Is there a contradiction between Israelis’ praise for films like Waltz with Bashir and their support for exactly the kind of drunken use of power that it warns against?

Israeli-born writer Liel Leibovitz walked out of a screening of the recent Israeli film Waltz with Bashir a few weeks ago, and immediately checked the news for the body count in Gaza.

How could the Israeli public -- the same public which had heaped praise on Ari Folman’s riveting film -- now be “ignoring every one of the film’s harrowing lessons and once again unequivocally supporting an aimless military campaign, its goals unclear and its potential for rapid and incontrollable escalation vast.” And what is worse, that same public has now elected Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman to a position of potentially serious power.

What follows are some surprisingly insightful remarks on the link between art and politics in contemporary Israel, written by Liebovitz in The Nation. An except:

How, then, to explain this dissonance? How to analyze a nation willing to embrace a smart and sensitive work of art that digs deep into the collective memory and pleads softly and beautifully for recovery and repentance, while at the very same time cheering as the Israel Air Force assassinates hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, a significant portion of whom were civilians, and the Israeli army once again marches into the embattled Strip?

As is the case with most complex questions, there is no single, elegant answer. All I have is an explanation bordering on a hunch, a dark and disconcerting feeling put together, like a mental mosaic, over years of conversations and observations and frustrations. Here it is, in brief: for the most part, Israelis have become adept at using art as a mantle, a colorful cloth under which they can hide from the harrowing implications of the policies they support. Once a living, dangerous demon, Israeli art is now a gargoyle, perched high above the street, casting its reproachful look at us all, powerless and grotesque.

According to Liebovitz, the paradigm shift occurred in the wake of the Rabin government and the Oslo Accords in the 1990′s:

Sure, Israel was still occupying Palestinian territories, settlements were still being built and there was still a massive Israeli military force in southern Lebanon, but none of that mattered. By electing Rabin and embarking on Oslo, we convinced ourselves that we were the good guys, and reassured ourselves that whatever terrible transgressions we committed were to be forgotten at once because, after all, our true aim, clearly, was reconciliation.

How else to explain the fact that Israelis watching Beirut circa 1982 in Folman’s film are no longer shocked to the core, nor do they realize that they are still fighting the very same dumb and deadly war that so deeply traumatized the director and his friends? How else to explain their continuing support for brutal operations with little lasting strategic value, their continuing calls for increasingly bloody vendettas, their continuing endorsement of political candidates who promise tougher and more violent measures against anyone attacking Israel in any way?

According to this logic, we were finally free to enjoy works of art that shed light on some of our darkest national undertakings. Now that we were en route to peace, any creative act of political protest was to be interpreted solely as further proof of our enlightenment: what other country, my friends often asked me, would produce such a steady stream of critical, insightful films, records and novels, especially while still facing major threats? Can you imagine, they inquired rhetorically, any similar works being created on the Palestinian side or, even better, in Syria? To them--and, I suspect, to a majority of Israelis--making movies and waging war balanced each other out, proving beyond doubt that ours was the kind of thoughtful, responsible and soul-searching society that only resorted to violence when the very core of its existence was under attack.

Reality, however, is far less prosaic: in many cases, art has become almost an excuse, something to be immensely proud of while pursuing the very same policies to which Israel’s artists, for the most part, vehemently object and which they continually decry in their art.

Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, in a similar vein:

In “Waltz with Bashir” the soldiers of the world’s most moral army sing out something like: “Lebanon, good morning. May you know no more grief. Let your dreams come true, your nightmares evaporate, your whole life be a blessing.” Nice, right? What other army has a song like this, and in the middle of a war, yet? Afterward they go on to sing that Lebanon is the “love of my life, the short life.” And then the tank, from inside of which this lofty and enlightened singing emanates, crushes a car for starters, turning it into a smashed tin can, then pounds a residential building, threatening to topple it. That’s how we are. Singing and wrecking. Where else will you find sensitive soldiers like these? It would really be preferable for them to shout with hoarse voices: Death to the Arabs!

I saw the “Waltz” twice. The first time was in a movie theater, and I was bowled over by the artistry. What style, what talent. The illustrations are perfect, the voices are authentic, the music adds so much. Even Ron Ben Yishai’s half-missing finger is accurate. No detail is missed, no nuance blurred. All the heroes are heroes, superbly stylish, like Folman himself: articulate, trendy, up-to-date, left-wingers -- so sensitive and intelligent. Then I watched it again, at home, a few weeks later. This time I listened to the dialogue and grasped the message that emerges from behind the talent. I became more outraged from one minute to the next. This is an extraordinarily infuriating film precisely because it is done with so much talent. Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit. The war has been painted with soft, caressing colors -- as in comic books, you know. Even the blood is amazingly aesthetic, and suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines. The soundtrack plays in the background, behind the drinks and the joints and the bars.

And, right on cue, as if to provide a real-life illustration of the above-mentioned absurdity, this came out today in the Associated Press, under the headline Israel’s Eurovision Team: An Arab Who Looks Jewish and a Jew Who Looks Arab:

Israel is sending a Jewish-Arab duo to represent it with a song of peace at Europe’s best-known song competition at a particularly fraught moment for relations between the country’s Jews and Arabs.

Achinoam Nini, a regular on the world music scene known internationally as Noa, and Mira Awad, a local actress and singer, were selected by Israel’s national broadcasting authority. Their selection came a day after Israel launched its Gaza offensive in December to halt rocket fire by Hamas militants.

They are working on four songs, each in English, Arabic and Hebrew.