‘Yes’ Is a Scathing Portrait of Israeli Depravity. Why Are European Leftists Boycotting It?

In 2021, the Israeli film director Nadav Lapid moved to France because, he told me, he felt his country was in a state of “total moral collapse.” After Oct. 7, as Israel ground much of Gaza into dust, Lapid returned to Israel to make “Yes,” an impossibly scathing, bitterly surreal attempt to capture that collapse on film.

“Yes" tells the story of a struggling pianist and party entertainer known only as Y who is commissioned to write a new national anthem celebrating genocide in Gaza. (The song borrows from a real one in a video by an Israeli nationalist group.) Lapid’s film is a vision of a traumatized country where life has become a frenzy of orgiastic partying and histrionic self-righteousness. It’s like “The Zone of Interest,” the 2023 film about the banal life of a Nazi family........

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