Trailer for Gitai's film Kippur: at the edge of Civilization

Has anyone else seen this? The trailer blurs my vision too much, maybe I'll write some more later.

ping for more history on the Yom Kippur war. What happened?

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The Yom Kippur War

By Mitchell Bard

In 1971, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat raised the possibility of signing an agreement with Israel, provided that all the occupied territories were returned by the Israelis. No progress toward peace was made, however, so, the following year, Sadat said war was inevitable and he was prepared to sacrifice one million soldiers in the showdown with Israel. His threat did not materialize that year.

Throughout 1972, and for much of 1973, Sadat threatened war unless the United States forced Israel to accept his interpretation of Resolution 242-total Israeli withdrawal from territories taken in 1967.

Simultaneously, the Egyptian leader carried on a diplomatic offensive among European and African states to win support for his cause. He appealed to the Soviets to bring pressure on the United States and to provide Egypt with more offensive weapons to cross the Suez Canal. The Soviet Union was more interested in maintaining the appearance of detente with the United States than in confrontation in the Middle East; therefore, it rejected Sadat's demands. Sadat's response was to abruptly expel approximately 20,000 Soviet advisers from Egypt.

In an April 1973 interview, Sadat again warned he would renew the war. But it was the same threat he had made in 1971 and 1972, and most observers remained skeptical.

The War Begins

On October 6, 1973 — Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar — Egypt and Syria opened a coordinated surprise attack against Israel. The equivalent of the total forces of NATO in Europe were mobilized on Israel's borders. On the Golan Heights, approximately 180 Israeli tanks faced an onslaught of 1,400 Syrian tanks. Along the Suez Canal, fewer than 500 Israeli defenders were attacked by 80,000 Egyptians.

At least nine Arab states, including four non-Middle Eastern nations, actively aided the Egyptian-Syrian war effort.

A few months before the Yom Kippur War, Iraq transferred a squadron of Hunter jets to Egypt. During the war, an Iraqi division of some 18,000 men and several hundred tanks was deployed in the central Golan and participated in the October 16 attack against Israeli positions. Iraqi MiGs began operating over the Golan Heights as early as October 8, the third day of the war.

Besides serving as financial underwriters, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait committed men to battle. A Saudi brigade of approximately 3,000 troops was dispatched to Syria, where it participated in fighting along the approaches to Damascus. Also, violating Paris's ban on the transfer of French-made weapons, Libya sent Mirage fighters to Egypt (from 1971-1973, President Muammar Qaddafi gave Cairo more than $1 billion in aid to rearm Egypt and to pay the Soviets for weapons delivered).

Other North African countries responded to Arab and Soviet calls to aid the frontline states. Algeria sent three aircraft squadrons of fighters and bombers, an armored brigade and 150 tanks. Approximately 1,000-2,000 Tunisian soldiers were positioned in the Nile Delta. Sudan stationed 3,500 troops in southern Egypt, and Morocco sent three brigades to the front lines, including 2,500 men to Syria.

Lebanese radar units were used by Syrian air defense forces. Lebanon also allowed Palestinian terrorists to shell Israeli civilian settlements from its territory. Palestinians fought on the Southern Front with the Egyptians and Kuwaitis.

The least enthusiastic participant in the October fighting was probably Jordan's King Hussein, who apparently had been kept uninformed of Egyptian and Syrian war plans. But Hussein did send two of his best units — the 40th and 60th Armored Brigades — to Syria. This force took positions in the southern sector, defending the main Amman-Damascus route and attacking Israeli positions along the Kuneitra-Sassa road on October 16. Three Jordanian artillery batteries also participated in the assault, carried out by nearly 100 tanks.

Israel Recovers

Thrown onto the defensive during the first two days of fighting, Israel mobilized its reserves and eventually repulsed the invaders and carried the war deep into Syria and Egypt. The Arab states were swiftly resupplied by sea and air from the Soviet Union, which rejected U.S. efforts to work toward an immediate ceasefire. As a result, the United States belatedly began its own airlift to Israel. Two weeks later, Egypt was saved from a disastrous defeat by the UN Security Council, which had failed to act while the tide was in the Arabs' favor.

The Soviet Union showed no interest in initiating peacemaking efforts while it looked like the Arabs might win. The same was true for UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. (Waldheim's service with a World War II German army unit guilty of war crimes in the Balkans resulted in his being barred from entering the United States after his election as President of Austria).

On October 22, the Security Council adopted Resolution 338 calling for "all parties to the present fighting to cease all firing and terminate all military activity immediately." The vote came on the day that Israeli forces cut off and isolated the Egyptian Third Army and were in a position to destroy it.

Despite the Israel Defense Forces' ultimate success on the battlefield, the war was considered a diplomatic and military failure. A total of 2,688 soldiers were killed.

Israel once again proved its strength and leadership.

I didn't see this film as "anti-war." Seeing Israel come out ahead in the end, I said to a friend afterward, "Let this be a lesson to anyone in the future who thinks that fighting with people whose elder family members had been put in ovens is a good idea."

In an obvious anti-war sentiment, Gitai’s camera shies from nothing. We see severed limbs, misshaped bodies, and men struggling with feeble breaths in knee-high mud swamps. We see fear and chaos and moments of bonding that come as silent screams over witnessed horror. The realistic feel is enhanced by long, static camera shots, which make the scenes inescapable and multi-dimensional in terms of their emotional impact. This, after all, is a war movie about a unit of non-professional soldiers. They are disorganized, afraid, and for the most part unfit for the pure physical challenges of their situation. They are just average men, with regular jobs, girlfriends, and family histories. Their vulnerability paints a haunting picture of the destructiveness of war. The fact that we never actually see the invading army nor hear any political or patriotic rhetoric makes the exploits of the characters heartbreaking and deeply personal. They could be anybody, anywhere, at any war, and regardless of the outcome of the war, they will be forever scarred. --Craig Sones Cornell & Anna-Maria Petricelli of CinemaSense and CinemaSense.Com

The film is framed by a special kind of body painting, performed within a bohemian residence of some prosperity. The first colors we see, in tight composition, are those of the Israeli flag. More colors are added, turning the hue an ugly brownish-gray tone that retains a subtle hint of variance. The writhing illustration is interrupted by the wail of air raid sirens.

Although the tears came again and again while I had watched the trailer weeks before (which had happened to come on another disk) I sat somewhat distracted during the early part of the film. By the time I rented this, I found myself stoic until the very end.

However, there is a scene at the end where the Israeli doctors are working with a soldier, quietly talking to him to find out what kind of help he needs. As was the case throughout the film with the soldiers high and low, the medical professional was calm and collected, just trying to do his job and save a fellow human being.

Up until just before the last few scenes, it was clear that no one knew who would win the war. And in that western style hospital room, a Jewish doctor was ministering to another human being in resolute fashion, with utmost care and sensitivity, disregarding the possibility that the enemy could have been ready to burst through the doors.

The doctor once again drove home my original sense of Israel existing at the edge of an abyss.

I was eight years old when this war was fought. To me, it was grainy black and white footage of tanks quietly guarding retaken mountain passes in the heights and American TV talking heads discussing various opinions about whether or not Israel would stay.

Today, these are my brothers in arms. Today, I feel I should be ready to fight with them, for they are holding back an untold wave of darkness, much darker than the bluish-brown of the too-well mixed paint on a canvas that could represent western civilization's history.

Perhaps I was wrong about Gitai, but at least his argument holds no sway over my convictions.

In the classic Hollywood war film, great men lead others to seize the hill, take control, master the world. This is consistent with Americans' view of themselves as free agents, free to reinvent ourselves, free to remake the world in our image. In Gitai's film, everyone's fate is linked to everyone else's — and all are victims. Depicting war as chaos, he makes a powerful argument for peace. Gitai told Privett that he'd wanted to make this film for years but felt he could only after peace negotiations began, perhaps because he feared his sympathetic depiction of Israeli soldiers would have been taken as supporting the Israeli right; some of Gitai's earlier films were censored in Israel on the grounds that they were too pro-Arab. Here he's depicted what could be almost any war today. And by arguing that the characters' fates are intertwined and that no one is free to conquer the world, he not only links his characters to the Arabs, but all of us to one another. ---Fred Camper

I would like to see this movie. Was it easy to find in a video rental place?

Yes, but this video store is pretty good.