Our lives get nourishment from our meeting certain persons. One such was professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom I discovered some years ago, and rediscovered last year at a time when I was trying to understand what motives led the Israeli government to conceive the strategy of accumulated imprisonment that the occupation is: imprisonment within the territories, in the cities, in the houses; imprisonment of political power and of the mind; imprisonment through oppression, humiliation and denial; imprisonment of all forms of culture; geographical imprisonment, in jails, under tents; imprisonment in the status of terrorist, based on manichean and manipulative representations. These elaborate forms of destruction of a population through the putting in place of imprisonment within imprisonment are what the occupation really is.
A closer look at this illegal occupation will show how alarming the situation is not only in the occupied territories and among the Arab Israeli population, but above all within an Israeli society which hides behind the democratic values which the state claims it represents. Democracy cannot be upheld by preventive, defensive policies of elimination and of selection based on racial, religious and economic criteria.
On a shelf in my library I came upon a film by Eyal Sivan, whom I had met some time before: Itgaber, a conversation with Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1994. It cleared things up for me, opened new avenues: “The purpose of democracy is to limit the authority of the state to the indispensable minimum. […] the state of Israel today is founded on one value, to impose Jewish domination by force on the whole country and on the other people living in that country. […] That is a consequence of an objective fact: the state of Israel today is a colonial power.”
All the young people who refuse to serve in the territories strengthen therefore the meaning of democracy and uphold the basic values of humanity. These women and men, who dare use their critical faculty to keep their society from self-destruction, are so many flaws in the Israeli system of repression. In 1994, Leibowitz thought the 160 refuzniks were heroes. Insubordination is heroic, heroism consists in resisting one's impulses and natural inclinations.
Eyal Sivan is one of these “flaws”, he refused to serve. He uses his experience with images and words in the service of peace by putting together a film which will enable its spectators to apprehend thought in action. In it, they will see Yeshayahu Leibowitz think aloud, go off in the wrong direction, correct himself, bounce from word to word, build up—without hatred or violence—a case against his country's colonialist repressive policies, as he states repeatedly, he merely registers facts.
Let us hope, though, for the sake of the Palestinian people and of the humanity of Israeli society, that this particular struggle will end.
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Source : Mireille Mendès-France — Rencontres Palestiniens/Israéliens, «Que peut le cinéma ?», février 2003