When David became Goliath

Daniel Nelson

Censored Voices

Image by Censored Voices

It was an extraordinary, overwhelming victory.

I remember it vividly because I was living and working in Uganda at the time and as I monitored the daily coverage, particularly in the Kenya press, largely reflecting Egyptian propaganda announcements, I learned an important journalistic lesson: don’t rely on a single news source. The papers reported a series of Egyptian victories, culminating in total defeat. In truth, the war was won on Day 1 with pre-emptive strikes on airfields which gave the Israelis unchallenged air superiority.

Soon after Israel’s victory, I went on assignment to Israel and was shocked and disappointed by the anti-Arab racism of many Israelis. I wouldn’t be shocked today because I understand the euphoric triumphalism that comes from victory in battle.

Similarly, I am not shocked or surprised by Censored Voices, a documentary built around previously censored recordings of Israeli soldiers, young kibbutzniks, soon after the war, talking about their feelings in the midst of war.

Fifty years on I have a better understanding of the fear felt experienced by soldiers, of the dropping of moral restraints when it comes to killing or be killed, of the links between sexual desire – actual and expressed – in times of conflict, of both the dehumanising of the enemy and of empathy with actual opponents, dead or alive.

A devil’s brew of emotions is released, and I’m wary of drawing conclusions from them, except that war damages all who take part, victors as well as losers.

Nevertheless … this is a quietly fascinating film, that recalls a map-changing moment in contemporary history  and the voices of some of the participants – with the tapes, newsreel footage of the time, and, most devastatingly, the judgements of Israel  today of the men interviewed then (“Are we doomed to live in the pauses between wars?” )

The triumphalism is there – how could it not be? – not just in the relief of winning and surviving battle and of returning as heroes, but in smashing one of many anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as cowering tailors and shopkeepers. There’s also the admitting of war crimes, such as shooting unarmed people. But there’s more: the shock of recognition of the men’s own pasts as they watched  fleeing civilians; of pity felt for prisoners, so great that one soldier wonders if he could have fought had he known these were the people who would be his opponents; the lack of national and religious sentiment when it comes down to life and death – a soldier who fought his way to the Wailing Wall recalls regarding it coldly as just stones, not one of which was worth the death of a comrade; of the shift from fighting to survival to forcing people off their land (“Jerusalem wasn’t a freed city, it was an occupied city.”)