Government threatens Israeli cinema institute over films critical of IDF

A threat by the government to cut funding to a leading film institution is intensifying concerns over harm to the country’s cultural fabric by the most far-right government in Israel’s history.

The attack on the Tel Aviv Cinameteque for hosting a human rights film festival stands out as one of the more audacious and damaging moves during the morphing of Israel into a more authoritarian country underway since the Netanyahu government was elected two years ago.

In a letter to finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, Culture Minister Miki Zohar wrote that the Tel Aviv Cinameteque’s “Solidarity Festival” which ran from December 5-10, had shown films that “are against the state of Israel” and which “disparage the soldiers of the Israel Defense Force.” Zohar expects Smotrich to determine whether the festival violated funding laws.

Screening such films in an institution funded by the government “is problematic and deviates from legitimate and reasonable freedom of expression,” Zohar wrote. It was the first government step against the festival since it was established in 2011.

The coalition, dominated by ultranationalist and anti-Arab politicians, argues it is making Israel more democratic by acting in accordance with the will of the majority that elected it. It depicts its targets as elitists bent on preserving their privileges and power at the expense of the nation.

However, during Israel’s ongoing state of war, the coalition is pushing a flurry of antidemocratic bills, including one designed to restrict academic speech ostensibly for security reasons, and another that would effectively impinge on voting among Palestinian citizens of Israel and decrease their Knesset representation, thereby perpetuating the rule of the hard Right.

In film, the government’s threatening posture towards work raising questions about Israel’s foundation, or probing Palestinian dispossession or alleged army violations is already deterring filmmakers and supervisors from choosing critical or controversial topics. The reason is simple: in Israel the government, not private investors, provides the funding for films.

“When they threaten, you don’t feel like taking a chance,” said filmmaker Neta Shoshani, who has run into censorship issues over her film 1948: Remember, Remember Not, that was screened at the Jerusalem Cinameteque in November. “There is a chilling effect,” she told The Jewish Independent.

“This means that culture in Israel is rapidly becoming non-critical and doesn’t go to [controversial] places simply because there is no one to fund this type of film. If I enter controversial realms, I won’t get funding and at the end of the day, we all have to make a living. So clearly people exercise self-censorship even though they don’t admit it.”

“This is something that happens under every dictatorial regime,” Shoshani added. “In a fascist regime, culture becomes propaganda and not culture. Gradually, Israeli culture is becoming like that.”

Zohar’s office said in response: “we will continue to defend freedom of expression but we won’t let extremist and delusional elements incite and harm under the sponsorship of the state of Israel.”

The Cinameteque management has stressed that the ministry’s legal adviser had opposed the idea of stopping funding of the institution in retaliation for the content of the festival. But Zohar disregarded this advice.

The threat against the Tel Aviv Cinameteque, comes three months after the government started deploying a long-dormant 1927 British Mandate regulation to enable it to cancel, discourage or at least delay the screening of three films, two of them dealing with what Israelis know as the War of Independence, and Palestinians, the nakba, or catastrophe.

According to the regulation, films screened at cinameteques need to be greenlighted by a cinema board within the culture ministry. The board previously focused primarily on setting the age for a movie’s viewership.

According to Haaretz, now the board is requiring all Cinameteque directors to clear films with it.

Solidarity Festival organisers had posted that its films “strive to advance peace, democracy and human rights alongside equality and social justice”. The screenings included a panel discussion organised by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Israel’s oldest human rights group, on threats to media freedom in the country. 

It featured Noa Landau, an editor at Haaretz, itself the victim of government financial pressure largely because of its coverage of the Gaza war.

Shamai Glick, who heads the right-wing B’tsalmo organization, which often provides Zohar, the police, and other figures with information and complaints prompting them to ban films, plays or events often on the grounds that they defame the state or army, told TJI that his group triggered Zohar’s move.

“I call their festival the solidarity with Hamas festival,” Glick said, taking issue among other things with the festival’s giving space to the B’tselem human rights group and to conscientious objectors from army service.

Glick also sharply criticised the festival for screening the film Lyd, which depicts the 1948 expulsion of that town’s Palestinians and looting and an alleged massacre by IDF troops. The film imagines what Lyd would be like if not for the nakba. In October police banned a screening of Lyd in Jaffa after Zohar charged the movie was “inciting and mendacious”, funded by BDS activists and “slanders Israel and Israeli soldiers”.

Lyd co-director Rami Younis, who grew up in the city, told TJI that he has had censorship problems for years, but “the mainstream rarely reacts when a Palestinian is under fire. They don’t understand that it’s a matter of time before they come after them too. And now they are coming after them.”

In his case, he said the ban had only helped him by drawing publicity and opportunities to screen the film in the United States. Younis dismissed the allegation of BDS funding as a "fabrication", saying the film was sponsored by the New York State Council for the Arts, philanthropists, and the Harvard University Divinity School.

Younis linked suppression of films dealing with the nakba to what he said is another one being carried out by Israel in Gaza, where the IDF has expelled much of the population of north Gaza and destroyed their homes during the last two months in what it says is an operation against Hamas.

Over the course of the war, triggered by a brutal Hamas massacre on Israeli border communities, the army has forced most Gazans into “safe zones” that are not safe. “If you don’t recognise the crime the first time, and it goes unaccounted for, you are going to keep repeating that crime,” Younis said, noting that Israeli agriculture minister Avi Dichter, a member of the security cabinet, had termed the military operation “the Gaza nakba”.

Shoshani’s film lost several screenings after the film board said it needed to be assessed, but ultimately approved it. The film is compelling and thought-provoking, looking at the War of Independence/Nakba through testimonies and interviews with Israelis and Palestinians about the same events.

It also shines a light on how even after all these years, the Israeli state is censoring key documentation from researchers. The Kan public broadcaster, which had funded the film, has been declining to screen it for 18 months, or to confirm when it will be shown. Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi has pressed for it to be scrapped, Shoshani said.

Despite the risks, Shoshani says now is the time for critical filmmaking. “It doesn’t look like there will be a chance to do that later. It doesn’t look like things will change.”