By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 20, 2008
TEL AVIV -- Soon after war unexpectedly broke out on the border between Israel and Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Yariv Mozer, then a 28-year-old Israeli reservist, was called up to the front. With him, he took his rifle and his video camera.
As rockets rained down from Hezbollah guerrillas and as Israeli tanks furiously shot back into the distant hills, Mozer kept the camera tied around his neck with a shoelace.
He videotaped as his fellow troops scurried for cover from incoming fire, as ambulances bearing the wounded raced to the hospital, and as disenchantment grew over a misguided battle plan that left the soldiers feeling, as one tells Mozer's camera, like "somebody fooled us."
The result, a documentary that previewed this month, is offering Israel an unusual chance to remember a war that it would rather forget.
Less than two years after it was fought, the Second Lebanon War is regarded by many Israelis as an embarrassment for a country that has long taken immense pride in its military prowess. Unlike Israel's resounding victories of previous eras, this war's outcome was more muddled: Israel was not defeated, but it did not win, either.
"A semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technological advantages," a government-appointed committee concluded this year.
The war cost Israel 119 soldiers and 45 civilians; more than 1,000 people died in Lebanon, the majority of them civilians.
The fallout from the war included intense criticism of Israel's defense minister and army chief -- both of whom ultimately stepped down -- as well as a public campaign to force the resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
No wonder the Second Lebanon War is seldom discussed here anymore.
Mozer's film about the war -- shot, narrated and directed by one of its participants -- is an attempt to restart the conversation.
"My First War" debuted here in early April at the DocAviv Film Festival and will be distributed to theaters in coming weeks. It will be televised nationwide this summer for the second anniversary of the war.
Mozer, who owns a production company in civilian life and is a munitions officer in the reserves, said he did not originally intend to make a movie when he was called up. The camera was intended more for his own peace of mind, allowing him "to separate myself from the reality of war."
But the reality of war turned out to be far different from what he had expected. "I was really naive going into this war," said Mozer, who still looks the part of the soldier, with his muscular build and shaved scalp. "I thought that if the commanders were going to war, they must know what they're doing."
Instead, Mozer and his fellow troops received conflicting orders, inadequate protections and an inscrutable strategy. The goal was to stop the rockets, but Hezbollah's Katyushas continued to streak across the sky throughout the war's 33 days. Soldiers slept in the open in orchards that could turn at a moment's notice into fields of fire. Units were ordered into Lebanon, then hastily pulled back when they encountered the enemy.
While the war was ostensibly launched to save the lives of two Israeli soldiers who had been seized by Hezbollah, the troops that Mozer encountered expressed deep hurt at the lack of care that the military's leadership seemed to show for their lives.
"Somebody sent soldiers to die," a weary Capt. Reuven Saadon tells Mozer from the front seat of an armored Humvee as he drives back from Lebanon. "That is the clearest thing I can say."
The videotaped conversations with the soldiers came easily, Mozer said, because "I was wearing the same uniforms as they were."
In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Capt. Aharon Yechezkel returns to the front after attending the funeral of a cousin "who was unlucky enough to get a bullet in his armpit rather than the bulletproof jacket."
After the war, Mozer catches up with Yechezkel and finds that he has quit his high-tech job, stopped studying for an advanced degree and is afraid of answering the phone.
Instead, Yechezkel spends his time staring off the Tel Aviv coast, watching the waves of the Mediterranean lap Israel's shore.
Now back at work but still recovering, Yechezkel said in an interview that the transition to civilian life was made more difficult by the fact that most people did not want to acknowledge what had happened. "In Tel Aviv, where I worked, nobody registered the fact that the war was a war," he said. "It didn't have any impact."
Judges at the DocAviv festival commended Mozer's film for its "lively and intense" presentation and for capturing "moments that cannot be reconstructed."
Not everyone was a fan, however. Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian, said the film is a prime example of the "shooting and crying" mentality that has long been popular in Israel. He described it as, "Yes, we are crying because we are humans, but we continue to shoot because we don't have any other alternative."
The film, he said, does not adequately address the basic question of whether the war was necessary. "Shooting and crying doesn't help achieve peace," he said. "Israel wants to forget this war but is still preparing for the next one."
The military cannot have liked the film much, either, though an Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman said she had no comment on it.
In accordance with military policy, Mozer had the film reviewed by IDF officials before it was shown publicly. Initially, censors wanted to make significant cuts. "We had a lot of fights," he said. "They shouted and I shouted."
In the end, there were only two minor changes.
To Mozer, it was important to represent the experiences of his fellow soldiers as they actually happened, without any gloss.
"I don't think of this as an anti-Israel film. Not at all. I care about this country. I'm part of it," he said. "But Israel just moved to the next headline and forgot about this war. We really need to hear the voices of the people of this war, and to understand how traumatic it was for them."
Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
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