On October 7, 1973, the day the Yom Kippur War broke out, Why Israel premiered at the New York Film Festival. It was the first film by Claude Lanzmann, a renowned French journalist and intellectual, then aged 47.
The beginnings of the film's creation began twenty years earlier, when in 1952 Claude Lanzmann was sent by the newspaper Le Monde to Israel to write an article on this new country then under construction. On his return, he shared his feelings with Sartre and Beauvoir: "I had encountered a whole world there, a religion and age-old traditions, a people in its own way the subject of History, despite pogroms, persecutions and the Holocaust."
In the throes of the discovery of this new Jewish state, Lanzmann was unable to condense his experience and never completed his article for Le Monde. On Sartre's advice, he began writing a book, but abandoned it a hundred pages later.
Over the years, Lanzmann deepened his knowledge of the country, returning several times. In 1967, he made a long visit to Israel to prepare a special 1,000-page issue of Les Temps Modernes, devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which Arabs had agreed for the first time to appear alongside Israelis in the same publication.
Twenty years later, this unrealized reportage, this aborted book, long years of experience and maturation have become Why Israel.
How do Israelis see themselves? What are its political and religious foundations? Where do its inhabitants come from? Claude Lanzmann gives a voice to city dwellers, settlers, Zionists, soldiers, kibbutzniks, two teachers, a banker and a docker, Russian immigrants and Mizrahim... He lets us experience first-hand the many, sometimes contradictory facets of Israeli society.
While the preparation and production of the film proved long and laborious due to a lack of resources, the shooting of Pourquoi Israël went relatively quickly, as the director says he "knows precisely what he wants to convey". Without propaganda or Manicheism, he shows the achievements and contradictions of the Israeli nation in the making. The film contains two metaphysical leitmotifs: the contradiction between the normality and abnormality of the existence of a Jewish state, and the unanswerable question: "Who is a Jew? Who is a Jew?
The film is well received by critics in France and Israel. Notably with the Israeli government, since it was after seeing Why Israel that Aluf Har Even, department director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, summoned Lanzmann to congratulate him and inspire him with the idea that would make the director world-famous: to make a film about the Shoah, a film embracing the event in its totality and magnitude, a film from the point of view of the Jews: Shoah.
