Censored Voices review: Veteran Israeli soldiers revisit the horrors of Six-Day war

History, we are told, is written by the victors, but as Mor Loushy’s fascinating document demonstrates, conquerers do not always sing from the same hymn sheet.

In 1967, in the weeks after Israel’s ‘Six-Day War’, a group of young kibbutzniks, including the author Amos Oz and his editor Avraham Shapira, collected audio interviews with soldiers. The men had returned home to victory parades and jaunty Eurovision-friendly pop songs celebrating their victory.

But the men did not feel much like celebrating. Until now, only 30 per cent of their heavily redacted testimonies have been released.

In Censored Voices, the soldiers, now older gentlemen, sit down to listen to audio interviews featuring their younger selves. They occasionally pass comment or raise an eyebrow or sorrowful smile, closely framed by cinematographers Itai Raziel and Avner Shahaf.

The returning “heroes” were and are adamant that they are nothing of the sort. One is dismayed that he can lament the death of an Egyptian officer yet continue to shoot like ‘it’s a game’. War is likened to summer camp, when being “a hero meant hitting harder”.

Another, for whom the second World War is a fresh memory, likens the displacement of the broken vanquished to the Holocaust. There are pertinent military and moral questions: “Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defence purposes?” and some theological ones: “Judaism does not sanctify places, including the Temple Mount” and “People are what counts not rocks”. Almost 50 years later a veteran still would trade the Walls of Jerusalem for a fallen comrade.

Censored Voices, which was executive produced by Super Size Me's Morgan Spurlock, is accessible and educative. With a nod to Krapp's Last Tape, the presentation of the material is hardly radical, and yet the film's nuanced depiction of the Israeli Defence Forces – a group that are traditionally lionised or demonised – is not like anything we've seen before.