Memories of Lebanon, 1982

Jeff Blankfort responds to the Times review of Waltz with Bashir:

I read the explanation by the filmmaker Ari Folman as to why he focused on the Israeli side.  It is typical of the way Israelis and their supporters have used the massacre at Sabra and Shatila to mask the far greater war crimes committed by Israel in launching that war. I am sure that there is nothing in the film that mentions that, aside from that massacre, the Israelis killed an estimated (by the Red Cross) of 17,000 civilians, and wounded tens of thousands more by their indiscriminate use of American cluster bombs and white phosphorus against the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population.

I also suspect there is no mention of the fact that the Israeli tank corps blew a hole in the side of every building along the highway from the Israeli border to Beirut, something an Israeli tank corps lieutenant, who later became a member of the Yesh G'vul refusenik group, told me in Jerusalem before I went into Lebanon and who I thought had been exaggerating until I traversed that route by taxi. "You Americans give us all the bullets and shells we want," I remember him telling me, shaking his head. Here's Ethan Bronner:

"Some Arab critics have complained that Mr. Folman emphasizes the impact on Israelis rather than on those who truly suffered: the Palestinian refugees and the Lebanese. But Mr. Folman said he wanted to explore the issue from a personal and Israeli perspective. To do otherwise would be patronizing. “I feel very strongly that it is not my mission or job to deal with the other side,” he said".

The war on Lebanon was considered by Israel to be a "war of choice" and some 2000 reservists joined Yesh G'vul (which has a double-meaning in Hebrew: "there is a border" and  "there is a limit") and chose not to participate and some went to prison. I wonder if that was mentioned in the film? That war, if one can call it that, gave birth to the concept of "shoot and cry," where the poor Israelis who were forced to kill anyone who stood in their way, would cry afterward, and their fellow Israelis would give the killers a hug.

From my experiences with the Israeli military in Lebanon a year later, in which one of them fired a shot that creased my hair while I was taking a photo, I have little sympathy for what "suffering" they experienced in a country without an army where the resistance came only from ragtag militias. It wasn't,  in fact, until Hezbollah arose in 1983 in response to the racist nature of Israel's occupation that the Israelis started taking significant casuallties. What isn't generally known is that the majority of the Shia population in the south welcomed  the Israelis in hope that they would clear the PLO out of the area and let them live their lives in peace. But to the Israelis, one Arab was like any other so they proceeded to treat the Lebanese exactly as they do the Palestinians. 

The Western non-American press corps, unlike its US counterpart, saw the Israelis for the bullying brutes they were and most cheered when Hezbollah blew up Israel's intelligence HQ in Sour/Tyre. That led the Israelis to impose collective punishment on all of southern Lebanon, refusing to allow food or other supplies to cross the Alawi bridge that separates the north from the south for days. It was standing near the bridge in front of miles of stalled cars and trucks, with an Israeli tank only a dozen yards away that I felt the crease on my hair from the Israeli's shot. I changed my lens, took one more picture of two Israeli soldiers headed my way with their M-16s, one of whom had fired on me, and then turned around and walked back behind a roll of barbed wire that blocked the highway.