Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar Mocks Film Industry, Vows to Defund

Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar has escalated his campaign against the country’s film industry with a new Likud primary spot that mocks Israeli filmmakers as anti-Israel profiteers and vows to redirect public funding away from films he says “blacken” Israeli soldiers.

Zohar, a senior member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, released the video as part of his campaign ahead of the party’s primaries, just days before the start of the Jerusalem Film Festival which opens today with Moshe Rosenthal’s family drama “Tell Me Everything.”

The video, released on social media, depicts a film set where Israeli filmmakers gleefully stage increasingly grotesque scenes of soldiers abusing Palestinians — stealing a balloon from a child, running over pita bread with a tank and destroying an elderly Palestinian woman’s plants — while a director urges the actors to make the soldiers appear “more evil.”

Israeli filmmakers are portrayed as eager to expose the supposed evils of the Israeli army to the world, while doing so for government money.

“For years, the formula was simple: Defame Israel and receive a check from the government,” Zohar says in the clip. “Not anymore.” The minister goes on to say that the reform he initiated “transfers our money from films that Israel haters love to films that Israelis love,” adding, “This is the end of the era where Israeli soldiers are blackened at the expense of Israeli citizens.”

The spot marks a further escalation in Zohar’s long-running confrontation with Israel’s film community, which deepened after the country’s Ophir Awards selected “The Sea,” a drama centered on a Palestinian boy, as best picture and Israel’s Oscar submission earlier this year.

Zohar, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, moved to halt government funding for the Ophir Awards after the film’s win, arguing that taxpayer money should not support works he deemed disrespectful to Israel’s military.

Zohar’s position has alarmed many in the Israeli cultural sector which has long been one of the country’s most internationally visible cultural exports — with filmmakers including Lapid, Samuel Maoz, Joseph Cedar and Ari Folman winning major festival prizes and Oscar nominations.

Israeli filmmakers are already facing growing pressure internationally, with festivals even boycotting them over their perceived ties to the Israeli state. In June, more than 350 film industry figures, including Natalie Portman, Justine Triet and Jacques Audiard, signed an open letter defending Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid after he withdrew from the FID Marseille film festival amid boycott pressure over his planned participation as a jury member.

That controversy underscored the bind now facing Israeli filmmakers as even some of the country’s most outspoken critics of Netanyahu’s government and the war in Gaza are being targeted as representatives of Israel; while at home, the Israeli government is slamming those same filmmakers as disloyal and undeserving of public support.