Israel has no historians on a global scale, so the writers of the times continue to recycle a distorted description of the reality surrounding the War of Independence and the number of Arab casualties in it.
Leaving the Jerusalem cinema, after the film "The Picture of Victory", I climbed the escalator from the depths of the screening halls, and saw some Muslim women wearing hijabs.
I heard more Arabic in the mall than Hebrew or French, and to tell the truth, the encounter with reality after Avi Nesher's powerful and difficult film was gratifying.
Maybe comforting.
After all, usually the experience is the opposite;
After the cinematic fantasy, the streets of Jerusalem look harsh and disappointing.
And here - on the contrary.
In a small yellow amusement park car, flashing green and red lights, two young Muslim women are sitting and bouncing, but they are holding large, giggling ice cream cones.
The entertainment center of the Arabs of Jerusalem.
Despite the seemingly pleasant reality, the film about the fall of Kibbutz Nitzanim in 1948 continues to accompany the viewer. It evokes thoughts, during and after the film. Beyond its importance in the good parts of it, simply to get to know the existence of the War of Independence, it joins as further evidence of the state of mind of Israeli artists and intellectuals today.
We do not have great historians. We have neither Robert Conquest nor Neil Ferguson, nor Andrew Roberts. Neither Hugh Trevor-Roper nor Martin Gilbert. In Israel, there are period writers, most of whom are engaged in the "massacre of consciousness." They are a product of the massacre of consciousness of the 20th and 21st centuries, and they recycle this act themselves, both here and now. The phrase was coined by Robert Conquest in his book "Reflections on a Century in Much Pain": Mindslaughter.
At the center of the storm, the War of Independence. In 1990, Amos Oz wrote in a book intended to provide a sympathetic intellectual envelope for "Yesh Gvul", clear things about the war: .? " ("On Democracy and Obedience").
In the summary of his book "1948", entitled "These are no conclusions", Benny Morris wrote that "the 1948 war was characterized by very few rape cases compared to (occupation of Germany) in 1945 by Soviet army soldiers and in wars in the Balkans no longer" (Bosnia, Kosovo) . He went on to write: "It is worth noting that the 1948 war was characterized by relatively few civilian killings," and again compares it to the disintegration wars of Yugoslavia and the civil wars in Sudan. It is also possible to add close to two hundred thousand citizens who were massacred in Algeria - in the 1990s. And much more than half a million in neighboring Syria.
In his book, Morris publishes a figure according to which about 800 Arab civilians and prisoners were killed in massacres during the War of Independence. He did not think it was a particularly large number. Morris ignored the Egyptian bombing of the home front in Tel Aviv, in which about 150 residents were killed.
An American Jewish researcher once asked me what the Nakba is all about. How many Palestinians were killed in the war? I replied that I had read somewhere about a face number - 12 thousand. "If so, then that is the answer to the Nakba propaganda," Ben-Shikhi said, referring to an indictment that the court has no reason to address. Compared to wars in the 20th century, it's just not much, and no matter how many hundreds of thousands of refugees you put on it.
The number is actually taken from the number of Benny Morris, which is indeed recommended for reading;
However, Prof. Morris states that "the losses of the Palestinians in civilians and irregular fighters were not known. It is possible that they were slightly more than the losses of the Israelis."
That is, more than 6,000.
And the number 12,000 is a figure coined by Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1950s.
It can be stated with confidence that the real number is less than what the Mufti said.
The number 800 killed, in what is considered massacres in a war that lasted nearly a year and a half, I would place next to the number 500 killed in one massacre in the village of Mi Lai in Vietnam.
How many people even remember that there was such an event that shocked the Americans?
Aharon Barak with a nationalist scent
The Holocaust is relevant to 1948, not because of the collective experience of the Jews, but because of the cooperation between Mufti al-Husseini and Hitler
. Some of the testimonies that Sharaz cites are from Mapam and Communist sources (Mykonis in a Knesset query). The
testimonies may present some of the truth. Katin executed the Nazis.Why did they believe? Because this is what the Soviets sold to the world, and this is what "Al Hamishmar" and "Kol Ha'am" sold to their consumers in the closed resonator box, which is not fundamentally different from the Hermetic resonator box of Haaretz and other media.
The pressure of the incessant massacre of consciousness since the 1980s also affects the great.
The average, enlightened Israeli will find it difficult to identify who wrote the following in 1988, in a verdict in the case of the "Spark Road" defendants: "An instrument of detention until the end of the proceedings against those who corrupt the body and soul of the state, it is appropriate that this instrument be used against those who lend a hand in the displacement of both body and soul."
Sounds a bit extreme, nationalistic.
It was not written by Supreme Court Justice Michael Ben-Ari, but retired President Aharon Barak.
The mischievous reactions from Moshe Negbi, Prof. Ruth Gavison and other intellectuals from the left during the first intifada, apparently also changed Barak's consciousness.
But the point is that his ruling in the late 1980s reflected common sense, "proportionality," and morality with national political discretion.
Barak is at another address today.
An article called Magnifying Glass on exceptional cases from 73 years ago is intended for a purpose other than writing the historical truth. For example, to produce a conscious effect that will burn the hands of the executive elite in Israel in the next round of fighting. Uri Misgav, in his response to Adam Raz who surprised many, notes the lack of warlike and historical context of the historian's findings.
Misgav points out what the long-standing Nakba propaganda manages to conceal: the Arabs, residents of the country, launched an attack on the Jewish community, massacring many convoys and civilians; And immediately with the establishment of the state - there was an invasion of Arab armies, and there will be as many Chukamaks as there are. They had power and they reached almost the outskirts of Tel Aviv, as Avi Nesher mentions in his film "The Picture of Victory."
Misgav has training as a historian, but he also calls the land in whose fields and dirt roads the war was fought "Palestine."
Or rather, "plasticine."
He does not point out that the Holocaust was also in the background of the battle in which the question, in the words of Amos Oz, was whether we should all be slaughtered or whether we would survive.
The Holocaust is relevant to '48 not only because of the collective experience of the Jews, but also because of the knowledge that the Arabs, led by the Palestinians and their exemplary leader Amin al-Husseini, were allies of the Nazi Germans.
"Collaborators" is not enough to define the partnership of the Arabs together with the British in creating a Holocaust trap.
Today we also know what an exchange there was between the Mufti and Hitler and Himmler.
The Mufti vehemently demanded that the Germans not allow the rescue of a single Jewish child from Europe to Israel.
He conducted study tours of death camps with his associates and established a division of Muslim volunteers for the SS.
Good to fall in house excavations
Kovner is a big figure for Israeli filmmakers, so you should exit the screen and read the writings
article by Raz is designed, as they say in the jargon of the journalist, to give "deep background" UN committees and to The Hague when they investigate "war crimes" Israel today Uri Avnery was the first to mark the line of "we murdered, robbed, raped." This was back in 1950, in his book "The Other Side of the Coin". "What happened? There was a political ideological upheaval in the Israeli left of those days, adapted to change the Soviet line towards Israel.
But I also remember Uri Avnery some 60 years later, on a hot evening in May 2007, confronting an audience at the Leonardo da Vinci kibbutz in front of Ilan Pepe, who portrayed the Yishuv leadership as a Nazi gang. It was interesting to see Avnery, then already 84, struggling for his position on the far left, faced with a clear representative of the new, more venomous, more destructive wave. "We need to fight to prevent the spread of crime," cried Ilan Pepe. "To achieve this, it is necessary to use foreign international forces. Let us help turn the State of Israel into a leper state!"
Avnery defended the IDF and its war. "Ethnic cleansing was two-sided. Not a single Jew remained on the side occupied by the Arabs. We did not leave Arabs behind our front line ... Under the circumstances it seems obvious military necessity. "Avnery hinted that if Israel will be decided in - then" argument is not relevant. "In other words, the solution would be" final. "
His eagle brings us a sense of acute Present In this aspect, the scenes of the battles in Nitzanim bring to the Israeli viewer for the first time - to the best of my recollection - the war in a realistic fragrance. - Unlike the two most prominent films recently, Nadav Lapid's "The Knee" and Eran Kolirin's film "Let There Be Morning." These are two false films that present a false presentation of the reality in Israel.
Nesher's main obstacle is clinging to the figure of Muhammad Hassanin the Egyptian temple.
It is a bit ridiculous and cognitively impossible to be smeared with the psyche and conscience of the man who was the main campaigner of the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser for a generation.
There was an interesting episode in his life when he arrived on the battlefield in Nitzanim with the filming crew.
But if his conscience whispered something to him about the horrors of war, and more in the form of a captivating and victorious smile from the wonderful Joy Rieger, why did he engage in war-mongering for decades?
On the other hand, Heichal conducts a moral trial on the man who condemned the surrender of Nitzanim and the captivity of the members of the kibbutz and its soldiers.
This is Father Kovner.
Heichal is considered by Orientals to be the man who gave the intellectual depth to Nasser's desire for revenge and destruction, with Egypt infested with retired SS men.
So he is the man we are required to identify with, while Father Kovner deserves contempt.
"Buds fall - failure."
This was the title of the battle page published by Abba Kovner, which left a stain on the kibbutz that still haunts it, including the second and third generations, including commanders and fighters who participated in the following wars.
"A house has no conditional protection, protection means all the forces of body and mind ... It is better to fall into the excavations of the house than to surrender to a murderous invader ... to surrender as long as the body is alive and the last bullet breathes in the cartridge, is a disgrace.
The truth is that Churchill also ordered in some places to fight until the last soldier, and in his speech Dunkirk said: "Wars are not won by evacuation."
"We will never give up," he ruled.
But at the same time he knew how to elevate morale and not humiliate the warriors.
Kovner, a huge figure in the history of the people, was captured in 1948 in the Soviet style by the Red Army.
He is too big a character for an Israeli filmmaker.
Yaakov Ahimair is one of those who is bothered by the subject, and he has not left it since he came across Nitzanim closely.
He filmed a memorable television report in 1983, on the occasion of the re-establishment of the Givati Brigade.
In the article, he wandered with Shimon Avidan in the old Nitzanim area, after which a meeting was held with members of the kibbutz.
They expected redemption from the commander behind their denunciation.
Avidan acknowledged their heroism and fighting but refused to admit the mistake or express remorse.
Avi Nesher at least does justice to the heroic character of Mira Ben-Ari, a mother who sent her son to the home front, and stayed to fight until the last ball.
Ahimair told me that she was not awarded the Medal of Heroism just because Ben-Gurion dictated that the 12 medals be awarded for action in a battle of victory.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
If you found an error in the article, we'll be happy for you to share it with us