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The Times of Israel is liveblogging Sunday’s events as they unfold.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar threatens to cut off all state funding to the film industry amid an ongoing spat over his attempt to stage an alternate movie awards ceremony.
“I will work — already tomorrow — to cancel the Film Law and to end funding the film industry to the tune of NIS 130 million a year, and they can make the films they want to, the way that they want to, on their own dime, and not with public money,” Zohar says in an interview with the right-wing Channel 14.
Zohar says the decision is being made after figures in the industry are trying to push a widespread boycott of the alternative film awards he set up in protest of the prizes handed out at this year’s Ophir Awards, which is run by the Israeli Academy of Film and decides Israel’s Oscar submission each year.
The minister was outraged after the top award this year was given to the film “The Sea,” about a Palestinian boy. The film was submitted to the Oscars for consideration as best foreign film, but did not make the short list.
Zohar accuses some in the film industry of trying to pressure those who had initially agreed to take part in the alternative awards ceremony to drop out amid a number of withdrawals in recent days.
“There are situations in life when people need to know when to stop — and it seems like in this situation, those trying to boycott the ceremony did not know when to stop,” says Zohar.
He accuses these unnamed figures of being “violent extremists” who are “threatening” those who were nominated for awards at the newly established “Israeli Film Awards,” and causing them to back out.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi dismisses Attorney General Bahara-Miara’s sharp criticism of the coalition’s plan to establish a government commission of inquiry into the October 7 attack rather than a state commission.
“We won’t allow the ousted attorney general and her circle to evade a commission of inquiry,” Karhi writes on X, implying that the justice system will be a target of the nascent probe.
“The wording of the mandate frightens them, and a commission that is not under their control drives them mad,” the Likud minister adds.
The government has tried to fire Baharav-Miara but the High Court ruled that the dismissal process was not legal, and she has remained in her role, to the dismay of Karhi and his allies.
Karhi suggested that there will only be “justice” through the coalition’s own inquiry, despite Baharav-Miara’s “objections and fury.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to head the panel which will establish the parameters of the proposed government inquest — rather than a state commission of inquiry. He has argued that the latter would lack public buy-in and be seen as politically biased despite its independence from the government.
Critics have accused the premier of trying to “whitewash” his responsibility for the failures leading up to and during the savage terrorist assault and atrocities, the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.
Rahm Emanuel, who is a presumed 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, argues that Israel currently has “the best strategic terrain” for regional integration since its founding, but that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “pissing it away” and instead “leading Jews back into the ghetto.”
“Israel has never been more strategically secure since Ben Gurion was dancing the hora in 1948 in Tel Aviv, but more politically vulnerable,” argues Emanuel — who previously served as former US president Barack Obama’s chief of staff and mayor of Chicago — in an interview on the left-wing Pod Saves America podcast.
Rahm Emanuel’s candid take on Benjamin Netanyahu's failed leadership of Israel. pic.twitter.com/jObHMYwUYN
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) December 21, 2025
“Never in my life [did I think] the prime minister of the State of Israel would lead Jews back into the ghetto, and that’s what’s happening in Israel,........