TEL AVIV, Israel: A new Israeli movie documents one former soldier's quest to retrieve the memories he erased of fighting a bewildering war in Lebanon a quarter century ago.

"Waltz with Bashir," which debuted at Cannes and premiered to acclaim in Israel June 12, is a personal story of memory loss. But the film has touched a nerve because it mirrors a national phenomenon.

Israel's wars are very much alive in the country's consciousness, serving as milestones in a national narrative of tragedy and grit. One, however, is strangely absent: The Lebanon war, which began with a 1982 invasion, continued with an occupation of south Lebanon that lasted 18 years, and led to fissures and demoralization among Israeli civilians and soldiers that evoked America's ordeal in Vietnam.

Just as the movie's protagonist, director Ari Fulman, deleted his own memories of Lebanon, so in many ways has the country that sent him there.

The genre-defying "Waltz with Bashir" is an animated film that is part memoir and part documentary. It begins with a friend telling Fulman about a recurring nightmare: He is being chased through Tel Aviv by a merciless pack of drooling dogs, the same ones he killed with a silencer-equipped gun in Lebanese villages at night so their barking wouldn't endanger him and his comrades.

Fulman responds that he simply doesn't remember the time he spent as a young infantryman in Lebanon: "It's not in my system," he says.

One prominent Israeli journalist, Ofer Shelah, who was badly wounded and lost an eye when a roadside bomb exploded next to his patrol on a Lebanese highway in 1983, calls the conflict Israel's "forgotten war."

Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982 after a Palestinian shot and wounded the Israeli ambassador in London. The goal, as presented to the government by Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, was a limited incursion into south Lebanon to drive out the Palestinian guerrillas who had established a mini-state there, carrying out gruesome cross-border attacks on civilians.

But Sharon took the military much farther, battling halfway through the country into Lebanon's capital, Beirut, and engaging the Syrian army.

Attacking and carrying out air strikes on guerrillas in heavily populated areas, Israeli forces killed nearly 20,000 people, most non-combatants, and displaced 800,000, according to Lebanon's government and international organizations. While Israeli soldiers were deployed outside the Sabra and Shatilla Palestinian refugee camps, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel entered the Beirut camps and massacred around 800 Palestinians.

Israel succeeded in driving out the Palestinian guerrillas but became embroiled in the vicious civil war under way among Lebanon's rival sects. Targeted by new enemies like the Shiite guerrillas of Hezbollah, Israel gradually pulled its forces back, but troops remained in a strip along the Israeli border until 2000. Another round of fighting two summers ago, sparked by a Hezbollah attack on an army patrol across the international boundary, lasted a month. All told, more than 1,400 Israeli soldiers have died in Lebanon.

Before the invasion, Israelis largely remembered their wars with pride: the 1948 War of Independence, the Sinai campaign of 1956, the lightning conquests of 1967 and the hard-won turnaround victory of 1973.

"In Lebanon, for the first time, we were a hard-luck army, being shot at from all sides and not knowing by whom," Shelah said. And as the occupation dragged on, it turned out to be the first war that did not enjoy wall-to-wall support, instead becoming the subject of bitter recriminations while it was going on.

"The Lebanon war included many things people don't want to deal with. It's easier to remember victories and repress what happened there," he said.

Lebanon has not disappeared entirely. The movie "Beaufort," which was nominated for this year's foreign language Oscar, followed soldiers in an isolated south Lebanon base just before the 2000 Israeli army withdrawal as unseen guerrillas pick them off one by one. The movie was based on a novel, recently published in English under the same name, that became a surprise best-seller.

But considering that Israel spent nearly two decades in Lebanon and that tens of thousands of Israelis served there, the number of books, movies and even official memorials dedicated to the war is strikingly small.

"The awful thing about Lebanon is not that it was forgotten three days after we pulled out. It's that it was forgotten while we were still there," said Ron Leshem, who wrote "Beaufort."

Today, many Israelis do their best to shut out the news and forget about current events, like Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, Leshem said. That began with the Lebanon invasion.

"It was then that Tel Aviv began convincing itself that it was in Switzerland and the army began disappearing from our culture ? people just didn't want to hear about it," he said.

In his movie, Fulman eventually begins to recover his memories and shows them in haunting animated imagery lit up by searchlights, explosions and illumination flares descending slowly to the ground. He also describes the jolt of returning from combat to find himself among revelers in a nightclub in a country that seemed oblivious to what he was going through.

In one scene, one of his comrades grabs a machine gun in the middle of a firefight, dancing and firing wildly in the middle of a Beirut street as bullets rain down. In the background are murals of Israel's Lebanese ally, Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel. The incident inspired the movie's title.

Into the gunbattle strides another of the movie's characters: Ron Ben-Yishai, a well-known Israeli war correspondent who would go beyond his role as reporter when he learned of the refugee camp massacres and called Sharon from Beirut in a futile attempt to stop them.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Ben-Yishai noted that the Lebanon war was unique among Israel's wars because nearly no songs were written about it. And because Israelis became conflicted and even embarrassed about the war as it stretched into nearly two decades, soldiers returned home to a critical public and had to keep their memories to themselves.

"You can't say, like in the 1967 war, that soldiers returned and could tell their children about what they had gone through. After Lebanon, the support group for soldiers was only their friends who were there with them," he said.

Asher Kaufman, an Israeli scholar of Lebanon at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, believes Israel's Lebanon amnesia owes much to denial.

Israelis do not want to remember the terrible destruction their military ? still the country's most respected institution ? wreaked on Lebanon and the effect that had on the Lebanese and on the troubled relations between the countries since, he said. Instead, Lebanon is remembered as an incomprehensible sinkhole that periodically draws Israel in against its will.

"Memory requires an effort, and forgetting is the instinctive action," said Kaufman, who served in Lebanon as an infantryman in the mid-1980s and returned home to find that the war had "simply dissipated."

"Everyone has their personal memories and no one can take those away, but as a society, no one had an interest in remembering. The default option was better," he said.