Last week, my country reopened the season for a genre of film criticism boasting over 20 years of repertoire: the review written by someone who never bought a ticket. This time, the critics formed a panel any festival would envy, comprising the Prime Minister, the Minister of Culture, the Chief of the General Staff, and also the Prime Minister’s opponents in a rare moment of concord just weeks before the elections.

All were unanimous in condemning Naza, the documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor awarded in Venice, and all equally unanimous in acknowledging they had not seen it. Benjamin Netanyahu classified the film as yet another piece of global antisemitic incitement, Miki Zohar promised to act immediately to strip the two directors of their citizenship, Itamar Ben-Gvir called them a disgrace and told them to leave the country, and General Eyal Zamir sentenced that everything in it rests on blood libels. This confirms that among us, conviction dispenses with screening with the exact same serenity with which a sports fan dispenses with the replay to swear the referee was bribed.

No one can accuse them of having missed a single screening, since until now the film has only been shown in Venice, and anyone who was not in that room saw nothing at all: neither the Prime Minister, nor the general, nor the commentators who for a week have been discussing it with the fluency of someone who knows it by heart. Thus, all national indignation rests upon a single syllogism, so short it fits into a social media post, according to which anyone who questions the Army’s procedures is antisemitic, and therefore any film questioning them is antisemitic even before being projected.

Zohar stated the premise without beating around the bush by equating criticism of Israel’s actions with hatred of Jews, and Netanyahu completed the reasoning by lamenting that the incitement now comes from within, as if two Jewish and Israeli filmmakers proved that antisemitism has learned to speak Hebrew, when they merely prove that Hebrew remains fully capable of asking questions. Even the more than one thousand cinema professionals, among them Ari Folman and Nadav Lapid, who signed a manifesto of solidarity with the directors and censured colleagues who attacked the film without seeing it, admitted with rare frankness this week that they themselves still have not seen it either. This leaves them in the only honest position available in the country: that of someone who suspends judgment until the screening.

The repertoire has been perfected ever since the Film Board banned Mohammed Bakri’s Jenin, Jenin in 2002, heeding the complaint of five soldiers, a ban the Supreme Court overturned the following year for violating freedom of expression. Nine years ago, at the very same Lido as now, Samuel Maoz took the Silver Lion for Foxtrot, while Miri Regev, then Minister of Culture and former Army spokesperson, accused the film of defaming the soldiers and admitted with a certain pride to never having seen it.

In 2022, Avigdor Lieberman denounced Farha, by Jordanian director Darin Sallam, even before its Netflix premiere, while Chili Tropper, a Minister of Culture emerging from Benny Gantz’s centrist party, called the film lies and libels, and thousands of users poured a one-star rating on IMDb at a time when, as the director recalled, nobody yet had any way to see it. This at least demonstrates that the genre has never been a monopoly of the right.

Last year, it was Zohar’s turn to lament the Oscar win for No Other Land, the previous work by Abraham and Szor, treat the award as sabotage against the State, and request by letter that cinematheques and cultural institutions not screen the film. Now, with Naza, the escalation has reached citizenship, so that the recipe can be followed much like watching a child’s growth through pencil marks on a doorframe: first ban, then condemn without seeing, then condemn before anyone can see, then ask that no one see, and finally threaten with exile the person who........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)