A Waltz with Free Speech
Start a conversation with a Jewish student at Lehigh on the topic of Israel, and the ensuing moments will look a lot like the movie Flubber. No one will really know what they’re talking about, spectators will suffer whiplash trying to keep track of what’s going on, and more than a few delicate objects will end up broken.
So when the Berman Center for Jewish Studies brought Israeli writer and director Ari Folman to campus to screen and discuss a much different film: his acclaimed, yet controversial anti-war epic Waltz With Bashir, the debate was sure to be fierce.
Bashir is Folman’s account of his role as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force during the 1982 War in Lebanon. Years after the events took place, the film follows its writer, director and protagonist as he tries to recover suppressed memories from the 20 year-old conflict.
Specifically, Folman has a recurring nightmare about the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps (Google it). In one of the film’s most powerful and thought-provoking moments, Folman draws an equivalency between the actions of IDF soldiers and those of Nazis during the Holocaust. Both, he posits, stood by idly as thousands of innocent men, women and children were systematically executed.
The juxtaposition is startling, but for Folman, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, the shadow of that experience inevitably frames the discussion of all subsequent history. Yet many American Jews have a similar background, so it’s troubling that Israelis are free to engage in such unrestrained self-critique, yet external criticism of Israel is often dismissed as anti-Semitism in America.
To be clear, Bashir hardly touches the political dimension of this particular incident or Israeli foreign policy in general. The film focuses on the human consequences of war – especially its psychological impact on adolescent men who are tossed into a world of bloodshed and violence. In Israel, where military service is mandatory and conflicts occur at a tragically consistent rate, each generation is bound by the shared experience of the crucible of war.
In America, no such binding agent exists, which could go a long way in explaining why our political debate is marred by suspicions of bad faith and insidious motivations. At Lehigh and in the American press, the discomfort was palpable as Bashir raised issues that are usually considered off-limits. Rather than engaging the substance of Folman’s critique, some viewers simply dismissed its validity because they couldn’t be inconvenienced to amend their half-baked positions based on new information. It’s not that this film demands that every viewer radically shifts his or her perspective, but it does challenge the dangerous popular disdain for critical reflection.
Ironically, it was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that published a scathing review on the eve of the Oscars (Bashir was nominated for best foreign film in 2009), slamming Folman for his too-delicate treatment of the IDF. When the Berman Center brought another Israeli speaker a few weeks later, he remarked on the high level of implicit censorship in America as compared to Israel. Of course, the internet makes it so that anyone can say anything, but political, social and institutional norms define the legitimacy of specific arguments while excluding others. For instance, in 2008, the Israel lobby and mainstream media outlets pounced on then-Senator Barack Obama’s mere recognition of Palestinian suffering. This statement was soon diluted to attribute that suffering exclusively to the failure of Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel as a state.
With these subtle constraints on dialogue in America, it’s even more remarkable that a film as critical as Bashir was financed entirely by public money from the Israeli government. As that government moves farther to the right under hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vigorous debate over Israel’s direction as a Middle Eastern democracy will ensue. We can’t count on Americans to ask the tough questions, so it is even more important that the vibrancy of Israeli public discourse remains.
