Very interesting interview with the director of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann:
Interview: Anti-Semitism no longer shocks people
By DAPHNE MATTHIEU
Paris
Two decades after producing the groundbreaking documentary Shoah - an oral history of the Holocaust based on dozens of interviews - a pensive and disillusioned Claude Lanzmann watches France's and Europe's anti-Semitic resurgence with visible alarm.
"What do you want to know?" he asks with irritation, his critical eyes peering from behind a large glass desk strewn with papers and books. More books swamp a low rectangular table in the middle of his bright office overlooking the misleadingly happy scenery of Parisian rooftops.
The 78-year-old Lanzmann's irritation soon dissipates into a steady flow of sentences, punctuated by long silences during which his broadly built face seems to listen to an inner stream of thought.
A former colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre on the literary journal Les Temps Modernes - and now director of the prestigious bimonthly - Lanzmann has a typically Parisian way of evading questions he doesn't wish to discuss.
"I don't want to talk about that again! Haven't you read what I wrote about it?" he asks wearily after a question on the meaninglessness of the Holocaust.
Part of his office wall is covered with pictures of himself with famous personalities - from presidents Fran ois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac to philosopher and social essayist Simone de Beauvoir. A pile of pictures from the filming of Tzahal, Lanzmann's five-hour documentary about the Israel Defense Forces produced in 1994, sit casually on a corner of the bookshelf.
"This is Ariel Sharon," he explains, pointing proudly to a picture showing a smiling white-haired man wearing a leather jacket and holding a camera.
In 2002, you condemned in an article in Le Monde entitled the "Delirium of Anti-Israeli Hatred" what many see as a violent anti-Zionist sentiment currently common in France. Have things changed since then?
It did not change. Israel is still demonized in France. People refuse to see what is new in Israel, they refuse to accept that men can change. I was in Israel not long ago when [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon made his speech at the Knesset about the disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip. At the time, he took new and extremely strong positions. It was so new that a journalist from Haaretz, Yoel Marcus, wrote an editorial entitled "Run, Arik, Run!," in which he said that Sharon made a Churchillian speech and that he behaved as a Gulliver among the pygmies.
The French press did not pick up on Sharon's speech or when they did, they did not appreciate its significance. I think the significance of what Sharon said cannot be ignored. I myself have just written an editorial on the subject for Le Monde - about Sharon and [Palestinian Authority Chairman] Abbas. I think that something is changing and that a politician like Sharon could be the "Man of Peace" more than many others. One has to be prepared to see the changes. Instead, they have turned Sharon into such a monster. Their perception is so black and white that they are incapable of doing so.
I am also shocked that the French almost entirely ignored the extraordinary statements that Mahmoud Abbas made in front of the popular intifada committees in Gaza in December 2002, several months before he was designated as prime minister by Yasser Arafat. He said that violence had to end, that the killings were leading nowhere and that Sharon was the greatest leader that the Zionists had had since Herzl. He actually said that!
Where does this French attitude come from?
My film, Shoah, is screened in high schools following a decision from the Ministry of Education. I go to so-called "difficult" high schools where half of the students are from African or North African families. I explain to them what they are going to see, I screen Shoah and then I answer their questions. I see how moved they are.
I think it's a lot less difficult with these groups of people - but maybe I'm wrong because I haven't seen many of them - than with factions of the European Left. It is almost impossible to change the rigid thinking of the extreme and even moderate left-wing intellectuals. The bottom line in their views about Israel is that they don't condemn a policy - anyone has the right to condemn a policy, but it is not about that at all. What they condemn is Israel's right to exist itself. I know some of them who are ready to go back to the idea of a binational state. There are many people like that. They see the creation of Israel as the original sin and that we should put an end to the sin once and for all.
I'm sure that anti-Semitism exists among some Muslims living in France, but I think it varies; it is less deeply-rooted than among hard-line factions of the Left. Anti-Zionism flourishes in France. Zionism is identified with Evil. The expression "Zionist entity," used by the Arab propaganda, had a big impact here.
The Middle East is a center of Holocaust denial. How should this be confronted?
I find the new film about Hitler's last days - The Downfall - extremely dangerous. In this movie, Hitler is seen in his bunker bitching about the Jewish poison responsible for everything. This kind of theme is echoed by Arab propaganda which basically implies that Hitler did not do enough to exterminate the Jews. After all, they are the ones who treat people like Roger Garaudy [a French revisionist converted to Islam] like a liberator.
What does it mean to deny the Holocaust? The denial is motivated by the desire to continue the persecution. The bottom line is this: The goal of someone anti-Semitic is to kill the Jews. How do you fight against Arab denial of the Holocaust? Certainly not like in Western countries. But I don't know, I'm not Sephardic It has to be outlawed, like in France, that's all.
What should Israel do about its relations with Europe?
Israel is often blamed, and has always been, for its allegedly bad communications [policy] and for always doing things that put itself at a disadvantage. But Jews have learned something since the Shoah: to rely only on themselves.
A French radio station like "France Info," that people listen to all day long, offers them totally distorted news from Israel. You have to wait until the end of the news report, if they mention it at all, to understand that a specific Israeli military operation in the Palestinian territories was in reprisal to mortar shelling or to a bombing. They often don't mention the attacks on Israel, so it's always the same image of Israelis: They're killers, they like to kill.
It's true that Israelis are not bothered by this kind of reaction. But if they were bothered, they couldn't do anything.
Some settlers recently wore orange stars to protest Sharon's disengagement plan. What do you make of that?
I think it was pretty vain and ridiculous. In any case, they won't stay, there is nothing they can do about it. They're crazy. They had already painted swastikas on some walls in Mea She'arim. They go too far. But you should put yourself in their shoes. It's hard for them to leave. Many of them have a mystical link to the land, a "messianic complex," as Sharon put it.
Why is anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe?
There is no way to do away once and for all with anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is something totally different than any other form of racism. It has been on the rise for a long time now because barriers against it have been shattered. Anti-Semitism uses many different masks and anti-Zionism can be seen as one of them. It is like an illness, with periods of remission and hope. Then hope is betrayed and the illness returns. But one should not exaggerate, anti-Semitism can be fought and governments are fighting against it.
In France, an inter-ministry meeting is immediately organized each time there is an anti-Semitic act. It's like a Pavlovian reflex, an automatic reaction. Governments are more alert against anti-Semitism than they've ever been, but paradoxically, anti-Semitism has become something totally commonplace. It doesn't shock people anymore.
I remember in the 1950s how shocked people were when the anti-Semitic French newspaper of the 1930s, Rivarol, was published again in the name of freedom of speech. There were taboos, but these taboos, these safety locks, have been crushed.
The 60th anniversary of the death camps' liberation is approaching. How should it be marked?
It is an extremely important event that marks the end of the horror and barbarity. People do what they can with remembrance. What is extremely difficult is that you have to talk and keep silent at the same time. Very few means of expression allow this.
Things need to be taught again and again. Knowledge about the Holocaust is not something that is known once and for all. One always has to start learning about it again. People think they know, but they don't.
I think the role of Righteous Gentiles during World War II has been overplayed. I know many so-called righteous people who don't have a tree in Yad Vashem, didn't get decorations and don't want any. They are simply people who did their duty as human beings.
During the whole war I had fake identity papers. Municipal clerks took the risk to register me under false names. They didn't receive any recognition for that and they wouldn't even have understood getting something for it. They saw it as their duty. This whole remembrance frenzy about the Righteous is in my opinion a way not to face the brutality of the Holocaust.
Shoah is going to be screened on television in France for this 60th anniversary. The film is a burial place, a monument, the construction of a tomb. I was struck recently when, after a public screening of Shoah, a spectator told me, "Israel is a country for those living, your film is a country for the Dead."
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