If Israeli artistic expression can be said to have a specificity, it is that we often tend to detect there signs of tension and nervousness pointing straight back to the political situation in the country. Whereas Israeli society is divided over the Palestinian conflict, Israeli art seems to be unaware of this dividing line. Since the traumatic Lebanon war, most artists have made their choices. Many exhibitions, with sometimes the participation of Palestinian artists, are symbolic acts that try to build a dialogue through art and translate a deadly situation into an artistic language. Even if all artists do not rally to the declaration of the painter Moshe Gershuni who said in 1977: “the only problem of Israeli art is the Palestinian problem”, the Israeli artist cannot disregard this context. Yet, in which way does this situation differ from those characterizing other societies involved in a latent or open war? Indeed, let’s recall the artistic silence which prevailed in France regarding one of the last great colonial wars, that of Algeria, and we will see that a “hot” reaction is not always the rule. In addition, the problems faced by Israeli artists do not stop at the subject of war; there is also the ever-present question of the relation between the destiny of the Jewish people and that of Israel-Palestine. Obviously this doesn’t mean that each time an Israeli painter or sculptor engages in creation, he will attempt to question his “roots” or discuss the notion of rightful ownership of the land. However the critical, sometimes militant, position, of Israeli art exceeds “the simple” dialogue with reality and, more deeply, addresses the issue of the constituting components of the nation. Contemporary artists practice an increasingly corrosive vision of what is currently understated in Israel as the “situation”. Their approach to reality where any evocation of an idyllic past, that of the era of the pioneers, is either excluded, or made grotesque, is devoid of illusion. One often gets the feeling that these works echo the state of mind which has characterized Israeli society since the missed opportunity offered by the Oslo agreements and where clear-sightedness is generally synonymous with skepticism and fatalism. I will go over these works and their terribly acute vision of the conflict.