Lights, Camera, Othering: How Israeli Cinema Has Framed Arabs, Palestinians and the Zionist Sabra Myth

Anxieties about fortifying borders, wiping out the Other, can be traced to these early films, where militarisation was reinforced as the only way to secure Israeli essence. Ironically, Israel had to turn to immigrants from abroad to cobble together resources. This led to English as a primary language for the early films. The Israel-born soldier was reaffirmed as the constant hero. Ashkenazi Jews monopolised the national imagination, especially as people devoted to defending the land.

Two defining genre strands emerged. One was the widely popular ‘Bourekas’, often circling ethnic and cultural clashes between the Mizrahi (West Asian/North African) and the Ashkenazi (European) Jews. The Mizrahi was slapped with otherisation. The other breed of films belonged to the ‘New Sensibility’, swerving away from ultra-nationalist Zionistic scenography to French New Wave-inspired auteur-driven reflections. These flagged the suffering the Israeli soldier endured. They came as rebukes to a hardened nationalistic mythologisation of the Jewish settlement. Naturally, this crop of films invoked criticism from the establishment. In the ‘New Sensibility’ films, the historically imposed image of the Jewish hero fell apart. As for the Arabs, they appeared in just a few films, swinging between oriental tropes and outright monstrousness. As per Zionist frameworks, the Arab featured in a film only to serve as evil that must be purged. What remained constant was a primitive lensing to them, to contrast with a rational, secular Zionist ideal in concord with Western society.

A country’s history heavily bears on its cinema traditions, in the parti­cular bends in filmmakers’ regular complicity or defiance of the archetype. A brief ‘Palestinian Wave’ did ripple from the late 1970s to the ’80s. This was a knee-jerk reaction by some Left-leaning filmmakers to the coming to power of the right-wing Likud Party. Films of the 1990s and the 2000s garnered global attention and competed at prestigious film festivals, often foregrounding Israeli trauma. But these filmmakers found themselves caught in an unfavourable spot. The common Israeli was shown to suffer in a strange vacuum. Neither were the films spared by the government for casting a harsh light on military conscriptions. During the 1990s, the Palestinian Other was supplanted by the migrant foreign worker. Gradually, multicultural, ‘harmless’ films took over, coasting on mild, inoffensive subjects and being wary of even alluding to Palestine. This new spurt of films was primed as progressive, inclusive, accommodating of queer and marginalised communities, but these tiptoed around the Arab-Jewish clash. These films conveniently shifted the discourse away from the Palestinian Other to narratives in a more intimate register. Here, younger filmmakers could avoid controversy, while accentuating a palpable chasm between them and the older generation that was more vocal and confrontational about geopolitics. Most of the internationally acclaimed films erased the Palestine conflict and, at most, peered at interethnic strife within Israel’s Jewish spaces.

There have been a few odd interjections. In Nissim Dayan’s 1985 drama, On A Narrow Bridge, Palestinian actor Makram Khoury was cast as Katzman, a military governor. That he talks about his enduring persecution in Poland and his refusal to let the same happen again to Jews adds a rare spin on the Palestinian who is accorded no humanity in Israel. Haim Buzaglo’s 1988 film, Fictitious Marriage (Marriage of Convenience), portrayed a Jew who attempts to live and work with Palestinian labourers from Gaza. Yet, these politically strident films like Hamsin (1982), or Beyond the Walls (1984), refracted the agony of the external Other only through the Ashkenazi Israeli elite perspective. In Hamsin, Khaled, the Palestinian worker, arrives only for taking forward the Israeli character’s dramatic trajectory. Many of these films of the 1980s were swept up in erecting differences between moderates and extremists on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides. They mourned the death of the upright Israeli Leftist activist and ditched Palestine’s horrors. In her 1993 book, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction on Film, Nurith Gertz refers to an absence of real, sincere dialogue between the warring sides marking these films.

In the first decade of the 21st century, certain films such as Walk on Water (2004) stood out as interruptions of the exclusionary Israeli narrative. Another notable title, Lemon Tree (2008), castigates the Israeli Left for its supreme self-absorption.

Critically, Israel’s grandstanding and arrogance must also be viewed in terms of how it ties to American films. Hollywood has deep Jewish roots, with several founding figures being Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Pioneers such as Barney Balaban and Arthur Krim played a big role in building studios and tacitly endorsing Zionist ideals through their films. Hollywood tends to connect Jewish suffering vis-à-vis the Holocaust to the Israeli establishment, wholly bypassing the Palestine question.

Hollywood reinstates America’s reflection in Israel’s colonial state. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish functionaries were mobbed by American filmmakers desperate to produce films on the war. Legends like Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand rallied in solidarity with Israel right after the war. Similarly, the 1940s witnessed a proliferation of support for Zionism in key Hollywood circles. Once Israel was established, Hollywood was lured by commercial possibilities. American productions were offered tax incentives for filming in the new State. Consequently, many films such as Exodus (1960) and The Juggler (1953) paint Israel as brimming with valour and generosity. In these films’ rendition of Israel’s ‘War of Independence’, Palestinians are dismissed as violent and mindlessly divorced from Zionism.

In recent times, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has widened faultlines in Hollywood. Consistent pro-Palestine advocate Javier Bardem was one of nearly 4,000 Hollywood figures who signed a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions, those “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Heavyweights like Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo joined the call. Paramount and Warner Bros, both led by pro-Israel CEOs, David Ellison and David Zaslav, respectively, opposed the boycott.

However, over 50 prominent Israeli documentary filmmakers shared an open letter in 2025, expressing “profound shame” and “helplessness” over Israel’s actions in Gaza and declaring their support for the international film community’s boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.

Among the most trenchant Israeli voices today is dissident Golden Bear-winning filmmaker, Nadav Lapid. His latest, Yes! (2025), unleashes a blizzard of fury at an artist who succumbs to the regime’s violent whims. While his film, Ahed’s Knee, had won a Jury Prize at Cannes in 2021, the festival shunted Yes! to a parallel sidebar, Directors’ Fortnight, more known for platforming promising voices. It had trouble finding an international distributor before Kino Lorber stepped in. In its protagonist’s complicity with the elite whom he services, the film resorts to grotesquery to question him. Lapid orchestrates a frantic breakdown of the Israeli who gives in to the high society that’s in cahoots with the State. “You can’t draw a line between the oppressive apparatus and the oppressed mass, there’s a disgusting harmony,” the filmmaker said in a 2022 interview to Jewish Currents. Soon, however, Gaza becomes impossible to ignore. Lapid’s bold work represents Israeli cinema at a juncture where it has no option but to confront the genocide.

Debanjan Dhar is a film fest-junkie & is fascinated by South Asian independent cinema