One of the most remarkable films of the 21st century is Ari Folman’s 2008 animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. It is an Israeli movie; the dialogue is in Hebrew. And it’s about two things – genocide and amnesia.
It is an intimate exploration of a question that has become ever more haunting – how is it possible to live with the knowledge that you have engaged in or facilitated mass murder?
The film is autobiographical and almost all the characters are animated versions of named individuals who speak in their own voices. The use of graphics rather than live actors creates a kind of dazed hyperreality, at once dreamlike and vividly immediate.
And if you watch it today, this cognitive disturbance is even further heightened by the way an attempt to grapple with past horrors has become a nightmarish prelude to even greater atrocities. It’s a Gaza movie that doesn’t yet know itself to be one.
How is it possible to live with the knowledge that you have facilitated mass murder?
The really nauseating thing about the Ryder Cup is how seamlessly it will all happen
The presidential election needs a candidate I wouldn’t vote for: Maria Steen
Ireland was once the tradwife capital of the world. Worse, they were happy
Folman was a 19 year-old conscript in the Israeli army that invaded Lebanon in 1982. But the premise of Waltz with Bashir is that he can’t remember what he saw there.
It is a detective story in which the sleuth is trying to figure out the nature of his own crime.
The crime is the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps on the outskirts of Beirut. The killing was done by Israeli-backed Christian paramilitaries. The camps were sealed off by the Israeli army which fired flares to help the killers continue the slaughter by night.
No one seems sure how many people were murdered, but the likely figure is somewhere around 2,000. Women and girls were raped before being killed, men castrated, babies had their throats cut.
Folman was present at the massacre. But he has wiped it completely from his mind. The things that happened in Lebanon are what the psychiatrist he consults in the movie calls “dissociative events”.
“It’s when a person experiences a situation and yet they perceive themselves as outside of it.”
Psychiatrists diagnose one aspect of this mental condition as what they call “derealisation” – “feeling” as the Mayo Clinic puts it, “that other people and things are separate from you and seem foggy or dreamlike ... The world may seem unreal.”
The term encapsulates the way Israel and its enablers are dealing with the genocide in Gaza: instant amnesia.
There is an extraordinary moment at the end of Waltz with Bashir, when Folman has finally forced himself to remember Sabra and Shatila. Animated images of wailing women in burkas coming towards him dissolve into actual news film of the same scene. There are no more cartoons – these are real women overwhelmed by unspeakable horror.
And then there is footage of the dead bodies piled in the courtyards and alleyways. The film ends on a momentary but terrible glimpse of a dead child’s face peering out from a pile of corpses.
Anyone who uses the g-word, let alone anyone who has flashbacks to images of the Warsaw ghetto, is a Hamas-loving anti-Semite
This is, if the awkward word can be forgiven, an act of “re-realisation”. It takes the butchery out of the foggy, dreamy terrain of cognitive dissociation and hurls it back into the stark realm of naked actuality.
Folman’s film dares to use the g-word. One of his witnesses, commenting on the way senior Israeli officers and members of government were seeing the massacre in real time asks how come “no one realised they were witnessing genocide?”.
Even more remarkably, the Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai describes his first approach to the camps on the morning after the massacre: “You know the picture from the ghetto in Warsaw? The one with the kid holding his hands up in the air? This looked the same.”
Anyone with the slightest sense of history can understand how painful it must be for a Jewish person to use the word “genocide” in a context where Israel is on the side of the perpetrators rather than the victims. Anyone can imagine how shattering it must be for a Jewish person to see the Warsaw ghetto in the face of a Palestinian child whose family has just been massacred under the eyes of the Israeli army.
It took a quarter of a century for the events of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to be processed into a film like Waltz with Bashir. At the time it came out, though, it did seem like a moment of hope – not because it said anything much about Palestinians but because it said a lot about Israelis. It seemed to speak of a society willing to struggle against amnesia.
Yet as I watched it again now, an acronym from an entirely different script came into my mind – NRPI. In Succession, it’s the code Logan Roy’s company uses for women and migrant workers who suffer injuries or abuse on its cruise liners – No Real Person Involved. NRPI is rubber-stamped all over Gaza now.
The procedure Folman undergoes in the movie is now reversed on a massive scale. Derealisation is, for Israel and its supporters, total and absolute. There are no real people involved.
Folman’s film is being run backwards – from the news images that those of us in Ireland see every night to cartoons of subhuman terrorist-loving kids. And anyone who uses the g-word, let alone anyone who has flashbacks to images of the Warsaw ghetto, is a Hamas-loving anti-Semite.
In 2050, there will be a great Israeli film exploring the psychological cost of dissociative amnesia for the 19 year-old conscripts who are in Gaza today.
There will be middle-aged men and women wondering why 2024 and 2025 are blanked out of their memories and perhaps embarking on journeys back to the traumatic scenes they coped with by turning them into foggy and dreamlike figments. They will ask themselves how “no one realised they were witnessing genocide”.
Sounds and sights will resurface as they do at the end of Folman’s film – ghastly, unbearable screams, concrete smeared with blood and body parts, the face of a dead child.
The people will become real at last – but by then of course they will all be dead.
