The consecutive appearance of three major Israeli war films, Yossef (Joseph) Cedar’s “Beaufort” (2007), Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2008), and now Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” (2009), warrants a moment of pause to wonder what is happening in the visual registers and cinematic subconscious of the Jewish state.
Israeli cinema has always been inundated with war films. Israelis are warlike people. Their state is founded on war, has survived on war, fed on war, thrived on war, and lived for war. The Israelis have been in more wars over the past 60 years of their collective identity than just about anyone anywhere else on the planet. Not a single generation of Israelis has known anything except through the traumatic experiences of a major war. Some even say, and rightly so, that Israel is a military garrison with a thin veneer of a political apparatus built around it. It is quite natural that Israelis also make war films that entertain their belligerent fancies, assuage their militant preoccupations, confirm their paramount paranoia, demonize their enemies, celebrate their myth of origin, and at the same time mourn their perished sons and daughters, all wasted on a misbegotten ideology.
Beginning with the self-indulgent “Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer” (1955), Thorold Dickinson, a British filmmaker who was initially making documentaries for the Israeli army film unit, inaugurated an Israeli cinematic genre that has remained preoccupied with proving to itself, more than to others, the justice of its cause, waged, as it were, against an invisible, almost nonexistent enemy. Because as far as Israelis are concerned, Palestinians, until very recently, did not exist, the Israeli war films commenced their history against a vacuous Arab entity that can scarcely explain the ferocity of the Jewish state as a veritable killing machine. Hill 24 celebrates what Israelis call their “war of independence,” and denies Palestinians the permission to call it their Nakba. The four soldiers at the center of Hill 24 personify the sacrifices that the Zionist myth of origin wishes to convey to its future generations, and thus commence the genre of Israeli war films as the visual absolution of an invincible war machine.
To be sure, not everything in Israeli war films has corroborated the Zionist myth. Before 1967, such films as Uri Zohar’s “Hole in the Moon” (1964) or Micha Shagrir’s “The Scouts” (1967) began to offer a more realistic take on the war, at least so far as Israeli suffering was concerned: a thematic trait that tacitly challenged the image of an invincible war machine Zionism wished to portray. After the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the Yom Kippur/Ramadan War of October 1973, with such films as Renen Schorr’s “Late Summer Blues” (1987) and Amos Gitai’s “Kippur” (2000), Israeli war films began asking troubling political questions while, at the same time, Shmuel Imberman’s “I Don’t Give a Damn” (1987) dwelt more emphatically on the suffering that war veterans and their friends and families had to endure. By now, the Zionist propaganda machinery had no complete control over the warring image it wanted to portray. The image of suffering Israelis, battle fatigued and war-weary, crippled and unfulfilled, was evident throughout Israeli cinema.
Figure 17.1Poster of Yossef (Joseph) Cedar’s Beaufort, 2007, https://www.fruugo.lu/beaufort-movie-poster-11-x-17/p-9002061-19367234.
Something happens to, and in, Israel in the aftermath of the First Lebanon War (1982–2000) that gives Yossef Cedar’s “Beaufort” (2007), set toward the end of that war, the power and audacity finally to put an end to the Zionist myth of triumphalism, which in this film begins to unravel. “Beaufort” is set in the year 2000, as the Israeli army is withdrawing from South Lebanon. Set against the Crusader fortress of “Beaufort,” the film dwells on the moral and mundane preoccupations of a group of soldiers after 18 years of military occupation. The claustrophobic maze through which the Israeli soldiers navigate their daily lives is the perfect setting for the utter futility of the deadly game they are playing. A O Scott of The New York Times captured the surreal sense of the film in his review:
“Beaufort” may be, strictly speaking, a war movie, but for long stretches it feels more like science fiction. The small band of Israeli soldiers who are its main—virtually its only—characters inhabit a mountain outpost in southern Lebanon that might as well be a space station marooned in a hostile galaxy.1
Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2008) opts for an animated docudrama, with the aging director/soldier searching desperately for solace in the midst of his nightmares. The drama unfolds between two veterans, one of whom cannot remember a thing he did in Lebanon while the other is plagued with too much memory. But suddenly the clueless soldier has a flashback from the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The jolt prompts him to talk to others who have a better recollection of the massacre, and through it of the whole Lebanon war. The result is an eerie visual parable of a deadly and destructive orgy that simply defies realism and must reach for graphic registers. The even more troubling aspect of “Waltz with Bashir” is its videogame graphic animation—punctuated by Max Richter’s phenomenal scores that range from Bach to punk rock—that at once exacerbates reality and yet depletes it of its historicity. The result is a subterranean vision of a deadly daylight toward which one is at once attracted and fearful.
Figure 17.2Still from Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, 2008, https://editorial.rottentomatoes.comgallery28-best-and-worst-r-rated-animated-moviesbashir.
Figure 17.3Still from Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon, 2009, http://dennisamith.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Lebanon-2009-Samuel-Maoz.
The question that these films collectively pose is whether the evident record is for the Israeli war machine to go on a rampage—in and out of Palestine—and then more than a quarter of a century after the fact suddenly the teenage soldiers hit middle age and discover they have a conscience and cannot live with it, precisely at the same time that their own children, the next generation of Israeli soldiers, are on a rampage in Lebanon and Palestine doing precisely what their parents did a generation earlier; or, alternatively, is this a case of collective schizophrenia, prelude to a moral emancipation, and Israeli society is finally coming to terms with the terror it has perpetrated on Palestinians and themselves alike?
One cannot be sure that the latter is the case if we consider the fact that two years after the 2006 insanity of the Lebanon war the Israelis hit a new record of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza in 2008–2009 while at the same time electing one of the most warlike governments of their recent history, including Binyamin Netanyahu and his colorful foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. On the surface it seems that the Israeli collective schizophrenia is quite ambidextrous: it can make guilt-ridden movies with one hand, sending them off to international film festivals to show that Israel has a moral conscience too, while with the other hand votes Netanyahu and Lieberman into high office and dispatches the children of the selfsame generation of filmmakers to drop white phosphorous bombs on Palestinian and Lebanese children. Does the paradox hide something deeper in the agitated soul of the Israelis?
If we compare this genre of Israeli war films with those of another country great in making wars and war movies, we’ll see that in fact this is not the case with American antiwar films from the Vietnam era, when filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone pulled no punches in showing the horrors of war precisely at a time that historians identified a “Vietnam Syndrome” in American political culture, which Americans did not exit until the Reagan era. One of the greatest post-Vietnam films of all time, the Hughes Brothers’ “Dead Presidents” (1995) remains a classic study of posttraumatic syndrome in American cinema. After Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) and Michael Cimino’s “Deer Hunter” (1978) nothing has captured the moral degeneration of those involved in the horrors of war in quite the same way that “Dead Presidents” did. By the time Francis Ford Coppola made “Apocalypse Now” (1979) and Stanley Kubrick “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), the Vietnam Syndrome and a towering awareness of the monumental futility of war were in full display. With Oliver Stone’s trilogy, “Platoon” (1986), “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), and “Heaven & Earth” (1993), American antiwar sentiments were now fighting the Reaganite takeover of the American psyche. Reagan won. The United States exited its Vietnam Syndrome first in Nicaragua and Honduras, then in the first Gulf War (1990–1991) and again (in the aftermath of 9/11) with “shock and awe” vengeance in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What we saw in the American scene in the aftermath of Vietnam is a collective effort to capture the horrors of war that perfectly matches the sentiments of society at large in the 1960s and the 1970s, during the antiwar and civil rights movement. In the 1980s, Oliver Stone brought the previous generations of American antiwar films to a crescendo, and yet with all his cinematic might he lost to Reagan’s charismatic warmongering. As Reagan and his neoconservative cabal pulled the United States out of its remorseful Vietnam Syndrome, Oliver Stone took his revenge with “Natural Born Killers” (1994), whose scriptwriter, Quentin Tarantino, would soon after emerge with “Pulp Fiction” (1994) as the virtuoso internalization of the selfsame violence that between “Taxi Driver” (1976) and Born on the “Fourth of July” (1989) had gone through full circle. With “Pulp Fiction” and “Dead Presidents,” the proverbial chickens had come home to roost, at the time that the Clinton presidency was under pressure from the same neoconservatives and heading toward yielding to George W Bush and eight long and diabolic years of warmongering around the globe.
Compared to American antiwar films, the recent films that are coming out of Israel could very well be exceedingly hopeful signs—an indication that the fragile humanity behind the killing machine is exposed for the whole world, Israelis included, to see. In this regard, international recognition, which films like “Beaufort,” Waltz with Bashir, and “Lebanon” richly deserve, is precisely what these films need, as points of departure, as engaging the Israeli population at large, to see and observe the transmutation of a perhaps understandable dream of an exclusively Jewish homeland (just like the horrors of an exclusively Islamic Republic) into the entirely inscrutable suicidal nightmare of a modern Massada. The only significant difference between the American antiwar films and their Israeli counterparts is their respective contexts, where there is no sign of the massive antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era in the United States visible anywhere in Israel. Quite to the contrary, Israelis have made these three films precisely at the time when they were massively mobilized to wage one deadly war in Lebanon and another in Gaza.
Compared to Israeli and American war films, the case of their Iranian counterparts, the so-called “cinema of sacred defense,” has had a more fragmented character. While master filmmakers like Bahram Beizai, in his “Bashu: The Little Stranger” (1989), and Amir Naderi, in his “Search I” (1980) and “Search II” (1981), turned to Iran–Iraq War by way of extrapolating from it the visual registers of their own respective cinemas of magic and miracle, the younger generation of filmmakers, like Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Ebrahim Hatami-kia, Morteza Avini and Kamal Tabrizi, were infinitely more affected by the actual horrors of the war and thus gave birth to a uniquely Iranian war cinema.
All the propaganda purposes of the Islamic Republic notwithstanding, the Iranian war cinema of the 1980s and 1990s—in a cinematic panorama that extends from Beizai and Naderi to Makhmalbaf and Hatami-kia—became the dramatic repertoire of a national trauma that had left scarcely any Iranian unscathed.
The function of the most recent Israeli war films, however, seems to be different. For in this comparative context, the collective work of Cedar, Folman, and Maoz are beginning to raise the same sorts of question about Israel that Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi raised about Iran. How could a country produce both Khomeini and Kiarostami, or Ahmadinejad and Jafar Panahi, at one and the same time, as now one may wonder how could Israel produce Binyamin Netanyahu/Avigdor Lieberman/Ehud Barak and Cedar/Folman/Maoz at one and the same time? My response to the Iranian puzzle has always been that Iran produced Kiarostami not despite Khomeini but precisely because of Khomeini. In the Israeli case, the jury is still out. Are Israelis stealing Palestinian lands and killing them en masse during the daylight and then, at nighttime, making war films that win critical acclaim and seek to procure moral legitimacy for the Zionist project, or do films such as “Beaufort,” “Waltz with Bashir,” and “Lebanon” represent the healthy and hopeful signs of a society at the cusp of finally recognizing not what it has been doing to others but what it has done to itself?
In “Lebanon” in particular, suffering inside that infernal tank is not just a small band of isolated Israeli soldiers, but the very soul of an entire people, trapped inside a killing machine that keeps killing anyone in its sight as it is chewing on the body and soul of its own operators. “Lebanon” is Kafkaesque in its recollection of In the Penal Colony, where the Traveler, the Officer, the Condemned and the Soldier have all become one. Israel, if we are correct in reading films like “Beaufort,” “Waltz with Bashir,” and “Lebanon” as the signs of many sleepless nights, has become its own Kafkaesque nightmare.
The moral dissolution of the state of Israel is coterminous with the cul-de-sac that its militarism now faces. The two consecutive catastrophes of the second Lebanon War of 2006 and the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza in 2008–2009 have now been topped with the damning Goldstone Report, and a persistent pattern of diversionary tactics that is now dead set on demonizing Iran in preparation for a military strike. These films portray that moral crisis from within the tormented soul of that killing machine that calls itself Israel. For over 60 years, Zionism has sought (in vain) to portray itself as the victim of a crime that it has perpetrated on Palestinians. The more Palestinians it has killed, and the more of their lands it has stolen, the more it has portrayed itself as the victim of a crime beyond its control. That self-delusional paradox has finally caught up with Israel, as from within its own tormented soul, its most courageous visionaries—with Isaiah and Hosea mourning in their minds—are letting all see that to which they have cultivated an intentional blindness.
Could it be that these films are also cries for freedom; freedom from a self-imposed Masada complex that has finally run its full course and is seeing, in the face of Palestine and Palestinians, the pain and destruction that it has suffered for centuries? Ultimately no one can address the calamity of Zionism better than its most immediate victims, the contemporary Israelis who have been at the forefront of both fighting and dying for it. It took some 30 years of film, fiction and poetry for Iranians to become morally prepared to get rid of a corrupt monarchy, and it took yet another 30 years of film, fiction and poetry for them to collect their courage to launch a civil rights movement against a medieval theocracy. Some 60 years into their history, perhaps it is also time for Israelis to face up not just to the obscenity of what they have perpetrated against Palestinians, but the insanity of what they have done to themselves.
*First published in Al-Ahram Weekly, November 19–25, 2009.