An Israeli Soldier in the Battle for Truth

“My country is full of contradictions and volcanic eruptions,” says Israeli film director Amos Gitai. “We fluctuate between extremes. One morning you say peace is at hand and all problems will be resolved. The next day, it’s the apocalypse.”

Few eruptions in Israel’s 52-year existence did more to change the self-image of its people than the Yom Kippur War, the focus of Gitai’s latest film. The lightning triumph of the 1967 Six-Day War had convinced many Israelis of their own invincibility. The surprise attack by Egypt and Syria on Oct. 6, 1973, “shook the arrogance of our leadership,” says Gitai.

“As a people, we became much more aware of the fragility of our existence. We realized that military power is not enough, we must look for a political solution.”

Such views, and the movies and documentaries which dramatize his convictions, have made Gitai perhaps Israel’s most controversial filmmaker. “Kippur,” which opened Friday, follows the tradition of pressing his countrymen’s most sensitive nerves.

Recently, a British journalist described Gitai as “a director with a mission to tell the country of his birth the truth about its intolerances, its insecurities and its willingness to bowdlerize its own recent history.”

Gitai accepts the description, adding, “I have great compassion and passion for Israel, but I want it to remain as human as possible. I will never legitimize what Israelis may do wrong, just because I belong to them.”

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“Kippur” is not just vaguely autobiographical; it is a precise recounting of Gitai’s war experiences. The film opens as Weinraub (the last name of Gitai’s father, before he emigrated from Berlin to Palestine in 1935) walks through the deserted streets of Tel Aviv on Judaism’s holiest day, with muffled prayer chants echoing from behind the walls of small synagogues. Suddenly, the wail of sirens breaks the eerie street and radio silence. Weinraub jumps into his battered Fiat and, with a comrade, takes off for the Golan Heights to look for their combat unit.

In the chaos of the Syrian surprise attack, the two young men can’t find their outfit and link up with a helicopter rescue unit, ferrying wounded men and downed pilots from the front and behind Syrian lines.

With some of the repetitive relentlessness of the D-day invasion scenes of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” the camera fixates on the seven-man medical team as it extracts soldiers from burning tanks and crashed planes, agonizing over whom to save and whom must be left behind.

On the sixth day of the war, Gitai’s 23rd birthday, his helicopter is shot down by a missile, leaving two men dead and Weinraub/Gitai with a bullet lodged within a millimeter of his spine. His war is over.

But “Kippur” is more than a combat movie, and the title itself conveys layers of meaning. Most commonly, “kippur” means “atonement,” as in the Day of Atonement, which gave the war its name. The root word also alludes to the casting of lots, as in the Jewish holiday of Purim, and stands for the unpredictable chances of life and death in war. A third linkage of kippur is to “reconciliation,” says Gitai.

At a time when headlines report daily killings of Israelis and Palestinians, “reconciliation” is hardly the concept that comes to mind, but Gitai traces a psychological thread from confrontation to peace.

“The overwhelming feeling when you’re in war is not hatred, bravery or even fear, but of utter fatigue,” he says. “In this film, it’s not only physical fatigue, because you’re running and carrying people, but also emotional fatigue because you see such terrible things. That’s at the heart of my war experience.

“Wars come to an end not because of the wisdom of statesmen, but because everybody just feels wiped out. When enough people have died, they see the waste of it, they stretch out their arms and say, ‘Let’s do something else with our lives.’ ”

That, says the director, is the deepest meaning of “Kippur,” and in it lies the ultimate hope for peace between Arabs and Jews. “The final peace agreement, when it comes, will be hailed as a triumph of diplomacy, but it will have been dictated by fatigue,” says Gitai. “We are doomed to have peace.”

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Gitai is a stocky man with curly black hair, whose youthful face belies his 50 years and harrowing war experiences.

His father was an architect of the Bauhaus school, one of the Nazis’ first targets in 1933, and Gitai planned to follow in his footsteps. But after earning a graduate degree in architecture at UC Berkeley, he gravitated toward filmmaking, although he thinks his professional training still stands him in good stead. His academic background, he believes, helps him impose a certain structure and shape on diverse, and often contradictory, material.

He started his cinematic career in 1980, with a trilogy--a format he still favors--for Israeli television and almost immediately ran into trouble. In the three documentaries, “House,” “Wadi” (Valley) and “Field Diary,” “I tried to show that Palestinians have the same attachment to the land as Israelis,” he says.

The television executives refused to air any of the three films, according to Gitai, and so far only “Field Diary,” which was finally broadcast two years ago, has been seen by the Israeli public.

Gitai’s filmography now runs to 27 feature films and documentaries--including a 1997 film about his experiences in the war titled “Kippur: Memories of War”--and part of his most recent trilogy has been met with, as usual, controversy. Each of the three films sought to portray the character of one of Israel’s three main cities, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem segment, which opened in the U.S. early this year, is “Kadosh” (Holy) and is set in the city’s ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim quarter. It depicts the rebellion of an Orthodox wife against a stifling, hermetic society. “Kadosh” was bitterly criticized by many Orthodox Jews as showing a twisted picture of their way of life, but became the first Israeli entry in 24 years at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Produced for $1.5 million, “Kadosh” has also been one of the few Hebrew-language movies to make it commercially. “We didn’t threaten ‘Titanic,’ but we made some money,” says Gitai.

“Kippur,” which required a lot of military hardware, cost $4.5 million and is Gitai’s most expensive picture so far. It screened in competition in Cannes last May, and according to Gitai, about 3,000 people in the audience applauded as the credits rolled and then stayed quietly in their seats for a full five minutes.

The noted Egyptian director Yussef Shahine praised the film in his country’s press, a highly unusual occurrence, and Gitai hopes that Arab audiences will one day be able to view “Kippur” and recognize a mirror image of their experiences.

Supporters of the Israeli peace movement, among them Gitai, are frequently challenged to find activists on the “other” side who demonstrate in the streets of Cairo or Damascus against their governments’ anti-Israeli policies or make films critical of their societies’ transgressions.

“I have talked to Egyptian, Syrian and Palestinian filmmakers,” says Gitai. “It’s not easy for them, but I have found some with similar attitudes [to mine], who want to move away from their regimes’ simplistic propaganda positions.

“To me, cinema is not just a commodity to be sold like hamburgers, but it represents a form of dialogue,” he continues. “Beneath the surface, there is already an undercurrent of a cultural dialogue in the Middle East. For instance, Israeli music is affected by Arab music. When the time comes for a real peace agreement, it can’t be just a piece of paper. There must be, at the same time, a cultural dialogue.”