Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defence purposes?


December 26, 2015
Sarah Benton

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Michael Baron reviews Storyville – The Six Day War: Censored Voices

‘Censored Voices’ (shown on BBC Four on 7 December and available to view on BBC I-Player until 5 January) is a must-see.  A compulsively watchable 87 minutes of documentary interviews and previously unseen film of episodes in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israeli documentary film maker, Mor Loushy, has been permitted by the Israeli government to use recordings of returned kibbutznik soldiers of their experience of that war, and play these back to the same men now veterans.

The audio recordings made in the three weeks after the end of the war contain the raw, immediate emotional reaction of participants. Some euphoria, of course, but much pained reflection. It seems that only a few of the recordings, prior to the film, had been in the public domain. Now here they are, uncensored.

Speaking truth to camera in this way is a valuable, indeed essential, contribution from the past toward understanding the present. Not least since the testimonies are brilliantly interspersed with documentary footage of the war, and vintage news reels, from nearly 50 years ago.

This film is about truth, atonement, and re-evaluation of the ‘story’ of victory. Therein our debt to Loushy and his team. Behind the 1967 war, its predecessors and successors, lies the Shoah, as Jonathan Freedland reminded readers of The Guardian on 10 December last continues to ‘reverberate through Israeli life’.

Nonetheless, the small group of one-time soldiers led by Amos Oz and film editor Avraham Shapira, admit what might be war crimes and senseless cruelty among much else. Overall, there is a numbing consciousness of complicity in guilt and spreading fear as they listened to their own words. One old man – the thoughtful lined faces, expressly or implicitly questioning their youthful selves are a study in themselves – used the word ‘holocaust’ as he described the uprooting of Palestinians from their homes and their transformation into refugees.

So for today’s viewer, the sight of families with their bundled baggage on a dusty road is no longer unfamiliar. What again? one asks. Another ex-soldier wonders whether Zionism was not ‘a tragedy from the start’, and now sees peace and war as recurring periods in the years ahead.

What we now witness is more than what we witnessed in the aftermath of victory. The wrecks of Egyptian tanks in the desert; a family photograph from the wallet of a dead Egyptian; the first glimpse of the Suez Canal; Moshe Dayan marching into the Old City and soldiers praying at the Wall; maps showing the statistical might of the Arab armies at Israel’s borders, the call-up, and the joyous return with Sinai, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and Jerusalem added to the state’s land mass. Israel victorious, Israel the occupier.

Michael Baron MBE, L, is a long-term signatory of JfJfP and one of the founding parents of the National Autistic Society.

That’s all there in the film, and much else. It is also Israel in its legitimate triumph (but illusory as a war to end wars) forcing people from their villages and putting them on the road to refugee camps. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before? Don’t we see this now?

Some of the men interviewed acknowledged there were similarities of inhumane and shameful behaviour. It is these contributions, these previously hidden testimonies, that make the film remarkable. It is not the greatest documentary of its sort. One can criticise the repetitive image of the tape recorder opening each sequence and the bare kibbutz rooms in which the revisitings of the past take place.

But the film succeeds – it hurts to know a little of the other side of victory. As a critic put it ,‘the glossy modern footage does not interrogate whether those sentiments (i.e the ‘less triumphant language’) endured and limit the scope….to that of a time capsule’. Certainly it is a time capsule which we need to open and enter to help, even if ineffectively, how to explain the Middle East today.

“Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defence purposes” is the interrogative that hangs like the Damoclean sword over every discussion. ‘Censored Voices’ with its mix of the known, the unknown and the testimonies, serves to reinforces the prescience of the question.

 


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