Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Image from "Waltz With Bashir."

What "Waltz With Bashir" can teach us about Gaza

The stunning new Israeli film reveals painful parallels between one of Israel's darkest moments and the current conflict.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Palestine, Israel, Middle East, Gary Kamiya, Opinion

Jan. 13, 2009 | The Israeli slaughter in Gaza is continuing into a third week under the approving gaze of the Bush administration, both political parties and the mainstream media. A U.N. Security Council resolution, worldwide protests, cries of outrage from human rights groups and the Red Cross, petitions by academics, and televised images of civilian deaths have no effect on Israel or on the American establishment. Nearly 900 Gazans have been killed, the already-desperate strip has been devastated, whole families wiped out. It is clear that Israel has no strategic vision, no idea of what its onslaught is supposed to ultimately achieve or how to end it. When it finally ends its assault, Hamas will emerge from the rubble, Iran and Hezbollah will be empowered, Egypt and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas will be weakened, and America's standing in the region will be lower than ever.

Yet in America the war might as well not even be happening. This Sunday's New York Times' "Week in Review" section, that snapshot of the American intelligentsia's collective brain, contained not a single word about Gaza. The ongoing carnage is clearly passé.

Yet in a strange case of art imitating life, at the same time that Israel is blasting a defenseless population enclosed in a tiny area, an Israeli film has appeared that depicts an earlier war in which Israel was complicit in an appalling massacre. America's cultural gatekeepers have rightfully hailed Ari Folman's "Waltz With Bashir" as a tour de force and cinematic breakthrough. On Sunday night, as Israeli warplanes carried out 12 bombing raids in Gaza, "Waltz With Bashir" won the Golden Globe Award for best foreign film. Most people who see Folman's stunning film will probably not connect it with Israel's current war. But if they dig a little deeper, they might realize that the film's moral lessons apply not just to the terrible events that took place 28 years ago but also to what is happening today.

"Waltz With Bashir" is about Folman's attempt to recover his lost memory of his experiences as a soldier during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and in particular the Sabra and Shatilla slaughter of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. Carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, under Israeli protection and with its leaders' complicity, it was one of the most notorious massacres of the 20th century. "Bashir" is an extraordinary work, whose hallucinatory animated imagery and unflinching moral honesty offer an intense depiction of the horrors of war and its devastating psychic consequences. A dreamlike combination of "Apocalypse Now" and "Maus," it is at once the idiosyncratic story of one ex-soldier's attempt to heal his hidden wounds and a damning indictment of the Israeli leaders who enabled the slaughter. In the end, by interviewing other soldiers, talking to a psychiatrist and sharing his anguish with friends, Folman succeeds in putting together a fragmentary picture of the terrible events he witnessed and had blocked out for so long. Whether he himself gains any catharsis from his quest is not clear, for at the very end of the film he abruptly abandons both his personal narrative and his animated technique and simply shows filmed images of the slaughtered Palestinians heaped up like cordwood in the alleys of the camps.

Folman's film is not political. It does not preach or pass judgment. Yet in its artistic integrity, it unintentionally reveals the grim parallels between Israel's invasion of Lebanon and its complicity with the Sabra and Shatilla massacre and its current onslaught -- parallels that, if Israel and the U.S. heeded them, would lead them to understand that the Gaza campaign is both morally appalling and politically self-destructive. Israelis justifiably regard their leaders' role in enabling the Sabra and Shatilla massacre as one of Israel's darkest moments, a permanent stain on its character. Of course, Israel's moral culpability for the 1982 massacre is not the same as its moral responsibility for the civilians killed in the current war. But there are painful similarities. Sooner or later the patriotic war fervor will fade, and Israelis will realize that their leaders sent them to kill hundreds of innocent people for nothing. And perhaps in 2036, some haunted filmmaker will release "Waltz With Hamas."

It is not necessary to have any special knowledge of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, or Israel's 1982 Lebanon war to which it was a grisly coda, to appreciate Folman's groundbreaking film. But some historical context is necessary in order to grasp the parallels between what happened in Beirut 28 years ago and what is happening today in Gaza. 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.

In 1982, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided to put an end to Israel's Palestinian problem once and for all. Hamas did not yet exist: Back then Israel's terrorist archenemy, the fountainhead of evil, was Yasser Arafat's PLO. The two hard-line leaders 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 agree to peace on Israeli terms. Using an attack by non-PLO Palestinian extremists on the Israeli ambassador in London as a pretext, Israel launched airstrikes against Lebanon. When PLO forces in Lebanon responded by shelling the Galilee in northern Israel, Sharon and Begin persuaded the Israeli Cabinet to approve a ground invasion of Lebanon. In words that almost exactly recall the language that Israel and its U.S. supporters have used to justify Israel's onslaught on Gaza, Begin said that unless Israel went to war, it would have to accept "the ceaseless killings of our civilians ... seeing our civilians injured in Metulla or Qiryat Shmona or Nahariya."

"Operation Peace for Galilee," which Sharon initially claimed was going to be a limited and short military operation, quickly became a full-blown war. While the Israel Air Force blasted Lebanon from the air, gutting the ancient cities of Sidon and Tyre, its army drove all the way to Beirut. Just as in the current Gaza assault, the vast majority of Israelis approved the war and Begin and Sharon's popularity soared. Formally abandoning its original limited objective of merely pushing the PLO out of artillery range of Israeli cities, Israel now 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 permanently changing the political landscape in Gaza, 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 that 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 are claiming that Israel's assault on Gaza is in the Palestinian people's best interests.

Subjecting Beirut to a brutal seven-week siege in which it engaged in high-altitude bombing of Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps (bombings that inevitably killed thousands of civilians and enraged a Yemen-born radical named Osama bin Laden), and cut off water and electricity to them, Israel finally succeeded in forcing the PLO and its leader, Yasser Arafat, out of Lebanon.

Having achieved its military goals, Israel pursued its political ones. It 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 and upsetting the old Lebanese political order in which Maronite Christians dominated. Gemayel had called for the destruction of Lebanon's Palestinian 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 nine days before Gemayel was to take office, on Sept. 14, a huge bomb, probably planted by Syrian agents, killed him. Burning with murderous rage, Phalangist militiamen thirsted to take revenge against the Palestinians, whom they blamed for the assassination.

The stage was now set for horror. But it is critical to understand that before the Gemayel killing, Sharon and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, Rafael Eitan, had warned that after the PLO evacuation from Beirut, large numbers of Palestinian "terrorists" would be left behind and would have to be hunted down. Sharon claimed that 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. (Sharon's estimate of the number of fighters who remained in Lebanon was wildly exaggerated.) According to Israel's Kahan Commission report, which the Israeli government, to its credit, commissioned to investigate Israel's role in the massacre, Sharon and other top 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 Phalange, which had benefited from Israel's invasion, needed to do its share of the fighting.

On the evening of Sept. 14, after Gemayel's assassination, knowing full well just how enraged and bloodthirsty 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. on Sept. 14, 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. According to the Kahan report, an Israeli officer overheard Phalange's chief intelligence officer, Elie Hobeika, telling a Phalange soldier, "You know exactly what to do" with a group of 50 women and children. On hearing this, the Phalangists on the roof broke out into "raucous laughter." The IDF officer understood that Hobeika was calling for the women and children to be killed. The Israeli officer reported what he had heard to his superior, but no action was taken. Also according to the Kahan report, a battalion commander said of the reported massacre, "We know it's not to our liking, and don't interfere." And in an event described in "Waltz With Bashir," Israeli TV journalist Ron Ben-Yishai telephoned a sleepy Sharon himself on the night of the 17th to tell him that there were credible reports of a massacre taking place. Sharon thanked him for the information and did nothing; in the film, Ben-Yishai says that Sharon apparently went back to sleep.

The slaughter went on under the IDF's nose for more than two days. Even by the gruesome standards of intra-Lebanese conflict, it was horrific. 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.

Next page: Why did Israel attack Gaza?