Waltzing with Zionism

I did not want to pay money to an Israeli company to watch the film. Yes, I am that old fashioned when it comes to boycotting the Zionist entity. A friend brought me a DVD (non-pirated, I am sure) from China. Excellent copy, naturlich. So I watched. Visually (illustrations and movements) and the music were quite good. I liked that. That is all what I liked. The rest was your typical Zionist liberal trash about the "anguish" of the Israeli terrorist soldiers. But the director/soldier reveals the sensibility of the White Man soldiers of the colonial-settler state: he has only compassion for the dogs and horses that were killed or injured by Israeli soldiers during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And don't be fooled with the coverage of the massacre of Sabra and Shatila: it was only covered (and made into the title of the film) because it was perpetrated (literally in this case) by the Israeli-trained, Israeli-armed, Israeli-financed, Israeli formed, Lebanese Forces: the fascist militia of Lebanon. Of course, they want to focus on the massacres of Sabra and Shatila because they want to maintain a theoretical distance of responsibility. But the Israeli invasion of Lebanon killed 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians why not cover the rest of the victims. I guess it would not be possible to blame all that on the Phalanges, huh? As despicable and as criminal and as fascist-Nazi those Lebanese allies of Israel are. Yet, the film only deals with one of the many massacres committed directly or "indirectly"--to use the deceptive language of the Kahan commission--by Israel. And the movie does not tell you that Israeli soldiers did not dare to enter Beirut until after all PLO fighters were evacuated from Lebanon. It did not tell you that the Israeli army was not facing an army in Lebanon: but committed yet irregular fighters who were unfortunately betrayed by lousy leadership of Arafat who did not want to allow real resistance to form in Lebanon. The film wants you to feel sorry not for the victims but in a typical Zionist fashion with killers. You have to feel sorry because the killer is having nightmares. That is supposed to be disturbing. And the Palestinians and Arabs in the movie are what they are in Renoir's painting, The Mosque: they are merely a background blob. They don't speak: except in few scenes as crowds. They are never individuals. Only the Israelis are entitled to their individualities and to their personalities. The enemy is a collection of blobs. And in reference to the Sabra and Shatila massacres the film basically wants you to believe the unbelievable: that only the Phalanges are capable of such massacres and not the Israelis, when the Phalanges were trained by the Israelis. They learned from Zionist massacres all that is to know about massacring. And one Israeli soldier even invokes an Israeli Orientalist cliche about "those people" and the notions of "honor" and "face"--stuff distilled from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind. There is more about this lousy film but you can read about that in my long essay in Al-Akhbar next week.