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.)
