When I saw Claude Lanzmann’s movie “Shoah”, I was struck dumb. It was in 1991, at the house of an American Jewish doctor called Sam Horovitz who had decided to return to the Promised Land and had taken up residence in Ramat Aviv. The guy was a model of courtesy and good nature. He called me up to discuss an article of mine about Umm Kulsoum’s song “Ahl al-Hawa” that had been published in Kol Ha’ir. Sam and his wife Kate were lovers of Arabic music and regularly attended video-screenings of Egyptian movies. He called me and we met more than once. He declared his admiration for my articles, with their openness towards Arab culture, and said he’d never met another Jew so open to the culture of the region.
He asked me to explain oriental musical modes and the concept of the quarter-tone, and I was astonished by his love of Arabic culture. He said he’d read Diary of a Country Prosecutor by the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al-Hakim, translated into English by Aba Eban (sometime Israeli minister of foreign affairs), and had fallen under the spell of that writer, who had managed to present the social issues of the poverty-stricken Egyptian countryside in the form of a detective novel. He had daring ideas on the necessity of Israel’s integration into the Arab region and showed sympathy for the cause of the Palestinian refugees living in wretched camps. Once, after a long discussion over coffee, I told him I wanted to ask him a question but was hesitant to do so and afraid of upsetting him.
I asked him why he had gone there. “You love Arabic culture but Israel is a project with a Western bent that despises the culture of the country’s original inhabitants, so why did you come here?”
He answered me that he’d come because of Claude Lanzmann and spoke at length about the genius of that great leftist man of culture, friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He said Lanzmann’s movie “Shoah” had changed his life and was one of the reasons for his adoption of his Jewish identity and his decision to return to the Promised Land.
“Lanzmann was the portal to my identity. Umm Kulsoum, though, is the magic of the East that captivated my heart when I came here.
“Have you seen the movie?” he asked me.
“No. I’ve heard of it, but the hype here in Israel made me reluctant to go and see it. I don’t like blockbusters.”
“This time, you’re wrong,” he said, and he invited me to his house, where I spent six hours transfixed in front of the small screen witnessing savagery in its most extreme manifestations.
“I’m bowled over,” I told Sam.
A movie unlike any other, stories unlike any others, and one tragedy giving birth to itself inside another.
Despite Lanzmann’s Zionism, his peacock-like personality, and his later movie “Tsahal”, in which he glorifies the Israeli army with a blind partiality informed by a loathsomely romantic attitude towards an armed force that hides its amorality under claims of morality, my admiration for “Shoah” has never gone away. I regard it as a humane work in which the content is greater than the form, and one that succeeds in telling what cannot be told.
Nevertheless, I feel perplexed when faced by fate’s coincidences and try to find an explanation for them, which I cannot. The coincidence of my meeting with Murad is understandable and logical: falafel, hummus and nostalgia led the seventy-year-old to the Palm Tree restaurant. But what possessed Claude Lanzmann to bring a group of Holocaust survivors and men who’d worked in the Sonderkommando teams to the Ben Shemen colony, just outside Lydda, to tell of their suffering when burning victims, victims who were of their own people? We may be sure that Lanzmann was unaware of the existence of a Palestinian ghetto in Lydda. Even if echoes of the great expulsion of 1948 ever reached him, it’s certain that, if he’d had to choose between it and the stories of the Nazi Holocaust that he decided to tell in his movie, he would have granted that marginal event no consideration. All that is understandable — or, let us say, something that I try to understand, having drunk that experience to its dregs, and adopted the identity; indeed, at one stage of my life I believed I was Jewish, the son of a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, my recall of scenes from that coincidental event fifteen years before my encounter with Murad al-Alami, who witnessed the transformation of the Palestinian youth of the ghetto into a new form of Sonderkommando, shook me to the core.
Why did Claude Lanzmann bring the Jewish men of the Sonderkommando to Lydda?
And would the Franco-Jewish writer and movie-maker have been able to imagine a possible encounter between those poor men and Murad and his comrades, who carried out the burning of the corpses of the people of Lydda in obedience to the orders of the men of Tsahal?
I have no idea, but what makes me angry is that no one confronted the French director with this truth, which was known to all the youth of the Lydda ghetto. Maybe the tragedy has to remain enveloped in silence, because any discussion of its details would disfigure the nobility of that silence.
Murad was right to be silent.
Murad’s silence resembles that of Waddah al-Yaman. Now I understand why Murad severed all ties with me and why Waddah al-Yaman rejected my attempt to identify with his story.
It’s the story of the sheep that was driven to slaughter and never opened its mouth.
That is the story of the children of the ghetto.
I don’t want to draw a comparison between the Holocaust and the Nakba. I hate such comparisons and I believe the numbers game is vulgar and nauseating. I have nothing but contempt for Roger Garaudy and others who deny the Nazi Holocaust. Garaudy, who walked the tightrope of ideology from Marxism to Christianity to Islam and who ended up a mercenary at the doorsteps of the Arab oil sheikhdoms, committed the crime of playing with numbers, reducing that of the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis from six million to three million. No, Monsieur Garaudy, in the Holocaust everybody died, for whoever kills one innocent person is like him who kills all humankind. As it says in the Mighty Book, Whosoever slays a soul not to retaliate for a soul slain, nor for corruption done in the land, shall be as if he had slain humankind altogether.
That said, what is the meaning of the chance encounter of these two incidents? Did they meet so that the banality of evil, the naïvety of humankind and the insanity of history could be laid bare?
Or does their encounter point to the apotheosis of the Jewish issue at the hands of the Zionist movement, which transformed the Jews from victims into executioners, destroyed the philosophy of existential Jewish exile and, indeed, turned that exile into a property of its Palestinian victims?
I swear I have no idea! But I do know that I am sorrowful unto death, as Jesus the Nazarene said when he beheld the fate of humankind in a vision.
Translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies