[Peace-discuss] Israeli film on Sabra and Shatila massacre

[C. G. Estabrook]

	'Antiwar' film Waltz with Bashir is nothing but charade
	By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent

Everyone now has his fingers crossed for Ari Folman and all the creative artists 
behind "Waltz with Bashir" to win the Oscar on Sunday. A first Israeli Oscar? 
Why not?

However, it must also be noted that the film is infuriating, disturbing, 
outrageous and deceptive. It deserves an Oscar for the illustrations and 
animation - but a badge of shame for its message. It was not by accident that 
when he won the Golden Globe, Folman didn't even mention the war in Gaza, which 
was raging as he accepted the prestigious award. The images coming out of Gaza 
that day looked remarkably like those in Folman's film. But he was silent. So 
before we sing Folman's praises, which will of course be praise for us all, we 
would do well to remember that this is not an antiwar film, nor even a critical 
work about Israel as militarist and occupier. It is an act of fraud and deceit, 
intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how 
lovely we are.

Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry 
will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country's 
good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, 
gifted and tasteful - but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join 
Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened 
- so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who 
bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, 
and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite 
picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and 
self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need 
propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey 
"information"? We have this waltz.

The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the "we shot and we 
cried" syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to 
this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli 
self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization - another absolutely essential 
ingredient in public discourse here - and voila! You have the deceptive portrait 
of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.

Folman took part in the Lebanon war of 1982, and two dozen years later 
remembered to make a movie about it. He is tormented. He goes back to his 
comrades-in-arms, gulps down shots of whiskey at a bar with one, smokes joints 
in Holland with another, wakes his therapist pal at first light and goes for 
another session to his shrink - all to free himself at long last from the 
nightmare that haunts him. And the nightmare is always ours, ours alone.

It is very convenient to make a film about the first, and now remote, Lebanon 
war: We already sent one of those, "Beaufort," to the Oscar competition. And 
it's even more convenient to focus specifically on Sabra and Chatila, the Beirut 
refugee camps.

Even way back, after the huge protest against the massacre perpetrated in those 
camps, there was always the declaration that, despite everything - including the 
green light given to our lackey, the Phalange, to execute the slaughter, and the 
fact that it all took place in Israeli-occupied territory - the cruel and brutal 
hands that shed blood are not our hands. Let us lift our voices in protest 
against all the savage Bashir-types we have known. And yes, a little against 
ourselves, too, for shutting our eyes, perhaps even showing encouragement. But 
no: That blood, that's not us. It's them, not us.

We have not yet made a movie about the other blood, which we have spilled and 
continue to allow to flow, from Jenin to Rafah - certainly not a movie that will 
get to the Oscars. And not by chance.

In "Waltz with Bashir" the soldiers of the world's most moral army sing out 
something like: "Lebanon, good morning. May you know no more grief. Let your 
dreams come true, your nightmares evaporate, your whole life be a blessing."

Nice, right? What other army has a song like this, and in the middle of a war, 
yet? Afterward they go on to sing that Lebanon is the "love of my life, the 
short life." And then the tank, from inside of which this lofty and enlightened 
singing emanates, crushes a car for starters, turning it into a smashed tin can, 
then pounds a residential building, threatening to topple it. That's how we are. 
Singing and wrecking. Where else will you find sensitive soldiers like these? It 
would really be preferable for them to shout with hoarse voices: Death to the 
Arabs!

I saw the "Waltz" twice. The first time was in a movie theater, and I was bowled 
over by the artistry. What style, what talent. The illustrations are perfect, 
the voices are authentic, the music adds so much. Even Ron Ben Yishai's 
half-missing finger is accurate. No detail is missed, no nuance blurred. All the 
heroes are heroes, superbly stylish, like Folman himself: articulate, trendy, 
up-to-date, left-wingers - so sensitive and intelligent.

Then I watched it again, at home, a few weeks later. This time I listened to the 
dialogue and grasped the message that emerges from behind the talent. I became 
more outraged from one minute to the next. This is an extraordinarily 
infuriating film precisely because it is done with so much talent. Art has been 
recruited here for an operation of deceit. The war has been painted with soft, 
caressing colors - as in comic books, you know. Even the blood is amazingly 
aesthetic, and suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines. The 
soundtrack plays in the background, behind the drinks and the joints and the 
bars. The war's fomenters were mobilized for active service of self-astonishment 
and self-torment.

Boaz is devastated at having shot 26 stray dogs, and he remembers each of them. 
Now he is looking for "a therapist, a shrink, shiatsu, something." Poor Boaz. 
And poor Folman, too: He is devilishly unable to remember what happened during 
the massacre. "Movies are also psychotherapy" - that's the bit of free advice he 
gets. Sabra and Chatila? "To tell you the truth? It's not in my system." All in 
such up-to-the-minute Hebrew you could cry. After the actual encounter with Boaz 
in 2006, 24 years later, the "flash" arrives, the great flash that engendered 
the great movie.

One fellow comes to the war on the Love Boat, another flees it by swimming away. 
One sprinkles patchouli on himself, another eats a Spam omelet. The 
filmmaker-hero of "Waltz" remembers that summer with great sadness: It was 
exactly then that Yaeli dumped him. Between one thing and the other, they killed 
and destroyed indiscriminately. The commander watches porn videos in a Beirut 
villa, and even Ben Yishai has a place in Ba'abda, where one evening he downs 
half a glass of whiskey and phones Arik Sharon at the ranch and tells him about 
the massacre. And no one asks who these looted and plundered apartments belong 
to, damn it, or where their owners are and what our forces are doing in them in 
the first place. That is not part of the nightmare.

What's left is hallucination, a sea of fears, the hero confesses on the way to 
his therapist, who is quick to calm him and explains that the hero's interest in 
the massacre at the camps derives from a different massacre: from the camps from 
which his parents came. Bingo! How could we have missed it? It's not us at all, 
it's the Nazis, may their name and memory be obliterated. It's because of them 
that we are the way we are. "You have been cast in the role of the Nazi against 
your will," a different therapist says reassuringly, as though evoking Golda 
Meir's remark that we will never forgive the Arabs for making us what we are. 
What we are? The therapist says that we shone the lights, but "did not 
perpetrate the massacre." What a relief. Our clean hands are not part of the 
dirty work, no way.

And besides that, it wasn't us at all: How pleasant to see the cruelty of the 
other. The amputated limbs that the Phalange, may their name be obliterated, 
stuff into the formaldehyde bottles; the executions they perpetrate; the symbols 
they slash into the bodies of their victims. Look at them and look at us: We 
never do things like that.

When Ben Yishai enters the Beirut camps, he recalls scenes of the Warsaw ghetto. 
Suddenly he sees through the rubble a small hand and a curly-haired head, just 
like that of his daughter. "Stop the shooting, everybody go home," the 
commander, Amos, calls out through a megaphone in English. The massacre comes to 
an abrupt end. Cut.

Then, suddenly, the illustrations give way to the real shots of the horror of 
the women keening amid the ruins and the bodies. For the first time in the 
movie, we not only see real footage, but also the real victims. Not the ones who 
need a shrink and a drink to get over their experience, but those who remain 
bereaved for all time, homeless, limbless and crippled. No drink and no shrink 
can help them. And that is the first (and last) moment of truth and pain in 
"Waltz with Bashir."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1065552.html