Director Nadav Lapid on Israel after Gaza: It Was Our Duty to Scream
Israeli society failed to stop the killing in Gaza. And we as artists were complicit, write Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid.
![A still from "Yes," the new film from Nadav Lapid.](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/3da2a91d-1370-40e8-8394-6458b089f3e4_w960_r2.385834109972041_fpx49.85_fpy54.99.jpg "A still from "Yes," the new film from Nadav Lapid.")
A still from "Yes," the new film from Nadav Lapid.
Foto: Grandfilm
My film "Yes” was born from a painting: "Pillars of Society” by the German artist George Grosz. In this famous work of art stand a financier, a soldier and a priest. They are feasting, drinking, indulging. Their faces are bloated, bestial, grotesque. Their smiles nauseating.
The year is 1926. The place: Berlin.
These are the pillars of German society just before the rise of Nazism – physically, mentally and morally deformed. What are they celebrating? Their current power? The horrors that would erupt only a few years later, which Grosz already sensed back then?
Germany in 1926 had not yet fallen into the bottomless abyss. In theory, all futures were still open. But in Grosz’s painting, you can already see the terminal illness of a society whose pillars are these men. The figures, the title, the exaggerated style, all speak the same truth: The monstrous future is, like always, already glowing inside the present. Grosz, faithful to the artist’s calling, does not ask what will happen to Germany, but rather: What is Germany?
Foto: FELIPE TRUEBA/EPA-EFE/REX
Nadav Lapid was born in 1975 in Tel Aviv and is an Israeli screenwriter and film director. He studied philosophy and literature in Tel Aviv and Paris. After graduating from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, he turned to filmmaking. In 2019, he won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale for the autobiographical drama "Synonyms," in which he processed his traumatic service in the Israeli military as well as his experiences as a migrant in France. In 2021, he was awarded the Jury Prize in Cannes for his farce "Ahed's Knee," in which he addresses his experiences with state censorship. His new film "Yes" opens in Germany on November 13. In it, an opportunistic composer accepts a commission to write a new Israeli national anthem while the war in Gaza rages.
Answering the second question sometimes gives you the answer to the first.
The surreal tone of Grosz’s painting is a horrifying reflection of the collective German psyche of that time. The grotesque extracts the soul from the body. It is, in the deepest sense of the word, a documentation of truth, of reality. To extract it from the false normality of everyday life, Grosz relies on exaggeration, thus achieving a precise documentation. Surrealism which is, in fact, the deepest realism.
Israel’s True Disgrace
Grosz’s painting appears in "Yes” as a paraphrasing of Israeli society – even before the massacre of October 7th and the genocide in Gaza. The message is clear: Before you stands a sick society on the edge of a moral abyss.
The Israeli campaign of killing and ruin in Gaza was interrupted, after two years, by a bad joke of history – by Donald Trump – even as Israel sailed on toward yet another pinnacle of evil: the plan to erase Gaza City.
Gaza City in March 2025.
Foto: Jehad Alshrafi / AP / dpa
But Israelis themselves did not stop the killing, nor were they close to stopping it. No significant protest or struggle against the horror in Gaza was seen in Israel during those two years – and such a thing probably would not have occurred even after two more years.
There were fierce battles over the hostages. There were fierce battles over Netanyahu’s corruption.
But not over Gaza.
Israeli society did not fight to stop the horror in Gaza because it did not view it as horror. It was not shocked by it then, and it is not shocked now.
The true disgrace of Israel – even more than what the "bad Israelis” (the extreme right, settlers, etc.) did – lies in what the "good Israelis” did not do. The ordinary, decent people who did nothing as their state committed a massacre, and who now have no particular difficulty living with that lack of action.
Stripping Away the Last Inhibition
Is this surprising? Probably not. Blindness, indifference to the blood of others, racism, a sense of moral superiority, the eternal victimhood that frees the fighter’s soul from all restraint, the worship of the army: It was all there, long before.
The terrible cruelty of Hamas on October 7th stripped away the last inhibition, and turned the fantasy of waking up to a morning without Palestinians into a tangible possibility.
Did Israeli cinema tell the story of this society, this Israel? Would a faithful viewer of Israeli films over the past two decades have glimpsed the Israel capable of committing genocide? Would such a viewer have glimpsed the Israelis who would support such genocide? Or the ones who would so easily grow accustomed to it?
Many Israeli films have touched on politics, pointing at this problem or that injustice, often sharply, especially in documentary cinema. But few have asked not only what we did, but: What are we?
Focusing on a single problem acts as a sedative. Normal societies have political problems to be solved. But societies in existential crisis do not have a number of different problems, they have one enormous problem: their very image as reflected in the mirror they refuse to look into.
Disconnected from Reality
This Israeli society is absent from the screen. As if we, the filmmakers, were also blind to its existence. In this sense, Israeli cinema was truly Israeli. We shared fully in the Israeli blindness toward ourselves.
Our cinema, in recent years, has traditionally opted for a fairly standard form of realism. A cinema that sanctifies an ideal of proximity to reality while rejecting anything that seems like exaggeration.
An extreme society that is allergic to extremes.
An excessive society that hates excess.
A realistic cinema that is, in retrospect, disconnected from reality.
Our shots and our scenes, meant to reflect reality, were, in truth, a smoke screen concealing it. A cinema too sane for an insane country, and thus, perhaps, complicit in its madness.
In this sense, we failed. Perhaps similarly to other film industries that failed to foresee the catastrophe approaching them. (What American filmmaker ever foresaw Donald Trump – as a man or as myth? Perhaps only David Lynch.)
But each of us must reckon with our own failure.
Following Politics Into the Abyss
Even as our army crushed Gaza, we – artists, filmmakers – did almost nothing. The media, and especially television, chose of their own free will not to show Israelis the horror unfolding just an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv. And precisely for that reason, it was our responsibility to use our artistic tools to create an alternative to the propaganda, an alternative image and an alternative sound.
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A cinematic mobilization such as the one that occurred after October 7th, when Israel’s film industry rushed to document the atrocities against Israelis and cry out for the hostages. That did not happen for Gaza. Art in Israel did not challenge Israeli politics in any meaningful way, and plunged with it into the same abyss.
We, Israeli artists, chose to be more Israeli than artists.
Now, with the world having mercifully done Israel a favor and forced it to stop, the Israeli soul stands at a crossroads. It has drawn no conclusions, learned no lessons. It feels no remorse, no doubt. It remains arrogant, tender towards itself and merciless toward others. Its blindness is still both innocent and murderous, shared by "bad” and "good” Israelis alike. "It’s only fog,” many of us said while shooting scenes for "Yes” near Gaza, as thick plumes of smoke rose from the shattered buildings.
After failing to tell the story of Gaza – which, to a great extent, is the story of our own sick soul; after remaining silent when it was our duty to scream, will we now know, in retrospect, how to film it?
Will we be able to strip away the false serenity from our cinema and turn the screen into a mirror?
To become George Grosz?
"Yes" opens in German cinemas on November 13, distributed by Grandfilm. The Austrian release is on December 12.