Roy Cohen
+972 Magazine / September 22, 2025
Films challenging dominant Zionist narratives have long faced bans, funding cuts, and smear campaigns from Israeli officials and right-wing activists alike.
A pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions has quickly racked up the signatures of over 4,500 actors, directors, and other film workers from around the world. Launched on Sept. 8 by the group Film Workers for Palestine, the pledge commits signatories — who include Emma Stone, Joaquin Phoenix, Javier Bardem, and Ilana Glazer — not to work with Israeli production companies, broadcasters, cinemas, or festivals deemed to be complicit in apartheid and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Hitting back, Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar described the boycott as “cynical and detached,” vowing that “Israeli film culture will continue to flourish, touch hearts, and succeed around the world.” Yet in truth, many Israeli filmmakers and institutions have already been facing boycotts and attempts at silencing for a long time — from the Israeli government itself.
Just last week, Zohar announced that he was pulling funding from the Ophir Awards, Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars. This was after the top prize went to Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, which tells the story of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the West Bank who tries to visit the beach for the first time but is stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint.
“Starting with the 2026 budget, this pathetic ceremony will no longer be funded by taxpayers’ money,” Zohar declared. “Under my watch, Israeli citizens will not pay from their pockets for a ceremony that spits in the faces of our heroic soldiers.”
This was only the latest in a long history of right-wing attempts to silence critical Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, which has ramped up steadily over the past two decades, particularly vis-à-vis documentaries that challenge the dominant Zionist narrative. While these films rarely achieve commercial success, their impact has been amplified through earning recognition at some of the world’s most prestigious cinematic venues — from Berlinale, Sundance, and Venice, to the Peabodys, Emmys, and Oscars.
Some of these works expose hidden truths that have long been concealed from the Israeli public, such as massacres and land seizures during the Nakba (for example Tantura, 2022, and 1948: Remember, Remember Not, 2024), and systemic injustices in Israel’s civilian justice system (Advocate, 2019) and military legal apparatus (The Law in These Parts, 2011).
Two landmark documentaries — Five Broken Cameras (2011) and No Other Land (2024) — emerged as Palestinian-Israeli collaborations documenting Palestinian nonviolent resistance to land theft and ethnic cleansing in Bil’in and Masafer Yatta, respectively. Others like Mussolini’s Sister (2018) and Lyd (2023) combine documentary with fiction to reclaim and reassert the long-suppressed histories and identities of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
In both their production and distribution, these films have carved out a space for dissent while simultaneously underscoring its scarcity. Yet despite their limited reach compared to movies with more mainstream appeal, they have provoked intense — and at times violent — backlash from a growing alliance of far-right ministers, media personalities, and activists. As a result, critical filmmakers in Israel, many of whom are supportive of the international boycott against Israeli film institutions, are finding that their ability to document the reality on the ground and share their work with the public is more restricted than ever.
‘I’ve become radioactive’
Attempts to silence documentarians permeate through Israeli culture, from the government to the military and all the way down to civil society. Sometimes these efforts are subtle, but in recent years they have become increasingly brazen.
Following the success of No Other Land at the Oscars in March of this year, the Palestinian co-directors — both of whom live in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank, which is the subject of the film — have faced harassment and physical attacks at the hands of Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers. Just last week, the Israeli army raided the house of Basel Adra (who also reports for +972 Magazine) after settlers stormed his village. Only weeks after the Oscars, Adra’s colleague, Hamdan Ballal, was brutally beaten by settlers before being arrested and abused by soldiers who mocked his award.
Awdah Hathaleen, who also worked on the film, was shot dead in his village by a Jewish settler in late July; the settler was released from house arrest after less than a week and is continuing to terrorize the village’s residents to this day.
These violent attacks on the Palestinians behind the film followed the public vilification of Israeli co-director (and +972 Magazine reporter) Yuval Abraham, who was labelled “antisemitic” by a news anchor on Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, following his 2024 Berlinale acceptance speech — part of a smear campaign that generated waves of death threats against the filmmakers.
This backlash quickly evolved into coordinated efforts to suppress the film. In the city of Kfar Saba, pressure from the municipality and right-wing activist Shai Glick forced the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement to cancel a scheduled screening. Glick additionally pushed Haifa University to cancel its showing of the film, though it eventually went ahead.
Glick also tried with varying levels of success over the past year to ensure the cancellation of screenings of both Lyd, which deals with the destruction of a Palestinian city by Israeli forces during the Nakba, and The Governor, which examines the oppressive military regime that Palestinian citizens of Israel were subjected to until 1966. Glick’s threats led to cinemas suspending screenings of both films until their producers received approval from a state review board designed to rate films according to their suitability to young audiences — in other words, judging them on the basis of sexual or violent content, not politics.
Directed by Danel El-Peleg, The Governor explores the history of the military regime through the story of her grandfather, the first military governor of the Wadi Ara region. Though the review board eventually approved the screenings after weeks of stalling, El-Peleg told +972 Magazine she remained deeply troubled by the attempted censorship: “Why should the state have authority over whether my film can be shown at all?”
The creators of Lyd — Rami Younis, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Sarah Friedland, an American Jew — refused to submit the film for the review board’s consideration. The film resurrects the vibrant history of Younis’ hometown, now known by the Israelized name Lod, through testimonies from residents who remained under Israeli military control following the Nakba. One particularly haunting account comes from a man called Issa, who recounts being forced by Israeli soldiers at age 12 to gather the bodies of dozens massacred in 1948.
Younis and Friedland extended these testimonies into a speculative vision of a Lyd liberated from Israeli rule. The portrayal drew immediate condemnation from Culture Minister Zohar, who moved to ban the film domestically, denouncing it as “defamatory” for claiming that Israeli soldiers committed a massacre, that Palestinians were forcibly expelled from the city, and that Israel bore responsibility for its destruction.
Zohar’s campaign soon escalated into outright intimidation: he pressured police to block screenings at Jaffa’s Al-Saraya Theater, threatened to strip funding from the Tel Aviv Cinematheque for hosting the film, and even sought to shutter Al-Saraya entirely. The effect was soon felt by Younis. “I’ve become radioactive,” he said. “Venues in Haifa won’t even return my calls — they won’t even bother to reject me.
“I’ve warned Israeli filmmakers for years: ‘First they target Palestinians, then they’ll come for you,’” Younis continued. “Now that the state is persecuting Israeli filmmakers too, some in the industry are finally waking up — though many still refuse to see the full picture.”
‘Does my work subvert the system, or is it a fig leaf ?’
Even with the review board’s approval, some documentaries still face suppression. Neta Shoshani’s 1948: Remember, Remember Not brings together archival footage and contemporaneous letters from Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, exposing how evidence of wartime atrocities by Israeli forces remains locked in state archives. Ironically, this film about state censorship soon faced censorship of its own.
After initially being blocked from nationwide release, the film received authorization for theatrical screenings in 2023. Yet for two years it was censored by its own commissioner and funder: the public broadcaster, Kan. “There was only one screening,” Shoshani revealed to +972 Magazine. “After Shai Glick attended, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi sent letters to Kan that parroted Glick’s talking points word-for-word.”
“Kan kept postponing the screening indefinitely,” Shoshani told +972 Magazine, adding that the broadcaster claimed the film can’t be shown publicly more than a month before its TV premiere — while simultaneously preventing that very premiere from happening. “They didn’t know how to release it, so they censored it instead,” she concluded.
Eventually, Kan agreed to screen the film earlier this month. In response, Karhi threatened to defund the channel and its independent news company, but has yet to follow through.
While a broadcaster censoring its own commissioned film for several years represents a troubling new trend, the phenomenon of funders disavowing documentaries they had previously supported has precedent in Israel.
In 2019, Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche’s documentary Advocate — which profiles Lea Tsemel, a Jewish-Israeli lawyer who has defended Palestinian political prisoners for five decades — won Best Documentary at Israel’s DocAviv festival, earning them an Academy Award campaign grant by the Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Arts. In response, right-wing protesters splattered red paint on the council’s building, accompanied by slogans like “Don’t reward terrorism.”
“They completely blurred the line between the film as a portrayal of Tsemel and her clients’ actions,” Jones told +972 Magazine. “No distinction was made between the protagonist and the filmmakers, that is, between reality and its representation.”
The funding controversy sparked outrage across Israel’s creative community. The Israeli Film Academy threatened to cancel its annual awards ceremony if the lottery revoked Jones and Bellaiche’s grant, while prominent female authors withdrew from consideration for the council’s prestigious literary award, the Sapir Prize. Facing mounting backlash, the council ultimately upheld the funding. Yet censorship persisted: then-Culture Minister Miri Regev successfully pressured the mayor of Ma’alot-Tarshiha to cancel a local screening of the film.
Jones recently co-produced the film Coexistence, My Ass! about left-wing Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster Eliassi, and is now directing a film about Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament — her first project without any Israeli broadcaster. “I deliberately interviewed the Knesset members in their mother tongue, Arabic, seeing as most of their podium speeches are in Hebrew,” she explained. “Broadcasters said, ‘Our audience doesn’t have an ear for it.’”
Several Israeli documentary filmmakers confirmed to +972 Magazine this pattern of broadcasters resisting Arabic-language content. Through such gatekeeping, these institutions systematically restrict resources for films centering Palestinians or challenging the biases of Jewish commissioners at Israeli broadcasters, or their perceived audiences.
Jones is all too aware of the dilemmas that this poses. “For years, we’ve asked ourselves: ‘Does my work subvert the system, or is it being used as a fig leaf?’” she said. “When you’re someone who vocally and visibly critiques a society from within, the answer is rarely clear-cut. But as times change and reality moves from bad to unbearable, the question looms larger — and so do the doubts.”
Cultural gatekeeping
Funding decisions in Israel’s film industry rarely come with transparent explanations. Yet one controversial case 17 years ago laid bare the systemic and psychological barriers to free expression that critical filmmakers face.
In 2008, France-based Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan’s Jaffa – The Orange’s Clockwork — which uses archival material to show how the Jaffa orange brand was transformed into an icon of Jewish labour following the expulsion of the city’s Palestinian population during the Nakba — controversially won a Jerusalem Film Festival development award. The award was funded by privately-owned Channel 8 and two major film funds: the Israeli Cinema Project (more commonly known as the Rabinovich Fund) and the New Fund for Cinema and TV.
“The funders were so outraged that my project won an award commemorating Israel’s 60th anniversary, they cancelled the prize entirely,” Sivan told +972 Magazine. “When [the] Rabinovich [Fund] established its own award, the selection committee again chose my film — prompting chairman Giora Eini to fire committee members he suspected of supporting my work.”
“It was my first encounter with such blatant political censorship,” recalled Sinai Abt, then Channel 8’s documentary chief. “Even Channel 8’s management was stunned, though in today’s climate, no one would bat an eye.”
Ultimately, Sivan produced the film without Israeli public funding. But the controversy became political ammunition: right-wing Knesset members cited these events while advancing 2008 legislation to deny public funds to films that “may damage the principles of the State of Israel’s existence or its safety,” while prioritizing those “promoting good citizenship … and [that] strengthen the bonds with Jewish and Zionist legacy, and its values.”
The proposed legislation emerged after years of heated debate in Israeli media about films presenting the Second Intifada through Palestinian eyes. The most prominent was Mohammad Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin (2002), documenting Israel’s military assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in the spring of 2002. While it screened in cinematheques, the review board banned commercial showings of the film — a decision the Supreme Court overturned in 2003 following the filmmakers’ appeal.
Nevertheless, the filmmakers were taken back to court multiple times by soldiers who claimed Bakri’s film misrepresented their actions in a way that damaged their reputation. The controversy peaked when then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, appointed by Netanyahu, backed one soldier’s case, asserting in an official statement: “We bear both a moral and civic duty to assist soldiers in protecting their reputations from false accusations.”
In its 2022 final ruling on the case, the Supreme Court found that the film’s editing deliberately suggested the prosecuting officer — shown for merely 3.5 seconds in the allegedly defamatory sequence — had stolen money from an elderly Palestinian man, constituting defamation. The court levied a NIS 175,000 (around $50,000) fine and imposed a comprehensive distribution ban in Israel, including confiscation of all copies. This decision likely shaped Bakri’s approach to his 2024 follow-up, Jenin, Jenin, in which he conspicuously avoided showing any soldier’s face.
Prominent Israeli documentary producer Liran Atzmor (who signed the recent petition in support of the international boycott of Israeli film) told +972 Magazine that the Supreme Court’s Jenin, Jenin ruling was predictable given the political landscape shaped by the Knesset’s 2018 approval of the “Nation State Law” — legislation that codified Hebrew as Israel’s official language, enshrined state symbols, and reinforced Israel’s commitment to Jewish settlement expansion.
Atzmor identifies the law as pivotal in facilitating censorship of speech that challenges state-sponsored narratives. “Giora Eini of the Rabinovich Fund literally copied clauses from this law into the fund’s production contracts,” Atzmor said. “This bound filmmakers funded by Rabinovich to avoid depicting the Nakba or showing footage like flag burnings during the First Intifada. In practice, it erased Palestinian resistance and historical narratives from funded films.”
Still, Sivan points to a problem he sees as far more damaging than official censorship: the self-censorship that is ubiquitous throughout the Israeli film industry. “While Israeli cinema is considered around the world to be progressive, it largely perpetuates Israel’s democratic facade,” he said. “State-funded films remain trapped in the system’s suffocating embrace.”
Roy Cohen is a writer and a filmmaker, born in Ashdod to an Algerian-Moroccan family; in his work, he deals with artificial intelligence, LGBTQ identities, political art, grief and taboo
