One of the worst-kept secrets of any nation-state is that war takes a devastating psychological toll on those who fight it, to the extent that the only reasonable course of action is to avoid going to war in the first place. Mor Loushy's Censored Voices allows Israeli soldiers who fought in the Six-Day War of June 1967 to speak via recordings they made in the three weeks immediately following the conflict. The "censored" part refers to the Israeli Defense Force having suppressed 70 percent of the recordings at the time; of course, there's already controversy about to what extent any censorship actually happened, but that's less important than the power of these oral histories as the men talk about the horrors that were still fresh in their mind. The accompanying visuals are largely archival footage, but more effective are the contemporaneous, patriotic war songs juxtaposed with the men's descriptions of the atrocities they witnessed during that very bad week. One soldier in Censored Voices ruminates on how seeing Arab refugees leaving Jericho reminded him of the displacement his family experienced during World War II, while another realizes that their participation in this brief and much-celebrated new war only made a bad situation worse. It's no wonder the military would want to keep these voices silent.
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