The Israel Nobody Films

Before it became a book, Israeli Girls was a self-published magazine—the kind of thing that exists because someone needed it to. Photographer Dafy Hagai grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv and spent years shooting the world around her the way you do when you’re trying to hold onto something before it slips. The result reads less like documentation than memory: girls in backyards, at the beach, in bedrooms, suspended in that formless nowhere-time of adolescence.

Every time Israel appears in the news it arrives with the same visual grammar—smoke columns, rubble, Iron Dome contrails against a pale sky. The geopolitical reality is real and the body count is real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But there’s a version of the country that never gets shown: suburban, bored, young. Dafy shoots that one. Her models—some of them close friends—had one condition attached: they had to remind her of her own youth. It shows. The photographs don’t feel staged. They feel like someone found an old roll of film in a drawer and was surprised by what was on it.

The book frames itself as a cultural statement rather than a political one, and I take that at face value, even if those two things can’t fully be separated when the country in question is Israel. What Dafy is actually saying is simpler and more stubborn than any statement: young people here aren’t fundamentally different from young people anywhere. Same boredom, same heat, same desire to be looked at. The same need to prove that their particular suburb was specific and real and worth remembering.