By, Mordechai Beck
3 min read
ByMordechai Beck, Mordechai Beck
Last month, we saw an Israeli documentary film that raised more than a few eyebrows when its screening was announced. Called Censored Voices it was a continuation of Siach Lochamim (The Seventh Day in its English edition), a book produced just after the 1967 Six-Day War by a group of left-wing, secular kibbutzniks. The people interviewed then spoke of their abhorrence of the war, their feeling of sadness at the necessity of killing, of their humanitarian attitude towards the enemy, etc. The book received glowing reviews and was translated into a number of foreign languages. Its positive message was that the Israelis were not savages, even in war. They were deeply bothered by the violence and cruelty of a war that was thrust upon them.
What was not known at the time, was that over 70 per cent of what they said was censored by the army.
Now that the censorship has been lifted, Mor Loushy, a young Israeli film producer, decided to re-interview some of the original people from the book and ask them how they felt about what happened in the war. Armed with the uncensored script, Loushy confronted the elderly kibbutzniks with what took place and what was censored in the original book. The recall was not pleasant. "Yes," said Amos Oz the most famous of the interviewees, "we did terrible things, even though at the back of our minds we kept thinking 'what would have happened if the situation had been reversed; would they have been any less brutal towards us?'"
There followed documentary films, mainly from foreign sources, since most of the Israeli-made films were accidentally burnt. Many of the films show the Arab enemy being captured, trussed up like so many chickens, stripped to their underwear, driven from their homes, etc. Recalling those savage times, the kibbutzniks recalled how they took the men of a particular village lined them up and shot them dead. "They were our enemy," said one, "we had to shoot them." Thankfully, there was no mention of rapes. But other atrocities were cited. We - the audience - could understand why these images were censored for so long.
What I saw, however, was something even more telling. It showed that the generation of kibbutzniks -sons of the founders, of "the generation of giants," as they are called in the local parlance - were not the ''new Israeli man'' as they had thought, a man who showed supreme tolerance for the enemy, who respected "the other". No, this film demonstrated how they could be the savage beast who, when he had the opportunity, exercised vengeance on his enemy, just like anyone else. That's what was censored.
The capture of the Wall was not worth one life
In defending their actions, many of the kibbutzniks took issue with the whole ideology behind the war and, beyond that, with the roots of Israel in Judaism. As Amos Oz himself says in the film, "The capture of the Western Wall was not worth the life of one Israeli soldier."
In so doing, these people alienated themselves from the majority of their fellow Israelis, many of whom emigrated from other parts of the Middle East, and/or were traditional or religious Jews. Thus began the decline of the Western-orientated, secular Ashkenazi Israelis, and the rise of the traditional Jews, those simple souls "who kiss the mezuzah" and "pray at the tombs of tzaddikim"( in the recent words of artist Yair Garbuz at a rally before the recent elections), or are "herds of cattle" ( in the words of actor Oded Kotler in reaction to the present Minister of Culture).
Censored Voices is an important document in that, for good or bad, it represents a watershed of where Israel was going at a vital turning point in its history. The fact is that the right-wing, and particularly the religious Zionists, reacted by drawing on traditional sources, especially biblical models, to justify the victory, not only in the face of the actual Arab forces, but also more latterly, of world opinion. Their ideology rose while that of their opponents has waned.
If anything, the film challenges the left and the secular Israelis to create a new ideology, one which connects to the tradition and is sensitive to the "simpler souls", which offers an alternative to the ultra-Conservatism of the present government and its worship of money and power.
