Sean Lee in Beirut sent me the following stirring commentary on "Waltz With Bashir," which the Times featured yesterday. I offer Lee's statement with this optimistic comment in advance: The lesson in my headline is one that I also tend to forget. We all have a lot to learn about one another, and globalism/the internet is giving us that opportunity. Sean Lee:
I imagine it won't show
in cinemas here in Beirut because the censors have started cracking down
on Israeli movies that make it into the country. Although I imagine
that before long, it'll be available in many of the pirated DVD stalls.
I saw this film over the summer in Jerusalem with a young Israeli woman
who had done her military service and then stayed on in the military for another few
years. After the film, she admitted to me that she hadn't known that it
was the Phalangists who had actually killed the Palestinians, she'd
always assumed it was Israeli soldiers. I.e., when it
came down to it, she didn't see the state as something that was
incapable of committing massacres. I was really surprised by this and
wasn't sure how to digest it. Living in Lebanon, and having
experienced the war in 2006, there's almost always a tension between
myself and Israelis who have served in the military.
But my visits
to Israel, and travels to Africa where I inevitably run into Israelis, have
been very valuable to me. While I grew up in America hearing the
"Israeli side" of the conflict, it was always a collective story, never
a personal one. And it gives me a little bit of hope to meet people
like the Tel Aviv bookseller who upon learning that I was visiting from
Lebanon got excited and gave me a free bag, telling me, "I've been to
Lebanon a few times, but not on a tourist visa." Or the PhD student who
after serving in the West Bank and Lebanon discovered Elie Khoury's
novel, The Gate of the Sun, while he was in prison for refusing to do
his reserve duty. Or the Siberian friend I made, who brings a level
head and a calm heart to the questions of Israel and Palestine. I don't
always agree with these guys, but they are reasonable people whom I can
communicate with.
But back to the film. It's one of the best movies I've seen about the
war in Lebanon. Jeff Blankfort doesn't seem to have seen the movie, so it
seems silly to talk about what it "probably" does or doesn't address.
The Israelis were one group of belligerents here, and it seems only
natural to me for an Israeli documentary filmmaker to address his own
perspective in the war. And I think Folman has done a fine job. It's
easy, I think, in Lebanon or Palestine to want a monopoly on the
suffering that these wars have had. Being the victim is somehow morally
facile. But I think a nuanced look at the war will show that even the
aggressors, foreign and domestic, were harmed in very deep ways. To my
mind, Folman has managed to tell a larger story in telling his own,
personal story of what it was like for him to be in Lebanon and to have
participated in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. The view of an
Israeli grunt is not a god-eyed one, and I think it would have suffered
had the film tried to be an indictment of "far greater war crimes
committed by Israel
in launching that war." There are plenty of sources for laying out the
crimes of Israeli aggression in Lebanon, and I think that what makes
this film so powerful for a Lebanese audience is that it humanizes the
Israeli soldier. Some may complain about this, but to my mind, to truly
understand conflicts we mustn't humanize only the victims. (Beaufort is
another interesting example of this.) I think that a real conversation
about these histories must include Israelis, and I think it's important
to address the self-inflicted brutality that being an occupier has had
on Israeli society. Not only to understand how Israelis think and see
the world, but as an argument that the occupation is ultimately
damaging them as well as the occupied.
P.S. This sentence from the Times article really annoys me [as it did Jerome Slater in this post yesterday]: "The
film is both the psychologically
compelling story of Mr. Folmanâs search for his own past â his younger
self â based on videotaped interviews he conducted and a scrupulous
recounting of the massacre of hundreds (some say thousands) of
Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Forces inadvertently
facilitated by the Israeli Army." (Emphasis mine.)
"It's easy, I think, in Lebanon or Palestine to want a monopoly on the suffering that these wars have had. Being the victim is somehow morally facile. But I think a nuanced look at the war will show that even the aggressors, foreign and domestic, were harmed in very deep ways."
– no Phil, you are being morally obtuse. The fact that aggressing other nations fucks you up simply proves you shouldn't aggress them.
The film is worth seeing — I went in with a lot of hesitation and my defenses up, and I have to say I found it very compelling. True, it doesn't take on the grand crimes of 1982, and it is sometimes frustrating how narrow the perspective is. However, through its very focus it actually opens up issues in ways you will rarely see in the US. Ethan Bronner's ridiculous claim of "inadvertent" collusion (in the NYTimes) is clearly at odds with the film itself, as it unequivocally indicates in several ways that highers-up in the IDF were involved and that a massacre was exactly what they wanted and expected. But the film opens shortly in the US so I'll wait for others to catch it and to chime in.
The only shame of Waltz With Bashir is that there are two or three very interesting Palestinian films, and a couple of Lebanese films that are making the festival rounds this year, and none seem destined to gain the audience and profile of Waltz, despite being as good in their own ways, if not better.
Look up: Under the Bombs; Salt Of This Sea; Pomegranates and Myrrh; Layla's Birthday; I Want To See…
The film is worth seeing — I went in with a lot of hesitation and my defenses up, and I have to say I found it very compelling. True, it doesn't take on the grand crimes of 1982, and it is sometimes frustrating how narrow the perspective is. However, through its very focus it actually opens up issues in ways you will rarely see in the US. Ethan Bronner's ridiculous claim of "inadvertent" collusion (in the NYTimes) is clearly at odds with the film itself, as it unequivocally indicates in several ways that highers-up in the IDF were involved and that a massacre was exactly what they wanted and expected. But the film opens shortly in the US so I'll wait for others to catch it and to chime in.
The only shame of Waltz With Bashir is that there are two or three very interesting Palestinian films, and a couple of Lebanese films that are making the festival rounds this year, and none seem destined to gain the audience and profile of Waltz, despite being as good in their own ways, if not better.
Look up: Under the Bombs; Salt Of This Sea; Pomegranates and Myrrh; Layla's Birthday; I Want To See…
While you're waiting for some rich Hollywood producer to bring over some Palestinian flicks, check this excerpt from Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention:
thanks rowan, but i already have the dvd…i also know that the lincoln square cinema in NY refused to program the film solely on the basis of the ninja sequence at the end. but in cinematic terms that doesn't make waltz with bashir a terrible work, it just highlights the lamentable fact that in the US excellent works by palestinians are not seen, largely because the film industry is so zionist.
We've discussed this before. Of course Israeli jews are damaged by their oppression of arabs, but the constant emphasis on this issue, to the exclusion of the actual and far more intense suffering of the arabs being maltreated, is just one sign of the persistent overconcern for the coloniser and limited concern for the colonised in this relationship. Anyone who treated the problems of apartheid primarily from the point of view of concern for the brutalisation of the Afrikaners would rightly be termed a bigot. The same is true here.
Do we have a new Gone With The Wind in the making?
I wonder if a film that would account for the Lebanese and Palestinian lives lost would create the same kind of press in Israel or the US.
I agree that the self-pity of the oppressor is a disgusting thing, and there is an especially nasty example of it in Golda Myerson's well-known exercise in advanced hypocrisy about "we" not being able to forgive the victims for making us kill them. Any truly moral being would have blown her head off for saying that, in my view, so it's just as well for people like here that there aren't any truly moral beings.