Rencontré à Thessalonique, le cinéaste défend la solution d'un État commun.
It's March in Greece. The world famous Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan is attending the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, which is showing a retrospective of his many films. Along with Amos Gitai and Avi Mograbi, Sivan is known as a dissident among Israeli filmmakers. He tells DOX that he wants to provoke with his films, to get people to react. Sivan is used to opposition, but for each person who supports him, there are ten who criticise him. Many hate the free-speaking filmmaker from Israel's upper middle class. He has received a bullet in the mail with the message “next time, it’ll be one of these”.
Sivan grew up in Jerusalem with Zionist parents but moved to Paris in his twenties. He has made more than ten controversial documentaries and continues to make his mark through essays and as the editor of the political journal South Cinema Notebooks. His films are principally about the perpetrators — he believes victim films show only the consequences, not the causes. His aim is to leave his audiences uneasy. Since his first film, Aqabat-Jaber (1987), which he felt merely confirmed audiences’ desire to be empathetic humanists, he has wanted to disturb audiences with films like The Specialist: Portrait of a Modern Criminal (1999), which deals with the Israeli court case of Adolf Eichmann. Sivan claims the legal procedure was political, and comments that the six-month-long court case could have lasted three days, had it not been for Israel’s desire to give “evil” a face.
Claude Lanzmann has verbally attacked Sivan over Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel (2004), calling it “a bad film, fastidious, irritating, Holocaust-denying, profoundly immoral, and dishonest.” The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has called Sivan “a self-hating Jew.” Sivan responds: “It’s a struggle between Zionism and non-Zionism. I think there are many ways of making cinema, not just one. Lanzmann thinks of Israel in terms of fiction, I think of Israel in terms of reality.”
In Jaffa, The Orange’s Clockwork (2009), Sivan uses archive film to analyse images of the Palestinians forcefully driven out of Jaffa — only 3,000 remained out of the 180,000 who worked in the orange groves there. Sivan believes the current collaborators in Israel are those who avoid criticising: “When you come from an apartheid state, from the white upper class, with complete freedom to criticise, if you, as an intellectual or an artist, do not take the opportunity to criticise — it’s pure collaboration.” He criticises the image of Israel as the victim because it “legitimises” the attacks on the Palestinians.
On his film Izkor – Slaves of Memory (1990), which examines what the myth of the “chosen people” is doing to Israel’s young schoolchildren, Sivan says: “You have a memory that you were born out of Auschwitz; it’s your perspective, but also the idea that the only thing you can go back to is Auschwitz. Everything in Israel is done to go inside an apocalyptic vision — you don’t have a vision of life, but of destruction. […] We’re talking about a nation that has almost 200 nuclear bombs. If you think about Iran and Israel today … it’s about suicide.”
“Israel represents a moral credit of six million corpses facing Europe. But the interest today of the state of Israel is to keep Auschwitz as the centre of attention. That we are all victims, we were victims, we are victims, we will be victims. […] Memory is not good or bad. It can be the most horrible weapon, as we see how our memory is used by Israel, for example. Sometimes there is a need to forget. There is no duty of memory. The victim has a right to forget. If there is a duty of memory, it is on the side of the perpetrator.”
Sivan fights for a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine, in contrast to most political positions on the Middle East: “Since 1937 we have said to the Palestine question: ‘partition!’, 75 years. Everybody says this is the good solution. Come on, if it was such a good solution, how is it possible with 75 years with no solution?” In his film Common State – Conversations (2011), he lets 25 intellectuals, activists and academics, Jews and Arabs, discuss the one-state solution.
“The problem is not to have an identity — French, Arab, etc. — but to have one unique identity. Not to accept multiplicity, to refuse it. This is exactly what power can play with,” Sivan says of the solution. Asked how he sees a one-state solution falling into place, he answers: “I think it will have to be something that has to be imposed by force. […] I see it first as the end of the occupation. How? By an international force. […] In a common state, the government can only have members who are committed to this solution. Equal citizenship. The occupation must be abolished.”
Sivan ends by telling DOX — as to a Norwegian — that there is a need for a new Oslo Agreement: “There has to be a new Oslo Agreement that has to be about one space that has to be shared, and not partition between the two. […] What followed from Oslo was a catastrophe. Why? Because the Israelis were not honest. They didn’t come with an idea of how to build togetherness. They came with the idea of how we will separate.”
Source : Truls Lie, űA common state solutionű, DOX magazine, n° 94, été 2012.