers Brigade. During that time he did a five-month rotation in Gaza and another three months in Lebanon. He says he lost a close friend a month after losing his cousin, and that he lost many other friends as well. In a situation like that, he says, you "pull the plug," become a machine and act in purely practical terms, and when you do that for a long time, it takes its toll.

He talks about the bodies he saw and the smell, which he says will never leave his nose. He describes near-death experiences, including an incident in which his logistics convoy was hit by a missile between the trucks and his truck flipped over. What troubles him most is the abrupt transition to civilian life: one day he is in Khan Younis, and the next he is signing a discharge form and being told "bye, figure it out" and go be a civilian.

His testimony is interspersed with clips of speeches by senior Israeli officials. In one of them, someone says, "We will win this war, but the price is unbearably heavy." In another, the speaker expresses pride in leading commanders and soldiers, among them thousands of reservists who left everything behind and came to defend the home. In a third clip, the line "We are fighting human animals" is heard. The narration mentions, in passages that are not entirely clear in the transcript, the allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the journalists who were killed and the thousands killed in bombings.

To get away from his demons, the narration says, the soldier has been crossing India by motorcycle for 11 months, and the trip serves as his therapy. He explains that wherever Israelis go, they "take over" an area and all the other Israelis follow, and it has been that way for several generations. Friends from the reserves told him the trip changed them and healed them. What convinced him was precisely meeting other Israelis along the "Hummus Trail": you meet people and maybe realize you are not alone with your feelings.

In a market scene, he haggles over a price of 3,700 rupees. The Indian vendor says the people there are generous, that they have had a very good relationship with Israelis over the years, that "people love Israel" and that the government is a good friend of it.

The narration places the scene in a broader context. According to the intelligible parts, the "Hummus Trail" was born during the hippie wave. The friendship between Indian Prime Minister Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu, both described as nationalists, is today a value in India. India has become a major market for Israeli defense exports, and according to the narration it also supplies the IDF with weapons that have been used in Gaza. The transcript also mentions that Israelis have faced a boycott in the Maldives and threats in Thailand, but the passage is garbled. According to the figures in the narration, more than 80,000 Israelis come to India every year, and more than a third of them have just finished compulsory service or reserve duty. They come to a cheap country where some divide their time between meditation sessions, while others escape into alcohol and drugs. The soldiers call these trips "detox trips."

Israeli travelers talk about the signs in Hebrew and the Indians who speak Hebrew with them and greet them with "Shalom" and "Hayush." One of them describes another place they visited, with much less of this phenomenon, and compares it with the current place, which is rougher and messier but "good." There, the Israelis have "the Jewish home," the Chabad House in Arambol, which he says serves first and foremost as a place for Israelis.

On the walls of the house hang stickers of people killed on October 7 and in the war. One traveler spots a sticker of a friend he grew up with and shared an apartment with before the army, "really a friend like a brother," and says it moved him. He says the place feels like everyone's home, and the stickers are a reminder of what the nation has been through.

One of the people at the house explains that houses like this have existed for 20 years and are nothing new. Since October 7, he says, they have focused more on mental well-being, a sense of belonging and a deep inner search connected both to Judaism and to peace of mind.

Another traveler was seriously wounded in Gaza. He says he thinks a lot about the incident and the injury, but takes them "to positive places." He says he did not come to India to find himself or to forget. Someone close to him says it reassured him greatly that the traveler accepted what happened "in a healthy and proper way," out of faith, and that this gave him the strength to cope with the trauma and the crisis. The traveler himself says he walks down the street in a tank top, people stare, and he is proud to say he is a Jewish Israeli soldier who was wounded in the Land of Israel, "which is our land."

He reconstructs the incident: the unit was searching for a tunnel shaft, and it never occurred to them that there was a sniper 800 meters away. According to the narration, Hamas filmed the scene through the sniper's scope, and the shooting killed his commander on the spot. He remembers everything: the moment the bullet hit, the intense pain, the fall, the minutes he lay alone waiting to be extracted, and the evacuation to the helicopter.

He says many people come to India after the war and reserve duty to forget and fill their heads with other things, like drugs and alcohol, and "it's sad and it's a bummer." He says some people sink into their injury and into feeling like a "poor thing," that they can be understood and cannot be judged. But, he says, "the fact that you chose life is a big deal," and it is part of healing the soul.

A group breathing session also takes place in India. The facilitator prepares the participants: various emotions may come up, crying, laughter or an urge to scream, and it is important to release them. They may see "visions from the past" and situations they experienced, and they should accept that. During the exercise, he encourages them to keep breathing hard and rhythmically, "let it go, don't keep it inside, get it all out." Some participants laugh; others ask for tissues.

After the session, they share. One says he breathed a lot, stopped for a few minutes, started again, and at the end suddenly felt overwhelmed. Another says he felt as though he had "attacked himself," that all the adrenaline and fear rushed through his head. The question is raised whether it isn't frightening that in a session like this someone might have difficult visions from the war. One participant laughs that he was afraid exactly that would come back to him. Another friend, addressing Yonatan, offers a faith-based interpretation: the Holy One, blessed be He, puts you through a journey to strengthen you, not to break you.

Another participant admits that for him it is simply fear: that something will open up in him that he lacks the strength to close. He says it is much easier for him to run away, and he has to really fight to stay in the session and not get up. Later it comes up that it is not yet possible to talk about recovery, because "we're still at the peak of the trauma." One of them mentions Iran and says he is going straight from India back to reserve duty, for his sixth or seventh rotation, "I don't even know anymore."

When the conversation turns to the accusations against Israel, one of the travelers says in English that they are on vacation and do not want to talk about difficult things. Of anyone who hates them, he says, "Fuck him." But he also asks that people know this is the situation not only for him but for many people his age: he says his entire generation is traumatized, and this will have a major impact on the country in the future. He wants to show the world "that we are human beings," that the conflict belongs to both sides, that they are part of it, and that they are paying the price now and will keep paying it forever.

The narration notes that after years of war, the intensity of the fighting, the number of military casualties and international condemnation are taking a growing toll, although the passage is garbled in the transcript. The film moves on to Noam, a soldier who has not surfed in a month. In a conversation with an interviewer, he explains that going to the sea is a statement for him: putting himself first for a moment, time for himself that he has not given himself enough of. The quiet, the sea, the sport and the "wash" drain everything out of him.

The interviewer asks whether there is something healing about returning to the place where he fought on that terrible day when so many people were murdered. Noam replies that the drive there is complicated: there he was expecting the enemy, and now he is expecting a good wave. Coming to the sea and saying "there are waves and no terrorists" is already a kind of contentment. According to the narration, on October 7 he arrived at the site with the soldiers of his unit, and the number 17 is also mentioned, but the passage is unclear. He points south toward the maritime border: beyond the fence, Gaza begins, and the terrorists came from this beach. He says that seeing cars, people and beach umbrellas today helps him tell himself that he went through what he went through for this.

Noam uses a term he learned at reservists' meetings: "the break line," the moment you leave for a rotation. How do you tell your wife, how do you wrap things up, how do you lace up your boots again, and "if you're not ready for it, it's complicated." Now, he says, he has found himself preparing for the sea's break line, meaning the point where the waves break. In summing up, he says that recovering from trauma is a big, complex and difficult thing, in which it is hard to see a finish line. You are taught to live with it and cope, "because it comes in waves."

Another voice in the film belongs to a veteran soldier who introduced himself by a name the transcript renders as "Flint." He served for years in Golani, and in the reserves he was a battalion-level commander until 2014. Since then he has been a public refusenik. He says he has developed several new therapeutic protocols and teaches them in Israel and around the world. According to the narration, professionals are worried about a deeper injury among the soldiers, "moral injury."

He explains that moral injury is tied to the feeling that "I crossed an inner line," that something a person believed in was shattered because of things they did. He says the terrible things done in Gaza now are far more severe than what was done in 2014, but in his view the difference is mainly one of scale, because even when they entered Gaza back then, they were told to shoot at everything. He calls for doing everything possible to avoid war: making peace with Lebanon and Syria, granting full human rights to Palestinians inside Israel, and finding a way to address the needs of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as well. If they keep committing crimes, he warns, the moral wounds and the trauma will continue to eat away at society.

A group of shell-shocked veterans describes a struggle with the state. One of them says they are still invisible, that no one really sees them or understands what it means to be shell-shocked. He compares it to a physical disability: a person whose legs have been amputated gets "100-plus," and he says it should be the same for the shell-shocked, because "it can't be that they took your whole life from you and won't give you anything." Of something they consume together, he says, "this is our medicine," something that helps them feel a little alive and not explode too much.

A shell-shocked veteran of the Second Intifada, who enlisted in 1999, says he fought for the state, and when he needed it, it did not stand by him. He says there are instructions for how to send a soldier into an operation, but the instructions for how to bring him back are not implemented. In the latest fighting, he says, many young people aged 22 and 23 have joined who say they are shell-shocked, but "have no idea what awaits them 20 years from now." Another member of the group says they do not want the next generation to go through what they are going through, but the way the new ones are being treated, the new ones are not surviving either. He claims more than 100 have died by suicide, and he addresses the establishment: "Don't close your eyes. It can't go on like this anymore."

The film also tells the story of Eliran, a soldier who died by suicide, through his family members. A woman from the family says he was a site foreman who built tunnels, bridges and roads. "When he was a civilian, he built the country, and when he was in Gaza, he destroyed Gaza." The family members show a model of a D9, the vehicle Eliran operated in Gaza, "a strong and powerful machine, just like Eliran." They keep the flak vest he wore in Gaza without washing or cleaning it. They say it still has grains of sand from Gaza in it, and even a little of Eliran's smell, even though two years have passed.

They describe him as a hero, strong, optimistic, connected to the positive side of life, "the last person who would have killed himself." He put on a front that everything was fine, while in fact he was shattered to pieces inside, and they did not know. The family is angry that they were not there to help him, and that the army was not there either: it did not notice, did not understand and did not help. Hence the message they want to convey to soldiers: don't be ashamed, it's okay to have post-traumatic stress, and you can get treatment. They say that as the war ends and people return to routine, post-traumatic symptoms will intensify. People put it off and put it off, but in the end it explodes, and there is demand and no available places.

The soldier from the opening returns to Israel after long months in Asia. He says it takes time to adjust and that coming back is stressful, especially since he has to report for reserve duty in Lebanon for several months. On a trail near Jerusalem, from which you can see Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital, the Jerusalem Forest and the landscape, he says he feels the wind and "this is home." He wants to live in peace, "everyone does."

But, he says, "we have a job to do," and the country must be defended. He is willing to pay with his mental health and, "I don't want to say it," with his life too if required. He says this is a fighter's mentality and it must be accepted, because that is the situation in the country: you can dream of peace, but you have to do the work to make it happen, and of course win the war against Iran and "cut off the head of the snake." The film ends with narration stating that the army, operating under the orders of the most extreme government in the country's history, is not willing to lay down its arms and is entrenched in this conflict.