After 7 October: Five Israeli films that try to address the Palestinian elephant in the room

“After 7 October: Five Israeli films that try to address the Palestinian elephant in the room Submitted by Joseph Fahim on Mon, 05/04/2026 - 10:06 Israeli cinema is slowly developing a pariah status on the festival circuit but these films try to take a critical stance on the state’s treatment of Palestinians Coexistence My Ass! follows Israeli comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi (Autlook) Off The trajectories of Palestinian and Israeli cinema have diverged sharply since 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza. While Palestinian stories have gained unprecedented global visibility, culminating in the Oscar win for No Other Land in 2025 and the nomination of The Voice of Hind Rajab this year, Israeli films have, by contrast, faced increasing barriers to circulation. Many have been sidelined by festivals and distributors amid growing discontent that has, in some cases, taken the form of an informal boycott. Films supported by state-backed institutions, such as the Israel Film Fund, have come under heightened scrutiny from international bodies, often wary of criticism from pro-Palestinian groups and human rights organisations. Productions centred on the experiences of Israeli hostages, while omitting Palestinian suffering, such as Doron Eran’s Stay Forte (2025), and documentaries including #Nova (2024), Screams Before Silence (2024), and We Will Dance Again (2024), have struggled to gain traction at major festivals. They have also largely failed to secure theatrical distribution. A small number of these films have, however, been acquired by American streaming platforms. Supernova: The Music Festival Massacre (2024) was picked up by Apple, while We Will Dance Again was released as a Paramount+ original, a signifier of the broader political alignments of US media corporations in the Trump era. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that the few Israeli films to achieve international visibility in this period tend to emerge from explicitly left-leaning perspectives. Their political stance often reads as broadly critical of Zionism. Their engagement with the idea of peace vacillates between initial idealism and a more sober recognition that the prospect of a two-state solution may no longer be viable. No Other Land director recounts ‘horrific’ raid on his home by Israeli forces Read More » This emerging strand of independent Israeli cinema is marked by an overriding sense of loss: of Jewish ideals, of democratic principles, and of justice itself. Its portrayal of Israeli society is often bleak, depicted as violent, morally compromised, and in profound crisis. References to the Nakba are no longer treated as taboo, but are increasingly invoked as an acknowledgment of the Palestinian tragedy, an essential step toward a more credible dialogue with a global audience that is now more informed about the issue than ever before. Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Palestine, Lebanon, and beyond is likely to further discourage international festivals and distributors from engaging with Israeli cinema. Yet despite its internal contradictions and contested positions, this defiant body of work remains significant within contemporary cinematic discourse on Israel and Palestine. At times they function as an important, if imperfect, contribution to the visual and moral documentation of Israel’s war. The divergences in tone and approach across these films reflect a broader uncertainty within Israeli cinema itself. A field torn between a desire for international legitimacy and recognition, and a more urgent attempt to grapple philosophically and ethically with one of the defining ruptures in Israel’s modern history. Yes Since his 2006 debut, Emile’s Girlfriend , Nadav Lapid has emerged as the enfant terrible of Israeli cinema and the nation’s most decorated filmmaker of the 21st Century thus far. With films such as the Locarno-winning Policeman (2011), the Berlin Golden Bear recipient Synonyms (2019), and the Cannes prize-winning Ahed’s Knee (2021), Lapid has established himself as one of the most forceful critics of his own country. His films interrogate Israel’s militarisation, exposing endemic political violence, tracing the moulding of identity under nationalist ideology, and portraying the cultural establishment as a praetorian guard. 'Shut up and fall in line': Israel, Palestine and the dawn of a new censorship in western art Read More » Yes , which premiered at Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year and has struggled to secure broad distribution, pushes this trajectory further still. It offers a nightmarish vision of a post-7 October Israeli society mired in a bottomless venality; a malevolent, narcissistic society that can no longer be saved or redeemed; a society too punch-drunk on its inflated self-righteousness to come to terms with its degeneracy. Ariel Bronz plays Y, a Tel Aviv jazz pianist commissioned to compose a new national anthem designed to galvanize troops, revive national spirit, and sharpen hostility toward the Palestinian “enemy”. Over the course of the film’s 150 minutes, Y and his wife degrade themselves in every imagined fashion, as he simultaneously attempts to distance himself from, or erase, the memory of his mother’s pro-Palestinian stance in pursuit of a more secure future. Stylistically, Yes is Lapid on steroids: hyper-theatrical, dominated by aggressively tight close-ups, restless camera movement, fragmented editing, and a fluid boundary between realism and hallucination. Yet for all its provocations, Yes ultimately registers less as a forensic autopsy of post–7 October Israel than as a grand act of effrontery - an abrasive, knowingly grandiose gesture that at times feels more performative than penetrating. Two key limitations complicate its ambition. First, the decadence Lapid foregrounds is rendered partially in sexual and hedonistic terms, echoing a familiar register of moral decline narratives found most memorably in Stanley Kubrick’s epic Spartacus (1960) that risk flattening the complexity of its subject. Second, at the heart of this dark allegory lies a portrait of a society that has lost its moral bearings. Given the abundance of reporting and testimony over the past three years, Lapid’s vision of a guilt-ridden, wounded nation is difficult to buy into. For all its formal bravura, the film never fully answers its central implicit question: how exactly did this society arrive here? How did violence become so normalised, so structurally embedded? And most pointedly, why does Y - privileged, aware, and ostensibly reflective - never seriously consider exit or refusal as viable options? Violent authoritarianism, the kind Lapid is unconvincingly attempting to invoke, does not typically present its subjects with such open-ended agency. Yet Y remains a figure of choice who repeatedly chooses the collective indulgent immersion in denial - a contradiction that serves the demands of the film’s tortured dramaturgy more than its political inquiry. Still, Lapid’s attempt to probe the moral and ideological collapse of a nation that may never admit its sinister sanctioning of the carnage in Gaza and beyond remains significant. But the limits of Yes also expose a broader constraint within this mode of cinema: how far can even its most confrontational filmmakers push against the foundational narratives of the state they inhabit? Coexistence My Ass! This American-French documentary by Canadian-Lebanese filmmaker Amber Fares is not, strictly speaking, an Israeli film. Its subject, however, is unmistakably Israeli: the comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi. Born to an Iranian-Jewish mother and an Israeli father, Shuster-Eliassi was raised in Oasis of Peace, a community north of Jerusalem where Palestinians and Jews opted to live side by side. Fares traces her evolution from an aspiring politician deeply embedded in Arab-Jewish dialogue to one of the most polarising - and widely vilified - comedians in Israel. Structured around a post–7 October stand-up performance, the film weaves together video diaries, archival footage, and observational material, capturing pivotal, often intimate moments in Shuster-Eliassi’s life between 2018 and 2024. Fares revisits several defining milestones: Shuster-Eliassi’s early UN address as a peace advocate; her Harvard Kennedy School performance; her viral “Dubai Dubai” music video, which satirised Arab states’ embrace of the Abraham Accords; and her confrontations with right-wing protesters who denounce her as a national disgrace. Unlike Yes , Shuster-Eliassi repeatedly emphasises that the root of the entire Middle East malaise – even after 7 October – lies in what she explicitly refers to as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Her arc moves from a sincere belief in coexistence toward a more sobering admission: that such a vision is no longer tenable. Much of her work interrogates the asymmetries of power underpinning so-called coexistence. For Shuster-Eliassi, genuine cohabitation is impossible without meaningful power-sharing - an arrangement she argues Israel has neither pursued nor permitted. What has long been celebrated as coexistence, she ultimately concludes, amounts to little more than token inclusion. Fares does not fully unpack the historical and ideological dimensions of coexistence, and the film occasionally sidesteps deeper theoretical engagement. Still, Coexistence, My Ass! stands as a vital document, one that captures, with urgency and clarity, why the promise of reconciliation feels increasingly out of reach. Far From Maine Equally shaped by a searing sense of disillusionment is this sophomore documentary by queer Israeli filmmaker and journalist Roy Cohen. Structured as a letter to his late Palestinian friend, Aseel Aslih, killed by Israeli police in 2000, the film unfolds as both personal elegy and political reckoning, drawing in part on Cohen’s own written account of the incident, published in The Guardian’s Long Read four years ago. The title refers to the American peace camp where Roy and Aseel first met and forged a lasting friendship. Footage from the camp is among the film’s most compelling elements. Maine as a backdrop operates as a kind of laboratory, one in which the performance of identity and the hierarchies of privilege are both staged and, ultimately, reinforced. Despite this, Cohen clings to a near childlike belief in the possibility of dialogue. The events of 7 October force a painful reassessment, as he confronts what he portrays as a radicalised and desensitised society, one capable of rationalising, or at least ignoring, the devastation unfolding next door. At its core, the film wrestles with a question that shadows many leftist, pro-Palestinian activists: is it morally feasible to remain within such a system? Cohen offers no definitive answer, but gestures toward a justification of sorts - that resisting from within, building opposition rather than withdrawing, may itself constitute a moral stance against a system he views as ethically bankrupt. Far From Maine - made without Israeli state funding and with Palestinian collaborators - remains modest in scale but earnest in intent. Cohen’s naivety and wide-eyed perspective can occasionally test one’s patience, yet, like Coexistence, My Ass! , the film ultimately serves as a revealing meditation on the limits of coexistence within Israel’s current political reality. Collapse This essay film by Israeli documentarian Anat Even is the most austere - and arguably the most forthright - entry of the group. Having left her home in the northwestern Negev near the Gaza border, Even returns in the aftermath of 7 October and spends two years documenting the war’s impact on the destroyed Nir Oz kibbutz, all while making futile attempts to cross into Gaza and bear witness to the destruction there. The film opens with a quote from Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz, “Yet we regarded all this with indifference”, as images of Israeli bombardment of Gaza fill the screen. This intro sets the tone of the rest of the picture: a stark, unadorned meditation on indifference, and on the quiet, pervasive callousness on one side of the fence. The distance between viewer and the Israeli voter may differ, but the mechanism of detachment remains distressingly similar Though marked by the trauma of the Hamas attacks, Even’s moral clarity remains strikingly intact. Her empathy resists the pull of collective vengeance that has come to define much of the national mood, offering instead a measured, deeply personal counterpoint. A voiceover by Palestinian doctor Ezzideen Shehab introduces a perspective often absent from films like Yes , grounding Even’s restrained images in a broader philosophical context. It is through such minimal interventions that the film achieves its greatest force - subtle, lingering, and quietly devastating. Scenes of protest punctuate the film, but they are fleeting. What dominates instead is a chilling normalcy, captured most memorably in a scene where Israeli visitors gaze out at Gaza from a memorial park, treating the wreckage as a distant spectacle. Anat Even visits the Nir Oz kibbutz to document the destruction in Gaza in her film Collapse (Berlinale) Even subtly implicates not only the Israeli citizens but also her audience. The distance between the viewer and the Israeli voter may differ, but the mechanism of detachment remains distressingly similar: a momentary recognition, followed by a retreat into a fog of unconcern. Collapse is a remarkable work - one of the most potent and unflinching cinematic responses to the post–7 October Israeli reality. Where To? If Collapse stands as the most powerful film of the group, Where To? is arguably the most contrived and the most disingenuous. Assaf Machnes’s debut feature unfolds as a Disney-like meet-cute, pairing a middle-aged Palestinian taxi driver with a young queer Israeli man in an unlikely cross-cultural friendship. Also backed by the Israel Film Fund, the film pointedly sidesteps politics, foregrounding instead a shared, depoliticised humanity. What 'Where To?' ultimately elides is a fundamental asymmetry: Peace does not carry the same meaning for the occupier as it does for the occupied Over a series of extended taxi conversations between 2022 and 2024, the two men bond by bracketing the very differences that define their realities. Machnes gestures briefly toward structural inequality in a single scene contrasting their life paths: the Israeli leaves home in pursuit of the Berlin experience, while the Palestinian seeks a more equitable existence in Europe. But the film never meaningfully develops this disparity. Germany is rendered as a fantastically neutral, frictionless space in which Israelis and Arabs move on equal footing, and even the events of 7 October leave the pair’s relationship curiously undisturbed. The film’s perspective remains unmistakably Israeli - marked by a romanticised gaze that overlooks the enduring weight of displacement, exile, and systematic inequality. The Palestinian driver’s weariness is reduced to the fallout of a failed romance, rather than rooted in the deeper, more intractable questions of identity and belonging. His discontent is framed as personal rather than political, as though the structures shaping his life were too diffuse or inevitable to confront. What Where To? ultimately elides is a fundamental asymmetry: peace does not carry the same meaning for the occupier as it does for the occupied. Nor, in practice, can any encounter between an Israeli and a Palestinian remain untouched by politics, however casual it may appear. Set in a kind of alternate reality - one largely unmarked by decades of violence and loss - the film advances a manufactured humanism rooted in a faux-liberal Zionism, blind to structural power asymmetries and to the ways such a posture obscures underlying political conditions while absolving the passive aggressor of accountability. 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