Waltz With Bashir directly addresses the philosophical question we’ve been discussing here. Ari Folman, the film’s director, served as an Israeli soldier on the perimeter of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut at the time of the massacre committed there by Lebanese Phalangist militiamen in mid-September 1982. Folman clearly feels guilt, and feels that he abetted an act that was comparable to the Nazis’ massacres of Jews in Europe—his parents are Holocaust survivors. To what extent is he, an individual soldier, morally culpable. Should he have acted otherwise than he did?

There can be little doubt that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Chief of Staff Rafael (Raful) Eitan, and the top army command knew very well what would happen if the Phalangists were given a free hand in the refugee camps. The Phalangist forces had a long history of murder, mutilation, and destruction, committed not just against Palestinians and Muslims but also against rival Christian forces in Lebanon.

Many lower IDF ranking officers and soldiers had an opportunity to see the Christian militia in action. One of Folman’s interviewees refers to the “slaughterhouse,” the field in Beirut where the Phalangists interrogated, killed, and dismembered their prisoners. These soldiers had no illusions about the militia. Most were shocked. Just as many were happy that the Phalangists were doing a lot of the house-to-house fighting in Beirut that would otherwise have fallen to the IDF (you can be, simultaneously, shocked by your allies and grateful to them for enabling you to avoid dangerous combat).

Folman asks Roni Dayag, one of his interviewees, whether he suspected anything when he saw Phalangists taking Palestinian women and children out of the camps and loading them on trucks. Dayag said that he assumed that the Christian forces were acting properly in removing civilians from a battle zone where they were liable to get hurt. Only later, when some of his soldiers saw, through their binoculars, Phalangists lining other women and children up against a wall and shooting them, did he realize a massacre was taking place. He reported the fact to his superior office and was told that the matter was being attended to. He had done what he could do, he said. (At this point, remember, he had seen a single incident. While he may have suspected that it represented what the Phalangists were doing elsewhere in the camps, he had no direct evidence to that effect.)

Assuming Dayag’s account is accurate, could he have done more? Should he have organized his squad and run into the camp to attack the attackers? Should he have abandoned his post in protest? Either act would have been foolish, ineffective, and would have placed his men in extreme danger for no practical end.

It may be disturbing, and it is certainly heartbreaking, but a low-ranking soldier caught in such an awful situation can do little at the moment. Afterwards, he can and should demand an accounting of his officers. He can and should, in civilian clothes, demand accounting of his government. He can and should talk to journalists, write letters and articles of protest, make films. The army’s top officers and civilian decision makers should be tried and convicted, but the individual soldier in Dayag’s position is not morally culpable. He is right to feel ashamed about his marginal involvement in such a crime, but his atonement will come not as a soldier who leaves his post but as a civilian who does all he can to keep that crime from being forgotten, and to prevent his government, and his army, from committing such acts in the future.

See Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (1) – A National Nightmare on Film

Just after seeing Waltz With Bashir at the Semadar Cinema in the German Colony, Ilana and I ran into our 17-year old son, Niot, with two friends. They had been at the pool, at their twice-weekly get-in-shape-for-the-army swim class. “You’ve got to see this film,” I told them. “Every kid who is dying to be a soldier should see it. So should every Israeli who loves his country.”

In Waltz With Bashir, director Ari Folman conducts a personal journey to recover his lost time and lost memories of the first Lebanon War. He knows that in September 1982 he was an Israeli soldier in Beirut. He was there when Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen, outfitted in IDF uniforms, massacred Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, two refugee camps that had become neighborhoods in the Lebanese capital. But, except for an odd vision of himself and two friends swimming naked in the sea at the time of the massacre, he can remember no details—what he was doing at the time, how he felt, who was really there with him.

At the encouragement of a high school friend who is now a psychotherapist, Folman, who has made several documentary films, set out to interview old army buddies and other Israelis who were in Beirut at the time. Little by little, the pieces come together and the memories return. Finally, Folman places himself on the rooftop of a Beirut high-rise, part of an Israeli team that sent up flares that provided light for the Phalangists to carry out their slaughter of an estimated 3,000 men, women, and children in the camps.

I wasn’t in Beirut in September 1982. I had begun basic training a month earlier. But I remember the anger, frustration, and shame I felt when news of the massacre became public. I was not the only one. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens massed in Tel Aviv’s central square on a Saturday night soon thereafter to demand that Prime Minister Menachem Begin establish a national commission of inquiry. Home on a weekend’s leave at Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi, I donned civilian clothes and drove with a friend to Tel Aviv to attend the demonstration.

Even before the massacre, the public had been betrayed by its leaders. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Chief of Staff Rafael (Raful) Eitan had concocted a grandiose plan to evict the Palestinians from Lebanon by installing the young, handsome, and merciless Phalangist chief, Bashir Gemayal as president. The plan called for sending Israeli forces deep into Lebanon, up to Beirut. Sharon and Eitan knew that even Begin’s hypernationalist cabinet would never approve such a megalomaniac operation, so the plan they submitted called for a short-scale, modest incursion into southern Lebanon to clean out the Palestinian bases from which rocket attacks were being launched against Israel’s northern settlements. Once the army had crossed the border, Sharon and Eitan sent the troops onward and northward. Gemayal became president, but was soon assassinated. His Phalangist followers demanded revenge, and Israel’s military decision makers gave them the opportunity in Sabra and Shatila.

Israeli hands did not spill this blood, but a small number of Israeli hands and voices could easily have prevented it. In not doing so, they betrayed their country and the trust of the soldiers who, like Ari Folman, became unwitting and unwilling accessories to a war crime.

As he conducts his interviews, Folman puts together a portrait in which uncaring Israeli leaders, civilian and military, used their soldiers as pawns in an ill-advised and ill-planned military adventure. The culmination of the war’s ugliness, to my mind, comes not in the scenes of exploding shells, machine guns, and death—though these are numerous and difficult to watch. It’s the scene where a paunch-bellied brigadier sits, shirt unbuttoned, on an expensive armchair in a requisitioned Beirut mansion watching a German porn movie, as he orders Folman to take his squad out to sit in ambush all night for an expected car bomb. In my time in Lebanon I served under many dedicated, morally upstanding commanders—but also under no few ones like this perverted colonel.

Folman’s chose well to use animation this documentary. Since so much of his story involves memories, true and false, and fantasies, good and bad, his characters, and his battle scenes, are more effective as drawings than they could ever be as putatively real people and events on film.

The only thing that doesn’t fit is the way he chooses to end–with live footage of Palestinian women as they bewail the destruction and death in the camps. We already know that an awful thing has happened. What we want to know is what conclusions Folman draws from his journey through his memory–what he has discovered about himself and the country for which he fought. After subjecting us to these horrors, he owes us a statement.

I told my son and his friends that they must see this film because they must know that in setting out enthusiastically to defend their country, there may well be times when their lives and their country’s moral standing will be in the hands of perverted colonels and megalomaniac politicians. Defend their country they must, but they should avoid the tendency, all too common in Israel, to over-idealize the IDF and our legitimate struggle for our survival. Fighting to defend our country, we—soldiers and civilians—must fight at the same time to ensure that the shame of Beirut, September 1982, is never repeated. That’s what you do if you love your country.

For more, see Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2) — War Ethics in a War Zone (3)

Beirut is an evocative city even when you’ve only seen it in its worse moments. In yesterday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen waxes nostalgic about Beirut of a quarter-century ago, and in today’s Ha’aretz, Yehuda Ben-Meir praises Israel’s restraint in not invading the city back in the first Lebanon War. I was probably in Beirut at the same time Cohen was, so I’d like to join the party.

I was two days into Hell Week, the first chapter of my infantry NCO course, when helicopters appeared out of nowhere. We had barely slept for two nights, had eaten little, and were caked with the mud stirred up by a persistent late-winter downpour. Within a few minutes we threw our gear together and lugged it into the choppers that flew us to Tyre.

Israel had been in Lebanon for six and half months then and the quick victory and new Middle East that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon had promised had not materialized. The IDF had begun a long and intractable occupation of all of southern Lebanon–including the southern neighborhoods of Beirut. Ben-Meir, who as a parliamentarian for the National Religious Party, was a member of the governing coalition at the time, is not accurate in his description of events. Israeli forces entered the Lebanese capital at the beginning of the war. The restraint he speaks of was not pressing further into the northern and western sectors of the city, where Cohen was, where Arafat and the PLO leadership had been until they were, as Ben-Meir describes, forced to leave.

In Tyre we were installed for the night in a huge port-side warehouse. Since we were on high alert, we had no duties assigned to us other than a half-hour’s guard duty per soldier during the night. Traumatized by the previous two days, we barely cared that we’d been sent into a war zone. The warehouse was warm and dry and we had hours upon hours to sleep. That’s all that mattered.

The next day buses took us up the coastal road to Beirut. We got shot at a few times, emptied the bus, took up positions, but never saw our attackers. I don’t remember the name of the Beirut neighborhood that was our final stop, but it was one where Christians and Druze and Shiites had been feuding by trading small-arms fire and an occasional RPG missile, and we were there to stop that. My platoon was ordered to commandeer the empty shell of a half-built mansion. We had beds and mattresses but no showers or plumbing. We smelled pretty bad when we got there and I’m sure the whole neighborhood smelled worse after a couple days. We patrolled narrow streets inhabited by people who hadn’t lived a normal day since the previous June. Many of them, presumably, were out of work and out of money. Although we saw some kids going to school, many others were on the streets all day. We’d heard stories of children firing RPGs at soldiers. My own RPG, along with three two-part rockets, was securely fastened on a pack on my back–securely so that it could not be grabbed, so securely that it would take me many long minutes to set it up should I need it. In my thoughts, I pretended it was a bassoon (which it vaguely resembled), an instrument I had played for a couple years in high school.

Cohen drank Black Label, stood in line for the telex machine, and got invited to a young woman’s home. He collected stories. We did our best to keep from getting killed and waited eagerly for the long-promised but repeatedly-delayed field shower.

I didn’t much like Ben-Meir at the time, because he supported the government that had gotten us into that useless and megalomaniac war. But in recent years he has been a vocal advocate of moderation against militarism. His advocacy of diplomacy over military action is welcome at this tense time–he learned a lesson in the 1980s. Cohen got some good stories. My platoon and I left the city a week later, without having suffered, or caused, any casualties. That was the greatest accomplishment we could hope for a quarter-century ago in Beirut.