Country: Israel
Director: Ari Folman
Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Mubi (free w/subscription); Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Suppressed memories, civil conflict, guilt and culpability
W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “I and the public know/ what all schoolchildren learn/ those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return.” On 14 September 1982, Lebanon’s president-elect (and commander of the Christian Lebanese Armed Forces), Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated in a Beirut car bombing. The Lebanese Civil War had begun 7 years earlier, sparked by fighting between Palestine Liberation Organization forces (who had moved into southern Lebanon from Jordan following the events of Black September in 1970) and Maronite Christians. The conflict would grow to encompass not only the country’s different religious factions, but external actors including (among others) Syria, Israel, and the United States.1 The conflict would end with the Taif Agreement in 1990.
Three months prior to Gemayel’s assassination, Israel invaded Lebanon in order to expel the PLO from the country. Gemayel and his Maronite forces had been allies. By June 1982, Israeli forces had surrounded West Beirut. Under international supervision, PLO forces negotiated passage out of Lebanon—the organization would move its headquarters and leadership to Tunis. In September 1982, two days after Bashir’s assassination, Christian militia forces (known as Phalangists) entered two Palestinian refugee camps (Sabra and Shatila) in West Beirut and massacred somewhere between 800 and 3,500 civilians over 48 hours.2 Throughout the massacre, Israeli forces manned the refugee camps’ perimeters, standing within eyesight of the unfolding violence. In the evenings, Israeli soldiers shot flares into the sky to illuminate dark alleyways for Christian militia members. Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli Defense Minister, took little action to stop the bloodshed. (Whether or not he actively encouraged it has remained intensely contested.) According to Israeli journalists (some of whom relayed eyewitness accounts to Sharon as the massacres unfolded), Sharon remained willfully uninterested in reports emerging from the camps. Israeli soldiers in the vicinity witnessed portions of the violence and radioed information to their superiors, who similarly remained unmoved. A 1982 UN report and a subsequent 1983 Israeli government report would find that senior Israeli officials had understood the massacres to be underway. Sharon would be elected Israel’s Prime Minister in 2001.
Ari Folman’s beautifully animated film, Waltz With Bashir, recounts the director’s experience as an Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion. The film begins late one evening in 2006—the date is not accidental: Israel invaded Lebanon again in that year. In a Tel Aviv bar, Folman’s friend recounts a dream in which 26 dogs stand barking outside his window. In 1982, Folman’s friend had been tasked with killing stray dogs as Israeli troops entered Lebanese villages in order to quell barking that might alert townspeople to the troops’ presence. Over the course of the war, he had killed 26. In response to his friend’s story, Folman remarks that he has little memory of his time as a soldier during the invasion. Soon thereafter, he experiences a vision in which he sees himself floating naked in the Mediterranean besides a Beirut beach as flares descend from the sky. Beside him are two soldiers, one of whom he recognizes. Did this vision actually occur? In order to re-surface his lost memories, Folman seeks out other soldiers from his regiment, uncovering and exploring events his memory has suppressed, while engaging themes of guilt, trauma, and culpability in the process.
Filled with flashbacks and extended scenes of his time in Southern Lebanon and Beirut, Folman’s memories (and visions, which anchor themselves in forms of truth) re-emerge through discussions with other IDF soldiers present during the invasion, revealing the particular grotesqueries that manifest when young soldiers (terrified, adrenaline-filled, uncritical) confront complex contexts within which “terrorist” and “civilian” appear indistinguishable. As stories from the conflict proliferate, a picture of the war’s wanton destruction (and pointlessness) emerge: A family-filled car gets sprayed with automatic fire as soldiers land on a Lebanese beach. Bombs miss their targets. Friends are killed. At home in Israel, relatives and acquaintances know little and ask even less. And, of course, Sabra and Shatila—the events around which Folman’s memories circle—invoke forms of shame that vitiate the moral certitudes and lessons borne from a different period of Jewish suffering.
As the film unfurls, Folman’s bracing use of animation allows the conscious and the subconscious to bleed together in ways that disrupt and destabilize both personal and state-manufactured narratives. Of course, Folman’s particular form of memory suppression, which emanates from guilt and compunction, remains a privilege of the perpetrator (or those meaningfully complicit in an act’s perpetration). This does not invalidate its harms and consequences, but its centrality can occlude more pronounced sufferings generated by the same acts. The film gestures towards, but never directly confronts, questions concerning how we adjudicate responsibility when aggressors themselves remain victims? (This question was recently central to the Ugandan rebel leader Dominic Ongwen’s trial at the ICC, itself interestingly showcased in the 2023 documentary Theatre of Violence.) After all, states have long employed (often grotesquely ignorant) young people to carry out violence in their name. Those young people lack the critical capacities to challenge the narratives and reductive framings that de-humanize individuals in order to facilitate the prosecution of state violence. This is by design. At the same time, the Phalangist forces that massacred civilians in Sabra and Shatila could not have done so without young Israeli soldiers (who knew enough to understand that violence on a systematic and undiscriminating scale was being committed) lighting flares to guide their movements and surrounding camp exits.
Folman’s film remains largely about the ways self-protection facilitates the warping of past memories. In this way, the personal becomes a metaphor for broader society. As such, Waltz With Bashir self-consciously emerges a film designed for Israeli audiences—I say this both following Folman’s own statements and because it helps to explain why Palestinian and Lebanese individuals remain largely ancillary to the work. Victims are noted and marked, but never invested with humanity or explored. In many ways, this reproduces the soldier’s experience: all too human defense mechanisms require fighters to de-humanize those they have been directed to harm. As a result, the film captures something deeply true (and unsavory) about conflict and its effects on those who prosecute it.
The problem with “uncovering” the past can be that in “processing it,” one renders it discrete and bounded. The promise remains that by confronting individual trauma, one overcomes the nefarious personal impact of certain events through an understanding of their effects on the individual, in turn allowing for the construction of a more accurate, robust, and resilient sense of self. To resurrect the past in this fashion limits its persistent impact on the present by fixing (in both senses) its psychological harms—it has been transcended, contained, and mastered. On a personal level, this approach can achieve something like closure.
Yet, societies do not have the same attributes as individual psychologies. They remain too multifarious, complex, and dynamic to erect self-contained narratives that effectively reflect and dictate outcomes, regardless of the ways polities constantly foist and manufacture such narratives. In many ways, artistic works premised on individual psychologies can thus ignore the insidious conditions that facilitate, encourage, and countenance cruelty. This need not be a problem, though Folman’s goal of awareness raising can only succeed if an exploration of individual subjectivities does not obscure the structural conditions within which those subjectivities were forged.
In wrestling with the events at Sabra and Shatila, Waltz With Bashir explicitly invokes the Holocaust. It remains without question that every German who facilitated the movement of Jewish individuals into concentration camps failed some basic moral test, yet too many Germans (alongside many others) failed this exam for the important questions to focus on individual ethics. Individual stories of this nature illuminate only when rendered representative of broader strains within society. In some ways, this remains the challenge with a work like Waltz With Bashir. Its focus on an individual (and some of his fellow soldiers) may too easily occlude the most important aspects of the society from which this violence sprang. This is not to say the film’s aim is ignoble—quite the opposite—but rather in approaching the events at Sabra and Shatila primarily (though not exclusively) through the lens of personal culpability, the film does not touch on the systems, conceptions, and beliefs that made those events possible. In this way, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila emerge as an aberration both within an individual life and within a country’s history. In 2021, Human Rights Watch published a report documenting how Israel’s treatment of citizens and non-citizens under its control constitutes apartheid, a crime against humanity. The following year, Amnesty International reached the same conclusion. These are not questions of individual failings and personal psychologies.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Ari Folman — Where Is Anne Frank (2021)
Ziad Doueiri — West Beirut (1998)
Like all extended civil conflicts, the Lebanese Civil War, which ran from 1975-1990, was extremely complicated and saw shifting alliances and various forms of direct and indirect intervention from external actors. Robert Fisk’s other issues aside, his work Pity the Nation: Lebanon At War is a helpful primer.
The precise numbers are contested. On the low end, Israeli intelligence estimated 800 deaths. Israeli and Lebanese journalists, alongside the Red Crescent, estimate between 2,000 to 3,500 killed.