Waltz with Bashir by film director Ari Folman and artistic director David Polonsky

“Waltz with Bashir” is an Israeli animated documentary film which took four years to make. It was released in 2008 and made into a graphic novel in 2009. We have both the book and the DVD. Since I watched the DVD before reading the book, it was difficult for me to evaluate the merits of the book by itself. The book is a fairly seamless adaptation of the movie, so it mostly served to remind me of how I experienced the film. Although the shots in the book are chosen with care, the bleakness and the violence portrayed have a greater impact in the movie then from the book’s pages.

Ari Folman started working on the film after a friend who had served in the Israeli army brought to his attention a recurrent nightmare he had that stemmed from his wartime experience. Folman realized that he himself had blocked out memories from his own time in the military. He then began dreaming of himself emerging on a beach with two other young soldiers, going forward to encounter streams of women and children, all in great distress. Because he couldn’t remember where this dream came from, he began to talk to others who served with him. Eventually the scenario of a particular event emerged, a 1982 massacre by Lebanese Christian Phalangist soldiers of residents in two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.

War had been going on in Lebanon since 1975. Many Palestinians lived in Lebanon and some of them waged war on Israel from Lebanese territory. Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982, seeking to wage war on the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), with the support of the Lebanese government. Eventually Israel forces controlled Beirut, and they agreed in September to let the Lebanese Christian Phalangist forces enter the two camps in West Beirut, ostensibly to flush out PLO fighters. Instead of which the Lebanese soldiers killed, raped and mutilated men, women and children for three days, while Israeli forces provided light by shooting flares and kept residents from fleeing the camps.

The film has won numerous awards and accolades for both the director and the artistic director. It shows the fighting from the young soldiers’ viewpoint - how they fire because they are told to fire, and because they are afraid. The film has been faulted for indirectly slighting or minimizing the massacres by focusing on what it meant for the Israeli soldiers to be part of the killings, without full knowledge or consent. What is interesting in the political fallout is that some higher ups in the Israeli army were removed from their commands as a result of their collaboration in the massacre, but no Christian Phalangist soldiers were ever charged with their crimes. Ari Folman simply terms his film as “anti-war”; and as an exercise into how horrific events can go unacknowledged even when people see them with their own eyes.

The film shows us the cruelty, the wantonness of war, and how combatants try to protect themselves by blocking out events. But this specific war has specific circumstances. How people live with unsafe borders, how soldiers deal with being fired on by 13-year olds, how displaced people wait for liberation and a job… “Waltz with Bashir” raises more issues then it can deal with. Ari Folman, in a BBC interview, comments sardonically that Israel has had no issues with the film and its depiction of events. This may be because while we see the bodies, and hear the wailing of those left alive, there is no real unearthing of what happened, of how this ferocity was unleashed.

Homesick / by Eshkol Nevo; trans. from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston

In modern-day Israel, Amir and Noa are a young Jewish couple who decide to move in together. Both students, respectively at universities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they select a small apartment roughly midway between the cities in a village called Mevasseret, a town vacated by Palestinians in 1948. Though content with their humble accommodations, it's not quite as secluded as they'd like. Constant bickering between their landlord Moshe and his wife Sima, who live in the neighboring apartment, interrupt their time together just as other nearby tenants seemingly can't help impeding on the young pair's happiness.

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A few doors down, a middle-aged couple still mourns the loss of their son, a soldier recently killed in Lebanon. Yotam, the couples neglected younger son wanders about the complex, soon forming an odd friendship with Amir. Keeping a curious eye on everyone is a Palestinian construction worker named Saddiq, something of an unattached man who curiously hangs around in creepy fashion, mindful of the fact that this was where his own family used to live. With time, Amir and Noa find that their new home is fraught with the same problems, much of it other people's problems spilling over into their own lives, which originally prompted their desire to move.

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Israeli author Nevo weaves together a stimulating portrait of domestic life set in one of the world's most scrutinized places. Readers shouldn't expect a very linear, straightforward structure from the author who seems at his best telling the story through multi-perspective, first person disclosures. Actually set in 1995, the narrative jumps around from person to person, voice to voice, sharing intimate details along with banal, seemingly insignificant tidbits. Intermittent "chorus" poems spliced between the chapters offer cultural side-notes shining light on the world the characters inhabit--definitely not the Israel of nightly news reports though certainly nothing resembling western civilization's model for a peaceable society. (FIC NEVO)

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and The Heart of the Middle East / by Sandy Tolan

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The Lemon Tree tells many stories. It is the story of Bashir Al-Khairi, a Palestinian Arab born in Ramla (West Bank, Israel) just before the termination of the British Mandate, and who, throughout his life, devotes himself to the cause of a free Palestine for Palestinians only to wind up permanently maimed in battle, detained and torchered by occupying forces, imprisoned for over half his adult life and ultimately made a refugee in exile, forbidden ever to return to his homeland. It is the story of Dalia Eshkenazi, a Bulgarian Jew and Holocaust survivor who, while still a child in 1948, resettles in Israel with her family during the UN Partition Plan in the same Ramlah home Bashir and his own family were forced out of. It is the story of millions of people displaced by war and politics and of millions more divided by partisan causes. Ultimately though, it is the story of an age-old, still-simmering and unlikely-to-cease conflict, of a war which has waged for centuries between Jews and Arabs, Judaism and Islam, Israelis and Palestinians, though it has really only been infused into the global conscious for the last half century.

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While the Arab-Israeli conflict is a complicated one, embittered with hate and recrimination, Bashir and Dalia's lifelong friendship, linked by coincidence but proliferated through trust and love, is an enlightened union. The pair's unlikely friendship is one which endures despite the maddeningly stubborn socio-political debacle defining their age, the constant wars and violence causing many sad and troubling times of grief, isolation and despair, not to mention each's unchanging personal convictions. Tolan, a UC-Berkely professor and NPR syndicated journalist has written a compelling book on a very touchy, very saddening and very volatile situation of our time. (956.9405 TOLAN)