The movie seems to be a meditation about Israel as lived by US Jews, who do not dream of the violence underlying their realm of messianic hopes.
I read biographies of Keith Gordon and the father of Mark Romanek. I also note that Gordon makes anti-war movies. Static, which I watched an hour ago, is obviously about something. Even the VW Thing which he is driving at the beginning Julia is driving at the end: whose was it, what was their relationship while out in the music business? "Twins"? You'd noticed the resemblance already. So why make such a detailed plot about a crazy guy?
The protagonist's parents dying in the car crash, that's the Holocaust. Israel would be what is seen on the TV screen, a land of answered dreams attained or at least seen by modern technology. The crucifixes stand for the yearning for divine justice. The movie attempts by metaphor to present the solidarity of the Israel movement in grief and denial, unable to accept loss.
I think the signature moment in the movie was when Ernie Blick is telling rather than asking the Sheriff to let Ernie's cousin (I can't quite explain that connection) off the hook. "Do me a favor" or something like that. Ernie has this power but he doesn't know what to do with it except that it has to do with his parents' dying, which, even, he is not so aware of as the people around him are. He puts it neutrally: "you can see your parents in heaven".
The plot reaches its conclusion before the big blow-up--causing the big blow-up?--when Julia asks him what it would change even if people could see their departed relatives in heaven. "So what?" That's not how you come to terms with death. You have to dig into the circumstances of their death, on the one hand, and into the pending business you had with them--what kinds of people you and they were--on the other.
Israel is not only an amusement park for the Holocaust, as someone said, but a really bad one, reproducing the very racial policies that led to the prior disaster. Not a very credible memorial to genocide. But as a political venture with tremendous oomph and zero psychological insight, zero human content, why, it's like some guy losing family to sudden tragedy and trying to skip over the human questions and jump right to the happy reunion by means of bogus high-technology. Why, after all, why? Because this is America where anything is possible, where dreams come true. Until the bus blows up because the security forces got a little out of control.