Two years after the massacre, I look back in disbelief. I, too, missed the October 8 surprise / ‘If 1948 was a war of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel’

NB: I respect this writer and this film maker for speaking the truth as far as their resources allow. The term community of crime is something terrifying because it reflects the truth about the fragility of human consience; and the power that ideologies possess to pervert the conscience into its opposite; to literally create communities of crime. As has happened repeatedly in India, for example in 1984. This is why we need to think far more deeply about religion, both in its exclusive and inclusive senses; about its sanctions and taboos; about the dreadful idea of ‘God’s chosen people.’ Yes, I believe it is dreadful, regardless of which of the prophetic faiths profess this doctrine: because if there is a God, we are all God’s children; or none of us are. There is no especially sacred land; the whole earth is sacred; or all places on earth are doomed. And the Bible is not a title deed.

Nir Hasson and Neta Shoshan are right, what Israel has done to the Palestinian people every since 1948 has destroyed its moral foundations as a state. Niether Israel nor its Western supporters will ever regain a shred of moral stature. And it a great pity that only a tiny minority of Israeli’s empathise with the terror unleashed upon the people of Gaza, despite the fact that over 100,000 of them have died, and that it has the largest number of children with amputated limbs compared to any place on earth. All talk of a two-state solution is deceitful, it was a non-starter from the day the UN Commissioner for Palestine Count Bernadotte was assassinated by Zionist terrorists in September 1948. The only solution is a secular state, not a state for Jews but for all inhabitants of Palestine.

What the rest of the world needs to think about is this: similar atrocities and similar acts of self-deceit are being committed in every continent. Niether the UN nor any coalition of states is able or willing to do anything about it. Its only the labour movement and civil initiatives such as the Sumud Flotilla that can make a difference. It’s up to us ordinary people of conscience to stop the disintegration of organised humanity and the complete dissolution of human conscience. Hasson and Shoshan are two such people and we should hope that there are many more like them.

In the Russian film Repentance, made during the last days of the USSR; there occur these lines: There are three type of wrong-doing: a mistake, a crime and a sin. Mistakes can be corrected; crimes punished, but as for sins – all we may do is repent.” Who – among those who justify this massacre – repents and when you do so, is between you and the authority you name God. The rest of us can only rub our eyes and turn away in grief and shame. DS

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Two years after the massacre, I look back in disbelief. I, too, missed the October 8 surprise

Netanyahu and his failed government are responsible for the two greatest disasters in Israel’s history: the massacre of October 7 and the Israeli response to the massacre of October 7…. The first disaster fomented a trauma whose reverberations will be felt for decades to come. But the second disaster destroyed the foundations on which the State of Israel was built: the international legitimacy, the diplomatic and economic relations with the Arab world and the solidarity within Israeli society – Nir Hasson

On the UN stage, Netanyahu made a point of clarifying that he is not the only one responsible. This came in the context of Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian state, but the message was clear – I am not alone in bearing guilt for the second disaster…. That was an expression of pure truth in a speech studded with lies and half-truths. That truth was foreseen by the historian Adam Raz, who at the start of the war wrote about the emergence of a “community of crime.” He foresaw how the Israelis would unite around the joint crime, and how the leaders would ensure that we would all take part in it. “There is a political type whose policy is to turn the Israelis into criminals,” Raz wrote. I too am part of the Israeli community of crime.

Nir Hasson

On Friday of last week, just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started his speech to the United Nations General Assembly, footage from Shifa Hospital in Gaza was posted on social media. A brother and sister, no more than 10 years old, sit on a bed. Both are injured and crying, covered in dust, with blood streaking red lines across their ashen faces.

The girl, who is smaller than her brother, gets his attention and shows him her wounded leg. But he is no longer capable of fulfilling the big brother role. “Where did mom go?” he asks his sister, and bursts into tears. An adult stranger tries to get him to talk, to offer consolation, but the boy refuses to be comforted.

Even before Netanyahu completed his speech by bewailing the world’s failure to recognize that Israel is a “beacon of progress,” more footage appeared: a foot protruding from under the rubble of a building. People pull the limb, and reveal the body of a little girl covered in dust and blood.

A few minutes after the feeble applause of the Israeli delegation fell silent, a third video was posted. Two children are standing on the second floor of a building whose façade was destroyed by bombing a few minutes earlier, and are calling for help. They sob uncontrollably, pleading with the people below to rescue them. Their mother is still alive, trapped beneath the rubble.

There was nothing special about last Friday. Another day in Gaza.

Netanyahu and his failed government are responsible for the two greatest disasters in Israel’s history: the massacre of October 7 and the Israeli response to the massacre of October 7. In the first disaster, about 1,200 people were murdered and killed, women and children were abducted, horrific crimes against humanity were perpetrated. In the second disaster, we killed tens of thousands of civilians, caused the death of captives, inflicted destruction on a whole district, initiated mass starvation and committed countless war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The first disaster fomented a trauma whose reverberations will be felt for decades to come. But the second disaster destroyed the foundations on which the State of Israel was built: the international legitimacy, the diplomatic and economic relations with the Arab world and the solidarity within Israeli society.

The second disaster is prompting more and more people and institutions around the world to distance themselves from the crimes and from the criminals behind them. And it will continue: boycotts, sanctions, disgust and contempt for everything the State of Israel stands for. In the economy and in academia, in culture and in sports. At Eurovision, the Champions League, at conferences and festivals – in every platform and arena in the international community.

And as in the international sphere, so too in Israel: As the truth continues to come to light, and the public internalizes the horror in all its grimness, more and more Israelis will seek to distance themselves from the crimes. Already today many are refusing to take part in them, emigrating and being ashamed of their identity.

But these are only the margins of the disaster, mere appendices. The real catastrophe is the actual death of tens of thousands of people – buried under the rubble, shot by soldiers while waiting for food, or dying slowly of hunger in hospitals. The many lives that were cut off, the masses of people who have been maimed, the refugees whose body wanders by day and whose sleep wanders by night. The vast suffering that comes with the mourning, the wounds, the trauma. And the whole cities that have been erased and turned into heaps of ruins and dust.

***

On the UN stage, Netanyahu made a point of clarifying that he is not the only one responsible. This came in the context of Israel’s opposition to a Palestinian state, but the message was clear – I am not alone in bearing guilt for the second disaster: “I want you to grasp something else… I say this not only in my name or the name of my government… It’s not a fringe group, it’s not the prime minister who is extreme or is held hostage by extreme parties to his right. So my opposition to a Palestinian state is not simply my policy or my government’s policy. It is the policy of the state and people of the State of Israel.”

That was an expression of pure truth in a speech studded with lies and half-truths. That truth was foreseen by the historian Adam Raz, who at the start of the war wrote about the emergence of a “community of crime.” He foresaw how the Israelis would unite around the joint crime, and how the leaders would ensure that we would all take part in it. “There is a political type whose policy is to turn the Israelis into criminals,” Raz wrote. I too am part of the Israeli community of crime.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein warned us as early as October 18, 2023, and tried to suggest lessons that could be learned from 9/11. That attack, he said on his podcast, “drove us mad with fear. And in response, we shredded our own liberties. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded Iraq. Our response to 9/11 led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It made us weaker. It made us poorer. It made us hated around the world… 9/11 created a permission structure in American politics to do incredibly stupid, brutal things, and we are still paying the costs.”

Not long afterward, on November 1, I translated that warning to Hebrew and posted it on X. There was good reason then to think that we were heading toward the commission of war crimes, but I never imagined that we would fall into such a deep abyss.

In the first days of the war I said to my wife that it’s going to be horrible, that 10,000 people would die before it ended. I never imagined that Israel would cause the death of 100,000 people. Just as the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service missed the warning lights before the first disaster, we too missed the portents of the second disaster. Before October 7 we misread the intentions of the other side; after October 7 we misread the intentions of our side.

What is the explanation for our cruelty and indifference? Part of it is certainly related to the trauma fomented by the massacre. Hamas’ assault was so savage and so horrific that it seemingly justifies everything. I can understand that.

On October 8, 2023, I arrived at the home of the Edri family in the western Negev town of Ofakim. It was morning, and volunteers were loading the bodies of militants onto a pickup truck before driving to a nearby street to collect another body. Afterward I drove to Soroka Medical Center in Be’er Sheva, and met dozens of terrified people, who were in a state of uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones.

From there I went to the Re’im Junction and encountered bodies by the sides of the road. I entered a mobile shelter that had been placed at the junction and became a death trap. Even today I can still conjure up the smell of the blood that hung in the air there.

From Re’im to the parking area of the Nova rave. Along the way were burned cars, bodies of terrorists, abandoned objects, documents, phones, sleeping bags, stunned soldiers issuing contradictory orders and an acrid smell of burnt plastic.

On the days that followed, I was at all the arenas of the mass murder. The stench of the bodies and the smoke accompanied me everywhere. Then I went to Eilat to meet the survivors from Kibbutz Nir Oz. We sat for hours, the photographer Olivier Fitoussi and I, in the luxurious lobby or by the pool, listening to stories that were totally inconceivable.

Eitan Cunio related how he parted from his daughters after the safe room in their home had filled with smoke and the girls had lost consciousness, and how they were rescued at the last minute, thanks to the bravery of Eran Smilansky and Benny Avital, members of the emergency squad. Nir Adar described how he survived in the safe room with two little girls.

The two of them were the lucky ones in their families. Eitan’s two brothers, Ariel and David, were abducted and are still being held in captivity. Nir’s brother, Tamir, was killed in the battle for the kibbutz, and his body is still being held by Hamas.

Another explanation for Israel’s brutality in Gaza lies in the fact that there has been no closure for the trauma of October 7, and there are those who continue to stoke it. An example is the avoidance of returning the captives. The media’s intense focus on the events of that day is another example. This focus is understandable – I myself wrote dozens of reports on the massacre – as long as it is accompanied by attention to what is happening in Gaza, and the enormous price its residents are paying. As long as we do not fully confront the present, we risk creating a distorted picture of reality.

For Israelis, the sun that rose on October 7 has not yet set. That day continues, and with it, the revenge. The fact that we have since killed nearly 20,000 children changes nothing.

For Israelis, the sun that rose on October 7 has not yet set. That day continues, and with it, the revenge. The fact that we have since killed nearly 20,000 children changes nothing

***

However, it’s impossible to tie everything to October 7. After all, that day only unleashed the demons that had been there all along, that were cultivated across decades of growing extremism, religious zeal, dehumanization, chauvinism and militarism. Prior signs weren’t lacking: the indifference that was shown toward the settlers’ terrorism, the violence of the army and the police against Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, statements by ministers and Knesset members that by European standards are lodged deep in the neo-Nazi spectrum.

All of these were telltale signs, and the tale was soon told, loud and clear. In fact, the second disaster started immediately after the first, as soon as October 8. As I walked between bodies in the Re’im parking area, I heard the air force launch a brutal attack.

The connection between the bombings, border security and the rescue of hostages was already tenuous back then. The goal was to restore the self-confidence of the IDF and Israelis, to blur the first disaster and to exact revenge. Under pressure from the prime minister and with the backing of artificial intelligence systems for target identification, the gates of hell were opened, as government ministers liked to call it. At that time, Israel was killing hundreds of civilians every day. By the end of the month, the death toll in Gaza had already exceeded 8,000.

I admit that I was focused on other things then. I visited all the arenas of the massacre many times, interviewed dozens of survivors and fighters and published a series of articles about October 7. We celebrated with Nir Oz the release of the captives in the first deal, we mourned with them over the dead who were identified day after day.

And in the meantime, the IDF continued with its assault, and the death toll surged rapidly: more than 15,000 by the end of November. It wasn’t until the summer of 2024, when 40,000 had been killed, when the erasure of Rafah was at its peak, when a million and a half DPs were living in tents on the seashore, when hunger and diseases spread across the Strip – only then did it dawn on me that something terrible of historical dimensions was taking place in Gaza, something that will shape our lives from now on.

I sat down and watched video after video of the events in the Gaza Strip. I saw children with severed limbs, horrified survivors, stray dogs eating human flesh, buildings collapsing, wounded people wallowing in their blood, patients hospitalized on the floor. I saw human suffering of all types, in every conceivable form.

The Gaza videos can be divided into two types: the gray and the red. The source of the gray is the dust that’s created by the disintegration of concrete and bricks in the buildings that are bombed. Gray was the color that dominated Gaza even before the war, but it was mixed with the white shades of roofs and hothouses, the black hues of roads and solar panels, the greens of orchards and of trees in the streets.

Since the war started, it has all turned gray. You can see that gray even from space, in satellite photos. It covers the faces of the wounded, of the survivors. It’s the color of the dead and the color of the living.

The source of the red is blood. It oozes from amputated limbs, dyes clothes and shrouds, glistens on the gloves and robes of physicians. The gray videos document the landscape, the destruction, the clouds of dust. The red videos document the horrors in the ER and on the sidewalks, in the seconds after an attack.

After immersing myself in the videos, I started to speak with people in Gaza. I started with UN staff and aid workers, moving on to physicians and residents and also Israeli soldiers. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa told me about the compound of dying children, to which those who have no chance of surviving in the conditions of the hospitals in Gaza are referred. They lie there and wait to die.

Dr. Mimi Syed spoke about Sami, an 8-year-old boy whose jaw was ripped from its place in an explosion, and whose big brother carried him to the hospital in his arms. Anas Arafat patiently gave me the names and photographs of all 12 of his family members who were buried beneath the rubble, with the IDF not allowing them to be extracted, even though his trapped sister-in-law was still alive a day after the attack.

Since the war started, Gaza has all turned gray. You can see it from space, in satellite photos. It covers the faces of the wounded, of the survivors. It’s the color of the dead and the color of the living.

Dr. Ezzideen Shehab wrote me: “Israeli officials called us ‘human animals.’ And so they stage scenes of frenzy and say, look at how they behave. But they will not show you the mother boiling lentil water for her infant. They will not show you the man burning his books, not because he hates knowledge, but because his children are starving. They will not show you the doctor who tried to get food and was shot, because he believed hunger was more fatal than a bullet.”

Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra showed me what happens to an infant whose mother feeds him a weak formula that contains neither protein nor vitamins, after the milk in her body ran dry because of the starvation.

And then there are the numbers. Hour after hour I stared at the unending list of names provided by the Health Ministry in Gaza. The first name is Mohammed al-Marnah, who died the day he was born. So too the seven infants who follow on the list. The next 930 names are of infants who were less than a year old when they died.

I engaged a great deal in the mathematics of death. What is the proportion of those killed from the entire population? (3 percent.) How does this compare to other wars? (Almost incomparable.) What is the proportion of children among the dead? (30 percent.) How does this compare to the percentage of children who died in Israel on October 7? (Ten times as many. There are partial explanations for this disparity: the high percentage of children in the Strip, and the fact that there were no children at the Nova and on the army bases.) Thirty-six Israeli children were murdered on that day, and two more (Ariel and Kfir Bibas) were murdered later. In Gaza the number is 18,430.

In January, at the time of the ceasefire, I believed that my role in Gaza had ended; that I would soon be able to go back to writing about Jerusalem and the climate crisis. On TikTok I became addicted to the clips showing residents of Gaza returning home, clearing the debris and photographing themselves drinking tea in what remained of their houses.

I even wrote that after all the suffering I’d seen, I shared the happiness of the Gazans who had survived. That sentence drove people wild. Hundreds of readers took the trouble to curse me and wish me death in horrible ways. That was another warning light: The revenge was not yet sated. Another wave of crimes loomed.

***

On March 2, the government of Israel decided to starve the residents of Gaza. Two weeks later, the air force launched the first attack of a new military operation. Three hundred women and children were killed that night. In the weeks that followed, the killing, the destruction and the starvation continued and grew more extreme. At the end of July, daily death from starvation started.

In September, the IDF started to expel a million people from Gaza City and to do what it had done in other cities: bomb, kill, flatten whole neighborhoods. Two years have passed, and the defense minister is still delighting in toppling towers. The revenge is at its peak.

On the day Netanyahu spoke, the number of people killed in Israeli attacks, according to Gaza’s health ministry, stood at 65,427. The true number of dead – including the missing, those who were killed and hastily buried and the excess mortality as a result of the situation – is more than 100,000. Another 170,000 are wounded. And the killing continues every day.

Two weeks ago I returned to Nir Oz. Two years after the massacre, the kibbutz seems to be starting to come back to life. A new neighborhood is being built at its entrance, on its other side a group of workers is renovating homes, some of the burnt houses have already been demolished, and here and there one sees people walking on the paths. Someone hung out laundry next to a house.

We looked toward the other side of the border, at the place where the eastern suburbs of Khan Yunis once stood. What we saw were mounds upon mounds of destroyed structures and rubble of buildings. From time to time an explosion of a shell shook the air. When will this rubble be cleared? When, if ever, will Gaza’s rehabilitation start? When will it be rebuilt?

The two disasters that befell us are intertwined. For most Israelis this will sound off the wall, even treasonable, but today it is clearer to me than ever: Kibbutz Nir Oz and the State of Israel will not be rehabilitated as long as Gaza is not rehabilitated.

Source: HAARETZ

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‘If 1948 Was a War of Independence, the Current War Could Be the One That Ends Israel’

Neta Shoshani’s controversial documentary about the 1948 war was banned in Israel because it exposed many of the flaws in the ethos underlying creation of the nascent state’s identity. It’s now finally being aired

Nirit Anderman

At the beginning of the documentary film “1948 – Remember, Remember Not,” a group of Israel Defense Forces soldiers is searching for something in rocky terrain. Under a blazing sun, their hands gloved, they pick up stones, roll boulders, examine their findings.

The commander of the IDF unit tasked with locating missing soldiers four years ago, Col. (res.) Yoki Ulliel, explains to the camera that they are searching for the remains of 172 soldiers whose place of burial is unknown. In essence, the search is for bones of any size, from a skull to the smallest joints.

“Giving up is not an option,” he says. “Or, as a Givati [Brigade] soldier who once joined the searches put it, ‘For the first time I understand that if something were to happen to me, heaven forbid, the State of Israel and the IDF would not rest until they brought me back.'”

More than two years ago, when the film’s director, Neta Shoshani, was editing the footage, she chose to insert this scene early on in order to emphasize the Israeli and IDF ethos that holds that no one gets left behind. In light of the fact that she aimed to examine the set of values around which Israeli identity has evolved, and because many of the MIAs whom the unit was searching for fell in the War of Independence, the core subject of the film – that decision makes sense.

But this past winter, when Shoshani attended a screening of “1948” in Jerusalem, after more than a year and a half of not having viewed it in its entirety, something happened. She was certain she would learn nothing new from seeing it again, but suddenly she saw this scene, which she had already viewed countless times, in a different light.

“It was already over a year into the war in the Gaza Strip,” she explained to Haaretz in a phone interview last week. “I was surprised to discover that suddenly many things in the film took on a different significance. In the scene where Ulliel says that the IDF will do everything in its power to bring back every single soldier, alive or dead, I heard the audience around me sighing, saying, ‘oh, come on.’

“Today it sounds ridiculous, or shocking,” she says about Ulliel’s declaration. “It’s so weird, because he said those words just four years ago! Today no one would utter that sentence with the same confidence, pathos or deep inner conviction.”

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However, the fact that dozens of Israeli hostages – civilians and soldiers, alive and dead – have been languishing in Hamas captivity for 700 days without anyone in the government of Israel moving heaven and earth to bring them home, isn’t the only thing that has happened here recently. Over the past two years Shoshani and her film have been subjected to a campaign of persecution that reflects transformations occurring throughout all of Israeli society.

“1948 – Remember, Remember Not” is a documentary project that was commissioned by the Kan – Israel Broadcasting Corporation, the public broadcaster, to mark the 75th anniversary of the country’s independence. However, even though this rich, comprehensive and riveting work, which is of unmistakable historical importance, was ready to be broadcast more than two years ago, ahead of that Independence Day, and even premiered at the 2023 Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival, in Tel Aviv, where it won a prize (for research) – the corporation refused to air it.

Exceptionally and rather strangely, the broadcasting date was repeatedly postponed over the course of more than two years. Although Kan didn’t bother to offer a plausible explanation, reality “volunteered” an explanation of its own for this situation. On October 7, various channels postponed the broadcast of any program or film deemed potentially too difficult for Israeli viewers to digest. Meanwhile, a few months after the Docaviv screening, the far-right, ultra-nationalist organization B’Tsalmo – “a human rights organization in the spirit of Jewish ethical traditions,” according to its English-language website – launched a campaign of persecution against the documentary.

Asserting that Shoshani’s “1948” is “a film that is all lies and blood libels against heroes of Israel who have fought and fell in the defense of their nation and home,” B’Tsalmo let its poison machine loose in order to stymie the work itself, its creator, the corporation that funded it – and essentially anyone who wanted to screen it or see it.

Right-wing agitators set about thwarting attempts by local cinematheques to show the film, fired off letters to persuade politicians and cultural institutions to ban it and even cited a century-old British Mandate ordinance to enable the Israel Film Council – which technically has authority in such situations – to morph from a relatively toothless body into a tough censor capable of silencing voices, at least for a few weeks.

Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi was also only too happy to join the chorus of denunciation. Early last year, he reprimanded the chairperson of the public broadcaster for the initial decision to produce the film and to invest in it a million shekels (about $285,000 at the time) of public funds, echoing the criticism that the documentary was riddled with “atrocious and false blood libels.”

In light of all this, it’s not difficult to surmise why Kan preferred throughout this period to leave the film, with its volatile focus on the War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba, on the shelf, far from the public’s eyes. As such, “1948” became the prominent, albeit unwilling, symbol of locally made, contemporary artistic works whose creators dared to depart from the heroic and patriotic Israeli narrative and, as a result, fell victim to political persecution.

But lo and behold, last week the broadcasting corporation decided to end the film’s “quarantine” and announced that it would be aired in two parts, on Kan Channel 11. The first is scheduled to air Saturday (Sept. 6); the second, a week later. So now the Israeli public will at last have the opportunity to form its own opinion about the film, which by means of a mosaic of archival materials and excerpts from personal letters and diaries written by Jews and Palestinians – ordinary residents and officials alike – in real time, during the war, depicts the course of the fighting and the mood among the public on both sides.

Asserting that Shoshani’s ‘1948’ is ‘a film that is all lies and blood libels against heroes of Israel who have fought and fell in the defense of their nation and home,’ B’Tsalmo let its poison machine loose.

At the same time, the film traces the origins of what became the basic values that formed the very backbone of Israeli society – and shows that many of them were baseless. The result is fascinating, but also, in the shadow of the current war, heartbreaking.

Shoshani: “The film is about the Israeli ethos that was forged in 1948, on whose foundations the state, the army and Israeli society in general were built. This encompasses the notions of camaraderie, the concept of ‘a few against the many,’ ‘purity of arms’ [i.e., the basic principle that demands that soldiers must act in an ethical way and are permitted only to use weapons in the name of a certain operation, but without endangering innocent people], expulsion or flight, yes Nakba/no Nakba” – a reference to the wartime “catastrophe” when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes.

“My goal was to look at this ethos with a critical eye,” she continues, “to examine what underlies it, to understand the connection between the history and the ethos, the difference between what we want to remember, or the way we want to see ourselves, and what we really are. The film examines this ethos, constructs it and then gradually takes it apart.”

I originally interviewed Shoshani more than two years ago, in May 2023, not long before the originally scheduled broadcast date. October 7 wasn’t on the horizon, it was impossible to imagine the atrocities that were looming for Israelis and Gazans, or the campaign of censorship and harassment that awaited her documentary itself.

At the time we spoke about filmmaking, the content of “1948” and what could be inferred from it concerning contemporary Israeli society. Routine stuff. Now, though, with the Kan corporation announcing broadcast dates, it was obvious that the original interview with the filmmaker needed updating. The documentary itself hasn’t changed, but reality has been turned upside down, the country is not what it was and we are surely not the same as we once were. We arranged to meet again.

Shoshani recalled the screening in Jerusalem, when she watched the film along with the audience, at the hosts’ request. After five years of working on it, countless hours of reviewing the material and long editing shifts, she was struck by an surprising realization: “As I sat there watching it, I suddenly realized that in the past two horrible years the whole matter of the Israeli ethos has been totally shattered.

“Take the disintegration of ‘purity of arms’ and the talk about the Nakba, for example. Since October 7 no one seems ashamed of those things, no one conceals them. On the contrary: People are proud of them, they admit that a ‘second Nakba’ is now being fomented. Suddenly I grasped that an ethos has a great deal of power, that it contains society within certain boundaries. And even if those boundaries are breached – and they were certainly breached as early as 1948 – there was still something in society’s moral codes that at least caused it to feel ashamed. So for decades that ethos safeguarded society and the army, compelling them to preserve certain limits.”

Like a moral compass.

“Exactly. And when that ethos falls apart, it’s really scary. From this perspective, the film was difficult to watch from the get-go, but after the last two years it’s become unbearable. The second part talks about the norms that were enshrined after the War of Independence in the IDF and in the political leadership, in regard to the crimes committed by soldiers against Palestinian civilians during that period, that is, from 1947 to 1949.

“At that time there was a public debate over the punishment that was meted out and society’s attitude toward the crimes that were committed. The episode involving Shmuel Lahis appears – he was accused of committing war crimes, of murdering dozens of Palestinian civilians [in what is referred to as the Hula massacre, in November, 1948], and was tried. But he received only symbolic punishment, was pardoned by the president and eventually became the director general of the Jewish Agency. The film maintains that this marked the point of no return.

“Today,” Shoshani adds, “more than 75 years later, I feel that we are seeing the results of that, we are seeing the extreme situation we have reached. If that war was waged in the name of independence and revival, it’s possible that the present war is the last war, the one that could effectively finish off Israel.

“And the film was made a moment before everything blew up – at the last moment at which a documentary like that could be made, because in the final analysis it was made from an innocent standpoint. Because, what is the Nakba of 1948 compared to what is happening today in Gaza? If you compare the number of fatalities, the lack of effort to conceal things, the absence of apology – today this discussion is no longer relevant. Today no one would even let me make the film, still less with public funds. It simply wouldn’t happen.”

A toast to the Negev

In October 1948, shortly after the IDF captured Be’er Sheva from Egyptian hands, the film recounts, the director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund, Yosef Weitz, arrived in the city. “It was good to drive along the highways of the south and the Negev and to reach Be’er Sheva,” he wrote in his diary. “Its wealthy inhabitants had fled about a week before the city was conquered, no property remained, and what did remain was looted by our people.”

He added, “116 soldiers were taken prisoner. The sick, the women and the children were sent to Gaza. We gathered in a room at the governor’s house and drank a toast: to the life of the Negev!”

Yes looting, no looting, the main thing was to raise a toast. What remains of that long-ago war for most Israelis today seems to be no more than a blurry hodgepodge of consciousness consisting of anecdotes and values that we’ve learned by heart – along the lines of the so-called war of the few against the many; David vs. Goliath; purity of arms; the “silver platter” concept (to the effect that the birth of the state was served up on a silver platter of sacrifice]; Arab nations who rose up to annihilate us but discovered that those who had once been led like sheep to the slaughter had suddenly become peerless warriors; and Palestinians who fled their homes in the face of the new Jewish heroism, tanned and muscular, engendered by the nascent state. The War of Independence contributed to the shaping of each of those values, and together they have defined Israeliness to this day.

However, “1948” makes it clear that in many cases the ethos is not consistent in terms of historical accuracy. A case in point is the David vs. Goliath concept. “Excuse me for butting into your ethos, but Jewish forces had a decisive and clear-cut military and strategic advantage [in 1948],” the historian Prof. Mustafa Kabha says in Shoshani’s film. He quotes data from a book that had come out under the imprint of the Defense Ministry’s publishing house: The Arab forces in the War of Independence numbered about 35,000 troops, whereas the Haganah – the pre-state underground, Jewish force that would form the basis for the IDF – was able to field 67,000 combat soldiers.

Another issue concerns the purity of arms. An effort was made as early as 1948 to inculcate that ethos – which Berl Katznelson, a prominent intellectual of Labor Zionism, coined back in the 1930s – in the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite strike force, but Shoshani’s “1948” begs to differ. It doesn’t try to soften or tone down anything, rather it depicts with precision the course of the war and in doing so reveals war crimes that were an inseparable part of it. Not just looting of Palestinian property by Israeli soldiers, but the massacre of innocent civilians and the rape of women in captured villages. Not only crimes committed by one side, but wartime atrocities perpetrated by all those involved in the fighting.

The documentary contains no new and sensational revelations, no new information that was previously unknown, but the cinematic portrayal of archival footage, together with academic research and a large number of testimonies of Israelis and Palestinians who recount the horrors that played out around them at the time – all of these produce a petrifying effect.

Not only did massacre, rape and looting occur in quite a few cases, as the film makes clear, but moral laxity was an open secret in the nascent state; political decision makers knew about the war crimes being committed but chose to turn a blind eye. The prime minister and defense minister at the time, David Ben-Gurion, did in fact order the creation of a commission of inquiry into these matters, chaired by the attorney general, Yaakov-Shimshon Shapira. However, its report was kept hidden from the public, was buried in the Israel State Archives and remains classified to this day.

In fact, not only does the archives continue to deny access to the report, Shoshani says, but even the minutes of the cabinet meetings that discussed the issue of war crimes in 1948 were classified until a few years ago and only finally made public in a heavily redacted form.

Excerpts from these discussions appear in the film. “The situation in this matter is tantamount to an epidemic,” Health Minister Haim-Moshe Shapira is quoted as saying. “If this is the situation, I don’t know from which side we can expect a danger to the state – from the Arabs or from ourselves. In my opinion, all our moral foundations have been undone, and a way must be found to curb these passions. A [public] commission should be chosen, so that the public and the soldiers will know that the matter has come to [the attention of] the government, and the government is not turning a blind eye.”

But ultimately, as said, the government did choose to do that and the majority of those who committed war crimes in 1948 were not held accountable.

Powerless president

Neta Shoshani, 44, was born and raised in Jerusalem, did her military service in Army Radio and worked for a few years as a content editor in television, while also studying visual communications at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. She became interested in documentary cinema thanks to the director David Ofek, and with him co-directed “Handa Handa 4” (about Bukharan couples who refuse to marry) and the series “House Call” (about a home-hospice team).

Her first solo effort was “Born in Deir Yassin” (2017), a documentary featuring testimonies of fighters from the pre-state Irgun and Lehi undergrounds about what happened in that Arab village during the War of Independence – a massacre in which more than 100 villagers were killed – while concurrently telling the story of the psychiatric hospital that has operated at the site, on the west side of Jerusalem, for years.

The portrayal of the archival footage, along with academic research and the testimonies of Israelis and Palestinians who recount the horrors that played out around them in real time, produce a petrifying effect.

Already then she and the film were slammed by right-wingers and lambasted by the culture minister at the rime, Miri Regev (Likud). But that didn’t stop Shoshani (whose partner is Haaretz journalist Gidi Weitz) from starting to work on “1948” immediately afterward.

Even though the earlier film was nominated for an Ophir Award, Israel’s equivalent of the Oscar, no film foundation was willing to invest in her project on the War of Independence. For years, the filmmaker relates, she approached every possible organizations, only to collect dozens of rejections. The only body that ultimately recognized the importance of the project and was courageous enough to support it – even though it was clear that the film would give a voice to the Palestinian narrative as well as the Israeli one – was the Kan public broadcaster.

“In ‘Born in Deir Yassin’ I dealt with human memory and how deceptive it is, and how among 15 people each one remembers something completely different after one traumatic event. In ‘1948’ I was more interested in the collective memory and what remains in it from a war that happened more than 70 years ago,” Shoshani explains.

“I thought it would be interesting to describe the frame of mind of people who lived here back then, in real time: what they know, what they think, how they react to things that are happening, what they glean from the insane history that is happening before their eyes,” she says. “And besides that, the myths. One of the questions that most interested me is where the myths come from, how they’re constructed, who navigates them and why.”

The excerpts from the personal diaries and letters that are interwoven in the documentary definitely forge a fascinating picture of nascent Israel at that formative time, a Rashomon that sweeps the imagination and jolts the mind far beyond any history book.

For example: “I always hold the pen in the evening, so I am already tired, only so that a memory will remain of that chaotic period,” wrote Hadassh Avigdori, 20, who was a paramedic in the Palmach. “The young people are falling like flies, and as always it’s the good who go. Sometimes the feeling takes hold that slowly we will all go, that we will not be the ones who’ll see the light.

“Our consolation,” she continued, “is that the situation of the Arabs is harder. Who knows one another among them? And who cares [among them] that someone fell? I very much doubt that they are as seriously affected by another person’s death as we are. We are so few, and every person is so precious.”

Whereas Hala Sakakini, 24, daughter of a noted Palestinian scholar and a teacher in Jerusalem, wrote a diary entry after Jews blew up a hotel in the city’s Katamon neighborhood with people inside. Her aunt Melia called the Iraqi consul to ask that troops be dispatched to protect that Arab neighborhood, she noted. During a meeting of male residents, at her house, it emerged that the group possessed only three rifles and four pistols between them.

“All day long,” she wrote, “you could see people carrying their belongings and moving from their houses to safer ones in Katamon or to another quarter altogether. They reminded us of pictures we used to see of European refugees during the war.”

Shoshani depicted the events chronologically, carefully compiled texts from diary entries and letters, using the voice-over technique to accompany visuals of the texts along with archival footage and images, and in general added quite a bit of information that gives the viewer an excellent, general picture of the war, enabling one to follow its developments and outcomes.

The amount of the material she came across and its complexity led to her decision to divide the work into two parts. The first, dealing with the war’s first months, up to the declaration of the state, is titled “Remember”; the second, portraying the period in which the forces had already been organized into a full-fledged army, the IDF, and during which the war crimes were committed, is called “Remember Not.”

My goal was to examine what underlies the ethos, to understand the connection between it and history, the difference between what we want to remember, or the way we want to see ourselves, and what we really are: Neta Shoshani

An example of what Israeli society would like to forget is described in a letter that two dignitaries from the Arab village of Ilaboun in the north of the country sent to the minister for minority affairs at the time. They related that the villagers held up a white flag when the Israeli army entered. “The priest Murkus al Mualem greeted the conquering commander and said: ‘I hereby hand over to you my village and my people.’ The commander replied: ‘Where are the people?’ He demanded that they appear and they did so immediately.

“When one of them, Azar, emerged from the gate of the priest’s house, a soldier shot and killed him, and also wounded a 12-year-old boy. When the inhabitants gathered in the village square, the commander chose 12 young men from among them and removed them to a different place … [and later] they killed the 12 young men in the streets of the village.”

“Remember Not,” Shoshani takes her camera to the Galilee, to Yad Ya’ari – the archives of the left-wing, Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth movement, in Givat Haviva, the national education center of the Kibbutz Federation. There she hears from the director of the archives, Dudu Amitai, how every few years representatives of the Malmab – the director of security in the defense establishment – used to show up, review the catalog of documents and instruct him as to which sensitive materials he was to bury in the safe and keep secret from the public.

“They were mainly 1948 documents dealing with, let’s call it, all kinds of ‘malfunctions,'” says Amitai. However, when he discovered that such a directive lacked any legal validity, he started to release some of the material gradually, on his own.

Shoshani asks to see an example and Amitai shows her a letter that a reporter for the Hashomer Hatzair organ, Al Hamishmar, sent to his editor. The reporter recounts eyewitness testimony of a soldier who was in Dawayima – an Arab village where IDF soldiers carried out a massacre on October 29, 1948 – that was penned the day after the military incursion. There was no fighting and no resistance, he writes; troops killed between 80 and 100 men, women and children.

“Another commander ordered a sapper to take two old Arab women into a house and to blow it up with them inside,” the reporter continued. “Another soldier boasted that he had raped an Arab woman and then shot her. An Arab woman with a newborn baby was employed in cleaning up the area where the soldiers eat. She performed that service for a day or two, in the end they shot her and her baby.

“The soldier relates that commanders, who are civilized and polite, and are considered good fellows in society, became base murderers, and not in the heat and passion of battle. The fewer Arabs that will remain, the more praiseworthy it is. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place: To shout this out in the press is to help the Arab League; not to react is to show solidarity with baseness and murder. I am writing this to you so that the editorial board and the party [most likely the reference is Mapai, forerunner of Labor] will know the truth and take some action,” the reporter informed his editor.

There were other such revelations. “Mano Friedman and others told me about our soldiers’ cruel acts,” wrote Yosef Nachmani, director of the Jewish National Fund in Tiberias. “In Safsaf, after we entered the village [near Safed] and its men raised a white flag, men and women were gathered separately, the hands of the fellahin were tied and they were shot, put to death and buried in one pit. A few of the village’s women were raped.

The ethos of the silver platter is correct. Many young people died [defending the country]. That’s very sad. Everyone knew someone who died. I don’t know if it was possible to do it differently.

Neta Shoshani

“In Khalisa [north of Safed], whose inhabitants hoisted a white flag, a true slaughter was perpetrated. Men and women were killed. Is there no more humane way to distance these inhabitants other than by these means, and afterward to rob their property?”

Arnon Tamir, from Kibbutz Hazorea, south of Haifa, wrote: “Stick good fellows in barracks conditions and they become cruel, infantile, like every soldier in the whole world. I see in this war, along with those taking a courageous stand in certain cases, a sort of whirlpool of coincidences that overall brings about moral degeneration, the removal of any hint of civility. Against this backdrop, is it surprising that all the acts of rape and robbery in the various conquests occurred?”

The turning point in the hostilities came in March 1948, when the heads of the Yishuv – the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine – decided to launch “Plan D,” involving a transition from defense to an offensive strategy.

“And then, gradually it begins to trickle down, this whole posture of force,” Shoshani explains, adding that by thanks to a diary documenting a Palmach training course, she uncovered testimony of murder and looting in Lod and Ramle upon their capture. How does Netiva Ben-Yehuda put it?” the filmmaker adds, referring to reactions by the noted author and editor to diary excerpts, which are presented via voice-over in “1948”: “‘Here you go, we also know how to shoot and kill, we’re not those wimps from the Diaspora.’ And suddenly there’s a sort of enthusiasm for this thing. Palmachniks relate how, during the conquest of Lod, the guys were burning with rage, they were ready to commit murder on the spot, and they ‘cleansed’ the city.

“And they write: ‘We were told to rest, but there are multiple treasures in the city – a word to the wise.’ In other words, they’re laughing about what they’re doing. And we see how this seeps in, how things continue to deteriorate.”

In the documentary historian Benny Morris cites a list of Arab villages in which, according to his research, IDF troops carried out massacres, rapes and looting. Testimonies and documents in the film bear out his findings. Such war crimes were committed in various locales in the Galilee, among them Ilaboun, Majdal Krum, Jish, Safsaf and Khalisa, and in the village of Houla, in Lebanon.

It was Morris who discovered the existence of the Shapira Report, which summed up the findings of the government’s commission of inquiry into the War of Independence. In the film he relates how, while researching his seminal 1988 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” he searched the state archives for material about the attitude toward the Palestinian population in 1948, and came across documents indicating that a commission of inquiry like this had in fact existed, but that that fact had never been made public.

Morris even came across a file with documents from the end of 1948 that bore Shapira’s name, but when he wanted to open it the state archivist refused. The historian petitioned the High Court of Justice in the matter, but his petition was rejected.

“In the minutes of [the cabinet discussions about] the Shapira Report, the participants are more than worried,” Shoshani explains. “They realize that something significant is happening, that things are headed in that direction. So Ben-Gurion appoints a commission and allows them to write a report, but it’s sealed – nothing is done with it.

“Only one person was tried for that [war crimes]: Shmuel Lahis, who murdered a few dozen [Arabs] and blew up houses with people inside. But he served a short prison term and was given a pardon. And not only was the report never published, no one even knew about it. So why did someone go to all that trouble – so it would lie closed in the archives for all time?”

Additional testimony revealing that the young country’s leaders knew about the war crimes is found in another quote cited in the film, from Yosef Nachmani’s diary. “When I returned to Tiberias, [a woman named] Hanna told me that Chaim Weizmann’s adjutant had been calling from Galei Kinneret [a Tiberias hotel] and the president wants to see me,” the JNF-Tiberias director wrote. “‘How is it, Nachmani, [Weizmann asked,] that you always make a habit of speaking with me when I am elsewhere in the country and now, when I am in your city, you didn’t see a need to visit? I heard that the Arab inhabitants who have survived are being treated badly. I heard about robberies, rape and malicious behavior. Where did our sons learn this cruelty? Don’t they ask you how Arabs should be treated?’ I replied: ‘They don’t ask. And do they ask you, as the state’s president?’

“‘No,’ he replied in a whisper, in a despairing, depressed voice. ‘No.’ ‘My friend, the president,’ I said. ‘Now there is a state with a prime minister at its head, I no longer have influence. Only the government has the ability to restrain the instincts bursting out of some of our boys.’ ‘Yes, true,’ he replied, his eyes expressing that distinctive Weizmann-type anguish. ‘Unfortunately, I too have no influence.'”

A type of ‘camaraderie’

The two parts of “1948” run two and a half hours. “The balance was important for me, and it’s a very delicate matter. Because, how can I document the explosion of the hotel on Ben-Yehuda [Street], but not the fact that a few weeks earlier, a hotel of Arabs had been blown up in Katamon? I wanted to convey that complexity and to be as balanced as possible. Look, I was stubborn about having the present in the film, too, because that’s part of the statement that we’re talking about a war that is not over.”

In addition to contemporary interviews, the filmmaker’s camera, as mentioned, also accompanies the IDF unit that searches for the remains of soldiers. They are seen searching for many days in fields and rocky areas, digging and poking about, though there is little chance of finding such remains. So little that it’s hard not to be amazed at the soldiers’ determination.

Shoshani: “I absolutely do not disdain them, I understand that there are people for whom this is important. But then you stop and think: Hold on, the soldiers are dead, their parents are dead, so what’s so important? I tried to talk with them, to understand the values that drive them, and in the end it’s mostly this ‘camaraderie’ thing, which in my view is the ethos of 1948: Know that we will search for you even 75 years later, that we will make every effort to give you a Jewish burial, we do not leave wounded and dead in the field.”

In contrast, the film puts paid to the ethos of “Let every Jewish mother know that she has placed her sons’ fate in the hands of commanders who are worthy of this,” as Ben-Gurion put it.

“Think of what would have happened if the Shapira Report had been published – some cabinet ministers even suggested holding a public trial – then a genuine discussion of our morality would have been conducted,” Shoshani says. “There’s a lovely sentence in Ben-Gurion’s diaries which he utters just before launching the last two [IDF] operations of the war. A journalist says to him, ‘You are socialists from Russia, so what will you be now, a Western democracy?’ Ben-Gurion replies, ‘We will be a Jewish democracy, which is a lot more than that, because we have Jewish morality.’ And I’m certain he really believed that – that Jewish morality, after years of victimhood, is different.”

So the idea to shelve the Shapira Report and hide the fact of its existence was aimed at preserving the idea of Jewish moral supremacy?

“A. – yes. And B. – I think they always thought that the time hadn’t yet come for that, because we’re not strong enough and still have so many enemies. When I was working on ‘Deir Yassin,’ I was also asked: ‘Why do you have to talk about this now, when there are all these terrorist attacks?’ Or: ‘Now, when there’s a war, you have to deal with this?’ Things like that – when you sweep them under the carpet – they don’t disappear. The opposite. Or even more: They become second nature. Because if you don’t address moral deterioration it seeps in and becomes second nature, to the point where you don’t ask questions, because it’s clear to everyone that this is the way things are supposed to be done.

“And here, not only did no one ever conduct a discussion about this – they hid it and said it didn’t happen. Even though everyone knows it did happen, because rumors spread and the country was small, 600,000 people all told. On the other hand, I have a hard time with films that only batter, only shatter the ethos. There are things you can’t take away, and shouldn’t.”

What do you mean?

“The ethos of the silver platter, for example, is correct. A great many young people died here [defending the young country]. That’s very sad. Everyone knew someone who died, and that’s really tough. And I don’t know if it was possible to do it differently; I wasn’t living here then.

“Ben-Gurion was very structured and organized, saw to it that money was raised, saw to it that there were weapons, that soldiers were trained – thanks to him there was an army here that functioned, institutions that functioned. The state already existed de facto. And that is exactly what is different from Palestinian society, which had no leaders, no institutions, no arms and nothing was organized.

“In the end, that’s what won the war. It wasn’t a miracle. Very serious work was done here by people who knew what they were doing, and you can’t take that away from them. We are here thanks to them. I am here, and I’m not going anywhere. Regrettably, perhaps, but I’m here. And that’s no small thing.

“So it was very important for me to insert all those segments into the film, because that’s the truth. It’s the history and it’s part of the story. Because of that I was insistent about having two parts: ‘Remember’ and ‘Remember Not.’ Both were part of that war.”

The Kan – Israel Broadcasting Corporation said in response: “The documentary “1948,” which deals with the War of Independence, was scheduled for broadcast after being postponed several times due to the outbreak of the war and programming considerations. The Broadcasting Corporation that commissioned the film is committed, and will remain committed, to providing freedom of expression and creative freedom for a variety of opinions and perspectives in Israeli society.”

Source: HAARETZ

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