The bad thing about building very high walls is that you can no longer see what’s behind them. For those who invented them, that’s also the good thing: that the Israelis, for example, could live without paying attention to what was happening on the other side. But there was a conflict. It didn’t disappear because it wasn’t seen. Now that compassion for Palestinians is being attacked as if it were an endorsement of Hamas terrorism, it is good to remember that there are significant numbers of Israelis who stand up against the mistreatment of their neighbors.
The documentary The First 54 Years. Short Manual for a Military Occupation (on Filmin) is the work of Israeli director Avi Mograbi and is based primarily on the Israeli voices of former soldiers who are ashamed of what they had to do on Palestinian land. The story is completed by videos of some of these abuses against this second-class population, repeated from 1967 until just before 2021, when the film was released in theaters and had a greater impact abroad than at home. And we have the explanations of Mograbi himself, who coolly and somewhat sarcastically deconstructs the logic behind those who decide on the occupation. This helps to understand what is being done and, most importantly, why it is being done. To seize land, to make the future independence of the occupied territory unviable, to destroy the local social fabric.
Most of the former Israeli soldiers present, many and of all ages, work with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, which denounces human rights abuses in Palestine. There are stories of very preventable shootings where shots are fired; They say he lives it like a video game. And we see soldiers at the height of barbarism taking photos with the bodies of the Palestinians they killed as if they were trophies. There is also talk of arbitrary arrests, of beatings of those arrested, of the destruction of houses and entire rows of houses, of the usurpation of properties that had an owner.
Israeli soldiers pose with the body of a Palestinian, breaking the silence
Mograbi focuses on the deliberate intent to disrupt workers and sabotage their routines. These stories are irritating to say the least. This one about this old man who comes to his farm on a donkey and finds a military camp there at night. That of those children who wake up at dawn with their parents to be photographed and draw a map of their precarious home, without there being anything suspicious about it. The one about this carpenter and his apprentice who were tied to a tree all night for no apparent reason. That of these roads cut off or riddled with checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from moving within the West Bank turns into a Gruyere cheese whose holes are the illegal colonies. This from the neighbors who have an hour or two to pick up their things and say goodbye to their houses forever because the machines are coming to destroy them.
In a history spanning more than half a century, we experience moments of relative calm and very high tension, through the two intifadas and the Oslo Accords, through the creation of a Palestinian Authority that is prevented from exercising the promised autonomy , through the expansion of settlements due to the “separation” of the Gaza Strip, which has been under an oppressive blockade since 2007. Towards the end, one statement is revealing: the instructions to the military in the occupied zone make no mention of avoiding civilian casualties. On the contrary: the euphemism “cleanliness” is used to encourage doing everything against everyone. The dehumanization of others becomes even worse as the government now refers to those targeted for bombing as “human animals.”
They understand that the war we are witnessing now does not arise out of nothing, but when António Guterres made this very obvious statement at the United Nations, they jumped on him. They understand that too much resentment has accumulated over decades. The director of this film belongs to a pacifist left that was relevant in Israel, but is now pushed into a corner and hardly makes itself heard. Who believes in the two-state solution, which seems increasingly distant and utopian, when it is the only way out of this madness? That’s the bad thing about walls. How much would it cost to remove it after installing it?
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