A defender of Israel’s Gaza incursion emailed anti-Islamists the following excerpt from a front page story, “Fighter Sees His Paradise in Gaza’s Pain,” in the January 9 New York Times:
21 year old militant with Islamic Jihad awaits treatment for shrapnel wounds:
“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting…We are fighting the Israelis…When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.”
He continued smiling. “Why are you so happy?,” the reporter asked.
“Look around you. Don’t you see that these people are hurting?”“But I am from the people too.” he said with his smile incandescent.
“They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
I’d seen the original story in the Times where that bright, shining smile lit up the madness of Jihadis. But there was something vital missing from the e-mailer’s excerpt. Right after Times reporter Taghreed El-Khodary entered her own story to address the happy militant – “Look around you.” – she brought readers inside the hospital’s emergency room:
A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.
Only then did El-Khodary turn back to ask the militant: “Don’t you see that these people are hurting?”
Her story of the smiley Jihadi stuck with me in part because she nailed the pain the wannabe martyr refused to take in. But it seems the Jihadi wasn’t the only imperfect witness. I suspect the “pro-Israeli” e-mailer cut El-Khodary’s passage on the victims in that hospital because it brings home the excruciating consequences of the Gaza incursion. Jihadists who provoke Israel bear much responsibility for causing the suffering of Palestinian civilians but so do Israeli politicians and the population who overwhelmingly support the operation in Gaza.
Columnist Ralph Peters, though, denies their agency in the New York Post, arguing it’s time to “smash the lies.” But you don’t have to be a dupe – or a sucker for Jenin-style myth-mongering – to recognize that Peters starts his own piece off with a whopper: “Israel hasn’t killed a single civilian in the Gaza Strip. Over a hundred civilians have died, and Israeli bombs or shells may have ended their lives. But Israel didn’t kill them. Hamas did.” Peters may argue Israel’s killing of civilians is unintended, justifiable, “proportional” etc., but his distinction between “killing” and “ending lives” is a linguistic dodge.
I watched Israel’s Foreign Minister Tipzi Livni do some dodging in an interview a few nights ago. Livni is likeable enough. And when you compare her to brutes who rail on behalf of Hamas or Hezbollah, she seems to incarnate the difference between barbarism and civility. But she wasn’t at her most winning as she deflected questions about Israel’s war aims and the timing of a cease-fire. Mulling over the disjunction between her abstractions – “Israel must change the equation” – and the reality of unending suffering in Gaza – I was struck by what I took to be traces of a smug smile that played around her lips as she played cat-and-mouse with the interviewer.
It wasn’t as bad as that Jihadi’s “incandescent” smile. Still, it distanced her in my mind from the persona of a good contemporary Israeli artist, Ari Folman, who may be on his way to becoming an unacknowledged legislator of his country.
This Writer/Director of the new autobiographical animated documentary film about the horrors of Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon, Waltz with Bashir, is not without humor. But Folman’s Leonard Cohen-ish manner (in person and in his movie) isn’t smiley. Waltz with Bashir is suffused with…Jewish guilt. Its version of the Lebanon war is shadowed from the beginning by the specter of the mass killings of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps committed by Israel’s Phalangist allies (and facilitated by then-Defense Minister Arik Sharon and Israeli military officers). Folman switches from animation to actual photographs of the murdered Palestinians at the end of Waltz. He wants to make sure his audience gets real about those massacres. But the movie isn’t chiefly about Sabra and Shatila. As Folman allows, there’s not much news on this score – and no revisionist history – in Waltz. (The fact of Israeli complicity at Sabra and Shatila is not in dispute though Israel-haters have been known to underplay the truth that Palestinians in the camps were actually murdered by other “Christian” Arabs.) Folman’s Waltz tells an eternal anti-war story in a fresh way. Animation enables him to flash back and fast-forward seamlessly from surreal wartime to dreamtime. The movie begins inside a nightmare that haunts a friend of Folman’s who was in his unit of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) when they both participated in the invasion of Lebanon. This friend dreams repeatedly that he’s being chased by 26 vicious dogs. In the first of the movie’s many unobvious turns, it turns out that Folman’s friend is at the mercy of guilty memories though he couldn’t bring himself to fire on the enemy when he was in Lebanon with the IDF. Aware of his conscientious objections, his fellow soldiers had him shoot dogs in Lebanese villages instead. They offered a military rationale for these little acts of cruelty – silencing the howling village dogs would keep the beasties from alerting “terrorists” to the presence of the Israeli strangers/invaders. But Folman’s buddy’s nightmares suggest this war aim wasn’t all that rational. His story of the barking dogs of (the Lebanese) war rouses Folman to realize he’s repressed his own memories of combat (and mass murder). He starts to meet and interview old friends and comrades in an effort to discover the felt truth of that time.
Folman comes to recognize he was near the camps when the massacres took place and even helped the killers since his unit shot flairs into the night-sky making it easier for Phalangists to find their victims. That late revelation caps Folman’s search for the origins of his own bad conscience. But his journey is never narrowly personal. One key to its larger meaning lies in an earlier scene imaging the “waltz with Bashir” invoked in the movie’s title (which refers to Bashir Gemayel – charismatic leader of the Phalangists, ally of Sharon, whose assassination led to the revenge killings at Sabra and Shatila).
There are two major players in this sequence which unfolds as Folman’s unit is pinned down by snipers on a Beirut block. Both are defined by their exceptional physical courage. One is Israel’s most respected war correspondent, Ron Ben-Yishai, whom Folman recalls “walking tall” among the bullets in West Beirut, “gazing at hell with eyes open, calm.” The other, Shmuel Frenkel, made a career in the military before going on to become Israel’s “champion 8 years running in an eccentric martial art known as ‘Dennis Survive’ whereby two competitors essentially bash each other’s brains out until one surrenders.” It’s Frenkel who does the title-waltz. Grabbing a machine gun and firing back at the snipers, Frenkel dances amid the bullets in that Beirut street as boldly as Ron Ben-Yishai (or Sean Flynn).
Frenkel is far from Folman’s ego-ideal, but he’s not mocked. Waltz provides a sort of back-story that hints at how a nice Jewish boy might turn into the menace of “Dennis Survive.” (Frenkel’s bio on the website promoting Waltz further domesticates this macho man:
Whoever served in the military with Frenkel is extremely familiar with his wife Miri, who despite strict army regulations was with him throughout his military service, except when he was dispatched on military operations. Somehow, she always found a way to wait for him at the end of the day in his tent, secretly, in the middle of the night, in the most remote locations on the planet. Miri, whom he calls Yoko, was always there. No one figured out how. Incidentally, they are happily married and have five children.
)
Folman bows down to Ben-Yishai who’s known for his moral courage as well as his physical bravery. It’s Ben-Yishai who warned Arik Sharon massacres had begun at Sabra and Shatila and pressed the Minister (unsuccessfully) to call off the Phalangists. Yet there are no heroes in Waltz. The bulk of the interviewees are just regular guys. Normal conformists or natural marginals, they’re lost in the fog and noise of war. (Public Image’s “This Is Not a Love Song” plays on the soundtrack.) Unlike Frenkel, they find combat repulsive not romantic. The villain of the piece may be Arik Sharon but Waltz’s true object-of-contempt is war-in-itself.
And that suggests its original target-audience is a moving one. Folman was surprised at the positive response to Waltz in Israel, where, as he’s noted in interviews, it’s been embraced by all sides, outside of the “extreme left.” Yet the nation who identified with anti-heroes in this anti-war film has fallen in line behind politicians who authorized the current war in Gaza.
What gives? To me, the takeaway from that contradiction is that Israelis might be ready – sooner rather than later – to vote their way out of those “equation(s)” the IDF tries to change by fire. Forget me, though. Last fall, the “Father” of Israel’s peace movement, Uri Avnery, proposed today’s Israelis may be the ones he’s been waiting for. He fantasized about an Israeli Obama whom he gave an imaginary Hebrew name: Barak Hasson Ovadya. Avnery argues the closest Israeli equivalent to the black community in the United States is the Oriental Jewish community – those who came to Israel from Arab and other Islamic countries. Oriental Jews, he notes, are “patriotic” but see themselves as a “community of second class citizens” in a nation ruled by European, “Ashkenazi” elites. He anticipates the Israeli Obama “will be half Oriental and half Ashkenazi, with the Oriental part of his image dominating.”
In Avnery’s eyes, Obama’s achievements provide a template for Ovayda’s tasks. The Israeli politician of Avnery’s dreams will mobilize “millions of voters” who are now “fed up with politicians…having come to the conclusion there’s no real difference between members of the various political parties.” Avnery’s Ovayda will reject one-issue politics and build a rainbow coalition for “big change” that unites “masses of young Ashkenazis and Orientals, the ‘social’ public, the Arab citizens, the Russian community, the greens, the secular, the gays and lesbians, the feminists, the religious progressives, and of course the peace activists.”
Avnery is an echt peace activist, yet he has the wit to see he and his allies can’t come up with a solution to equations of force on their own. The only hope is a politician who links humane constituencies and messages by emphasizing “the uniting and not the dividing, so that each of the aims finds the place it deserves in the general scheme and it is clear that one thing depends on the other.”
Can all these messages, which look so different, be connected to each other?…The answer is: yes, absolutely! All these aims spring from the same source: the striving for justice, for a model society, for a country that is good to live in, a state we can be proud of.
Avnery allows an Ovayda would face a “Herculean task” and that peace activists have done some of the dirt that must be washed away.
For reasons we don’t have room to go into here, an abyss is yawning between those who are striving for peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people, almost all of whom belong to the Ashkenazi elite, and the Oriental Jews, the great majority of whom vote for the old right-wing parties, in glaring contradiction to their own economic interests.
While Avnery gets how the presence of a charismatic “liberal” Oriental Jewish politician would change the game inside Israel, it occurs to me there’s another upside across the borderline. An Ovayda would undercut one key ideological rationale of Palestinian “anti-imperialist” irredentism. Arabs tend to picture Israel as a Colonial settler state, but the country’s Oriental Jewish population gives the lie to that version of history. It’s a reminder that hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced out of Middle Eastern countries after the Palestinian Nakba. The presence of an Oriental Jewish politician all up in the peace process might force Palestinians to make room in their own heads for the history of other victims from the Middle East. It would implicitly underscore that tribal peoples there have been committing crimes against each other for centuries and that modern Arab nationalism was infected with ugly prejudices decades before Israel came into existence (and well before 700,000 Arabs were pushed out of Palestine).
The heavy legacy of racism among Arabs is apparent each time Al Q’aeda spokesmen open their mouths to spew venom at Barack Obama. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number-two man in Al Qaeda, called Obama a “house Negro” in a taped message after the November election. Obama, said Zawahiri, is “a slave of the same criminal American mentality towards the world and towards the Muslims.” But as Lawrence Wright recently pointed out in a blog posting, Zawahiri and co. can’t wrap their heads around Obama’s rise. I understand those who hope against hope an Obama administration will craft specific new proposals that will empower the peace camp in the Middle East. But – quash that inner foreign policy wonk for a moment! – and consider Wright’s line on why Obama’s election matters in the Middle East.
Americans have powerfully demonstrated the peaceful route to social revolution. Nothing else we have done since 9/11 has made such a profound and favorable impact on peoples who are themselves often buried under repressive regimes with little idea of how to escape their fate. Al Qaeda offered them one model, made of blood and vengeance. Democracy has just presented them with another, comprised of reason and hope.
Perhaps God isn’t always in the details (even if all politics is local).
From January, 2009