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 "I could see myself in those kids who were carried in their
parents' arms, when my father carried me," the unidentified
soldier says on an audio tape in the documentary shown at the
Berlin International Film Festival.
"Perhaps that's the tragedy, that I identified with the other
side, with our enemies," the soldier continues.
The soldier's testimony, and that of dozens of others, was
recorded by authors Amos Oz and Avraham Shapira after Israel's
spectacular victory against overwhelmingly superior Arab forces.
"They (Oz and Shapira) felt when everyone was dancing and
celebrating, they felt that other voices are there and all the
fighters who came back from the war are broken but are not
talking about it," Loushy, whose film will be released in Israel
in May, said in an interview.
The book based on the tapes, "The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk
about the Six-Day War", was a best-seller in Israel, but Loushy
says it was never the whole story.
"They initiated the idea of making these conversations and it
took them two weeks in 20 kibbutzes all over Israel and then
they wanted to publish it as a book and the Israeli censorship
censored 70 percent of what they wanted to publish...but even
though it was very censored it was a very anti-war voice," she
said.
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The documentary shows some of the former soldiers today listening to
the tapes they recorded, but as the film unfurls, the speakers from
almost 50 years ago are not identified.
Instead, the viewer hears a soldier's testimony while seeing archive
footage of the war and its aftermath, interspersed with news
reports.
What comes through very clearly is that while the soldiers believed
the war was just, several of them had doubts about forcing the Arabs
out of Nablus and Jenin, and taking the old city of Jerusalem,
giving the then in many ways secular Israeli state access to potent
religious sites.
"Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defence purposes?”
one of the soldiers asks.
"They knew our future then," Loushy said. "They knew how this war is
going to complicate our life, they knew back then of this bloody
circle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if we stay in those
territories."
(Editing by Ralph Boulton)
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