Algeria and Six-Day War led Lanzmann to make Shoah (and to deny the Nakba)

Over at London Review of Books, there’s a fascinating review by Adam Shatz of Claude Lanzmann’s new autobiography. Shatz names many of the stations of the cross for Jewish political identity in the 20th century. Lanzmann went from Communism to Zionism, from being a resistance fighter in World War II to being a Nakba denier.

Lanzmann had been a Communist– the Soviet Union was the sky over his head– and then came the 1960s:

At a rally in Paris on 2 June [1967], Lanzmann declared that the destruction of Israel – a ‘second annihilation’ – would be worse than the Holocaust: ‘Israel is my freedom. Without Israel, I feel naked and vulnerable.’ Lanzmann was hardly alone among French Jewish intellectuals. Most shared his sense that Israel faced imminent destruction, rejoiced in its lightning victory and felt betrayed by de Gaulle’s press conference of 27 November 1967, in which, using language not heard in public since the war, he described the Jews as ‘an élite people, sure of themselves and domineering’. Yet there was much that rang true in de Gaulle’s warning that the occupation would not proceed ‘without oppression, repression, expulsions’; that ‘resistance’ was bound to follow and that Israel would call it ‘terrorism’. The messianic zeal with which Israel rushed to conquer and colonise the West Bank soon troubled Jewish liberals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean Daniel, the editor of the Nouvel Observateur, but Lanzmann’s attachment to Israel only grew fiercer.

Maybe the most important point in this tale is the extent to which Arab self-determination has always been at odds with Zionism. Note this discussion of Algeria in the 1960s:

Lanzmann’s relationship to Israel became a source of friction with Sartre in the 1960s. Like most people on the French left, Sartre was sympathetic to Israel, but he had also supported the FLN in Algeria, and viewed Nasser as a fellow progressive. A friend of both the Jews and the Arabs, he felt helplessly torn. Lanzmann had chosen sides after Ben Bella gave a speech promising to send troops to liberate Palestine. He felt betrayed…. ‘For me, it was over: I had thought it was possible to believe both in an independent Algeria and the state of Israel. I was wrong.’

(This is a very similar point to one that Mustafa Barghouti made at J Street just a month ago, saying that Israel has depended upon Arab dictatorships and western imperialism: “If I was in the place of Israel, I would think a lot that their relationship with the whole region would be totally dependent on how they deal with the Palestinian issue. There is no way you can ignore the fact that the people in these countries are going to be free, and their solidarity is going to be free. So they cannot be suppressed or oppressed. And so the time of agreements that are imposed is done.”)

I didn’t know that the film Shoah was commissioned by the Israeli government. Sort of like Leon Uris getting commissioned to write Exodus:

Lanzmann’s first film was an admiring portrait of the Jewish state. Released in 1973, Pourquoi Israël led to a summons from Alouph Hareven, director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hareven told him that Israel had a mission for him: ‘It’s not a matter of making a film about the Shoah, but a film that is the Shoah. We believe you are the only person who can make this film.’

Lanzmann accepted the assignment. The Foreign Ministry’s support for him reflected a shift in priorities. Until the 1960s, Israel had shown little interest in the Holocaust. The survivors, their stories, the Yiddish many of them spoke – these were all seen as shameful reminders of Jewish weakness, of the life in exile that the Jewish state had at last brought to an end. But with the Eichmann trial, and particularly after the 1967 war, Israel discovered that the Holocaust could be a powerful weapon in its ideological arsenal. Lanzmann, however, had more serious artistic ambitions for his film than the Foreign Ministry, which, impatient with his slowness, withdrew funding after a few years, before a single reel was shot. Lanzmann turned to the new prime minister, Menachem Begin, who put him in touch with a former member of Mossad, a ‘secret man devoid of emotions’. He promised that Israel would sponsor the film so long as it ran no longer than two hours and was completed in 18 months. Lanzmann agreed to the conditions, knowing he could never meet them. He ended up shooting 350 hours of film in half a dozen countries; the editing alone took more than five years. 

Lanzmann’s sensitivity to the Jewish historical experience has not jumped the fence to the Palestinian experience. Shatz has distinguished himself in recent years by doing just that, opening himself to the related narrative: 

‘Everybody is somebody’s Jew, and today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis,’ Primo Levi said after the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. The bitter ironies of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians – all too evident to Levi, who had seen men and women in Auschwitz reduced to ghosts ‘who march and labour in silence’, known in the camps as ‘Muslims’ – are invisible to Lanzmann. He is fond of quoting Emil Fackenheim’s remark that the murdered Jews of Europe are ‘the presence of an absence’, but refuses to see that the Jewish state was also created ‘in the presence of absence’, as Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Only a few years after the war, Holocaust survivors found themselves living in the homes of another people who had been driven into exile, and on the ruins of destroyed villages. The Ben Shemen forest, where Lanzmann spoke with survivors of the Sonderkommando in Shoah, is only four kilometres east of Lod, where tens of thousands of Arabs were forcibly expelled in 1948. The Nakba – Arabic for ‘catastrophe’, or Shoah – has yet to end.

Some of Shatz’s conclusion: 

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the French Jewish community has been swept by a wave of communautarisme, or identity politics. Anti-semitism is one reason: clannishness is understandable in the face of incidents like last month’s killings in Toulouse. But anti-semitism alone can’t explain the Jewish community’s turn inward, or its drift to the right. A few years ago, troubled by the increasingly bellicose tenor of Jewish politics in France, Jean Daniel published a striking little book called The Jewish Prison. This prison, unlike anti-semitism, was self-imposed, and made up of three invisible walls: the idea of the Chosen People, Holocaust remembrance and support for the state of Israel. Having trapped themselves inside these walls, the prosperous, assimilated Jews of the West were less and less able to see themselves clearly, or to appreciate the suffering of others – particularly the Palestinians living behind the ‘separation fence’. Over the last four decades, Claude Lanzmann has played a formidable role not only in building this prison but in keeping watch over it.