Waltz with Bashir: One viewer's thoughts

As an Israeli and a Jew, I was very proud that Israel could make itself so vulnerable and be introspective in broad daylight about such a serious and disturbing topic. This is a testimony to Israeli democracy at its best.
The movie itself probably resonates differently with every viewer. On the literal level, this is a compelling voyage of one individual grappling with his past through a documentative narrative that weaves between the two forms of story telling with great ease. The animation is rich and in-vocative. The merger of comic-bookesque two dimensional animation and 3-d environments was a visual feast for the eyes. The music set the tone of the narrative and would probably stand very well on its own, and the combination of all these factors led to a product that was greater than the sum of the parts.
Every person seeing this film will have a different experience. That sounds like a simple statement, but it isn't. I saw the movie for the first time in Tel-Aviv and discussed it afterwards with a friend who was in the Israeli Defense Force with me during the first Lebanon War. Neither of us was in the IDF during the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, but we both experienced the ugliness of this war. My friend became an officer and commanded troops on the front lines, while I delivered food and blankets to people living behind the front lines. As my experiences were less dangerous and had an element of humanity to them, I never had to eliminate my memories of the war. My friend, on the other hand, forgot everything, and really doesn't care to remember.
My experience of the movie in Evanston, Illinois, just after the cease fire in Gaza, was much different. The movie ended. The audience remained in their seats. A woman yelled, "That's Gaza. They Israelis are now doing what the Christians did to the Palestinians." Many yelled for her to "shut up." Another person said that this was our American tax dollars at work, and another suggested that we stop paying our taxes.
While these were just shouts, their violence was magnified by the juxtaposition to the movie. Waltz with Bashir is not just about a war. It is about war. It is a statement about the demagoguery of political leadership. It is about the chaos and banality of battle. It is about the lowest forms of human interaction and it is about the human mind and its potential to allow for such agency to exist in the world.
To suggest that Israel perpetrated a Sabra and Shatilla like massacre against Palestinians is hyperbole. The intentions of the war were not genocidal. Israelis seek security. This drives them to do things they never had to do as a people without a country. I believe that they might not have to do them if they end the military occupation of the West Bank, but I am a optimist.
Regardless of all the drama surrounding the movie screen, Ari Folman's work is to be commended to the fullest degree. Israeli cinema has come of age, and Waltz with Bashir is a world class production.