Filmmaker Eyal Sivan talks about his exhibit with over 100 testimonies given by the perpetrators of the Nakba.
Last month in Tel Aviv an exhibit with an unprecedented intention debuted. Curated by two prominent anti-Zionist Israelis, filmmaker Eyal Sivan and historian Ilan Pappe, "Towards a Common Archive" presents over 100 testimonies given by the perpetrators of the Nakba, the period between 1947 and 1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their land to create the state of Israel. The exhibit is hosted by Zochrot, the sole Israeli organisation dedicated to remembering the Nakba.
Sivan describes their project as racing against time, as it collects testimonies from the ageing generation that fought with the Zionist gangs. In the absence of a formal Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sivan envisages the perpetrators' historic testimonies as forming a basis for truth without which a future reconciliation could not occur. Yet despite the significance of the undertaking, the Israeli press has completely ignored the exhibit, save for one right-wing settler newspaper which disparaged it.
Charlotte Silver: You have drawn on the words of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi to argue that in any crime, it is the perpetrator who is the primary witness. Could you expand on this idea?
Eyal Sivan: I am interested in the traces of the perpetrator, because he can testify about the system. He is the one who can explain to us how it is done. I'm not talking about the narration of the perpetrator, nor am I talking about finding a regime of justification, rather I look for the way the perpetrator tells the story of what happened. I think there is strength and power in the fact that the perpetrator is speaking — and this is the thing you feel in the exhibition. The documentary tradition is one that gives voice to the victim. For a long time, I have wondered about the function of the victim and to what extent facing the victim is, in fact, a redeeming act. However, I am interested in interrogating the spectator, to ask him the question: what would you do? What are you?
CS: What have you found surprising about the testimonies you have collected?
ES: What I found fantastic is that all those people speak in the same way. They have a common pattern of discourse. What I found surprising is that they use common justifications, so they frequently use the sentence, "We did to them what we thought they would do to us." I was also very surprised that they would contradict themselves without any problem. The third thing I found interesting is that each one of the soldiers can tell you at least one story of a crime, a thing that he found unpleasant, of what they call an "exceptional" moment. But all of them can tell you an exceptional event.
Charlotte Silver is a journalist based in San Francisco and the West Bank. — Al Jazeera, 12 novembre 2012.