The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  A year later, July 1969; it is night, I am in a cramped, uncomfortable hotel room in Aber-Wrach in Brittany, writing an article about Jaccoux for Elle – a piece I had proposed. I have to finish by dawn no matter what, so that I can dictate my copy to the magazine before setting off for Chamonix where the whole Dupuis family is waiting for me with Jaccoux, who is determined to take me on some new adventure. But this night is like no other: tonight, on a tiny, crackling old TV set, barely visible through the interference, I watch the first moon-landing in history. I forget about Elle, about Jaccoux, about all the mountain peaks on earth, as the dialogue – clipped, devoid of emotion, technical, an exchange of numbers, codes, coordinates – between Neil Armstrong, whose voice sounds so close across the infinite void of space, and the flight director at NASA in Cape Canaveral in Florida eclipses everything, relegating earthly matters to the background. Apprehension mounts as the lunar module, like some curious gallinaceous bird with four spindly legs of flexible steel wire, carries two human pioneers towards the unknown, towards who knows which Sea of Tranquility. With each passing minute the tension grows more unbearable, a primal urgency gives the lie to the apparent calm, the detachment of the only two voices that can be heard. As Armstrong and his co-pilot engage the reverse thrusters, allowing them to reduce the moon’s weak gravity to zero and delicately land the module, as they count down the number of feet separating them from the lunar surface, it is imminence itself. My heart stops beating. When, after a pause that seemed endless, after a long stationary shot of the module, Armstrong appeared in his white spacesuit and began to climb down the scant few steps of the ladder, setting his right foot on the surface of the dead satellite, when he said in his clear American accent the famous phrase, prepared and rehearsed so that he could plant it like a victory flag, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’, I shed tears in tribute to the genius of humanity. Then I left my hotel room for the white sand of the deserted beach, plunging into the ocean. I swam with all my might. My article on Jaccoux and mountaineering was delivered on time.

  Chapter 17

  I realize, rereading the joyful chapter I have just completed, in the moment that I begin this one, that for a whole decade, between 1952, the year of my first trip there, and 1962, when the war in Algeria ended, Israel disappeared from my thoughts, or at least it faded into the background. I was completely occupied by my life with Simone de Beauvoir, travelling, discovering the world, earning my living, the anti-colonial campaigns, Les Temps modernes. Although I did not belong to a party – the committee meetings and responsibilities of professional political activism bored me to death – I was passionate about French politics, politics in the essential sense of the word that will doubtless be considered antiquated and outmoded today, now that the triumph of technocracy and expertise has blurred everything, masking the ineluctable reality of mankind’s materiality. Back then, the class war existed, and having felt even as a child that to lose one’s status could result in being abandoned by all one’s friends, that there comes a moment when no one will help you, that it is possible to die of starvation, of cold, of loneliness, I was extraordinarily sensitive to anything that, to my eyes, concerned naked necessity, anything that exposed the violence underpinning all human relationships. When, a few short hours before going to the guillotine, Julien Sorel tries to calm his fears, quiet his emotions, contemplate life and death, he comes up with a phrase of sublime simplicity: ‘Men who frequent salons never get up in the morning with the urgent question – What will I eat for dinner?’ And a few lines further on, Stendhal allows Sorel to comment, ‘There is no such thing as natural right… there are no rights until there is a law forbidding something or other on pain of punishment. Until there is a law, there is nothing natural but the lion’s strength or the needs of someone who is hungry, who is cold – in a word, necessity.’

  In June 1955, working-class riots at the Chantiers de l’Atlantique in Saint-Nazaire were brutally suppressed and many were injured. I decided to cover the story for Les Temps modernes and I spent an entire week there, rapidly developing a close bond with the supposed ringleaders among the union workers, those whom the management of the shipyard, adopting shock tactics, had suspended, leaving them penniless and isolating them from their comrades. Saint-Nazaire was a rather bleak town, completely destroyed during the war and then hurriedly rebuilt to the plan of a soulless grid. But I felt at home there, I liked these men, I lived a frugal existence, learned about the history of the shipyard, interviewed the labourers, the foremen, the engineers, wanting to find out everything there was to know about shipbuilding, amazed to see the way a vast seagoing vessel could grow, day by day, in the dry dock as hundreds of workers beavered away on every deck. It was clear that jobs here were insecure, and not just labouring jobs, but those of skilled craftsmen who took pride in their profession. Orders were scarce or non-existent, because of competition from Asia, and there were heavy redundancies, with many labourers thrown out of work. In spite of promises made, there had been no rise in salaries at the shipyards for a long time. Angry shopfloor workers circumventing the union had staged sit-ins in management offices. The unions declared a general strike in support of the grassroots movement. After a month the government resolved to break the strike by any means necessary. The union backed down and a number of workers who had fought heroically against the CRS invited me into their homes with their wives and their children, knowing they had been stigmatized for life. Their defeat was infinitely sad, it made my heart bleed.

  My departure for Saint-Nazaire coincided with a special issue of Les Temps modernes published in May, entitled ‘The Left’; I had written a very long article for it called ‘The Man of the Left’, which was preceded by a piece by Simone de Beauvoir on ‘Right-wing Thought Today’. I had spent some time studying the Canut revolts, the uprising of the Lyon silk-workers in 1834, and I had been forcibly struck both by the overwhelming expression of the power of human need and the diffidence and indirectness of the workers’ demands, and the incredible respect they showed to their oppressors and their representatives. No sooner had the slightest concession been made than they would shout, ‘Long live the Préfet! Long live our father!’, but any concession was just a sop to get them to drop their guard, allowing the right-wing owners to call in the army and mercilessly crush them. Fifty years ago the long march towards working-class consciousness and the formation of workers’ organizations were not merely academic subjects – as the events in Saint-Nazaire attest – they were news, our reality, even if the seeds had already been planted for the strange and depressing world we know today in which man’s inhuman indifference to man seems to be a fact of life, accepted as such, where casting the weak into the abyss of history seems to be taken for granted.

  In spite of everything I knew, and everything I know now, of the black and bloody face of real Communism, in spite of my own experience of the cynicism and treachery of the PCF during the Resistance, in spite of my loathing for the show-trials in Moscow and Prague, for a long time the Soviet Union remained like a sky above my head, as it did above those of many men of my generation. This stems from the German invasion of 1941, from the extraordinary sacrifices made by all the peoples of the USSR, the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad, which marked the decisive turning point in the war. We owed our freedom, in large part, to the USSR and, in spite of everything, to our minds it remained the cradle, the future, the assurance of mankind’s emancipation. We discovered Marx in 1945, we were serious and passionate, history had to have a meaning, otherwise what point was there to living? What Sartre wrote in Les Mots about his atheism, ‘a cruel, long-term business’, I can use for the ‘sky above my head’: it was a long time before I gave up on utopia. I confess that Stalin’s death brought tears to my eyes, not for the demise of a bloody dictator who had always left me cold, but because, reading his obituary in France-Soir, amid the litany of regrets and lamentations, I came upon a phrase that moved me deeply: ‘The Soviet marines d
ip their battle flags…’ Perhaps what I felt had to do with the words themselves, with the battle flags, I don’t know. It was both real and fleeting.

  The bellicose and, to me, astonishing pronouncements of Ben Bella not only forced me to break with Algeria, a country in which I had invested so much hope for brotherhood and reconciliation, but brought to the foreground the danger that Israel would have to face for a long time to come. What many people were content to dismiss as Arabic cant and rhetoric were words and threats that I took very seriously, believing that there would be no end to the hatred and irredentism until the Arabs’ declared goal – the destruction of the Jewish state – had been attained. This appalling, malign fact was one that I had shied away from for so long, one that, extraordinarily, had not occurred to me on my first visit ten years earlier when my preoccupation with the metaphysical, or more accurately ontological, questions posed by its improbable existence had blocked out the properly existential threat to the young nation, which suddenly loomed large. The idea of a special issue of Les Temps modernes about the Arab–Israeli conflict was suggested to me by Simha Flapan, an Israeli leader of Hashomer Hatzair and a member of the kibbutz Gan Shmuel, a bastion of left-wing Zionism. Simha, a man of uncompromising gentleness, had been born in Poland and arrived in Palestine before World War II, and he devoted all his energies to fostering understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs when the state of Israel was declared in May 1948, the attacks by Arab countries, the War of Independence, had all profoundly marked him; he was extraordinarily aware of the rights and wrongs on both sides. Skilfully handling people with a resolute calm, he devoted himself – through his journalism and his talent at the Israeli national sport of fundraising – to muster both goodwill and money to achieve his goals. He had just been named chief representative of Hashomer Hatzair in France and was revitalizing the Jewish pro-Israel left-wing, the Cercle Bernard-Lazare for example; he travelled widely, forming alliances with Arab journalists. Flapan truly was what one might call a man of influence. He introduced me to Ali el Saman, an Egyptian correspondent who charmed me with his vitality, his acerbic wit, his uncommon political astuteness and the warm friendship he professed for me. We became very close. Once Sartre approved the idea of a special issue of Les Temps modernes, Flapan organized an investigative trip to Israel for me to select the contributors for the Jewish section. Had I followed Flapan’s wishes, I would have chosen entirely from the Israeli left, better yet from Hashomer Hatzair and its workers’ party, Mapam; he was blind to everything else. But I realized that Flapan and his people represented a tiny minority in the country and that for such a project, on such a subject, all groups, including right-wing groups, should be able to express their opinions. In any case, as far as Israel is concerned, I have always been more susceptible to what unites Israelis than what divides them, to consensus rather than dissensus.

  So I took a second trip and discovered an Israel that I did not know. I also managed to persuade Flapan to concede the validity of my position. Ali would be responsible for the Arab contributors. After long and finicky negotiations, it was agreed that the issue would be just a receptacle rather than a forum for discussion: Arabs agreed for the first time to appear alongside Israelis in the same publication, but only on condition that they would have the final say over the choice of contributors, their subjects and that there be no exchange of views. The issue would have an Arab section and a completely separate Israeli one, what Sartre, in his introduction, called ‘passive contiguity’. In my own introduction I explained that even this contiguity had cost us considerable sweat and tears. I did not go into detail, but an Algerian writer, Razak Abdel Kader, who, on his own initiative, had sent me a remarkable article, was rejected for publication by Ali and the Arab contingent for coming too close to embracing the ‘enemy’ point of view. It was a case of take it or leave it; we capitulated and took it. By the same token, Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew of Polish Bundist origin, a Communist, a theoretical and visceral anti-Zionist, a scholar of Islam by profession, offered an eighty-page article to the Arab section entitled ‘Israel, a Colonial Reality?’ The Arabs insisted that this article should lead their section, and therefore the issue, since they had been allowed to fire the first shot.

  This unprecedented project took two years to complete: with the exception of two articles, the issue, entitled ‘The Arab–Israeli Conflict’, was almost ready at the beginning of 1967. It ran to 1,000 pages and, against all odds, I had succeeded in ensuring that in each segment the number of articles, if not of pages, was equal. Apart from Rodinson’s contribution, the Arabic articles – Palestinian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian – were much shorter than those of the Israelis.

  What I had intuited while we had been working together turned out to be true: Ali, too, was a man of influence, and his involvement in launching and realizing the project was like the fulfilment of a political mission entrusted to him by the Egyptian authorities. He told me that to celebrate the forthcoming release of the issue (his own article, he informed me, would be ready just before publication), Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and I were invited to Egypt by Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, editor of Al-Ahram, the largest daily newspaper in Cairo, and a loyal personal friend of the reis, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The two-week trip was scheduled for March and was more or less an official visit, since it could not have taken place without Nasser’s personal approval, which indicated the extent of Ali’s influence. But this invitation, which pleased me, prompted one from Israel. The difference was that there was no Israeli Nasser, and Sartre would agree to go only at the invitation of the Israeli left, meaning Flapan and his friends.

  I will not dwell on the Egyptian trip here – Simone de Beauvoir has told of it – which was both touristy and political, except to give a few brief impressions: the indescribable chaos of the Cairo Museum, the City of the Dead, the dazzling beauty of Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, the most exquisite tombs, closed to ordinary visitors, opened especially for Sartre; Aswan and its waterfalls, the formidable dam on the Nile planned and constructed by the Soviets, that high, broad wall of stone and earth – an ‘embankment dam’ – graceless but indestructible, which specialists contrast with an ‘arch dam’, whose ethereal grace can prove deadly if the planning engineers make the smallest error in calculation. And our flight upriver from the dam in a Cessna four-seater provided by the reis across the vast reservoir named Lake Nasser, so shimmering and inviting beneath the harsh southern Egyptian sun that I longed to dive in until the pilot told me that swimming was forbidden since the waters were infested with bilharzia. We landed at Abu Simbel, gateway to the Sudan, where the wonders of Aswan were being reinstalled, having been moved to make way for the dam. Aboard a felucca-restaurant moored on the banks of the Nile in Cairo, the most famous belly-dancer in Egypt whirls around our table as we dine with the editor of Al-Ahram, she takes my hand and leads me to the middle of the stage where I stand stock-still like a totem pole, Sartre, Castor and Ali watch as she gyrates her hips wildly, thrusting herself at me, offering herself, only to retreat. It goes on for a long time. After she finishes, she bows to Heikal, referring to him as ‘Effendi’. She is pure poetry.