The Specialist, a 1999 documentary film, written and directed by Israelis Rony Brauman and Eyal Sivan respectively, offers a unique perspective on a spectacle which exponentially increased the world's comprehension of the Holocaust. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who once headed the German government department which coordinated the transport of several million European Jews to their deaths during World War 2, faced trial by the State of Israel at Jerusalem. Eichmann was charged with fifteen counts of crimes against the Jewish people, and his guilt was a foregone conclusion even before the hearings commenced. Nevertheless, Eichmann's trial challenged the status quo in respect to numerous political and ontological issues, and it raised quandaries in respect to how the State of Israel has conducted its affairs during its short history.
The second important inspiration for Sivan's film, after the trial itself, was Hannah Arendt's classic tome, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, first published in 1963. Sivan acknowledged that Eichmann in Jerusalem constituted the basis for The Specialist within its opening credits. Sivan, born in Israel in 1964, perceived parallels between the way in which the Nazis had treated the Jews of Europe and the treatment of Arab Palestinians by the State of Israel. "I grew up in Israel under the memory of the Shoah and its lessons," Sivan has said. "In 1989, during the first Intifada, I was living in Jerusalem, just opposite a Palestinian village. One day, there were shots, then attempts at escape and a launching of tear gas. There was a wind, and the gas entered through our open window. My mother closed it and cried. She said, 'Now I understand why German neighbors closed their windows.'"
The Specialist is a compilation of footage of Eichmann's trial, originally captured by Capital Cities under contract from the Israeli government. In creating the film, Sivan faced the challenge of condensing some 350 hours of footage into a two-hour film. Critics have accused Sivan of manipulating the messages contained within the footage, especially in relation to the testimonies of survivors such as the Vilna Ghetto fighter Abba Kovner.
Sivan agreed with Arendt's proposition that the State of Israel had ulterior motives for placing Eichmann on trial. As most of the archival footage available entailed Holocaust survivors testifying against Eichmann, Sivan and Brauman made a deliberate effort to shift the balance by allowing Eichmann to explain himself at length — which is why the vast majority of the film focuses on Eichmann and the way in which he perceived his own place within the Nazi hierarchy.
The notion of administrative evil is a significant feature of both Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Specialist. Sivan and Brauman develop Arendt's thought on administrative evil by featuring Pinchas Freudiger, who had headed the Hungarian Judenrat, showing that despite the fact that Eichmann performed the role of an office manager, the consequences of his actions were far from banal.
It is worth noting that both Eyal Sivan and Hannah Arendt have been accused of being opponents of Zionism. "For him, Israelis are the Nazis of today, and the Palestinians, the Jews of today," the documentarian Claude Lanzmann said of Sivan in 2006. Sivan has directed a number of films which express opposition to the manner in which Jews have treated Palestinians since the UN partitioned former British Mandatory Palestine in 1947. Sivan defended his right to criticise Israel in 2003 by suing a French radio personality who had slandered him on-air.
The concern which both Sivan and Arendt mean to promote through their works is to discuss the possibilities of the evil that can occur when normal people follow rules without considering them critically. For Arendt, Eichmann epitomised this danger; from Sivan's perspective, it is evidenced whenever a society tolerates cruelty committed in its own name — for Arendt in the machinery of the Third Reich, for Sivan in Israel's continuing treatment of the Palestinian people.
Source : MA thesis by Greg Diglin, 01.01.2008