Free The Idea of Israel by Ilan Pappé Page B

later tried to cleanse his name in a libel trial but failed. The film highlighted the uneasy connection between the Jewish leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, and put forward the uncomfortable conclusionthat the survival of the community in Palestine always came first. A 1995 docudrama by Benny Brunner, based on Tom Segev’s book The Seventh Million , focused on Jewish leaders’ decision not to become involved in operations to save Jews that did not bring survivors to Palestine and to concentrate on efforts to save Jews who were physically and mentally fit and likely to contribute to nation-building.
    Beyond the makers of docudramas are the documentary film-makers, who intervene very little in the raw reality they film, believing strongly that it speaks for itself. One of the best among them is Eyal Sivan. An early film of his, Yizkor: Slaves of Memory , tested the limits of how far one can challenge from within one’s own national ethos and mythology. In the film he follows the manipulation of Holocaust memories in the Israel high school system during the period between the Passover festivities through Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom Hashoah, and up to the celebrations of Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut. The camera hardly leaves the classroom or schoolyard, and an extended version includes an extremely poignant interview with Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who was mentioned in Chapter 4 above. For me the unforgettable remark in this interview was that the Holocaust is not a Jewish problem: ‘We did not do it. The Germans did, and it is therefore their problem.’ By contrast, the occupation should concern the Israeli Jews, because this is an evil of their own doing. Calling on Israel to focus on its own crimes and less on its victimisation was a demand rarely heard of even at the peak of the post-Zionist era.
    Yizkor leaves the viewer with a mixture of optimism and despair. The school manufactures a false and unconvincing Jewish narrative of self-righteousness and victimisation that lumps together the ancient stories of the Hebrews in Pharaonic Egypt with accounts of Nazi Europe and the 1948 War of Independence. The students do not always seem to fall prey to this metanarrative, but neither are they offered any alternatives, and thus are likely to become the slaves of this manipulated memory in future. What it also shows is the grotesque business of enslaving memory for ideological purposes: there is an efficient use of materials employed for the various memorial ceremonies, which have an almost postmodern character in whicheverything is the same whether it happened five thousand years ago or yesterday. An efficient teacher, then, will instruct the students not to waste the posters describing the exodus from Egypt so that they can be used again in a Broadway-style presentation on the various death camps of the Holocaust. On Yom Hashoah, each student is assigned a banner with the name of one of the camps on it, and the viewer almost senses a competition among the children to receive the banner that represents the worst site of the Nazi genocide.
    An original angle on Holocaust memory manipulation and its relationship with the Mizrachi Jews has been taken by the prolific film director Asher Tlalim in Don’t Touch My Holocaust . 15 In the film, Tlalim monitors a group of Arab and Jewish actors from Israel who participate in a play about the Holocaust, and poses the question of what later generations should know and understand about the horrific event. Tlalim would go on to explore the exilic and Holocaust background of Jewish experience through his 2000 film Galoot (Exile).
    Tellingly, both Sivan and Tlalim left Israel and emigrated to Europe. In exile, Sivan would make ten films, two of which dealt with the history of Palestine. One of his latest is called Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork , which follows the Zionist narrative through a multilayered deconstruction of the story of Jaffa oranges. It uses the Zionist takeover of