The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Our audience with Nasser lasted several hours, causing a commotion in security, bustling and deferential whispers from the guards who led us through a labyrinth of doors to his offices. The ‘free officer’ who had deposed King Farouk, nationalized the Suez Canal, transformed the Tripartite Aggression of France, Britain and Israel into a political victory, proclaimed a United Arab Republic with Syria, and compelled most Egyptian Jews to leave the country – this ‘free officer’ turned out to be a tall, timid man who impressed by his soft voice and his dark handsome eyes, which seemed to sound his own depths even as they gazed searchingly at his interlocutor. In other words he seemed to meditate, confer with himself as he spoke, never repeating what he said. One knows when one is in the presence of a statesman. Nasser was one, certainly. I remember he gave a general overview of the situation, considered the terms of the conflict, the various possible solutions and why each in turn was impossible. He concluded with a hypothesis, formulated as a four-word question, ‘So, war then?’ And answering himself, ‘But war, this is very difficult…’ He congratulated us on the issue of Les Temps modernes, and Ali, who had a naturally dark complexion, flushed bright red with pride. I saw that his career had just taken a great leap forward. The reis was aware of everything, he knew exactly who I was, knew of my connections to Israel and several times – there could be no doubt about his ulterior motives – looked at me, addressing himself to me alone.

  During our stay in Egypt, Sartre was clearly beset by an inner conflict. He had a very full itinerary – a plenary session at Cairo University, press conferences, meetings with writers, and so on – and he relaxed in the evening by drinking too much. We were staying at Shepheard’s, a famous old hotel, and on more than one occasion Ali and I had to hold Sartre upright as he staggered back to his suite. He could not bear to be dependent on us and one night as we were carrying him back, even more drunk than usual, he started to insult us, his voice slurred, calling us ‘queers’, insinuating that we were the prime example of how to resolve the conflict. Ali, who was unfamiliar with Sartre’s cantankerous, drunken ravings, could not believe his eyes or his ears. Since I was used to such behaviour, I reassured Ali that everything would be fine in the morning and that the great man would not remember a thing. Yet I did not like what I had heard. I spoke to Castor about it and she, like me, had noticed that Sartre was torn between his affection for our Egyptian hosts – who welcomed us with charm and sumptuous ceremony – his support for the Arab cause in general, and the unspoken anxiety aroused in him about our impending departure for Israel. I understood that I was a constant reminder of what was to come, like a statue of the Commendatore, a guardian of Israel, preventing him from truly enjoying the seduction of the Arab world and forcing him to maintain a certain objectivity.

  The grand finale of this suppressed turmoil occurred during a visit to Gaza, then under Egyptian rule. Nasser had afforded us the use of a plane, which was filled with officials and journalists poised to note down our smallest reaction or comment on the horrors that were the reason for this side trip: the Palestinian refugee camps. The plane made a stopover at El Arish military base on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai. There was no apparent reason for this stop, since the plane could easily have flown from Cairo to Gaza without refuelling. We were there for about half an hour, just long enough to witness a training flight of an Egyptian airforce MiG 21: this was clearly the motive for our stopover. It was a virtuoso display. I was struck by how tall and aristocratic the pilots looked. Who would have imagined, at that moment, that three months later, in a few short minutes, that very airfield, these very runways, those very planes would be destroyed together with most of the Egyptian air fleet and much of the Sinai and the Nile Valley, in a lightning strike by the Israeli airforce, launching a war that would last just six days, but change forever the face of the Middle East? In Gaza we were welcomed by the assembled Palestinian élite, whose leader at the time was not Yasser Arafat but Ahmad Shukeiri, who lost not only face but power as a result of the Six Day War. After that we were taken on a tour of the neat, clean streets of two refugee camps, mobbed by photographers, cameramen and microphones, deafened by the briefings of political commissioners in soft hats and the lamentations of Palestinian mothers as we passed. Sartre enjoyed the banquet that followed, which was as astonishing for the number of Egyptian and Palestinian guests – notables and landowners and all the well-heeled inhabitants of Gaza were in attendance – as for the number of dishes served. This meal, at which there was no alcohol, was truly a feast, and contrasted starkly with the wailing women we had seen that morning. A number of people spoke, each of the Palestinian speeches a call to arms, clearly implying that a war, even a world war, was preferable to any negotiated settlement. Sartre dared to respond with an extraordinary sincerity born of the indignation inspired in him by the camps, the banquet, the incendiary speeches. He spoke about the vastness of the Arab countries, the extraordinary wealth of some of them, his disbelief that they could leave the people of Jabailya or Dar El Bayla to rot, surviving on handouts from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – the product, he noted, of the very American imperialism they purported to despise – instead of marshalling Arab solidarity and doing something concrete, dealing with this cancer, whatever the eventual outcome of the conflict. I was completely in agreement with Sartre, yet I did not say so publicly, nor privately: I feared that such an expression of solidarity from me, rather than serving to appease, might make relations between us even more strained. But Ahmad Shukeiri’s Palestinians in their trilby hats insisted that we travel closer to the enemy. When the banquet and the speeches were over, we were taken to the demarcation line of the 1948 armistice and shown the Israeli guardhouse. I felt oddly disoriented for I had been at that same guardhouse not long before, on the other side of the line, staring out at Gaza. I was the only person there who knew these places and could not resist pointing towards the horizon and naming the borderland kibbutzim we could see in the distance. I still have a photograph of the scene: in it I am standing next to Ali, behind Sartre and Castor, surrounded by Shukeiri’s men, playing my role as guide to the hilt.

  But there was no way to cross this border to go to Tel Aviv, barely sixty kilometres away, where people were waiting for us. To get to Israel, we had no choice but to fly via Athens where we were to have dinner and spend the night. We arrived there from Cairo in the late afternoon. Sartre had brought only one book with him about Israel, which he obstinately leafed through during the meal in spite of my and Castor’s shocked reproof: it was Fin du people juif? [The End of the Jewish People?] by the sociologist Georges Friedmann, who specialized in industrial relations. Eighteen months earlier Friedmann had published this radically anti-Zionist book, whose central thesis was that Israel had brought an end to Jewishness, which could only thrive and be expressed by the diaspora. The least that can be said is that Sartre was setting out on the second leg of what was intended as a journey of reconciliation with a very prejudiced bias. The balance of his affections was not equal. I told him this, Castor agreed with me, and at that moment I decided I would spend only a few days with them in Israel.

  On our arrival, we were welcomed by joyous, democratic, congenial chaos. The Israelis who had invited us had done their best, but the means at their disposal were not equal to those of the Egyptian government. I became overtly angry with Sartre as Flapan attempted to outline the itinerary of our visit. An unimpeachable left-winger, Flapan had arranged a meeting with the army, a visit to a military base, a discussion with officers and soldiers. Sartre refused point blank: there could be no question of him meeting anyone in uniform, even a woman. It was an obstinate refusal even to try to understand Israel, and the vital role played by the conscript army in such a country in education, the melting pot of immigrants from around the world, the formation of a national identity, to say nothing of its primary, primordial mission: defence. It amounted to accepting a drastically reduced view of the country. I said as much to
him, asked him who his judges were, what he was afraid of, but he clammed up and, to my distress and to the genuine sorrow of many officers who were both intellectuals and his readers, it was impossible to get him to change his mind. On the second day, the plan was to visit the Weizmann Institute of Science and lunch with scientists of all disciplines. As we stepped into the vast laboratory in the biology department, its head, Michael Feldman, welcomed Sartre with the words, ‘Monsieur Sartre, there are at least ten people in this room who would not have refused the Nobel Prize.’ Here again, the atmosphere was strained; though these were not soldiers, according to Sartre they spoke English with a rather too-perfect American accent, a clear sign of a consubstantial imperialism.

  I returned to France while Castor and Sartre continued the trip at their convenience with their guide, Ely Ben-Gal, a French Jew from Lyon, a member of the kibbutz Bar’am and of Hashomer Hatzair, and without me as a mentor daring to tell them what to think. It was the end of March 1967 and the issue of Les Temps modernes was about to be put to bed, but events began to overtake us, with every passing day Nasser’s pronouncements became more bellicose. The man who, thinking aloud, had said, ‘So, war then? But war, this is very difficult…’ seemed to have forgotten the difficulties and had now embarked on a worrying escalation, ordering the withdrawal of the UN troops who had been stationed in Sinai since the Suez expedition of 1956 to create a buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, mounting a blockade of the Straits of Tiran, an act of open hostility to Israel, as it cut off access to the Red Sea. Having begun this escalation, Nasser had no choice but to persist if he were to be taken seriously, each new stage seemed inexorable, like a spiral that no one could control: military alliances negotiated with Syria and Jordan, the deployment of troops in Sinai almost on the borders of Israel. Israel was in danger, in our hearts alarm bells were ringing, every day the news was more disquieting, many of our Israeli friends were terrified and their fears became our fears. The European diaspora mobilized, particularly in France, organizations and individuals normally hostile to one another rallied to present a united front. During a hastily convened meeting on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, I was surprised to see Professor Pierre Vidal-Naquet, of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, hardly an ardent Zionist, suddenly appear. But like the rest of us he felt that Israel was in mortal danger and that was something he was not prepared to tolerate. French governmental policy merely served to heighten our apprehension: de Gaulle had met the Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, who wanted to know what position the French government would take if Israel, considering itself legitimately threatened, took pre-emptive action to break this vice grip; if, in other words, Israel attacked first. The General informed him that Israel was not sufficiently ‘established’ to resolve its problems alone, that any solution should be left to the major powers, and ordered him, ‘On no account should you fire the first shot,’ and threatened an arms embargo – France was Israel’s principal arms supplier at the time. This was no idle threat: de Gaulle announced the embargo on 2 June 1967, an act that, in all likelihood, actually hastened the war, which erupted three days later. My speech to the meeting on the place Saint-Germain-des-Prés was impassioned: I declared that, after Auschwitz, the destruction of Israel was unthinkable and that, if by chance it should happen, I for one could not bear to go on living. I ended my speech by calling for the formation of ‘international Jewish brigades, or brigades of the International Jewry, whichever you prefer!’, which was met with enthusiastic applause.

  Let me be clearly understood: I never considered Israel as the redemption for the Shoah, the idea that six million Jews gave their lives so that Israel might exist; such a teleological argument whether explicit or implicit is absurd and obscene. Political Zionism long pre-dates World War II, even if the Zionist leaders who met at New York’s Biltmore Hotel in 1942, highly aware that European Jews were doomed, considered the ‘Jewish National Home’ and the future state of Israel as the only salvation: good would come out of a catastrophe. The end of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is set in Israel, with the survivors saved by Schindler walking past the tomb of their benefactor to lay small stones on it, according to Jewish tradition. In contrast, the last scene of Shoah shows a goods train moving endlessly through the twilight of the Polish countryside. But there was no need to believe in any redemption or final salvation to be repelled by the prospect of a second bloodshed of the same people twenty-five years later. For it is also true that the state of Israel was born of the Shoah, that a causal relationship connects these two key events in the history of the twentieth century, and that a core of Israel’s population is made up of survivors and refugees weary of suffering.

  During these anxious weeks, I finally received the article from Ali, who had remained behind in Egypt. It did not beat about the bush. I was furious, I felt I had been betrayed by a friend, but at least now things were out in the open: the concluding section of his article for a special issue that saw peace on the horizon, however distant, was a candid anti-Zionist imprecation and, in the final analysis, a call for war: ‘May I say in conclusion how much I hate this Zionism that separates Arab from Jew?’ (The italics are his.) A petition in support of Israel was circulating, and I was asked to obtain Sartre’s signature. Outside his apartment, on the pavement of the boulevard Raspail, I gave it to him to read and he agreed to sign it, half-heartedly, as I have said, but he signed. He liked the issue of Les Temps modernes, which he had read in part. He wrote his introduction just before we went to press, and his last sentence began, ‘Even if blood should flow’ and later in the same piece, he said, ‘Let us not forget that these Israelis are also Jews’, so clearly Georges Friedmann had not led him completely astray. I then wrote my foreword, which he warmly approved. The issue appeared on 5 June 1967, the first day of the war. Israel had launched the first strike. The success of ‘The Arab–Israeli Conflict’ issue was unprecedented, we had to reprint several times, and the huge 1,000-page issue sold 50,000 copies, even today it remains a work of reference; some of the articles are as topical now as they were then, while others give a glimpse of the remote and obscure roots of the conflict and how the road to peace, if it should one day come, is steep and rugged.

  Contrary to what has been claimed over the past forty years, the Six Day War was not a walkover. The casualties of Tsahal, the dead and the wounded, were numerous and deeply painful to a people forced into war. The extent of the victory did not compensate for the loss. But Israel’s generals had demonstrated unparalleled strategic brilliance, and Jewish combat units displayed a courage and a self-sacrifice that could only have been inspired by the keen awareness of the mortal danger of the country felt, to his core, by each soldier citizen. The conquest of the entire Sinai Peninsula by three divisions that relentlessly breached Egyptian lines, as tank commanders stood in open turrets, being decapitated by enemy shells; the assault on the Golan Heights by armoured bulldozers detonating the mines that riddled the area beneath their caterpillar treads to clear a path for the front-line troops, who defeated the Syrian infantry in hand-to-hand combat; the capture of Jerusalem at great cost, since it meant defeating the Arab Legion of Glubb Pasha (its chief and founder, a British soldier who had converted to Islam), intensively trained and lying in ambush behind the crenellated walls of Suleiman the Magnificent – these theatres of war were a heroic gesture that would forever transform, for better or worse, how the world saw that narrow stretch of land on the eastern Mediterranean known as Israel. Among French Jews, the anxiety that lasted until the very end, because of the absolute secrecy Israel maintained over the operations, changed once victory was assured and its scale known into an explosion of relief, of joy, of pride that is difficult to understand today. Those who, until then, had been indifferent, or wanted nothing to do with Israel, became extremely curious about the country: some considered settling there, serving the country, studying or teaching at an Israeli university. I remember a lunch with Pierre Nora at which h
e and François Furet – my close friends at the time – decided in front of me to visit Israel on a reconnaissance trip. I listened, sceptical, convinced that there were a thousand things about the reality of Israel that would offend rather than captivate them and that their professional tendencies would win out in the end. I was not entirely wrong; they returned after a short trip full of fine feelings, but convinced that postgraduate studies in Israel could not compare with those in France and that Paris still remained the seat of excellence.

  Be that as it may, the time for rejoicing, for optimism born of a crushing victory, illustrated by the cover of Life magazine with its photo of a smiling Yossi Ben Hanan – the young officer who had been first to reach the Suez Canal near the El Fridan bridge and had dived in fully clothed, deliriously happy because he thought the war was over – that time of optimism was short-lived. Neither the national pride of Egypt nor of its Soviet ally – at the height of the Cold War – was prepared to tolerate such a defeat. Egypt was very quickly rearmed by airlift and by naval convoys. The Red Army sent instructors, missile batteries, completely new weapons systems that proved their worth in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. But while it took Egypt another six years before it renewed hostilities, as early as 1968 – barely a year after Israel’s establishment along the length of the Suez Canal – the Egyptian artillery positions on the other side began shelling the maozim, the bunkers hastily constructed by Israel every ten or twenty kilometres to protect the units stationed there. This was the beginning of what would later be known as ‘the war of attrition’, which went on for almost two years and proved to be extremely bloody. I arrived there, dispatched by Panorama, the French television programme directed by Olivier Todd, having crossed the Sinai from east to west with a small crew. About a kilometre from the Canal, in a sort of transit camp that seemed to be in total chaos, a Tsahal officer, surprisingly young, calm and elegant, introduced himself: ‘I am Lieutenant Ami Federman.’ His name has remained engraved on my memory because, as he spoke those words, three black Tupolev aircraft from the Egyptian airforce appeared, flying low, strafing the compound and dropping bombs. The Israeli anti-aircraft defence was composed entirely of reservists manning obsolete equipment. The bombers risked nothing. Ami shrugged, ‘It’s always like this, they take us by surprise, they make a single pass and don’t come back.’ But the one pass was enough to leave dead and wounded in its wake. Field ambulances quickly arrived, the drivers’ heads protected by nothing more than kippahs, their equanimity impressive. Federman – I later learned that he came from an illustrious family – explained that the Orthodox, who believed that their destiny was in the hands of the Almighty, had the singular courage of fatalism. We headed towards the Canal and the bunkers, whose concentric walls, made of stones and boulders piled high and ringed with barbed wire, surrounded a central courtyard with trenches leading to rooms deep underground capable of resisting intense shelling. The bunkers, crudely planned and built once it became clear that the Egyptians were not about to allow the Israelis to play tourist on the banks of the Canal and go swimming in peace, were improved over time until they became modern fortified castles, with slits in the walls making it possible to spray the far bank with bullets, and all surmounted by Israeli flags that floated on the breeze like an act of defiance. I stayed for several days, moving from one bunker to the next, spending the nights in blockhouses several metres underground that shuddered whenever a large-calibre shell exploded in the courtyard, devastating it. The muffled sound of bombing is the background to almost every interview I did. But the Israelis were not passive, they retaliated: one day, through the loophole on a bunker, I witnessed a retaliatory airforce raid made up mostly of Vautours, outdated French aircraft that were slow and vulnerable, flying at low altitude and dropping clusters of bombs on the Egyptian fortifications. The stretch of Canal where I was at the time was not even a hundred metres wide and the noise was so infernal it sounded like we were being strafed. Some Israeli army veterans consider that this war of attrition was the hardest they ever fought: you had to be constantly alert, you could never drop your guard, anyone who left the claustrophobic bunker to get some air had a good chance of being picked off by an Egyptian sniper. During my relatively short stay there, I saw a number of soldiers killed like that. I mentioned it in another chapter: every morning, the newspapers published the photographs of those killed the previous day, which meant the whole country was in a permanent state of fear and mourning, an atmosphere accurately reflected in the film we shot for Panorama, combining interviews with the men on the Canal and interviews with mothers, wives and children behind the lines. Dov Sion, the Israeli military attaché in Paris and husband of Yael Dayan – the daughter of General Moshe Dayan – sent me a huge crate of Jaffa oranges. My decision to one day become a filmmaker is doubtless connected to this documentary. When I got back to Paris, I would have liked to have done the editing myself, but that did not suit the pace of television: yet I know it would have been a better film if I had been at the helm from beginning to end.