"Waltz With Bashir" opened in theaters across the Bay Area.

"Waltz with Bashir" speaks through the medium of animation and recollection. The memories of the soldiers are detailed as part interviews, part real depictions. The story starts with the nightmare of one soldier in which he is pursued by the dogs that he killed during the war. He explained that Israeli soldiers were instructed to shoot the dogs because they served to alert the Palestinians of the approach of Israeli troops.

The idea of memory is central to the movie—the loss of memory about the horrors of that invasion and the doubts about the reliability of the memories. One soldier describes fleeing a ship, carried away by a giant woman, another, describes rising out of the sea with fellow soldiers. The blurriness of the borderline between what is real and what is not, is stressed from the beginning of the movie and serves as a central motif throughout it.

These flights of unreality are intercut with the testimony of Israeli soldiers describing running into ambushes, and trying to capture resistant fighters. The movie, however, is centered on the memories of soldiers who witnessed the massacre at Shabra and Shatila, carried out by the Christian Phalanges under the protective wing of the Israeli army. One soldier, upon witnessing a whole family being executed by the Israeli allies, describes calling his superiors, only to receive the answer "we are aware of that, it's under control". Another soldier describes informing Ariel Sharon, then the defense ministry, of that massacre, to no avail.

"Waltz With Bashir" confines its attention to the trauma that besets many soldiers serving in imperialist armies through the horrible crime that they are ordered to commit and are far too often too afraid to disobey, on pains of being imprisoned as deserters or of being killed for their disobedience. The high level of PTSD suffered by soldiers serving in Iraq & Afghanistan as well as the present-day unprecedented suicide rates within the US military attest to this phenomenon. Doing the dirty work of US imperialism against the Palestinians exacts not only a dreadful toll on the Palestinians but also on the Israeli soldiers whose "duty" is to "get the job done." Unfortunately, those Israeli soldiers who were sickened by their "duty" did not face a strong Palestinian resistance and did not have the backing of a powerful anti-war movement in Israel that would have empowered them to rebel against their officers, as happened during the Vietnam War with the American soldiers on the Cambodian border.
The reality of the horrors of the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon is brought home powerfully by the way the film ends—there is a sudden, jolting shift from animation to live footage of Palestinians mourning the dead who were massacred.

"Waltz with Bashir" is a powerful anti-war movie. However, its impact would be enhanced by familiarity with the historical context of the film. The 1972 Zionist invasion of Lebanon, orchestrated by Ariel Sharon, gave rise to 18 years of occupation by the Israeli military and their brutal allies, the Phalanges. The movie itself does not explain the motive behind Israel's disregard of the peace agreement with the PLO, or the justification for intervening in Lebanon's internal affair by installing the Israeli puppet Bashir Gayamel as head of state. Neither does it give any explanation of why the US has armed and protected the Zionist state since its birth. It is part of a small but quite possibly growing trend of "Refuseniks" in Israel itself.