Claude Lanzmann's Make-Believe Israel Tsahal (The Israel Defense Forces). Directed by Claude Lanzmann.
Five hours.
English Hebrew and French dialogue, with translations into all
three languages.
Claude Lanzmann's Tsahal is a film of five whole hours which
is as disap¬pointing as it is long. It is arrogant, hackneyed,
propagandist and lacking any credibility. Above all it is
anachronistic; even in France where Lanzmann is considered
untouchable thanks to his film Shoah on the Holocaust,
Tsahal looked so false that it inevitably received negative
criti¬cism. In Israel, the critics murdered the film and it
indeed required more than a little cheek to show the film on
Israeli screens. No wonder that it was also a box office failure.
When interviewed, Lanzmann claimed that he was "more pro-Israeli
than many Israelis." Nonsense! He hankers after nothing but a
make-believe Israel, one which exists only in his
imagination.
We sat for five hours in order to see how, for example, LanzmalU1
would deal with Israel's most problematical war, the Lebanese war,
a war which had shocked Israeli society, divided the people, caused
the death of some 700 Israelis and over 20,000 Lebanese and
Palestinians, and led to the res¬ignation of Prime Minister
Menachem Begin. Five hours without a single scene from this
terrible war which in effect is still going on in South Lebanon,
claiming casualties on both sides.
The film called Tsahal is silent about this war, in which the IDF
(Israel Defense Forces) bombed cities, destroyed refugee camps in
South Lebanon, imposed a terrible blockade on Beirut and finally
took it, enabling Israel's Phalangist allies to perpetrate the
horrible Sabra and Shatila massacre. Lanzmann simply blots Lebanon
out of the IDF's history. This is like mak¬ing a film about
the French army without Algeria, or the U.S. Army with¬out
Vietnam. Yet the director had the impudence to declare before the
gen¬eral release of his film that "I overlooked nothing, I
concealed nothing."
A Different Army?
However, Lebanon is not the only omission in a film pretending to
deal with the history and dilemmas of the IDP. Its five hours tell
us nothing of the com¬plex structural problems of its units,
its camps, the concern over religious coercion. Lanzmann only
briefly visited pilots in training, armored units and parachutists.
He ignores the increasingly critical inter-relationship between the
army and Israeli society. He overlooks the existence of disguised
anti¬-Palestinian units, of disgruntled soldiers, of female
soldiers lacking equality and sexually exploited in the army. Not a
single female soldier is inter¬viewed, even though the IDF is
the only army in the world to conscript women. Neither is there any
mention of the recurring accidents which nowa¬days fill the
headlines of Israeli newspapers.
Indeed there is not a word of criticism in the whole film. Instead
there appear fine heroic landscapes and sunsets (but we are not
even treated to any music). No Israeli would have dared to produce
such a tendentious work. The Israeli television shows films
exposing the army as it is, with its problems. Alas, this is not
for Lanzmann.
In his words at a reception in Paris, he said the aim of the film
was to pre¬sent a Jewish army whose values were different from
those of other armies in the world. Of course, Claude Lanzmann,
having set himself an impossible task, can only get caught in his
own trap. Tsahal is like every army in the world. When an army
becomes an occupying army, without exception it vio¬lates
human rights, oppresses the occupied people, and violates
internation¬al law. This is the real picture. That the IDF
soldiers are the sons of Holocaust victims, a fact which Lanzmann
stresses at every opportunity, does not con¬stitute any
justification, not even indirect, for trampling on Palestinian
rights.
Double Standard
Lanzmann's double standard is exposed by his attitude to another
phenom¬enon familiar in Israel's former wars: in times of war,
people abroad would rush home to join their units. In Lebanon it
was the opposite, and there appeared a mass protest movement on an
unprecedented scale against the war, and the phenomenon of refusal
to serve in an unjust war. The Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit)
movement came out against service in Lebanon and the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. Hundreds were tried and imprisoned for
this refusal and many thousands more identified with them.
This is the same Claude Lanzmann who, along with Jean-Paul Sartre,
was one of the signers in 1960 of the historic manifesto of the 121
French per¬sonalities against the repression in Algeria,
calling upon French youth to refuse to serve in an army which was
trampling on Algerian aspirations for independence. Now, however,
he is completely silent about the anti-Lebanon protest movement and
a similar refusal of IOF soldiers to participate in the repression
of another people. No less disgraceful is the treatment of the
Intifada and the conflict with the Palestinians, in which the IDF
played an important role. Approaching the subject only towards the
end of the film, we see pictures of children throw¬ing stones
at soldiers, with Lanzmann immediately pointing out how
dan¬gerous the stones are, and telling of a parachutist who
was killed by a con¬crete slab in the alleys of Nablus. Four
Palestinians are wounded by Israeli fire in the only incident we
see, though it is unclear whether the soldiers were in danger of
their lives. The orders for opening fire became more lax as the
Intifada proceeded, leading to some 1,500 Palestinian deaths and
30,000 wounded.
Innumerable reports of the repression by blood and fire of the
Intifada were for years seen by millions of TV viewers the world
over, yet Lanzmann couldn't spare five minutes in a five-hour film
to show the Israeli army doing this job: no bones are broken at the
orders of then-¬Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the early
days of the Uprising; no youths and children are shot at short
range; the local population is not humiliated; no houses of the
families of suspects are destroyed or sealed, no public
institutions closed; there are no expulsions or collective
punish¬ments, like protracted curfews; no censorship, no
military courts serving the Occupation.
Imaginary Scenario
In this film, as we have noted, the events and the human landscape
are cre¬ations of Lanzmann's imagination. Yet some 100,000
Palestinians went through Israeli prisons during the Intifada,
without passing across the screen even for a few moments. In June,
1994, Israel TV screened an excel¬lent documentary by Rami
Levi on the torture of Palestinians, with evi¬dence by the
tortured and the torturers alike. Had Lanzmann wanted, he could
have obtained similar evidence. He didn't do so because it would
have upset the imaginary scenario which he was projecting.
Only Israelis speak, hardly any Palestinians. We hear briefly from
one Palestinian who is a worker going to Israel to make a
livelihood for his ten chil¬dren, with Lanzmann, accompanied
by a military governor, asking him why he has so many children
instead of using birth control. As historian and critic Tom Segev
noted in Ha'aretz, Lanzmann could win an Oscar for bad taste.
A Jewish settler in the territories, Uri Ariel, gets a hug and is
another big talker. "The Arabs have built nothing, we are
building," he says, while in the background we see Palestinians
working in construction sites in his settle¬ment in order to
earn a living in a society where employment possibilities for the
local population is limited. There is hardly a hint about the
question of how, with the help of the army, the occupied is
dispossessed of his land.
Remote from the Reality
Another Palestinian who manages to get in a few words is seen
crossing Allenby Bridge from Jordan to the Occupied Palestinian
Territories. He complains that the process of crossing is drawn out
and we see his posses¬sions closely searched and disarranged.
One gets an impression of nor¬malization but here, as
elsewhere, the film distorts the reality. Having received
permission to film such a delicate subject, Lanzmann should have
revealed the truth about the ugly Israeli at Allenby Bridge. When I
served in the reserves for three weeks at the Bridge some ten years
ago, I was wit¬ness to endless acts of brutality and insults
meted out daily by some of the soldiers there. Nothing of this sort
is to be seen in the film.
On the other hand, there is unrestricted right of expression for
several Israeli generals who compete in trotting out stale cliches
about IDF moral¬ity, about the constant threat to Israel's
existence and enemy plans not to conquer but to wipe out the State
of Israel. Former Chief of Staff Ehud Barak peddles cheap
propaganda on the IDF's purity of arms, and he is in good company.
Ariel Sharon appears on his ranch like some ageing and amiable
shepherd. Lanzmann grovels before them all, avoiding mention of
Sabra and Shatila or of episodes like Sharon's murderous record in
reprisal raids over the Jordanian border.
Not a Documentary
Since it lacks continuity and completely ignores vital events, this
is a film which is unfaithful to the history of the IDF. Not
without justification did one critic call it "a document on the
position not of the IOF but on the mood of a Jewish intellectual in
Paris" (Dr. Shlomo Zand). The same critic oppos¬es the
exploitation of the Holocaust to justify a cult of force.
From the beginning, the film is full of tanks. The impression is
that Lanzmann likes tanks and tankists. It is explained that the
State of Israel is compelled to develop the arms industry because
of the embargo against it in its early years. Though arms became
one of the country's main exports, the film avoids the topic since
most of the clients were Third World dicta¬torships, like the
fascist Pinochet and the apartheid regime in South Africa. Hard as
it is to believe, after such unconvincing glorification, Lanzmann
told the Israeli press that after his film "the whole world will
speak of Tsahal as it did of the Holocaust."
The contrary is true. The film will be seen for what it is, as
one-sided and tendentious indoctrination. Perhaps the success of
Shoah went to Lanzmann's head, leading him to believe that
his new film would succeed in changing the image of Tsahal
in the world from that of an army of occu¬pation. If so, the
failure of the film proves that all Chutzpah has its limits.
