1.
The enthusiasm of Buenos Aires cinefolk for Israeli director Avi Mograbi and his film Z32 shows no sign of abating. Página/12 - a national newspaper which enjoys the favor of the government and whose weekend culture and entertainment sections are obligatory reading for a good part of the capital’s progressively minded opinion - today devotes two whole pages to an interview with three local documentary film makers in which each tries to outdo his colleagues in expressions of admiration for Mograbi and his latest film. I said what I have to say about the film itself in a previous post and here will focus on a couple of the more general ideas expressed by the journalist and his interviewees.
2.
Oscar Ranzani, the journalist who conducts the interview, gets the ball rolling with the following question:
Is interviewing a killer who gloats about his crime an ethical challenge for the documentary maker?
Only someone who either hasn’t seen the film or has seen it but didn’t understand it could have formed such a question. The ex-soldier mentions having had feelings of elation in the moments immediately after killing the policemen - not surprising in view of the fact that he couldn’t have known in advance that he was going to be involved in what turned out to be a turkey shoot - but the film turns on the axis of his troubled conscience and would never have been made if he hadn’t presented himself to a human rights NGO to recount what he had done.
3.
Ranzani goes on to ask the three whether the film would have had a
… different meaning if it had been about a soldier who killed someone during a war, in a fight on equal terms, and not an act of vengeance against defenseless Palestinian police?
Note well the phrase, “a fight on equal terms”. Ranzani seems to think that what distinguishes a war from criminal act of personal or state vengeance is that the participants in a war fight on equal terms. I hope I don’t unduly try the patience of readers by pointing out the very essence of war, including wars carried out in strict compliance with the relevant legal constraints, is the attempt to impose unequal and unfair terms of combat on the enemy, to strike him when he least expects it, where he has the least capacity to resist and with the minimum risk to one’s own forces. Fighting on equal terms is strictly for those interested in personal duels.
4.
Later in the interview Ranzani asks the three directors whether they,
… think that this isn’t just an isolated case but one representative of a systematic practice by the Israeli army. Without lessening the responsibility of the soldier concerned, isn’t it possible to understand his position when one thinks of the perversity of the training he received from the army?
Alejandro Fernández Mouján replies:
The Israeli army, as well as the American one, are the two who have taken manipulation to an extreme. The film shows the manipulation [by the IDF] of its own people, that it is supposedly trying to defend. The kid does his military service because he has to. And then he gets involved in a perverse situation where they turn him into someone whose only ambition is to kill. They have him doing nothing for twenty months, until he’s at the point of exploding, when they release him he’s going to want to kill even a five year old child. It’s very perverse, thinking of the people behind this policy.
In the Israeli army they train people to kill? Well, I’ll be damned. Who’d have guessed that? So unlike what they do to recruits in the armies of New Zealand, Canada and Norway, where they confine themselves to folk dancing and social work. And military life consists of long stretches of severe boredom and repetitive exercises punctuated by moments of acute fear and exaltation? Shocking stuff for the bien pensant documentary maker but not exactly news for anybody with the slightest clue about how armies work.
I guess that some of those journalists who write such silly remarks really have not “the slightest clue about armies work.”
But another possibility exists: The double standard of many left-liberals in Europe.
When it comes to Israel they expect perfection. For them the fact, that during the war of independence in 1948 very few Israeli soldiers committed crimes is proof that Israel was borne in sin. They tend to forget, that Arabs did not respect the decision of the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, that Arabs attacked the Jews. The fact, that Jews are not perfect, that not every Jew is an angel is disappointing those lovers of Jews, who voice the noblest sentiments while bashing Israel.
Having been myself a soldier at the time in Israel I can say, that in my unit there were two cases of soldiers appearing in front of a military court. One was a NCO who sold trousers belonging to the army, another was a soldier who tried to rape a Christian Arab woman and was condemned to six years prison.
Crimes committed by members of Palmach were described by Netiva Ben Yehuda, who is a Zionist. The new historians only had to quote her.
So if in an army of 70.000 soldiers 30 – 50 committed crimes, this is in the eyes of the Israel bashers mortal original sin of the “Zionist entity”.
Lets compare this with their reaction to the fact, that many soldiers of the Red Army liberating Austria were raping thousands of women. If one dares to mention this fact one is accused to be a “fascist”. It is a clear case of double standard and it must be confronted.
Of course the Red Army was a liberating army, despite the fact, that some of the soldiers raped and robbed. Those few who committed crimes don’t change the fact that the Israeli Army defended 1948 the Jews who were threatened.
It is not only the ignorance of some bien pensants we have to confront, but the double standard of so many left-liberal Europeans.
Because of this double standard, there is a real market for Israeli Israel bashers who transport antisemitism or legitimize it. I heard one film maker in Israel saying: “look I could not sell a project, not showing how bad Israel is, this is the market in Europe”.