THOSE JUICEBOX-SIPPING ISRAELIS.

January 7, 2009

6:44 PM

Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood is amazing. It consists of failed showbiz types whose insanity hasn't been tempered by the incessant mockery of the blogosphere, which means that each post is pure wingnuttia.

And then of course, half the time, the posters aren't actually working in Hollywood. They're wingnut all-stars like Ben Shapiro, who explains that Israelis are losing to Hamas because they can't stop watching anti-Semitic movies made by other Israelis:

Film has an impact. It’s no wonder that so many Israelis are disillusioned with their state. It’s no wonder that they’re apologetic for defending themselves. It’s no wonder they keep trying to make amends for wrongs they haven’t committed. It’s no wonder they love Waltz with Bashir.
In America, it isn’t too late. The American film industry may ignore its profit margin in favor of trendy pacifism, but such willful blindness can only last so long. Eventually, Americans will demand to see movies that champion America. Americans won’t let their children be convinced by nonsense like Body of Lies.

Yeah, it's not that Israelis have been mired in an endless cycle of violence for decades, and that their cinema reflects this cultural climate of desperate frustration. It's that they're watching movies that don't give them the rock-ribbed fortitude of Ben Shapiro, which allows him to rationalize the Israeli Army enabling the massacre of Palestinian civilians at Sabra and Shatila on the basis that since most of the victims were men, they must have all been terrorists.

Waltz with Bashir is an animated post-Zionist journey into the mind of a former IDF soldier who fought in the 1982 Lebanon War. It follows his investigation into what really happened during the Lebanon War, and it culminates in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, in which the Israeli Defense Forces failed to prevent Christian Phalangists from killing 700-800 Palestinians in those refugee camps. The Phalangist attack was a response to the Islamist killing of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel.

The film neglects to mention that only 35 out of the 700-800 killed were women and children – the rest were men, which suggests that most of those killed were in fact members of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization.

Note the implication that the Phalangists were justified in murdering Muslim civilians based on the fact that a Muslim killed Gemayel, and the passive phrasing of "failed to prevent" the massacre. Nevermind that the Israeli army controlled all entrances and exits to the camp, that they were the ones who ordered the Phalangists inside under the auspices of rooting out remaining PLO fighters, and that they lit up the whole area so the Phalangists could make certain not to miss anyone. In this view, killing Muslims is always justifiable because they're uncivilized monsters who make no distinction between combatants and noncombatants. These are just some of the hard decisions that only people like Shapiro have the will to make. I also love the use of the term "Post-Zionist." Not even Israel is safe from the endless parade of self-hating House Jews!

Let's be clear what Shapiro is protesting here -- he's angry that Israelis have the ability to feel shame and guilt when the officials they put in power do bad things. He's angry at Israelis for having a conscience. Shapiro believes that a national cinema has as its only significant role the veneration of the state and the cultivation of unreflective nationalism.

If only the Israelis had made Red Dawn or something, they'd have the stomach for the hard decisions that need to be made in war and wouldn't have held all those protests demanding accountability for their own government's inexcusable behavior. But then again, Israelis can't possibly know the cost of war like an American conservative who attended a college with liberal professors. That is war gentlemen, and it is all Hell.

-- A. Serwer