Times Delight in Israeli Moral Self-Absorption

"In Search of the Soldier in His Past"
AR22, Sunday 12/14/08
By Ethan Bronner

Ethan Bronner, NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief, explores the critically acclaimed Israeli film, Waltz with Bashir. The animated movie depicts Israel’s involvement in the Lebanon War (1982-1985), particularly in relation to the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982) in which Lebanese Christian murdered hundreds of Palestinians with the inadvertent assistance of the Israeli Defense Forces. The film is highly personalized given that the director, Ari Folman, was stationed as a soldier in the proximate area when massacre took place.

Unfortunately, however, the article turns out to be as hyperbolic as parts of the movie are, specifically in the linkage it creates between the massacre and the Holocaust. For example, Ron Ben Yishai, a well-respected Israeli journalist and character in the film, is quoted:

Ari is saying: ‘I am asking questions I inhibited for such a long time. I know we didn’t kill them, but are we really better than the Europeans who stood by when the Holocaust took place?

On multiple levels, that is an absurd question. The slaughter of the Jews in Europe was systematic and involved the active collaboration of many of its citizens. In comparison, the Sabra and Shatila massacre, a clear aberration in Israeli military history, involved the inadvertent facilitation of the IDF.

This theme is repeated in expounded with a quote from the director:

In Israel the Holocaust is in our DNA. We see mass murder [Sabra and Shatila], and what on earth could it remind us of but our past?”

In these quotes, it is both evident and absurd that Israelis continue to so violently self-flagellate themselves for a terrible event for which they weren’t even directly responsible. This moral self-absorption of certain Israelis allows them to conveniently forget that the Christian Phalangists actually perpetrated the massacre.

In the end, this sort of Israeli moral self-absorption fits greatly assists the Times narrative, which delights in heralding the moral missteps of the Jewish State