Waltz with Bashir is a visually striking and emotionally heavy film, but watching it as a Muslim, especially one aware of the history of the Israeli occupation and the suffering of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians, makes it a complicated experience.
Ari Folman attempts to reconstruct his lost memories of the 1982 Lebanon War, particularly the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The animation is stunning, the storytelling is engaging, and the film captures the way trauma distorts memory. However, it’s hard to ignore that the film ultimately centers the emotions of an Israeli soldier rather than the victims. The horror of the massacre is undeniable, but it is shown from the perspective of those who allowed it to happen, rather than those who suffered.
While it’s important to explore the psychological toll of war, Waltz with Bashir never fully reckons with responsibility. The Lebanese and Palestinian victims remain faceless, voiceless, and secondary to the emotional journey of an Israeli who, in the end, gets to grieve and be redeemed in a way that the real victims never were.
It’s a powerful film, but one that feels incomplete from a moral and historical standpoint. Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder: where are the voices of the people who actually suffered? Who tells their stories?