Chapter I. Last week at the Avraham Burg forum at the NY Public Library, Omer Bartov slapped Burg on the wrist for using Nazi analogies in criticizing Israeli behavior. Said he went too far. Then Bartov, a scholar of Nazism, with a faint smile aimed at defusing the hypocrisy, promptly described the time he himself used a Nazi analogy, when he wrote to then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago to say that Israeli soldiers throwing a Palestinian boy from a Jeep was the sort of brutalized behavior he had studied in Nazi Germany. (Well, it just goes on, doesn't it?)
Chapter II. A few weeks ago I got a lightning-bolt email from Virginia Reath. She's an artist friend who "gets" me (we basically share a ton of values) and from time to time she grabs my lapels. "I just saw an Israeli film called Waltz with Bashir. You absolutely have to see it! let me know i want to see it again. finally a film that demands the end of innocence !!!!!!!" I learned that the film involves the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, but I didn't see it…
Chapter III. Two days ago I got a similar email from a guy in England with dual English/American citizenship, who's lived in the U.S. too. Requesting anonymity, he told me why the film is so important:
It is a great film on many
levels. It's a great animation and a great
war film (which is an unusual combination) and is interesting in its own right, but I think it also
perfectly illustrates the point that Israelis
don't seem to have a problem with self-criticism. There are several
explicit comparisons made by Israelis in the film between events in
Beirut in 1982 and Nazi behaviour in WWII.
Interestingly,
this made me feel much more sympathetic to the Israelis than any amount
of distorted, one-sided history that I used to listen to from people in
the States: people who were intelligent, well educated, and far to the
left of me on every other issue. [Weiss emphasis thruout]
While it deals
unflinchingly with the Sabra and Shatila massacres
and the Israeli role in the them (and probably in fact because of this)
I felt sympathetic towards the Israeli characters. They were trying to
deal honestly with a dark part of their own and their country's past
(the main character has actually lost his memory of the events and is
trying work out what he can't remember and why). It was also
interesting seeing a whole film in Hebrew. I have never really
listened to the language and I found it fascinating. There are Hebrew
rock songs in it (which I presume date from the Lebanon war) with lyrics like "we bombed Beirut
today, we bomb it every day". The darker and more Vietnam-like it
became the more I felt the "they're people like us" idea which I always
think is the subtext of the "shared values" Israeli lobby argument.
Normally I wouldn't feel that way, in fact quite the opposite, because
I would feel like I was being fed propaganda.
Wow. From which I conclude that: The whole world knows that Israel is conducting atrocities. Israel itself knows this. We deny it here, deny it deny it deny it. Dershowitz and Peretz, both 70 years old and blowing out the moral lights. But allowing smart people to talk about these things openly, using any historical analogy they frikkin please, is liberating intellectually and may actually serve Israel, just when it's slidin off the brink…
