person:mor loushy

The real Oslo criminals
▻https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-real-oslo-criminals-1.6338505

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We should adopt the conceit of the right: the Oslo criminals. The pejorative should be attached, of course, to Benjamin Netanyahu and the savage incitement that he and the settlers perpetrate; but the heroes of the peace, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, are also worthy of the title. Their missed opportunity, rooted chiefly in their cowardice, is unforgivable.

A new documentary shows this quite well. “The Oslo Diaries,” directed by Mor Loushy and Daniel Sivan, which was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival, is a moving and important film that many Israelis will see.

When it was over, a woman sitting in front of me got up and tried in vain to hold back her tears. It was the chairwoman of Meretz, MK Tamar Zandberg. It was touching to see a politician crying over a missed opportunity, but a similar discomfort, to heavy to bear, filled the entire hall. The film proves how, despite all the wariness toward the Oslo Accords, they still represented an opportunity — and this is what Rabin and Peres missed. This missed opportunity was not only fateful, it was also irreparable.

“The Oslo Diaries” reflects the spirit of the times. Netanyahu, still with his unkempt hair, looks like a crazy man at the right-wing rallies, his eyes spinning round, different from his relatively level-headed image of today, and the fascist and violent atmosphere of the street as never seen before in Israel. But the film deals with the peacemakers, and the picture that arises from them too is worrying. They are the explanation for the failure, most of which can be placed on their shoulders.

Faltering from the beginning: Yair Hirschfeld preaches morality with characteristic haughtiness and threatens Ahmed Qureia for daring to mention the Nazi occupation of Norway and to compare it to the Israeli occupation, which has lasted 10 times longer and exacted many more victims. A few of the other members of the Israeli delegation are tainted by the same arrogance toward the Palestinians — particularly legal adviser Joel Singer, who is exposed in the film as an especially repulsive and arrogant individual.

Standing out from them is the innocent and benevolent figure of Ron Pundak, and above all of them shines Yossi Beilin, one of a rare breed of diplomats who can set his ego aside, always behind the scenes and focused on the goal rather than on getting credit. Beilin has never received his due honor: Oslo is Beilin, Beilin is Oslo. The missed opportunity belongs to those above him, Rabin and Peres. They are the heroes of Oslo, and its criminals.

They began the negotiations with the intention of manipulating the Palestinians as far as possible. There is not a moment of equality or fairness in the negotiations. When agreement is reached on an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank in the second stage, they insisted on only 2 percent. Only they had “misgivings” about sitting with the PLO. They, who never shed a drop of blood, found it so difficult to speak with the bloodthirsty terrorists from Tunis. They, who did not exile hundreds of thousands in 1948 and did not establish the occupation enterprise in 1967, suffered so much from speaking with terrorists.

The theatrical feeling of disgust they showed, and Rabin in particular, from shaking hands with Yasser Arafat demonstrated their true attitude toward the Palestinians. Rabin of the expulsion of Ramle and the massacre in Lod, Rabin of “break their bones,” recoiled so much from defiling his pure hands with Arafat’s bloody hands. And he took the trouble to show it, too. This is not how you make peace. If anyone should have recoiled it was Arafat, who was forced to shake the hand of someone who occupied and disinherited him. Arafat wanted to start a new chapter more than Rabin did.

But the main guilt is in the missed opportunity. There were at least two, one for Rabin and one for Peres. Rabin, who gave Beilin the impression that he was about to remove the Jewish community of Hebron after the Baruch Goldstein massacre, became frightened and did not keep his word, and in doing so determined the future of the relations, possibly forever.

At the end of the 40 days of mourning, the suicide bombing attacks began. It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened had Rabin removed the obstacle of the settlement in Hebron. Peres, who in the movie is seen giving one of his peace speeches, one of the most courageous and hair-raising ever heard here, rejected as prime minister the draft of the permanent agreement reached by Beilin and Mahmoud Abbas, out of fear of the coming elections. This was the second moment of missed opportunity. Everyone knows what happened next, and it makes one despair.

’Censored Voices’ film tears apart Israel’s heroic narrative of Six-Day War - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.640216

C’est du Oz a l’état pur : Des saloperies d’accord, mais ce sont les Arabes qui ont commencé et nous aurions subi un génocide si nous n’avions pas réagi,

In the wake of Israel’s seemingly miraculous triumph in the Six-Day War in 1967, the country’s victorious soldiers were lionized as heroes.

But in private, even just one week after the conflict, many of them didn’t feel that way. One describes feeling sick to his stomach in battle and collapsing into a trench.

“I wanted to be left alone,” he says. “I didn’t think of the war.”

Another talks about watching an old Arab man evacuated from his house.

“I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil,” the soldier says.

The voices come from tapes made just weeks after the war’s conclusion and now presented, some of them for the first time, in the powerful new documentary “Censored Voices,” which premiered Jan. 24 at the Sundance Film Festival here.

Piece by piece and story by story, they tear apart the heroic narrative of Israel’s great victory in favor of something far messier, more chaotic and more human.

The tapes were made by fellow kibbutzniks Avraham Shapira and the novelist Amos Oz, who were driven by a sense that amid the triumphalism, more ambivalent emotions were not being expressed.

“It was a sadness that could only be felt in the kibbutz because we were living so close to each other,” Shapira recalls in the film.

Traveling from kibbutz to kibbutz with a borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorder, Shapira and Oz convinced fellow veterans to open up about their feelings, their memories and their misgivings from the war. But when they moved to publish what they had gathered, the Israeli government censored 70 percent of the material. Shapira published the remaining 30 percent in his book “The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk about the Six-Day War.”

Now, thanks to the efforts of director Mor Loushy, who convinced Shapira to give her access to the tapes, all of the soldiers’ stories can be heard. Films in Israel can be subject to censorship, but according to producer Hilla Medalia, “We were able to release the film as we wanted it.”

The voices from the tapes are combined to great effect with archival footage, photographs, contemporary news accounts and film of the now-aged veterans to tell the story of the war and its aftermath.

What emerges is a vivid portrait of the war as it was lived by those who fought in it. In the tradition of soldier’s-eye narratives like “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Red Badge of Courage,” the movie allows the soldiers to depict themselves as confused, selfishly afraid, often stupefied by the sight of death and dying, and morally troubled when they encounter the enemy as fellow humans.

Conflicting emotions

There is little doubt that prior to the war, the soldiers saw the build-up of hostile Arab forces on their borders as an existential threat.

“There was a feeling it would be a Holocaust,” one says.

Yet once the battle was joined, the soldiers find themselves besieged by a welter of conflicting emotions. They watch their comrades die. They feel terror. They find themselves killing.

“I was impressed at the calmness with which I was shooting,” says one veteran, recalling himself gunning down Egyptian soldiers. “I felt like I was at an amusement park.”

The veterans also graphically describe multiple instances of Israeli soldiers — including themselves — shooting unarmed soldiers and civilians.

“Several times we captured guys, positioned them and just killed them,” one veteran recalls.

They also recall the shock and anguish of being forced to confront the humanity of the men they were killing. One tells of sorting through the papers of a dead Egyptian officer and finding a picture of his two children on the beach. Another recounts captured Egyptian soldiers pleading for water and mercy, and frightened teenage soldiers who soil their pants. One watches Arab families carrying their belongings from Jericho and thinks of his own family fleeing the Holocaust.

Even the recapture of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall evokes mixed feelings far from the iconic images of conquering soldiers weeping for joy. One participant says that when a shofar blows at the wall, it “sounded like a pig’s grunt.” Others are troubled by the sense that they are conquering not soldiers in the Old City but civilians in their homes.

“It wasn’t a freed city, it was an occupied city,” one says.

It is that sense of occupation and displacement of Palestinian natives — that Israel was not merely defending itself, but acting as a conqueror — that troubles the soldiers.

“I was convinced the war was just. It was about our existence,” one says. “But then it became something else.”

There is so much raw, varied and shocking material in the movie that parts can easily be wielded or attacked to serve particular political arguments. But the film is courageous enough to embrace contradictions and leave them unresolved. It offers an unflinching look at Israeli atrocities without being unpatriotic or anti-Zionist, recounting the horrors of the war without suggesting that Israel should have refused to fight it. It is critical of the Israeli occupation, yet doesn’t claim to offer answers.

“This film is about listening,” producer and co-writer Daniel Sivan puts it after the screening.

At the end of the film, Oz, now 78, is asked what he thinks of the tapes.

“I feel we spoke truth,” he replies.