Israeli Filmmakers Hunted at Home and Boycotted Abroad
Netanyahu has set the Shin Bet on the soldiers who spoke to NAZA, as Geneva shuns Israel's Oscar entry. Israel's storytellers are hunted at home and boycotted abroad.
Over the weekend, Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s attorney general, army chief and Shin Bet chief to “act urgently to uncover the identity of all those who are involved or appear” in NAZA, in which 24 masked Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describe how the army chose its targets in Gaza with artificial intelligence. His letter calls the film a “false, misleading, and programmatic libel”, yet accuses its witnesses of leaking top-secret information. Ironically, by hunting the leakers, he has confirmed that the witnesses are exactly who the film says they are.
Two days earlier, his office honoured the makers of a rival film, NAZA: The True Story. And last week a queer film festival in Geneva cancelled the screenings of Israel’s Oscar entry, Tell Me Everything, after pro-Palestinian groups threatened to boycott it. Israel’s storytellers are now hunted by their government at home and shunned by the world abroad.
A story that conquered the world
Since its birth, Israel has relied on cinema as a soft power to propagate a narrative that portrays it as a force of good fighting the forces of evil. It succeeded, and Hollywood spread that narrative across the globe. Exodus showed Holocaust survivors fighting off savage Arabs to build their state, and after the Munich Olympics in 1972 the Palestinian became the terrorist of every Hollywood film. The Israelis were always the good guys and the Palestinians the bad guys. The Israeli government funded its storytellers the same way it funded its army.
Hollywood artists who strayed from that narrative were branded antisemites, and some paid with their careers. Vanessa Redgrave was hounded for making The Palestinian, and Zionist groups called for a boycott of Steven Spielberg’s Munich because it gave a Palestinian fighter a voice.
The storytellers turn on their state
But now the storytellers, and even the soldiers, are turning on their own government. In The Gatekeepers, every surviving head of the Shin Bet questioned his own methods. Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021 by mocking a state that censors its artists. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor won an Oscar last year for No Other Land, and the witnesses of NAZA come from the army itself.
Some no longer consider their cinema Israeli at all. Eran Kolirin, whose Let It Be Morning represented Israel at the Oscars, finds his roots in Palestinian cinema. Palestinians tell their stories through absurd comedy, the language of the powerless, and that absurdity, Kolirin told me, ran through Jewish cinema and literature “because Jews were always a minority”. Israeli cinema erased it when it “began to adopt the perspective of the authoritarian ruler, through the soldier’s point of view”. So Kolirin found in Palestinian cinema, the cinema of the oppressed, the Jewish cinema that Israel had lost. Of his film, adapted from a Palestinian novel, he said: “This is the film’s true identity, not the Israeli identity.”
At the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013, I was astonished to hear the Israeli director Udi Aloni call for a boycott of Israeli cultural events, his own cinema included, and even more astonished when the audience applauded him.
Controlling the narrators
The Israeli government has turned against them. Having given up on winning the world through cinema and even the press, it is now trying to control the narrative by controlling the narrators. The culture minister, Miki Zohar, cut public funding for the Ophir awards, Israel’s Oscars, after The Sea, a film about a Palestinian boy, won the top prize last year. In July, in an election video mocking Israeli filmmakers, he declared: “Defame Israel, and get a check from the government… Not on my watch!” He and Netanyahu have threatened to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, and Zohar has accused them of treason.
The press has fared no better. Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza on their own since October 2023, and assassinated some 200 Palestinian journalists telling the story from the inside. The Committee to Protect Journalists says Israel has killed more journalists than any government on its records, and last year alone it was behind 38 of the 47 killings of journalists that the committee classed as murder worldwide. The army says 170 of them were operatives of armed groups. Meanwhile Israel unleashed its hasbara, raising its public diplomacy budget to $730 million this year, almost five times last year’s, to no avail.
The images Israel could not stop
Even Israel’s most powerful supporters could not turn the tide. David Ellison now owns Paramount, Warner Bros., CBS and CNN, and his father’s company, Oracle, has a stake in TikTok’s American venture, a deal Netanyahu called “the most important purchase going on right now”. Traditional media was controlled by executives and editors. Social media answers to the millions of phones that feed it, beyond the control of its owners.
Images from Gaza kept streaming live to the world, and there was nothing Israel could do to stop them. The more it tried, the more people distrusted it. Even its bastion of support in the United States has crumbled. American sympathy for Israelis has fallen from 64 per cent to 36 per cent, a drop of more than 40 per cent, and for the first time Americans no longer side more with Israelis than with Palestinians.
Shunned for their passports
And the world that has turned against Israel is turning against its storytellers too. Israel’s critics have always seen its cinema as a propaganda tool that whitewashes the occupation and gives a human face to crimes against humanity. The boycott pledge signed by more than 5,000 film workers says it spares individual artists. Yet in June Nadav Lapid, who left Israel for France in protest at Netanyahu’s government, pulled out of the FIDMarseille festival after filmmakers there objected to his presence, while at home Zohar condemned his latest film, Yes.
Alon Schwarz was attacked from both sides for Tantura, his 2022 documentary about the killing of Palestinian villagers in 1948. “We killed them. No qualms at all,” one veteran says. Israel’s defenders questioned the testimony, and some of Israel’s critics attacked an Israeli for telling a Palestinian story. “Is it better if I don’t tell the story?” Schwarz asked me.
In Geneva, the festival asked Moshe Rosenthal, the director of Tell Me Everything, a family drama set in the AIDS years, to state his “position regarding the current Israeli government and the war in Palestine”. His producers replied that “a film does not represent a government” and that many of them oppose the war. The screenings were cancelled anyway.
So Netanyahu and the boycotters agree on one thing: that an Israeli film speaks for the Israeli state. He demands that its filmmakers prove their loyalty to that state, and they demand that its filmmakers answer for it. Israel won the world with its stories. Now it calls the storytellers who could still win it a hearing traitors.
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