ABSTRACT
There is a moment during Claude Lanzmann’s epic film history of the IDF,1
Tsahal, when an Israeli soldier describes the experience of travelling back to Tel Aviv from the Suez Canal, during the ‘War of Attrition’ with Egypt:
We were coming to Tel Aviv once [every] two months by air, by planes, landing in Tel Aviv in Ben Gurion Airport and by crossing Tel Aviv with our vehicles that took us home, we have seen something new, something that doesn’t understand, that doesn’t accept, that doesn’t know that a war exists only 30 minutes by flight by an aeroplane. All the Israelis along the streets, sitting in the cafés, drinking coffee, eating cakes, going to movies, to theatres, life was running on as [if] . . . there were not battles along the canal and it was so funny, something that we, the officers, couldn’t understand. How come we are fighting, we are eating, as I would say, shit day by day, killing Egyptians and the Egyptians are killing us, helping our friends that were wounded, going to the graveyards with our dead friends and here, in Tel Aviv, it was
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couldn’t understand, maybe, what we were feeling and, with a second thought, I would say maybe this is the strength of the Israeli nation. It is maybe ‘un-normal’ but this gives us the power to live in such a crazy country.
