Representations of war have always disrupted the stability of a mimesis built on a strict oppositional logic between interior fantasy and external realism. Indeed, even within the most popular understandings of war, its representation embodies a complex dialectic of irrealis and truth, of public and private, the political and the personal. One might argue, invoking much of the canon of Western literature and film, that war depictions constitute a basic aesthetic dynamic that defines much of the tensions between, on one hand, Cartesian notions of subjective hermeticism and, on the other, an objective notion of personal identity as dependent on social determinations of the self. Israeli representations have war have themselves always relied on this sort of dialectic. Perhaps one could even look at Israeli war depictions as constitutive of the basic Israeli citizen in how the disruption of a normative separation of public and personal in war defines the individual citizen's experience of the world as part of a wider political entity. In this context, poetry emerged as a dominant genre for much of Israeli cultural history, in how poetry negotiated between the subjective expression of the individual and the objective demands of public discourse. This paper argues that recent Israeli films--in particular the depictions of war in Beaufort and Waltz With Bashir--have worked to establish a new understanding of individual Israeli citizenship by disrupting these standard dialectics of art, of a separation and interconnection between interiority and exteriority. Film, in fact, has always presented challenges for the Israeli public sphere. In this, this paper works to connect recent Israeli war film to a Habermas-influenced conception of the public sphere, which relies less on an irreconcilable dialectic of public and private, and more on an analysis of how visual art--film, in particular, because of its inherently exterior perspective--works to redefine as a social experience individuality , private memory, and the relation between the subject and the world--in large terms, between psychology and reality.