I am giving you all a homework assignment:  If "Waltz with Bashir" is still playing in an independent theater near you, see it. If not, sign up to obtain a copy when it becomes available on DVD in March.  

Using animation in the same way as Persepolis to tell a true and disturbing story, Waltz with Bashir is utterly gripping on two levels:  Most obviously, it is the story of one former Israeli soldier's painful excavation of repressed memories of his own, personal role in the shocking massacre that took place in the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The retelling of just what happened during those infamous two days is worth going out of your way to see -- as a stark, dig-at-the-conscience reminder that history has just repeated itself in a different yet all-too-familiar way in the Gaza Strip....while the world watched.  

  The animation by David Polonsky is worth seeing by itself. In this surrealistic image , Ari Folman describes a fantasy he had as a young soldier, of escaping from the horrors of war by floating away on a body of a goddess-like woman who had come to rescue him.

But the film's real importance, in my opinion, is as a broader, more universal exploration of why atrocities are committed in the first place -- in other words, why "normal" human beings can be induced to commit heinous acts (or to allow them to happen, as in the case of the Israeli soldiers who stood by while their Christian allies in Lebanon did the "dirty work") despite being "nice people" in their otherwise-routine lives.  Taking this theme a step further, creator Ari Folman depicts in a very personal, introspective way the impact on young men and women when they are drawn into these grisly wars by their leaders – both military and political – and encouraged to compromise their own evolving moral codes by obeying orders and supporting their comrades. 

And that is a crime that is being committed by governments against their own people around the world every day. (Think Abu Ghraib.) It’s also one that we as the broader society have yet to truly grapple with. As the Rolling Stone review of Waltz with Bashir put it: “It's a story about how the responsibility for atrocities tends to be passed from one set of hands to another, never resting, and how the impact of violence is also passed down, never resting. It's a story about what combatants on both sides have in common: we are human beings.”

The Story of Sabra and Shatilla (and the Parallels to Gaza Today)

Waltz with Bashir opens when a fellow former soldier recounts to Folman a recurring nightmare he has about an experience he had in the military. The conversation triggers Folman’s realization that he has blanks in his own memory of his experience in the army, when he was just 19. Unable to ignore those gaps once he is confronted with them, Folman talks to a psychiatrist friend about the meaning of his amnesia, and how to clear away the “fog” obscuring those lost months in his life. (Repressed memory -- also called "motivated forgetting" -- is one common symptom of post-traumatic stress syndrome.) His friend encourages him to seek out the truth by visiting others who had served with him in Lebanon, probing to learn what actually happened during his service and the role he had played. Gradually, as Folman tracks down and talks to his former comrades, he begins to piece together the big picture, and where he fits within it. And with the clearing of the fog came his own recurring nightmare.

To appreciate just what Folman began to realize, it’s important to understand the historical context. 

It was 1982, and the Israelis’ nemesis -- Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Oragnization (PLO) – were exiled in southern Lebanon. (Hamas did not yet exist; it was created later, with the “encouragement” of Israel so that it could serve as a counterweight to the PLO.)  Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin wanted to put an end to their “Palestinian problem” once and for all. The two hawks believed that by inflicting a decisive military defeat on the PLO in Lebanon, they would force the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to abandon their nationalist aspirations and accept “peace” on Israeli terms.

Using an attack by non-PLO Palestinian extremists on the Israeli ambassador in London as a pretext, Israel launched airstrikes in Lebanon. When PLO forces responded by shelling the Galilee in northern Israel, Sharon and Begin persuaded the Israeli Cabinet to approve a ground invasion. In words that almost exactly presaged the language Israel and its U.S. supporters used in 2008 to justify the onslaught on Gaza, Begin insisted that unless Israel attacked, it would have to accept "the ceaseless killings of our civilians ... seeing our civilians injured in Metulla or Qiryat Shmona or Nahariya."

 Ariel Sharon -- instead of being imprisoned for war crimes, he returned as Israeli president in 2000.

"Operation Peace for Galilee" (a euphemism Bush obviously copied when he launched the propagandistic “Operation Iraqi Freedom”), which Sharon initially claimed was going to be a short, limited military operation, quickly blossomed into a full-blown war. While Israel’s Air Force blasted Lebanon from the air, gutting the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre, its army pushed all the way to Beirut.  Just as in the recent Gaza assault, the vast majority of Israelis approved of the war and Begin's and Sharon's popularity soared. (In fact,  it is widely believed that one of the real goals of the attack on Gaza wasn’t to stop the relatively harmless homemade rockets, but to boost Ehud Olmert’s, Ehud Barak’s and Tzipi Livni’s standing in the polls Feb. 10 when they go up against Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party.)

Formally abandoning its originally stated objective of merely pushing the PLO out of artillery range of Israeli cities, Israel announced two broad goals: to install a friendly, Christian-dominated government in Lebanon and to eliminate the PLO. Just as some Israeli leaders today talk of destroying Hamas and installing a hand-chosen replacement regime (Abbas and his contingent in Fatah), so did Sharon tell U.S. Secretary of State Al Haig that the war would "redraw Lebanon's domestic politics in favor of the Christian Phalangists." Israeli spokesmen claimed the war would actually benefit the Lebanese people, who were suffering because of the Palestinian state-within-a-state. In similar fashion, Washington and Tel Aviv today claim that Israel's assault on Gaza was in the Palestinian people's best interests.

Israel connived with the Phalange, the militant Lebanese Christian political movement, to install its leader, Bashir Gemayel, as Lebanese president. Gemayel and the Phalange were sworn enemies of the Palestinians, whom they blamed for ruining their country when the refugees from the 1948 creation of Israel poured in -- upsetting the old Lebanese political order dominated by the Maronite Christians.  Gemayel called for the destruction of Lebanon's refugee camps and the forced deportation of up to 200,000 Palestinian civilians. In a secret meeting with Begin, Gemayel promised to restore good relations with Israel. But on Sept. 14 -- nine days before Gemayel was to take office -- a large bomb killed him. Enraged, Phalangist militiamen vowed revenge against the Palestinians, whom they blamed for the assassination. 

The stage was now set for the horror that followed. But it is critical to understand that before Gemayel was killed, Sharon and the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, had warned that after the PLO evacuation from Beirut, large numbers of remaining Palestinian "terrorists" would have to be hunted down. Sharon claimed the PLO had left more than 2,000 heavily armed fighters hiding among the tens of thousands of civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla camps. According to the report of the Kahan Commission, which the Israeli government (to its credit) commissioned to investigate its role in the ensuing massacre, Sharon and other top military brass had decided to use the Phalange to clean out the camps -- in part because of "their skills in identifying terrorists" and in part because the Israeli public was insisting that the Lebanese Christians, who had benefited from Israel's invasion, needed to do their share of the fighting.

On the evening of Sept. 14, 1982, after Gemayel's assassination (and knowing full well just how enraged the Phalangists were), Sharon and Eitan decided to send them into the camps. Israeli troops moved into West Beirut, the Palestinian area, where they surrounded and closed off the camps. At about 6 p.m., 150 Phalangist soldiers entered the camps, which were lit by mortar flares fired by Israeli troops.

Almost immediately, there were reports that a massacre had begun. The slaughter went on under the IDF's nose for more than two days. Live grenades were hung around people's necks, a baby was trampled to death with spiked boots, pregnant women's fetuses were torn out, other women were raped and had their fingers chopped off before being killed. When it was over, between 700 and 3,500 civilians (figures differ and the actual number will never be known) lay dead.  

The situation with Gaza today is different in a number of respects, of course.  However, there are numerous parallels as well. Consider this report I just received from an acquaintance of mine, who is in Gaza as I write with a fact-finding delegation from the National Lawyers’ Guild:

What we’ve discovered is that the injuries and deaths weren’t simply collateral damage for Israel's failure to observe principles of distinction and proportionality. The Israeli army invaded to kill without mercy. Yesterday we visited a family in Khoza'a, a village in southern Gaza, which is part of Khan Younis. Israeli tanks and planes began shelling the village at 11 p.m. At 3 a.m., Israeli tanks rolled into the residential neighborhood and bulldozed nearly 30 homes in their path. The neighborhood of approximately 150 residents huddled in the house of Rouhiya al Najjar, 47, until 8 a.m., when they were ordered to walk to the city center. Fearful, only 20 women decided to walk out into the alley. Rouhiya handed out white scarves to everyone to indicate that they were civilians and encouraged the other women to be brave. Immediately upon entering an alley, an Israeli sniper shot Rouhiya in her right temple, killing her instantly. Her daughter Hiba, 14, who told us the story, tried to pull at her body, but was pulled back by the other women because of the incessant Israeli ammunition aimed at them.

They retreated to the alley and into a residential yard, where they stood for 5 hours until a bulldozer knocked down the wall of the house they huddled near. They were ordered to march to the city center again and forced to enter a school where they joined hundreds of other residents rounded up from nearby neighborhoods. Shortly thereafter, Israeli airplanes shelled the school and the survivors fled into ambulances, which transported them to Panacella -- another neighborhood where they remained until the Israeli tanks rolled out. It was 8 p.m.; only then was an ambulance driver able to get to Rouhiya's dead body which had become swollen and stiff from death. We spoke to the ambulance driver, who recounted that when he tried to turn into the alley to fetch Rouhiya's body at a little past 8 a.m., Israeli forces shot at him and forced him to retreat into an alleyway.

No national security imperative necessitated this sadistic behavior. Gazans had nowhere to flee, because Israel has sealed all its borders. There is no protection from tanks and warplanes; they were stuck in a box and made targets of a collective punishment campaign that treated them as if they were sub-human. After a a year and a half of a blockade that denied them basic goods, employment, gas, medical care and any chance at a “future,” I can’t look anywhere and see a row of homes--only rows of rubble and sand, toasted cars and endless seas of impoverished children playing with trash they’ve made into toys.

In the case of the Lebanese invasion, the Kahan report singled out Sharon as bearing a "personal responsibility" for the events at Sabra and Shatilla, and called for him to either resign or be dismissed. However, Sharon refused to exit gracefully, and Begin decided not to fire his formidable rival. In a compromise move, Sharon gave up the defense portfolio but remained in the Cabinet. After serving in various posts, he was elected prime minister in 2000.  Meanwhile, his hard-line policies toward the Palestinians met with the wholehearted approval of President George W. Bush, who called him a "man of peace." Sound familiar?

But there’s still another similarity with the aftermath of the 2008 Gaza blitzkrieg. The Lebanon war was a military victory, but a political disaster for Israel. The PLO was driven out but not defeated. Palestinian nationalism only grew stronger, and the Islamist Hamas party, far more unyielding and rejectionist than the PLO, took root in the occupied territories. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, the war gave birth to Hezbollah, destabilized the country, strengthened Syria's hand, and provided Iran with a strategic partner on Israel's northern border.   

Then as now, Israel went to war in the deluded belief that it could defeat a nationalist movement by smashing it into submission. Then as now, America signed off on this wrongheaded tactic. Then as now, Israel won a short-term tactical military victory that ultimately weakened its security and severely damaged America's interests. And then as now, both Israel and America justified massive civilian casualties by incessantly invoking "terrorism" and dehumanizing the Palestinians. 

Israel's recent attack on Gaza has had the same effect. Most analysts agree that attacking radical movements in the Middle East, without trying to address their grievances, only strengthens them. When will we finally learn that the only way to achieve lasting peace is through a political settlement?

Folman and the Impact on the Individual

 Ari Folman

What Folman learns as he pieces together the truth is that he was one of the Isareli troops positioned around the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, who lit the mortar fires that lit the way for the Phalangists – and who knew full well their intent. In perhaps the most chilling final minute of any film I have ever seen, Folman shows his 19-year-old self looking out from his position, and the animation switches to actual video footage of the carnage that was obvious when the first outsiders entered the destroyed camps.  Shown to the backdrop of a slowly pulsating drumbeat, my heart raced and tears rushed to my eyes. If you don’t react the same way, then heaven help us.

But what good does this kind of revelation do, if we repeatedly send our young men and women into situations that destroy their own humanity so that they can brutalize others’? (This lesson will really be lost if we think it applies to just that situation, or  to just the Israelis. And to start a healthy discussion here, I’ll throw out that I think any institution that requires its members to put aside their own moral and ethical judgment and simply follow orders is inherently engineered to lead to more situations like Sabra, Shatilla, Mai Lai and Abu Ghraib.)

Folman has been criticized for not vocally speaking out against Israel’s actions at the very public screenings of the film, and at the ceremonies where it has already won numerous awards. In a recent Washington Post interview, Folman himself played down the impact he hoped to have through the film:

How does it feel to have this film released in the United States just as Israel is at war again, this time in Gaza?

It's nothing of a surprise. There is a constant conflict, you know, so it's always happening again. This film is always being updated. It is always relevant to current events.

Do you think your film can do something to change the situation?

No. Film can build small bridges between human beings, but it can't change the world, change politics, change politicians, change decisions, change the majority of the support that the war has. No, it can't change anything.

Yet, the message when viewing the film is dramatic and clear, and it has achieved a visibility I would not have thought possible for a subject such as this. It has won the Golden Globe and Broadcast Film Critics' Association awards for best foreign language film, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association award for best animated film. It also has been nominated for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category. (It is in Hebrew and Arabic.)

We can all play a part in assuring that Waltz with Bashir initiates the critical discussions that it should. See it. Then hold a showing in your home when the DVD is available. Give it to others who are “in the dark” It’s time those nightmares are shown to be the realities that they are.

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