In February 2004, French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan filed a libel suit in the Paris courts against philosopher Alain Finkielkraut. The previous year, Sivan, working with Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi, had released Route 181: Extracts from a Palestinian-Israeli Journey — a four-and-a-half-hour travel documentary tracing what remains, in the memories of the landscape and its inhabitants, of the violent expulsion in 1947-1948 of some three-quarters of a million Palestinians from the territory that would become the state of Israel. The film had been aired on the European cultural television channel Arte in November 2003, and a few days later Finkielkraut was interviewed on the French Jewish radio station RJC, where he launched an aggressive critique of the film, arguing that its entire meaning rested on a false analogy between Israel's 1948 war of independence and the Nazi Holocaust, that the film was a "call to murder," and that Sivan himself was representative of "Jewish anti-Semitism."
The case came to trial on 23 May 2006 at the Palais de Justice, Paris. To testify on his behalf, Finkielkraut called on the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann; historian and former Israeli ambassador to France, Eli Bar-Navi; and Anny Dayan, a cinema studies professor. Sivan called two left Israeli intellectuals, philosopher Adi Ophir and film theorist Haim Bresheeth, as well as Parisian publisher/activist François Maspero.
Finkielkraut's accusation of plagiarism turned around a reading of one of Shoah's most celebrated sequences, in which Lanzmann interviews a survivor named Abraham Bomba, whose task in Treblinka was to cut the hair of Jews before they were led into the gas chambers, filmed as Bomba cuts hair in a Tel Aviv barbershop. There is a barber in Route 181, too: a Palestinian barber in the former Palestinian town of Lod, filmed recounting the scene of a massacre that led to the expulsion of most of the town's Palestinian residents in 1948. For Finkielkraut, the quotation was a hint that the film equated the expulsion of the Palestinians with the Shoah, and hence "a genocidal intention to kill if not all then most of the Jewish Israelis."
Finkielkraut's attack came in the context of a series of attempts to stop Route 181 from being shown in France, including a successful lobby against screening the film at the Pompidou Center's 2004 Festival Cinéma du réel — a censorship protested by more than six hundred people, including Jean-Luc Godard, Tzvetan Todorov, and Étienne Balibar. Although the presiding judge rejected Finkielkraut's conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, he dismissed Sivan's petition. In the wake of the trial, Arte decided to cease commissioning films from Sivan on Middle East affairs, and he lost his teaching position at CLEMI. Sivan appealed the decision in February 2007.
We asked Sivan about Shoah, the barbers, partition, and history. For him and Michel Khleifi, it was not a matter of "comparing" the Shoah and the Naqba, but of seeing them as historically continuous, part of a single historical process extending across the decade between 1938 and 1948. "It is shocking for a Frenchman, but frequently evoked in Israel," said Sivan. "The Naqba of the Arabs of Palestine and the Shoah of European Jews are two sides of a single Holocaust — ours…"
"Abraham Bomba was staged!" Sivan told us. "He was no longer a barber when he was interviewed, and three times during the interview he begs Lanzmann to stop. But Lanzmann believes that it is the victims who should bear the 'duty of memory.' I believe that this duty should be the perpetrators'." Sivan — who had earlier, with Rony Brauman, re-edited the footage of the 1961 Eichmann trial into a portrait of the banal professional "specialist" — explained that his project was "to treat the actors in a crime as bearers of the capacity both to witness and to reflect on it, and as the ones who have a 'duty of memory.'"
"I am as responsible as they are," Sivan said of the Israelis he filmed. "The problem is that we Israelis must take responsibility for the deeds of our parents, deeds for which they refused to take responsibility. In the eyes of Lanzmann or Finkielkraut, if they acknowledge the crime of 1948, then Israel does not have the right to exist." For the citizen, he said, the experience of partition can only issue in a sense of the inevitability of sharing: "We share the history of the land, we share a memory of the Naqba/Independence, we share a destiny. This is a basis for thinking equality."
Source : Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman — Cabinet, at Documenta 12, 08.09.2007