The life of a teenage girl in Israel is interrupted when she is plucked out of her environment at an age when sexual, educational, and family values are at their highest exploration point. She is then placed in a rigorous institution, where individuality becomes a secondary matter, making room for nationalism. "I solemnly swear…to devote all of my strength and to sacrifice my life to protect the land and the liberty of Israel," repeats the newly recruited soldier during her swearing-in ceremony. She enters the two-year period in which she will change from a girl to a woman, a teenager to an adult, all under a militaristic, masculine environment, and in the confines of an army that is engaged in daily war and conflict.

My project is about a return: revisiting my experience as a soldier in the Israel Defense Forces between the years 1988-1990. Through a series of images showing female soldiers in army bases and outside, individually and in groups, I attempt to reveal a facet of this experience that is generally overlooked by the global community. Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, my images disclose a complexity of emotions with an emphasis on melancholy. The soldier is often caught in a transient moment of self-reflection, uncertainty, a break from her daily reality, as if questioning her own identity.

My photographs expose the reality of the situation and the state of contradiction that my subject is in. She is a soldier in uniform but at the same time she is a teenage girl who is trying to negotiate between these two extreme dimensions. She is in an army base surrounded by hundreds like her, but underneath the uniform there is an individual that wishes to be noticed.

During my military service I endured periods of depression and loneliness, which at the time were unclear to me. When I look at these pictures that I took over the past year I feel an emotion that I would describe as affectionate, maternal, which might be in some way related to something that I was longing for during my service. These feelings constitute the frame of my project, and the core impulse of my decision to go back. With this project I wish to seek answers to matters that were left unresolved, and to shed some light on a side of the Israeli Army that is less obvious and predictable and more vulnerable than the way it is commonly portrayed.