Darkness on the shores of Beirut. The luminous, eerie, animated sea is revealed only by three flares in the sky which unveil another three products of the same destructive force. An Israeli trio emerge from blackened sea and float in an almost dreamlike fashion to the beach. The one nearest to me turns his head and presents a set of lost, tortured features, far removed from the usual brutal indifferent masks which IDF soldiers done far too often. The face isn’t completely new though, I’ve gazed upon it before with curiosity, often taking the words of others on whether it should be dismissed or given a chance to flourish. Standing in hmv, grudgingly getting by doing what little Christmas shopping actually needs to be done, I enjoy the chance to be obliterated by my own thoughts while I gaze upon the graphic novel version of the Israeli animation film, “Waltz with Bashir”.
I first heard of the film on a special coverage on Al Jazeera which described it as an anti-war film with an alternative Israeli view on the Israeli defence force and its long and forgotten involvement in the massacres in Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon war. I enquired about the film with a few friends who mostly attacked the production with negative criticism, mainly recurring around the supposed “positive” picture it presented of the IDF and its involvement in Lebanon. I left it at that for a while until I approached the graphic novel version, deciding to curiously glance through it. The animation was simply stunning, all encompassing a dark, barely lit atmosphere as if those three flares on the cover provided the only light for the whole movie. I didn’t grasp much of the story since that would require reading the entire novel which I had neither the time nor energy to do. I skipped to the last page where I was reunited with the same tortured face on the cover, gazing hopelessly into the future, coming to terms at being stuck in a world he didn’t know existed, his world. Rows of dead expand down a narrow alley and on the next screen it switched from animation to reveal the real pictures of the massacre. Dead Palestinian men, women and children, buried in the rubble in the middle of a refugee camp.
That last page was enough to change my mind, the film may be biased, itself being from an Israeli viewpoint but there was no way it could be described as a positive depiction of the IDF. I didn’t purchase the novel but watched the original film in its entirety and was very much benumbed with the results. From a purely artistic point of view, the film is simply gorgeous. Often surreal and hallucinatory at times, the viewer often feels himself being drifted along, interrupted by brief, temporary moments of Satori before the concluding brutal withdrawal. Politically, analysis on the film proves to be a far more complex task. The IDF is never portrayed in a positive light but is certainly humanised. Much like the actions of American soldiers during the My Lai Massacre, much of the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the film were rooted down to fear. Upon landing on a beach, soldiers open fire at anything that moves including a civilian car, killing the family itself. While this is certainly no justification for killing civilians, it certainly does explain the numerous accounts in the modern world, where well disciplined troops break down and inevitably commit atrocities due, primarily to fear. My main criticism on the film is that it never portrays any intentional acts of violence of the IDF towards civilians in which there were plenty. It often hints on the barbarity of the army, indiscriminately bombing Lebanese cities, but these are removed and attention is focused mainly on Israeli fear and carelessness. It should, however, be understood that the story is told from the perspective of an Israeli soldier. Like most soldiers of an occupying force, they have little understanding of the political situation beyond the concept of a dehumanised enemy which the state constantly beats into their heads. Even then, however, the “enemy” is almost nonexistent in the film. Soldiers spend most of their time firing into thin air, bombing cities and destroying cars and flats. Despite this, the film is revolutionary in its sharp defiance of the blind patriotic, expansionist policies of the Israeli state and of the rising right wing views of the public.
Aljazeera reported that the Israeli government officially approved of the film since it clarified that Israeli soldiers didn’t carry out the massacres in Lebanon, as if that somehow cleared the blame from the shameless barbarity of the Israeli state and military. In fact, if anything, the film clarifies Israel’s direct involvement in the massacres. The IDF provided cover for the Phalange militia, fired flares at night in order to aim they carry out the atrocity and simply sat back and let it happen until morning where thousands had already been killed. There is a deep psychological explanation behind this presentation with soldiers in the film describing the camp as identical to the Warsaw ghetto. The film is directed and based upon Ari Folman, who had relatives in Auschwitz, presents his experience in the camps in the shadow of the holocaust, taking the metaphorical role of a Nazi, drawing comparisons with SS behaviour in the concentration camps and IDF behaviour during the massacres. Commentary, an American-Jewish magazine commented;
“As vilely anti-Semitic as it is to compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis, it is perfectly natural for Israelis to think of the Holocaust in certain situations, because they, unlike other peoples, still live in the Holocaust’s shadow."
I would agree that it is completely natural for Israelis to compare their experiences with that of the holocaust. The holocaust itself was the very least, a brutally soul-destroying event signifying the destruction of humanity in the blitz of the madness which defined the twentieth century. Comparing the actions, however, of the Israeli state and army to the Nazis as Anti-Semitic? A state founded upon the principle of a militaristic and expansionist ideology, created by immigrants with no historical connection to the land other than an abstract religious concept, excluding members of any other religious and ethnic group and routinely carries out ethnic cleansing and acts of brutality isn’t at all similar to the action of the Nazis? Sure, it’s not to the same scale but in essence, it’s the same thing. Does the history of brutal treatment towards the Jewish people render Israel immune from criticism?
Indeed, I’m more inclined to agree with the review by Haaretz which described the film as;
“Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful - but propaganda for portraying Israel and the IDF in a too positive light”
Politically, the film isn’t perfect, however if looked upon in context of the story, it does little to take the blame away from the behaviour of the Israeli military in Lebanon. Overall, it’s a piece of Israeli cinema history. Beautifully animated, humanely heartbreaking and in the end, further hope that ordinary Israelis may one day recognise the injustice of their government and realise that coexistence with the Palestinians is the only solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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