PREAMBLE
A number of Israeli filmmakers have bravely turned the camera on their own society, revealing dark truths about their state and its history.
Each of these films are pieces of a grand mosaic revealing a morally bankrupt state whose decades-long policies have led them to where they are today.
The efforts of these filmmakers are as indispensable as those of their Palestinian counterparts.
Enjoy the films.
Full description of each film is on this [ Middle East Eye ] site.
》Click on each subtitle to view film
1. The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation (2021)
Mograbi’s characteristic black humour and angry tenor take a backseat to this subdued, straightforward and factual document of how Israel managed to seize full control of the occupied territories since the 1967 war.
Interviews with thirty-eight Israeli soldiers are punctuated with the director’s dry commentary on strategies used by the government to annex the Arab lands.
2. The Laws in These Parts (2011) and The Viewing Booth (2019)
Comprised of interviews with retired army judges, Alexandrowicz, like Mograbi, takes the 1967 War as a starting point to investigate the legal framework responsible of the systematic subjection of Palestinians and for the legalisation of settlements outside Jerusalem.
From the state-sponsored racist treatment of Arabs to the rise of “administrative detention”, where the accused can be held indefinitely in confinement without charge, Alexandrowicz lays bare a bigoted judicial system that has been relentless in dehumanising Palestinians.
3. 'The Viewing Booth': Trailer Can Palestinian videos change the mind of pro-Israel student?
“Maybe when we question what we see, it reinforces what we believe in,” she says. “Maybe B'Tselem is actually helping me.”
The sympathy the students initially professes to the gruelling footage of the Israeli abuses towards Palestinian civilians is gradually overtaken by doubt and ultimately apathy.
4. The Settlers (2016)
The feature documentary by Romanian-born, Israeli-raised Shimon Dotan is easily the most enraging entry in this list.
Dotan incorporates archival footage and interviews with critical leftist Israeli activists and academics into his chronological narrative, but the focus of the film remains the hair-raising interviews with the settlers.
5. Tantura (2022)
https://twitter.com/i/status/1603797370612785152
The Nakba remains a taboo subject for even the most left-leaning of Israeli artists. Alon Schwarz breaks the long silence with this haunting documentary that chronicles the little-known 1948 massacre of the eponymous Palestinian seaside town that saw the IDF’s Alexandroni Brigade murder hundreds of Palestinian villagers and bury them in mass graves.
Katz shared the recordings of the soldiers with Schwarz, and it is these interviews that form the basis of this searing expose
6. Jaffa, The Orange's Clockwork (2009)
Intermingling archival footage, photographs and interviews with both scholars and elderly witnesses, Sivan affectionally surveys the pre-1948 years when Jews and Palestinians lived in relative harmony next to each other. The Nakba changed everything.
Sivan portrays the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 as a grand colonialist undertaking that exploited every possible means to set up a glorified nationalistic self-image teeming with misinformation.
7. Let it be Morning (2021)
Based on a novel of the same title by controversial Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, the film’s plot centres on Sami (Alex Bakri), an IT executive leading a comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem until he finds himself stranded in his childhood Arab village due to a military blockade enforced for reasons never fully explained.
Let it Be Morning is arguably the most compassionate, most perceptive, most piercing depiction of Palestinian lives created by an Israeli filmmaker.