Hurray, That Israeli Film Didn't Get An Oscar!

First, an introduction:

“If we and the movies don’t create an illusion, we’ve failed,” said Mr. Weinstein, whose company released “The Reader.”

"The Reader", of course, excuses the SS, the Germans and a few others who killed (sorry) exterminated Jews. A beautiful woman, a bit of cinema-lite pornography, and poof!, we end up feeling sort of sorry for an illiterate cow who killed Jewish women in concentration camps.

But, my joy is not about Kate Winslett but "Waltzing With Bashir".



This film implicates the IDF in the Sabra & Shatilla Massacre committed by Lebanese Christians against Arab refugees from Mandatory Palestine residng in camps in Beirut in that, supposedly, the IDF shor at refugees fleeing the shooting by their fellow Arabs.

No evidence was ever uncovered regarding this despite a very hostile public atmosphere generated here in Israel in which Ariel Sharon was forced to resign as a result of the Kahan Commission.

In a scathing (Hebrew-language) article, Yossi Blum-HaLevy takes Ari Folman and his film apart. Matti Golan also is angry (in Hebrew).

I'll just mention that the Pal. terror that precluded the military actions by Israel do not exist. Off Israel went into Lebanon, it appears. And its soldiers are cowards.

It's not just an anti-war film but anti-Israel, predicated on self-hate.

Here's Debbie Schlussel's take:

I saw in this animated piece of garbage virtually every canard that HAMAS, Hezbollah, and Israel's enemies around the world have hurled.

Jews as Nazis . . . Check.

Arabs killing Arabs, but it's the Jews' fault . . . Check.

Jews as murderers of "innocent" Muslims . . . Check.

Terrorist Muslims as innocent victims of the Jews . . . Check.

Jews as the Michael Vicks of the Middle East, killing dogs and Arabian horses . . . Check.

Israelis as porn and sex addicts . . . Check.

Israelis as drug addict slackers . . . Check (well, that part is true about the Israeli left, like the scum that made this movie).

Check, Check, Check, Check, Check...


...In a 1.5 hour movie, I counted at least three comparisons of Israeli soldiers to Nazis and the situation to the Holocaust--that's one per half hour. They were called "Nazis." And their entrance into and activities in Lebanon were called both "Auschwitz," and the "Warsaw Ghetto." So let's compare: Innocent Jews rounded up and cooked in ovens versus Palestinians who raped, tortured and murdered the people versus Lebanon getting a tiny deserved taste of their own medicine. Hmmm ... sounds exactly the same to me. How' bout you?

And here's John Rosenthal:

...As concerns Folman’s personal involvement, the results of his efforts at self-examination are notably meager. In the end, he manages merely to “recollect” that he was present on a rooftop while Israeli troops set off flares in the vicinity of Sabra and Shatila, an action that seems to him to have been designed to aid the killers.

Along the way, however, the viewer is served up a veritable orgy of Israeli violence and vulgarity. Israeli soldiers are shown firing indiscriminately into fields and crushing civilian vehicles under their tanks. They are depicted carousing on a military vessel headed for the Lebanese coast (a kind of “love boat,” one character says) and cavorting on Lebanese beaches. They are depicted slaughtering defenseless animals and blowing holes in what appear to be residential structures. “I bombed Beirut every day,” the rock soundtrack blares, “Sure we kill some innocent along the way.” During the “I bombed Beirut” sequence, amidst the scattershot images of varied carnage, Ariel Sharon is depicted sitting down to a breakfast of beef and no less than five eggs, while holding a knife menacingly in his hand. Sharon was the Israeli minister of defense at the time of the Lebanon invasion.

In what may be the single scene most certain to inflame anti-Israeli — if not indeed outright anti-Semitic — prejudice, a portly unshaven Israeli officer is seen slouched half-undressed in an armchair while watching a porn video in an occupied villa on the outskirts of Beirut. (For lord knows what reason, the soundtrack of the porn film is in German.) By virtue of physiognomy and theme, the image is creepily reminiscent of the anti-Semitic caricatures featured in Julius Streicher’s infamous Nazi propaganda sheet Der Stürmer. (See here for an example. The cartoon is titled “Jewish Culture.” It shows a svelte “Aryan” couple contemplating nature, while the Stürmer cartoonist’s stock “fat Jew,” seen in profile, attends a porn flick titled The Sweet Sins.)...

Luckily, it would seem, there are enough smart Jews in Hollywood who saved Israel. Again.


And read Antony Beevor on films that rewrite history: Films that rewrite history, says Antony Beevor, are fatally warping our sense of reality

An Example of Israeli Self-Disintegration

Ideological self-disintegration, that is.

Here's the interview by Deborah Solomon with Ari Folman, director of "Waltzing With Bashir":-

The film can be described as the Israeli “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Yes, more than anything else, I see it as an antiwar movie.

One tends to think of Israel as a country where survivalist imperatives do not allow for much antiwar sentiment.
Israelis are divided, definitely, but I think you hear too much of the louder voices that always justify any kind of act of aggression. But there is a very big crowd of people who are fed up with war. I can’t understand the word “war” anyhow.

What can’t you understand?
I can’t understand people killing each other for a piece of land. Can you understand that?

...Israel’s founding generation didn’t seem to harbor ambivalence about war.
They were survival wars. They were about the existence of the country, and they were influenced tremendously by the Holocaust. But the Lebanon War had nothing to do with survival.

It was a military exception?
It was not an exception. It was a turning point in the relationship between the Israeli leadership and the people, who realized for the first time that war can be declared just for political reasons.

Of course, the wars forced upon Israel (1947 after UN Partition; 1949-56 by the fedayeen; 1967 by Egyptian and later Syrian aggression; 1968-70 by Egypt provocations; 1973 by Egyptian & Syrian invasions) were not about territory but Israel's existence. And Lebanon was a continuation in that the PLO was establishing itself in Southern Lebanon just like Hezbollah did 2000-2005.

How come 'smart' and 'clever' people who are creative enough to make good cinema, even if I don't agree with their politics, are so dumb in international relations and the reality of Arab hostility to Israel and Zionism?

Self-disintegration.