Too Scared to Speak, Arab Voters May Rescue Israel’s Filmmakers

The day before Israel’s election, the veteran actress Chelli Goldenberg, 72, went on Channel 13’s morning show to talk about her new film. Believing the cameras were off, she told her hosts she no longer felt proud to be Israeli. “We are occupiers,” she said, and listed the reasons: “religious coercion, the settlers, Jewish terrorism, arrogance”. When she added that a minority has the right to fight for its freedom, a host shot back: “Not if it massacres civilians.” “I’m not saying it on air,” she assured them. “I’m saying it quietly.”

Then came the most frightening question in Israel today: “Were we on the air?” They were. “You didn’t tell me we were back on the air,” she protested. “I’m really in shock.” After an early commercial break she returned to apologise. “I’m all fire and flames,” she pleaded, and reminded viewers that she is “a great patriot”. It did not spare her. A right-wing broadcaster accused her of justifying the massacre of 7 October.

I have just spent a week in Israel, and that clip is the country I found. Israelis, Arabs and Jews alike, are wary of speaking on camera. Palestinian citizens of Israel, whom the director Eran Kolirin once described to me as “a community caught in the middle”, are the most frightened of all. Their leaders pleaded with me not to quote them or broadcast their words of sympathy for their brethren in Gaza and the West Bank. Gone are the days of public solidarity and donations. Such acts now count as treason and support for terrorism. Police have investigated more than 400 Palestinian citizens for “incitement” since October 2023.

More powerful than Yad Vashem

The trauma behind this fear is real. Hamas-led attackers killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages that day. “Everybody I know suffers from post-traumatic disorder,” a former soldier stationed in the south told me. “I witnessed soldiers breaking down in agonising cries. I still can’t get over it.”

The government has turned that wound into a creed. An executive at the education ministry told me the school system is making 7 October the new Holocaust, and that it has already overtaken the old one. Hamas are the new Nazis, and the burned communities around Gaza are the new Auschwitz. Organised tours carry pupils and tourists through them to melancholic music, ending with the national anthem, and visitors break down in tears. “The experience is more powerful than Yad Vashem,” the executive said.

It is becoming an industry. A day trip with a survivor as guide starts at 650 shekels, taking in the Nova festival site and a graveyard of burned cars. The ministry sends schools on tours of the area to promote “a sense of belonging to the region”. “We will pass this memory, in all its facets, from generation to generation,” says the education minister, Yoav Kisch. The comparison had taken root early: by May 2024, 54 per cent of Jewish Israelis saw a basis for it. Questioning the official story of that day is now akin to betrayal.

The Gaza nobody sees

A nation busy processing its own pain has no room for anyone else’s. The images of devastation and mutilated children that have horrified the world are not seen in Israel, and few Israelis have the patience to hear about them. Last summer, 79 per cent of Jewish Israelis told pollsters that reports of suffering and famine in Gaza did not trouble them. Israelis accuse the world of ignoring their pain, and anyone who sympathises with Palestinians risks being branded a traitor, ostracised and sometimes attacked.

Meanwhile Jewish thugs have been let loose on the West Bank. Yesh Din counted 377 incidents of settler and soldier violence in two weeks of the olive harvest. Netanyahu has played down such attacks as the work of a few delinquents, and the army speaks of “Israeli rioters” who have fled by the time its troops arrive.

Filmmakers without a country

Israel’s filmmakers, invariably liberal, are the government’s favourite target. Netanyahu and his culture minister, Miki Zohar, have threatened to strip the directors of NAZA, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, of their citizenship, and Netanyahu has ordered a hunt for its witnesses. “We have become filmmakers without a country,” the producers Yoav Roeh and Aurit Zamir said on the eve of the vote. Katriel Schory, the former head of the Israel Film Fund, claimed that 90 per cent of filmmakers vote for The Democrats, the one party in the opposition alliance willing to govern with Arab parties. It won eight of 120 seats.

The only public debate is how to get rid of Netanyahu, and the charges against him are his corruption, his failures in the Iran war, his indulgence of ultra-Orthodox Jews who dodge the army and the damage he has done to Israel’s name. War crimes against Palestinians are not on the list. On their future the country largely agrees with him: 79 per cent of Jewish Israelis oppose a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines. His rival, Gadi Eisenkot, has pledged to eliminate Hamas from Gaza within 18 months and has condemned NAZA too.

The one crack in the wall came from the people too frightened to be quoted. Palestinian citizens turned out in record numbers, an estimated 80 per cent, and the Arab parties took 19 seats, leaving Netanyahu’s bloc on 53 and the opposition on 48, both short of the 61 needed to govern. Silent on camera, they spoke in the one place nobody could record them, and they may now decide the fate of Israel’s filmmakers. A government that leans on Arab votes could end Zohar’s war on cinema and loosen the fear around it. Eisenkot has not offered them a place, but he “will have no choice”, Schory predicts, if he wants to reach 61. President Isaac Herzog must now choose who tries to form a government by 11 November.

The liberal filmmakers still hope that removing Netanyahu could release Israeli society from fear and indoctrination and set it on a new path. So far there is no sign of it. Goldenberg’s only request after her ordeal was practical: “I didn’t see that it was red,” she said of the camera light, and asked her hosts to warn her next time. A whole country now watches for that light.

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