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 Thursday 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.”
