On 7 October 1973, the day the Yom Kippur War broke out, Why Israel is presented for the first time at the New York Festival. This is the first film by Claude Lanzmann, a well-known French journalist and intellectual, who was 47 years old at the time.
The beginnings of the creation of the film began twenty years earlier, when in 1952, Claude Lanzmann was sent by the newspaper Le Monde in Israel in order to write an article on this new country then under construction. On his return, he shared his feelings with Sartre and Beauvoir: “I had met a whole world there, a religion and age-old traditions, a people in their own way about history, despite pogroms, persecutions, holocausts.”
Lively, bursting with claims in the face of the discovery of this new Jewish state, Lanzmann was then unable to summarize his experience and did not finish his article for Le Monde. Under the advice of Sartre, he sketched the writing of a book but abandoned it a hundred pages later.
Over the years, Lanzmann deepened his knowledge of the country by returning there several times. In 1967, he spent a long time in Israel in order to prepare for Modern Times, a thousand-page special issue devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Arabs agreed for the first time to appear with the Israelis in the same publication.
Twenty years later, this unrealized report, this aborted book, long years of experience and maturation have become Why Israel.
How does Israel, in the person of the Israelis, perceive itself? What are its political and religious foundations? Where do its inhabitants come from? Claude Lanzmann gives a voice to city residents, settlers, Zionists, Zionists, soldiers, kibbutzniks, two professors, a banker and a dockworker, Russian immigrants and Mizrahim people... He makes us experience first-hand the multiple facets, sometimes contradictory, of Israeli society.
Although the film's preparation and production period proved to be long and arduous due to a lack of resources, the shooting of Why Israel happens relatively quickly because the director says “he knows exactly what he wants to transmit”. In it, he shows, without propaganda or Manichaeism, the achievements and contradictions of the Israeli nation in the process of being forged. Through the film, we find two metaphysical leitmotifs: the contradiction between normality and the anomaly of the existence of a Jewish state as well as the endless or unanswered question perhaps: “Who is a Jew? Who is a Jew? ”.
The film received good critical acclaim in France and Israel. Especially with the Israeli government since it is after having seen Why Israel that Aluf Har Even, head of department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, summons Lanzmann to congratulate him and instill in him the idea that will make the director world famous: to shoot a film about the Holocaust, a film embracing the event in its totality and magnitude, a film from the point of view of Jews: Shoah.
