New film probes Israel's involved in the 1982 Lebanon masacre

THE credits come up amid a longer than usual silence between the end of the film and when people start talking about it as they head out of the theatre. Faces are tense. Even in animation, a massacre is a lot to take in on a Saturday night out.

The audience in Jerusalem has just seen Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary about Ariel Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon that is the most talked-about movie in Israel in years.

The disastrous incursion, at first depicted by Israel as a limited push to halt PLO rocket attacks, culminated in the massacre of hundreds or perhaps thousands of Palestinians at Beirut's Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Israeli-supported Christian Lebanese Forces (LF) after their leader, Bashir Gemayel, president-elect of Lebanon, was assassinated.

It was wrongly believed at the time of the massacre that Palestinians had killed Gemayel, fuelling a revenge frenzy among the LF. As Israeli critics have noted, the Lebanon invasion was in a sense Israel's Vietnam War, complete with protests and a large segment of the public questioning why troops were fighting in Beirut, far from Israel. Previous wars had been seen as defensive, but in this one a promising young tank commander, Colonel Eli Geva, gave voice to the qualms when he resigned his post rather than fire into densely populated areas of Beirut. Influenced by Apocalypse Now, this is a damning film for Israelis though it has also been criticised by some left-wingers for letting Israel off too easily. Among other things, the movie shows that the move into Sabra and Shatilla by the Lebanese Forces was part of a joint military operation, with a joint briefing of Israeli soldiers and the militiamen in English beforehand and Israeli troops firing the flares that illuminated the killing orgy of 16-19 September 1982. The sheer physical proximity of Israel Defence Forces to the killing arena is stressed in the film. Israel set in motion the atrocity by ordering the Lebanese Forces to enter the camps, ostensibly to clear out "terrorists".

"I think the movie is saying that probably the Israeli army is just as responsible as the people with the guns inside the camps," says Liya Ophir, 26, a bartender in a caf adjoining a cinema in Jerusalem where Waltz is playing. She was jarred by the film into doing a Google search about the slaughter. Ophir is part of a younger generation of Israelis who are learning about the Lebanon war from the movie. "Not only are the leaders responsible, but also a low-ranking soldier who didn't say anything because he thought it was not his responsibility when it actually was," says Ophir. Her father fought in the war and had nightmares about it until four years ago. "I told him not to see the movie," she says.

Nightmares were also the catalyst for director Ari Folman. His quest to retrieve the blanked out memories of his service in the war and his presence around Sabra and Shatilla as a 19-year-old soldier forms the core of the movie. The film opens with a friend of Folman's, Boaz Rein-Buskila, telling him about his recurring nightmare of a large pack of fearsome dogs tearing down Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard and gathering outside his window. Boaz knows the exact number of dogs: 26, the same number of canines he killed in a south Lebanon village his unit entered one night in June 1982 in order to arrest PLO fighters. The movie flashes back to a younger Boaz shooting the dogs one by one so they would not alert the villagers to the presence of the soldiers. "They knew I was incapable of killing people, so they said 'Boaz, you go with the silencer and kill the dogs'," Boaz tells Folman during a conversation in a bar. "I remember all of them, all 26 of them, their faces, their expressions."

Boaz tells a surprised Folman that the latter was just a hundred yards away from the Sabra and Shatilla massacre and Folman replies with perhaps the most important line of the movie, a line later repeated by another ex-soldier: "Massacre is not in my system." It is a clear reference to what Folman sees as Israeli denial and deletion of the episode. In 1983, an Israeli state commission of inquiry found that Sharon bore "personal responsibility" for not preventing the killings and forced him to give up his post as defence minister. But he remained a minister and Israelis later chose to blank out the massacre, electing and reelecting him as prime minister in 2001 and 2003. Lebanon, for its part, has never seriously investigated the killings.

Folman insists the film is "not political." But in fact it marks the first time Israelis have reopened the Sharon/Sabra and Shatilla file since the Sharon era came to a close three years ago after the premier suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma.

In the film, Folman realises from speaking with Boaz that he has no memories at all of the war – just a flashback of emerging with two other soldiers from the sea towards the tall apartments of Beirut's waterfront as flares illuminate the sky. He takes the viewer along with him as he interviews old comrades in arms and speaks to his psychologist best friend in an effort to recover his memories. The memories come exploding back – all except for Sabra and Shatilla. For help in retrieving that, he calls on the well-known Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Ishai.

For many people, the most powerful part of the film is Ben-Ishai's recollection of a conversation he had with Sharon after the massacre had been underway for more than 24 hours. Ben-Ishai, stationed in Beirut as Israel Television's war correspondent, had heard from army officers at a dinner he hosted that a massacre was taking place. Disturbed by the reports, he called Sharon at his ranch in southern Israel but the defence minister showed little interest and did not act to stop the slaughter.

The choice of animation fits in with the film's exploration of dreams and memories and it makes the film's messages more palatable to Israelis than otherwise. But Folman decided to use real footage of the horror discovered by journalists in Sabra and Shatilla rather than animation for the last 50 seconds of the film. "I didn't want people to go out of the movie and say that was a cool animated film," he told journalists in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie gained a standing ovation. "These things happened. Thousands of people were killed. Women, children, old people."

A flaw in the movie is that it mistakenly gives the impression that the massacre lasted one night and was stopped the following morning

Regarding Israel's degree of responsibility in the killings, Ben-Ishai said. "It is like the allies in the Second World War who could have stopped the slaughter in the death camps but didn't."

In the face of this renewed attention to the notorious episode, Sharon's former spokesman Raanan Gissin, is standing by Sharon's adamant rejection of any Israeli responsibility for the slaughter. "We had nothing to do with the massacre. It is the best staged event in the history of modern warfare. It was Arabs killing Arabs and he took the rap."

In the film, one of Folman's friends and fellow soldiers, Carmi Can'an, looks back on the war after 26 years and remembers he wasn't at all surprised that the Lebanese Forces slaughtered Palestinians. "I realised their cruelty immediately," he says, recalling that Palestinians interrogated by the LF would end up as body parts in formaldehyde jars.

Sharon is shown only briefly in the film, wolfing down steak and eggs, his nose twitching as he talks on the phone to the then Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and to a commander in Lebanon. It is only later that one realises such calls would turn Israeli soldiers into accomplices in the massacre.

Or were they? If the viewer does not want to draw that conclusion, Folman offers a way out. After Folman retrieves his memories of Sabra and Shatilla, the psychologist friend tells him: "You lit flares, but you didn't carry out the massacre." The questions left for the viewer to answer are whether to believe the psychologist and how much of a distinction there really is between the two.

For Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg, the movie brought back memories of the protests in which he participated to force an inquiry. "The fact that under, public pressure, Israel created a commission of inquiry and Sharon was dismissed indicates there was a significant degree of a country insisting on an accounting," Gorenberg says. "The movie raises for us the question of whether that accounting went far enough."

Waltz with Bashir opens in the UK in November.

Ben Lynfield is Jerusalem correspondent for The Scotsman