While Hamas terrorists were hiding behind their own people during Israel\u2019s war in response to the Hamas massacre of 1200 Israelis, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who had moved to France in 2021, felt his home country was in a state of \u201ctotal moral collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n
So he made a film, \u201cYes,\u201d to capture that collapse.<\/p>\n
The movie, writes Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, \u201ctells 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s where the story gets crazy.<\/p>\n
As Goldberg writes, \u201cLast month, about a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the Marseille International Film Festival because Lapid, an Israeli who\u2019d taken public money, was going to be on the jury. Not wanting to cause trouble for the organizers, Lapid agreed to step down and instead hold a public master class on his films, but that too was canceled under pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Did you get that? A movie that accuses Israel of genocide was not enough for Israel-haters because the filmmaker is Israeli, the ultimate sin.<\/p>\n
In a sense, these guys are worse than Hamas. At least Hamas hides behind excuses like \u201coccupation\u201d to justify their massacres. These Palestinian filmmakers don\u2019t need any excuse to crush an artist. All they needed to know was that Lapid was Israeli. Never mind that he supports boycotting the country they hate.<\/p>\n
One would think Lapid would have learned something from such unconditional hostility, like, for example, that Israel is hated because it exists, not because of anything it does.<\/p>\n
Well, he did\u2014for a few minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor them, even if I would have been selling hot dogs in the festival, it wouldn\u2019t be legitimate,\u201d he mused to Goldberg.<\/p>\n
But that cold reality collided with a much warmer reality that has kept Lapid in the anti-Israel fold: he has received support from his comrades on the left, like the actress Natalie Portman. As Goldberg writes, \u201cthe letter signed by Portman calls Israel a criminal state but argues \u2014 I think irrefutably \u2014 that its dissident artists should be treated like those from any other rogue regime.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, they\u2019re supporting Lapid\u2019s freedom of expression because he\u2019s one of theirs and believes Israel is a rogue regime that commits genocide.<\/p>\n
One wonders whether Portman and her ilk would have shown such support for a right-wing filmmaker who exposed Hamas\u2019s violence toward its own people.<\/p>\n
In fact, while Lapid was promoting his anti-Israel film, a UN Human Rights Council report documented 249 cases of violence against Palestinians by Hamas-affiliated groups from August 2024 to January 2026, causing at least 108 deaths and 384 injuries through extrajudicial killings, kneecappings, and assaults with pipes and bricks.<\/p>\n
Imagine a film that would have captured that despicable reality\u2013 a terror group torturing and murdering its own people.<\/p>\n
Would Lapid have the courage to make such a film? Would Portman have the courage to defend it?<\/p>\n
Given that singling out Israel has become so easy and fashionable, why should they?<\/p>\n
Indeed because he bashes his own country, Lapid considers himself a rebel filmmaker. He\u2019s not. He\u2019s a conformist.<\/p>\n
A rebel filmmaker would have exposed the ugly truth about Hamas, something the legacy media can\u2019t bring itself to do.<\/p>\n
A rebel filmmaker would have realized that Palestinians are the coddled darlings of the left and would have punctured their smugness.<\/p>\n
A rebel filmmaker would have reminded the world that the biggest enemy of Gazans are their own terrorist leaders and the leftist ecosystem that sustains them.<\/p>\n
That rebel filmmaker would likely have talked to Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who recently wrote on X that \u201cHamas\u2019s twenty-year rule was sustained not only by its own brutality but by an ecosystem of NGOs, donor nations, Western European governments, journalists, academics, activists, lawyers, and even self-styled human-rights defenders who normalized Hamas, treated it as a legitimate authority, or tolerated its abuses because their hostility toward Israel outweighed their concern for Gazans.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of course, given that it\u2019d go after Hamas rather than Israel, such a film (that might be called \u201cNo\u201d) would never get the attention of a Michelle Goldberg or Natalie Portman.<\/p>\n
You see, these champions of free expression are not interested in a film about \u201cmoral collapse\u201d if it shows that it\u2019s their side that is morally collapsing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While Hamas terrorists were hiding behind their own people during Israel\u2019s war in response to the Hamas massacre…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491736,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-491735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}