The famous director, born to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, gave his take on the conflict between Israel and Hamas on Monday November 6 on franceinfo.
“What Hamas did is unforgivable, and at the same time, only forgiveness can make everything right”, declared this Monday on franceinfo in Le monde d’Élodie, director Claude Lelouch. With a Catholic mother and a Jewish father, the filmmaker had to flee the Gestapo during the Second World War in his youth. To protect him, his mother hid him in cinemas.
It is in this context that Claude Lelouch encounters the 7th art. The filmmaker looks at this historic conflict from the perspective of an 86-year-old man: “Today we need to understand that we are made to get along”, he said. While the risk of conflagration is more and more serious in the region, the author ofA man and a woman believes that the actors in the conflict behave like “spoiled children” who deserve “a little kick in the ass”.
franceinfo: What is your view on the conflict between Hamas and Israel?
Claude Lelouch: I think this will all end well. I believe in the positive. The “yes” always prevailed over the “no”. All the great catastrophes of humanity have allowed us to progress. What Hamas did is unforgivable, at the same time, only forgiveness can fix everything. Forgiveness is the aristocracy of intelligence. Today we need to be in this dynamic and we must start immediately with an urgent ceasefire. This is the first thing to do and then see how we can forgive each other for all our faults.
How do you experience the increase in anti-Semitic acts around the world?
It’s a constant scenario, I’ve experienced anti-Semitism my whole life. I was not a victim of it. My mother was Catholic, my father was Jewish. I went to the synagogue as much as I went to church. And so, if you like, it’s the same story. All religions tell the same story. What changes is the staging. This scenario creates terrible problems. Today we need to understand that we are made to get along. Too many gifts kill the gift. We have too much of everything today, we are super spoiled kids. We behave like spoiled children. The problem is that our whims and our ego cause a lot of deaths, cause a lot of injustice.
Do you still have a glimmer of hope?
Once again, I am positive. Abscesses must be burst. That’s it, they’ve burst the abscess. Now we have to take advantage of this burst abscess. It’s true that we have never, ever been confronted with such an ambiguous, difficult situation. We see this very clearly with everyone’s comments. Everyone contradicts themselves, everyone blames each other. We are spoiled children, and at some point, spoiled children have to give them a little kick in the ass.