To be honest, I've been hesitant to recommend Waltz with Bashir over the last few months.

One of my best friends is an Israeli Jew who was in the country on October 7th. He was the one who took me to see the movie when it was in theaters in 2008.

My reluctance isn't about any weakness in the movie. Really, it's among the best documentaries I've ever seen -- because it's damn honest. This isn't a Michael Moore documentary that's pumped full of lies to manipulate the audience. We know this because it's an Israeli production, made by a former IDF soldier, who is telling the story of something horrible that he and his fellow soldiers did in Lebanon in the early 80s.

My reluctance has been because of the out-and-proud Jew hate that I've been seeing, and my lack of confidence that any of those people are smart enough to understand what this movie, by simply existing, says about Israel and her people.

I can imagine some of you watching the movie and thinking, "Haha! The Jews admitted to it. See! We should obliterate Israel and give it to the Palestinians."

No, that's not the point.

Every nation that has ever been in an armed conflict has some history of soldiers doing horrible things to civilians.

These United States killed thousands of civilians in the carpet bombing of Dresden at the end of WWII. Plenty of American soldiers, as individuals, committed rapes and murders of civilians in Vietnam.

God knows that the Germans committed countless crimes against civilians in his past.

Waltz with Bashir shows why Israel should have our support. It shows that Israel is a nation that's open, honest, and contrite regarding her past iniquities.

If you monsters get what you want, and Israel falls, and my friends are raped and murdered by Hamas and Hezobollah in the process of creating a Palestinian state -- I know that we can't expect a Palestinian documentary in forty years wherein a former Hamas fighter looks back on his actions, and the actions of his fellow fighters on October 7th with a true reflection on the crimes that they committed, and the innocent lives that they destroyed.

We're never going to get that documentary -- hopefully because Hamas and Hezobollah will be destroyed -- but, also, because there was no moral questioning among the Hamas terrorists who raped and murdered those innocent people.

To them, and to many of you, there's no such thing as an innocent Jew. To them, and to many of you, a Jewish baby is simply a future oppressor by simply existing in the world.

This is the racism of the regressive left. This is also the racism of a lot of you on the right.

Waltz with Bashir, if you're not a racist, and know history, and are smart enough to process movies, is clearly a profound work of art. That's become clearer to me during the fifteen years since I first saw it.

Alas, what many people have shown me over the last few months makes me think that a lot of people lack the mental and moral fortitude to process the movie without using it as fodder for more Jew hate.