In his book, "Trauma: A Social Theory," Jeffrey Alexander observes that in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacres after Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War, “it was not only the public war of words between right-wing Likud officials and their Peace Now critics that allowed the Holocaust narrative to be extended to Palestinians for the first time. It was the extraordinary and unprecedented ritual of the ‘400,000 Protest,’ the spectacle of hundreds of thousands of patriotic but outraged Israelis massively protesting against the massacres in a Tel Aviv square.” Ari Folman’s "Waltz with Bashir," an animated pseudo-documentary about the massacres and the narrator’s guilty sense of complicity in them, would appear to confirm Alexander’s thesis that the massacres triggered a recognition among many Israelis that the Palestinian nakba [catastrophe] of 1948 and its horrendous consequences for the Palestinians in general might, like the Holocaust for Jews and non-Jews alike, be understood as a collective trauma. But, contradictorily, the film also seeks to absolve both the narrator and the Israeli state of any real responsibility for the massacres, by suggesting that the trauma being explored by the film is an individual one (that of the narrator), and the real and only collective trauma with a claim to universal status as a traumatic event for all of humankind is the Holocaust.