Waltz with Bashir (Israel)

http://waltzwithbashir.com

[Ari] Folman's "Waltz With Bashir" is a remarkable, haunting and intense work, quite unlike any animated film I've ever seen. Hand drawn in a crude, colorful underground-comics style, it captures Folman's struggle to recapture his lost memories of what he saw and what he did during Israel's ill-fated 1980s war in Lebanon, when he was a young draftee. Folman says that for many years he had no clear memories of his time in Lebanon, although he knew he had seen combat and that he had witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacres of September 1982, when pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian militiamen carried out a near-genocidal campaign of murder in two Palestinian refugee camps.

While trying to work his way out of a severe depression, Folman contacted many of his former military comrades, along with a psychiatrist friend and a neurologist who specializes in memory impairment. The film combines pieces of these interviews with fragmentary episodes drawn from these men's memories, dreams and perhaps fantasies, all of them (until the utterly devastating last scenes) delivered in the same animation style. At least in part, the subject of "Waltz With Bashir" -- the title refers to Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose assassination inflamed Lebanese Christians to widespread anti-Muslim violence -- is the unreliable and fantastic quality of memory itself. One friend's dream about being pursued by a pack of wild dogs seems just as real or unreal as another's eerie memory of a firefight in a remote orchard against a shadowy opponent -- a boy of 11 or 12, who blows up an Israeli tank with an RPG before being killed himself. (Folman was involved in this battle, but apparently still cannot remember it.)

Oddly, the adventure-comics presentation of Folman's memory excavation lends it less rather than more power. (As he has said, the alternative was to shoot a bunch of middle-aged men talking.) His resurrected war stories really are exciting adventures, but also terrible, nightmarish and finally pointless ones. Dredging up these dreadful memories may have been therapeutic for the men involved, but the point of "Waltz With Bashir" is bigger than that. It's a provocative, strange and arresting film, whose unusual blend of style and substance should reach a large worldwide audience.

Source: Salon

Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

This 1949 novella about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army has long been considered a modern Hebrew masterpiece, and it has also given rise to fierce controversy over the years. Published just months after the end of the 1948 war, Khirbet Khizeh (the “kh” pronounced like the “ch” in “Bach”) was an immediate sensation when it first appeared. Thousands of Israeli Jews rushed to read it, the critics began to argue about it, and a Palestinian journalist in Nablus described it as a sign that the Israeli army had a conscience and that peace was possible.

Since then, the book has continued to challenge and disturb. The various debates it has prompted would themselves make Khirbet Khizeh worth reading, but the novella is much more than a vital historical document: it is also a great work of art. Yizhar’s haunting, lyrical style and charged registration of the landscape are in many ways as startling as his wrenchingly honest view of one of Israel’s defining moments. Despite its international reputation, the book has never before been translated into English. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck’s expert rendering captures with grace Yizhar’s elusive prose, while David Shulman’s afterword makes the book’s contemporary relevance powerfully clear. Khirbet Khizeh is an absolute must for anyone interested in Middle Eastern literature and history.

See also Economist review

THERE is a myth that once upon a time no Israelis had moral qualms. Only after years of occupying the Palestinians, and after the series of books by revisionist Israeli historians that began appearing in the late 1980s, did Jewish Israelis start opening their eyes to the destruction that they themselves visited on another people in their attempt to create a refuge from the vast evil done to them. It is astonishing, therefore, to read the novella “Khirbet Khizeh”, just issued in English by Ibis Editions, a tiny non-profit house in Jerusalem dedicated to the translation of obscure gems.

First published in 1949, a year after the declaration of independence and 57 years before the publication of “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Ilan Pappé, perhaps the most controversial of Israel's historians, “Khirbet Khizeh” describes in detail one such act of ethnic cleansing. It is based on the experiences of its author, S. Yizhar (pen-name of Yizhar Smilansky), who was an intelligence officer in the newborn state's army. Blowing a further hole in the myth is the news, learnt from the helpful afterword by David Shulman, a peace activist, that the book has long been an optional text in the official Israeli school curriculum.

In the story, a squad is detailed to clear a Palestinian village that has remained on the Israeli side of the 1949 ceasefire line and pack its residents off in trucks with only the clothes on their backs (Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, has calculated that of 369 Palestinian towns and villages in what became Israel, at least 41 were forcibly evacuated, and in at least 228 the residents fled under attack by Zionist forces). When the narrator, his mind ringing with thoughts of how Jews were exiled by their persecutors, blurts out a protest, one of his comrades retorts: “Are we killing them? We're taking them to their side. Let them sit there and wait. It's very decent of us. There's no other place in the world where they'd have been treated as well as this.”

That quotation sums up why, despite being a school text, and despite the historians' efforts, “Khirbet Khizeh” is not central to the national consciousness. The whatever-we-did-we-suffered-worse rationale has allowed most Jewish Israelis to draw a veil over the sins of the state's early years, even as their misgivings about the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have grown.

Available in the US from Small Press Distributors. Elsewhere on the world see Ibis Editions website.

Dome of the Rock & Baseball!

Very interesting juxtaposition, Dome of the Rock and Israeli baseball, showing the appropriation of a Palestinian national and Islamic religious symbol for the promotion of an Israeli institution.

As usual, the Dome of the Rock is used as a signifier for the Jerusalem as an Israeli/Jewish city.

On a similar usage, from the 1930s see this post.

Incidentally there is no Jerusalem-based baseball team. The closest being the Bet Shemesh Blue Sox


http://www.israelbaseballleague.com/

The Divide: Virtual Exhibition

Excellent virtual exhibition on...

Waving PLFP ("Popular Liberation Front of Palestine") flags, Palestinian youth demonstrate against the separation walls in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya. The demonstration takes place on the international day commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Photo: Ahikam Seri, 2003.

Six Day War

What right had the British, in 1917, to promise the Jews a national home in Palestine? Why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947? Why did Israel colonise the territories after 1967? Why did the Americans let Israel get away with it? Why did the Arab states leave the refugees to fester in camps? The Palestinians are terrorists, Zionism is racism, Israel's enemies are anti-Semites. Yasser Arafat should have accepted Israel's “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000. But, hang on, Israel's offer was not so generous...

Tom Segev: 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East

Amazon UK
Amazon US

Yasmin Levy [Israel]: La Alegria

http://www.myspace.com/yasminlevy