Living in the Shadow of the Holocaust

Operation Sunflower, directed by Avraham Kushnir, opens with a suicide bombing and a siren due to the loading of nuclear warheads by Iran.   Most of the film, however, takes place in an historical period --  in the 1950s and early 1960s. As a deterrent against Russia's arming the Arab states and their desire to wipe the state of Israel  off the face of the earth, our first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had the chutzpah and the vision to go after  what he and his colleagues regarded as the perfect insurance plan for Israel's continued existence and he chose the nuclear option. 

 

The well-known Israeli singer Yehoram Gaon stars as the megalomaniac head of the Mossad who will do anything to obtain the nuclear option for Israel.  He negotiates with the French and the Germans and he organizes a team of Israeli scientists to go to Paris to work on the bomb.  Why do the scientists agree to do this work?  One wants it for his own career advancement.  Another wants it in order to be close to one of the other scientists.  Only the chief scientist seems to have doubts and questions concerning his role in the development of the bomb.  

The film includes a great deal of rhetoric about the post-Holocaust need to create a strong and invincible nation.  This explains why the nuclear option was chosen at that time -- not because Israel wanted to be the aggressor in war against her neighbors, but rather in order to ensure that "it would never happen again."  

Why are some  Israelis still obsessed with this subject -- and why are they making a film about it today?  Not only because Iran is looking to arm itself with nuclear weapons, but because many Israelis still see, in every enemy, Nazis who want  to annihilate the Jewish state.

At the end of the film, when the narrative construct returns to the present day, there is a coup in Iran, forcing those who were loading the nuclear warheads to back down, thus avoiding a nuclear disaster.  Notwithstanding the need to prevent Iran from stockpiling nuclear weapons and the winds of change that are blowing there, I much prefer Eytan Fox's perspective in his film Walk on Water, in which his Mossad killer/main character concludes that he just doesn't want to kill anymore.  In the context of that film, it can be interpreted to mean that he just doesn't want to hunt Nazis anymore.  In addition, we are now a strong and powerful nation and he doesn't want to only see the world through a lens of paranoia.   The main character also states  clearly that you don't have to walk on water.  In other words, it's time to stop our obsession with being super-human and all powerful, and just get on with living a normal life.

Operation Sunflower is available in the U.S. from Israeli Films.

An Open Hand, Not a Closed Fist

The following blog posting is an insight offered by Margaret Herman, a student at Columbia Univ. This year, she is studying with me in independent study, as part of her studies at the Rothberg Overseas School, Hebrew University. Here, she writes about the film Walk on Water (directed by Eytan Fox and scripted by Gal Uchovsky).

When we first meet Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), a hardened Mossad agent and the protagonist of Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water (2004), his girlfriend has just committed suicide, but he does not shed a tear. Here is the classic Israeli man, the macho attitude of hiding emotions in order to project a hard, impenetrable exterior to his enemies. This feigned toughness of Israeli machismo culture comes from Israeli paranoia of being seen as weak, as the poor Jew suffering in European ghettos without power to change his circumstances or protect his family or belongings.

This attitude recalls a moment in Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), another classic Israeli macho war film, in which soldiers are retelling their stories from the War of Independence. We see the main character in combat with a wounded Egyptian soldier, who has an S.S. insignia tattooed on his chest. All of a sudden, we see the main character’s hallucinations of the Egyptian/Nazi soldier in a Nazi uniform and himself in the European rags of the Holocaust Jew. Since the Holocaust, Israeli Jews have struggled with their self-image, making paranoid assumptions that their enemies see them as weaklings easy to defeat, and therefore obsessed with showing strength and power. Fear has turned into hate and the only thing preventing the enemy from victory is Israel’s tough attitude and hard shell.

Walk on Water is about breaking that hard shell. Though the tactic of speaking softly and carrying a big stick may be useful on the battlefield for Israelis facing constant annihilation from their various surrounding enemies, the personal battlefield of Israeli men and their relationships suffers from such an unemotional approach. Our main character realizes this only after fulfilling his Mossad mission of meeting and befriending a young German, whose grandfather is a former Nazi general living in hiding.

Trained from birth to see all Germans as disguised Nazis harboring hateful feelings towards all Jews, Eyal constantly shelters himself from being able to connect with this man. Until Eyal is standing over the bed of the sleeping Nazi war criminal grandfather, he has not seen what the cycle of fear, hate, violence and retribution has done to himself and his country. It has prevented them from living as free human beings, free from the baggage of the Holocaust and the added pressure of each terrorist attack in Israel, free from assumptions of their own weakness and suspicions of their enemies’ aims of destruction. Eyal is simply standing over an old man with a needle filled with poison. He backs off. He needs not prove his strength to anyone but himself.

In this post black-and-white world, Eyal has realized that Israel needs to break the cycle of violence and revenge with an open hand, not a closed fist.

Fading Chauvanism

Two major Israeli feature films from recent years which seemingly have little in common thematically – Time of Favor and Walk on Water – actually both have a great deal in common. They both deal with gender issues and how they affect our perspective on war and peace.

The highly acclaimed Walk on Water (2003) ללכת על המים was a tour de force for director Eitan Fox and for his life partner and scriptwriter, Gal Uchovsky. Over the decades there have been many Israeli films which deal with the ongoing struggle of Israeli citizens to live in the shadow of war, and in recent years, this theme has commanded the attention of Israeli filmmakers once again. This film is mainly about the emotional damage or baggage that Israeli men carry as a result of living in a society at war. For example, Israeli men find it difficult breaking through their hard shells and dealing with their emotions. Alex (Knut Berger), visiting from abroad, asks the film’s hero: “Is it true that Israeli men have trouble expressing their emotions?” Our hero responds jokingly, “I don’t know, I don’t like to talk about it.” Already, the viewer realizes that Israeli men are not the perfect hunk, as we like to think! On top of this the film adds a number of additional themes – understanding homosexuality more personally and more openly; and our obsession with Holocaust memory and with hunting Nazi murderers.

The film tells the story of a Mossad agent, a trained killer, named Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), whose assignment is to befriend a German tourist, Alex, in the hopes of finding and assassinating his aging Nazi grandfather. The complex script brings Eyal to Berlin where he is shocked to find himself in a fistfight protecting a group of cross-dressers, causing him to suddenly sees things from a different perspective altogether. Later on, still in Berlin, Eyal is invited by Alex (who really likes Israeli dancing) to his home for a family get-together. Alex gathers all of his stuffy, upper crust relatives and family friends into a circle, and teaches them a dance! Both the proper Germans and Eyal, their hardened Israeli guest, obviously have a lot to learn from Alex's open-minded, flexible and multi-cultural perspective. It takes quite a leap of faith to open up, see things differently and "walk on water"!

The film has an explicit message – it is time to learn to express what we are feeling so that we can end the cycle of hate and the cyle of killing. This is a new message, one that is overtaking the old macho message of earlier Israeli films which tended to portray the Israeli approach to war in black-and-white, simplistic and chauvinistic terms.

The Pioneering Ethic of Self-Sacrifice
In the classic, He Walked Through the Fields (הוא הלך בשדות (1967, the film’s hero (Assi Dayan) is a brash, unsentimental fellow. Although originally he is ambivalent about serving his country, eventually he is recruited to the cause. When he leads a dangerous mission, he tells his wife that their personal concerns must be secondary to his responsibilities in leading his men on a mission that can be fateful for them and for the direction of the war. In contrast, in today's post-modern times, we have begun to reclaim our personal lives, putting them back on the top of our list of priorities. We are no longer eager to sacrifice our lives and those of our family members for the greater good of the collective society. But can our choices really be so black and white? Living in Israel in this period, we must find a compromise path, one which will let us have both individualism and self-sacrifice; soldiers who can deal with their emotions and feelings, even when serving in defense in their country.

The Land of Israel is built on Self-Sacrifice
Nowadays, self-sacrifice is also demanded in the area of life on a settlement. In Joseph Cedar’s Time of Favor (ההסדר (2000, there is a mention of the Talmudic saying, “The land of Israel is built on self-sacrifice.” (This saying was considered motivational during the 1930's when the pioneers were working so hard to drain the swamps, build the roads, and defend themselves and their families. ) In this contemporary film, the young army officer, Menachem (Aki Avni), looks out at the landscape, and comments how beautiful it is – a direct reference to the majesty and awesomeness of the land of the Bible. It is the rabbi’s daughter (Tinkerbell) however, living on the settlement, who is able to look at the landscape and realize that people need more than "landscape" in their lives, that it is not enough to dedicate your life to the land of the Bible. There must be more to life than that. Not only is she is critical of the settler’s obsession with sacrificing for the land, she is also critical about how they “admire” each other so much, following the path set out for them, without questioning and considering things for themselves.

I once asked the filmmaker, Joseph Cedar, why he put the voice of criticism in the mouth of a young woman, after all, this is a film about modern orthodox young men learning at a yeshiva in the West Bank, serving together in the army in their own religious company. He told me: “In a militaristic and chauvinistic society like that of the settlers, the voice of criticism can only be from an outsider.” This young woman is not exactly an “outsider”, but her gender permitted her to have a different perspective than that of the all male club of yeshiva students and soldiers. Later in the film, we see her as a strong character, capable of taking matters into her own hands, and preventing an enormous tragedy as a result. Notwithstanding the fact that she has grown up within the settler movement, she is capable of thinking for herself and making her own decisions, even in contrast to what is expected of her.