'I Showed Palestinians the Footage That Israel Looted. They Started to Cry'

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

Ten years ago, Karnit Mandel paid a visit to the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archive in Tel Aviv. At the time, Mandel, an experienced archive sleuth, was working as a researcher on documentary films. One day, when she was hunting for old footage, she glanced over at the next table. Amid a hodgepodge of old drawings and documents that had clearly seen better days – her gaze happened to fall on a file folder on the messy table. Inside was a long list of items on a printout from a particularly ancient computer printer, bearing a Hebrew title that was hard to ignore: “War Booty Films.”

 
In response to Mandel’s question, a member of the archive staff explained that the file contained materials that had arrived from Beirut in 1982. She asked whether she could view the footage described in the list she saw; for that, she would need an official permit, she was told: You have to write a letter requesting to view the materials, the staffer said, and explain your reasons. Mandel, who at the time was an M.A. student in film school and was working on a seminar paper dealing with the visual memory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in addition to her other research work, was undeterred by the bureaucracy. She fired off a letter, explaining that she wanted to view the films for her academic research, and waited. And waited.

 
Failing to get a reply, she started to call the archive, relentlessly asking about the status of her request. “Every time I called, different people in the archive gave me different answers. Once I was told, for example, that they were not war booty films at all,” she relates. “I asked them how that could be, because, after all, the file says ‘War Booty Films.’ But each time I called and asked to view the footage, they turned down the request with a different excuse.”

Months passed before she obtained the coveted authorization. In retrospect, says Mandel, who is 44, she may have received the permit only because at that time visual historian Rona Sela was waging a legal battle against the IDF on the same subject. (In a 2017 interview with Haaretz, Dr. Sela related that when she asked to view certain films, she too encountered “difficulties, various restrictions and the torpedoing of the possibility of perusing the material.”)

 
A different reality

 
In the documentary film “Shalal: A Reel War” (shalal is Hebrew for “plunder”), which aired last month on the Hot 8 cable station and is available on Hot VOD, Mandel traces the saga she embarked on after accidentally coming across the folder. The film portrays the fog that shrouds the very existence of this plundered archive in Israel. It also allows a glimpse of some of the looted footage – shots that show a reality different from what Israeli propaganda has spouted over the years, and which may have provided a different perspective regarding events in this region and assisted the Palestinians in forging their historical narrative and national identity.

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

The footage Mandel saw, for example, includes images of the Jordanian village of Karameh, the site of a blood-drenched 1968 battle between the Palestine Liberation Organization and IDF troops. In an Israeli newsreel from that period that she found elsewhere, the IDF is portrayed as having achieved a relatively easy victory there: Israeli soldiers are seen distributing cigarettes to Palestinians, and not much more. However, the footage labeled as having been shot in Karameh turned out to have been taken in a different village. In actuality, the operation degenerated into fierce fighting, during which the IDF sustained heavy casualties (more than 30 killed and 160 wounded) – something that was only confirmed later when the documentation was allowed to be revealed to the public. But Prime Minister Levi Eshkol banned publication of any information relating to the operation in real time: It wasn’t until 1984 that it could be publicized. It apparently had been many years since anyone had seen the images in “the booty,” revealing a village in ruins, its houses demolished – a sight that makes clear that a hard-fought battle took place there.

Mandel: “I was shocked the first time I saw the material. I saw the footage from Karameh and it infuriated me that we had never seen it before: We Israelis, I mean – I’m not even talking about the Palestinians. For example, there is a shot there of a refugee camp [to which the village inhabitants fled after their homes were razed]. You see tents and people, mud and snow, a camp that looks just like the transit camps in Israel in the 1950s. And I had a definite feeling that this material needed to be made accessible to the public. In the footage I also found proof of the massacre in Khan Yunis [in the Gaza Strip by IDF soldiers in a November 1956 operation]. These are clearly materials of historical import.”

 
When seeking funding during the last decade for “Shalal: A Reel War” (co-produced by Mandel and Gil Sima, with the support of Hot 8 and the New Fund for Cinema and Television), the filmmaker says, she was asked repeatedly whether the footage would be of special interest. “All the time I kept getting asked what was sexy about this material, until at one point I said, ‘It’s not that I have [PLO leader Yasser] Arafat dancing around in his underwear.’” She adds, “From my point of view, the importance of the material goes beyond politics. I know I will be attacked as a leftist for this film, but I made it as a human being, simply because this footage is someone’s memories.”

In the early stages, Mandel relates, she worked on the film within the framework of Greenhouse, an initiative in which young documentarists from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe are guided in developing and producing projects.

 
“There were filmmakers from different countries including Jordan and Morocco, and among those in my group were two Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The footage I screened for them first was of Gaza fishermen in 1956, which I had found among the ‘booty’ – and they just started to cry. I asked them why, and they replied, ‘Simply because we’ve never seen this.’ That moved me deeply,” Mandel says, tears welling up in her eyes, too. “I just want people to see this.”

 
In the film, Prof. Mustafa Kabha, head of Middle Eastern studies at the Open University in Israel, says: “In this land there are different layers of history of different peoples. An attempt is being made to cover the layers of Palestinian memory and to erase them, but no attempt will succeed. The layer of memory will continue to peer out from under every carpet.”

Karnit Mandel.Credit: Rami Shllush

Urban legends?

 
In “Shalal: A Reel War,” Mandel is seen screening the films she found to Palestinians and Israelis, documenting their reactions, talking to them about the images – and trying along the way to figure out what happened to hundreds more reels of “booty” that the IDF brought to Israel from Beirut during the 1982 war, which she was not allowed to see and which she suspects are still hidden away in the archive. The archive staff wasn’t eager to cooperate or provide information on the subject. After long months, she finally got to speak with the archive’s director, Ilana Alon (who recently retired). Alon denied the existence of an archive of war booty. “We don’t have the Palestinian archive – it was returned after the Oslo Accords. The PLO archive is not in the IDF’s hands,” she states in a recording heard in the film. “Those are urban legends and they are untrue.”

 
Urban legends or not, this a far more convoluted tale than it appears to be at first. It begins with visual representation of a people’s national memory, which was snatched and has not been returned to its owners in the course of four decades. It continues with the army archive denying the existence of the war booty films, but at the same time having records of them and allowing the few people – like Mandel – who survive an intimidating bureaucratic obstacle course to view some of them. And part of the tangled tale also involves the dubious role played back then by state-owned Israel Television, aka ITV (now part of the Kan public broadcasting network).

 
In one segment of “Shalal: A Reel War,” reporter Ehud Yaari, at the time with ITV, is seen standing outside PLO headquarters in Beirut in 1982 and reporting that IDF soldiers have raided the building and are emptying it of documents, photographs and other materials, in order to transport it all to Israel. The main purpose of the operation was obviously to extract intelligence. But attached to some of the footage that Mandel was allowed to view was a form stating that the film had been transferred to video cassettes. The ITV logo appears on the form.

 
Mandel was puzzled: How could it be that footage converted from film to video by ITV was in the IDF archive? Seeking an explanation, she approached a range of people.

 
“I spoke with a famous Israeli director” – who did not want to be identified – she explains. “He told me that the footage had been taken for the documentary series ‘Tekumah’ [the 22-part 1998 series about the history of the State of Israel] on [ITV’s] Channel 1. An episode titled ‘Biladi, Biladi’ in fact contains several excerpts from the materials. But still, something felt not right, because the date on the documents that referred to the films being converted to video was far earlier than ‘Tekumah.’”

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

Then, just a few weeks ago, when Mandel’s film was already wrapped up, a message appeared in her email inbox that sheds light on the way things unfolded (perhaps).

 
Mandel: “Suddenly an Israeli who lives in the United States and had seen the film’s promo contacted me. He wrote: ‘I have something to tell you. I was Ehud Yaari’s soldier.’” The writer added that he had been serving in Military Intelligence at the time, and when all the plundered materials from PLO headquarters in Beirut arrived in the country, an agreement was reached: The IDF would make available all audiovisual materials to ITV, and in return the network would sort and catalog them properly. To that end, ITV hired the soldier, who says he speaks Arabic and that he did the work of viewing and cataloging the films.

 
She also looked for the hundreds of additional, lost war booty films in the ITV archive, but was unsuccessful. There, too, they insisted vehemently that the footage was not in their possession: “I spoke to all the researchers who worked on ‘Tekumah,’ and they all said the same thing: that there were hundreds of hours [of footage of Palestinians], tons of materials.”

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

A still from Karnit Mandel’s “Shalal: A Reel War.”Credit: Photographer unknown/PLO

The fate of the plundered films remains unclear. For their part, Palestinian film researchers, too, had never heard about them. Yaacov Lozowick, who until three years ago was Israel’s state archivist, appears bravely before the camera in Mandel’s documentary, and without referring directly to her work, asserts that “the archive’s role is to show the materials to the public. A very, very small core should remain classified. That core has nothing to do with concerns relating to the historical narrative. Materials must not be kept under wraps because ‘we don’t want part of the true story to become known,’” he says.

 
Kan’s response

 
The Kan broadcasting company stated in response: “The material never reached the [ITV] archive and is not part of the archive’s collections. The production of the series ‘Tekumah’ received material for an episode from the IDF archive. But it was not transferred to the [ITV] archive and certainly was not converted [to video].”

 
The Defense Ministry stated: “The PLO archive, which was taken as booty in the first Lebanon War, was returned to Palestinian authorities as part of the prisoner exchange deal in 1983. Over the years, the IDF and Defense Establishment Archive received other Palestinian booty that was taken by the IDF. Some of it was made available to the public. In general, the archive continually makes new material available, subject to the Archives Law and the requests it receives.”