I stumbled across it on Facebook — a sanctimonious post sandwiched between a cornbread recipe and an AI-generated video about erectile dysfunction. The headline read: “Filmmakers pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions.” It had been shared 627 times. My first instinct was a muttered, “Hell yes,” followed by a scroll through the hundreds of names in support. Most of them? Unfamiliar. But there was Mark Ruffalo and Tilda Swinton, lending the list some cinematic credibility.
I respected Ruffalo’s righteous fury over Gaza. Thankfully he was no Roger Waters — the former Pink Floyd frontman who dragged the BDS movement onto the dark side of the moon. Waters’ boycott was a blunt instrument, punishing Israeli laborers — including the very Palestinians who crossed the border to put food on their tables or carry their children to Israeli hospitals.
It was theater as protest, but Waters’ intentions were far from noble. I was there when he floated a giant pig balloon — a throwback to Pink Floyd’s “Animals” tour — this time defaced with a Star of David. That wasn’t political art; it was a grotesque caricature. In moments like that, Waters successfully turned BDS from a protest movement into a failed exercise in thinly veiled antisemitism, more about demonizing Jews than defending Palestinians.
But what of this boycott? It dawned on me that if the goal of a boycott is to put pressure on Israel’s criminal government, then aiming it at filmmakers is an odd way to do it. Cinema is the one arena where Israelis and Palestinians have collaborated for decades, telling stories that make enemies legible to each other and — at their best — modeling the very empathy this boycott claims to demand.
Silencing Israeli artists doesn’t strike at power. It strikes at the very people who dare to tell human stories in spite of power. These artists shout truth to power, raging against the machine of a criminally malignant Prime Minister — and you want to silence them? These are voices of courage, not policy! This boycott hands the government exactly what it wants: fewer stories, fewer careers and the smothering of bravery and artistic integrity.
I wrote about Israeli filmmaker Mike Burstyn’s movie, “Azimuth” (2017). It plays like a tense pas de deux — an Israeli and an Arab soldier, frozen in time, trapped together in an abandoned UN desert outpost, each convinced that the Six-Day War was still raging. What unfolds is not a clash of enemies but a fragile choreography of survival, suspicion and, ultimately, shared humanity. “Azimuth” is a reminder that cinema at its best dismantles the walls politics builds — showing that even in the rubble of war, co-existence isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.
Consider “Ajami” (2009), co-directed by Scandar Copti, an Arab-Israeli, and Yaron Shani, a straight-up Jewish-Israeli. Set in Jaffa’s mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood, the film braids five storylines across Israeli and Arab characters with a procedural, ground-level realism that refuses caricature. Its very authorship — an Arab-Jewish partnership nominated for the foreign-language Oscar — embodies the bridge the film builds on screen, showing how daily intimacy undercuts ideological absolutes.
Bridge-building also thrives in films that turn institutional secrecy into public soul-searching. Dror Moreh’s “The Gatekeepers” (2012) interviews every living former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Far from triumphalist, these men — lifelong insiders — argue on camera for political solutions, acknowledging the dead ends of force without empathy. A documentary that compels Israel to question itself is not propaganda; it’s democratic culture at work. It is art! Boycott that Mark Ruffalo, and you boycott accountability that focused on Israel’s decision to disengage from Gaza. Boycott that Tilda Swinton, and you muzzle brave artists who risk much for the truth.
Eran Riklis’s “Lemon Tree” (2008) threads the conflict through one Palestinian widow’s fight to save the grove that sustains her. The Israeli defense minister next door wants the trees cut down for security; she sues to stop him. The result is a humane parable that refuses to flatten either side, insisting that policy and property lines run through people’s lives. As The Guardian noted at the time, Riklis aims to keep everyone human, a tonal stance that is easy to dismiss as “cautious,” until you realize the courage it takes to hold that line when rhetoric is rewarded and nuance is costly. Boycott it!
If you want literal collaboration, it’s hard to get more direct than a film co-directed by a Palestinian and an Israeli. “5 Broken Cameras” (2011/2012) was shot by Emad Burnat in his West Bank village and shaped in partnership with Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi. It chronicles peaceful protest and the toll it takes on one family. You can disagree with its politics and still recognize that a Palestinian–Israeli co-authorship premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award is the opposite of cultural separation. That is what a boycott erases.
Yeah – let’s silence those brave filmmakers who dare to interrogate Israel from within and insist that the moral imagination of peace begins with responsibility. Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2008), an animated memoir-documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War and the Sabra and Shatila massacre, is precisely the kind of self-reckoning cultural boycotts say they want more of. It’s a film about memory and complicity that was banned in parts of the Arab world and yet crossed borders underground because people wanted to see it. They needed to see it. That’s how the truth works. That’s dialogue, not denial.
Finally, look at projects that put Palestinians at the center while refusing to “other” Israelis into faceless antagonists. “Bethlehem” (2013), co-written by Jewish-Israeli director Yuval Adler and Palestinian journalist Ali Waked, dramatizes the fraught bond between an Israeli handler and his teenage Palestinian informant so convincingly that Shin Bet reportedly screened it for agents. Its power lies in the uncomfortable middle ground — the place where policy meets psychology and where empathy complicates simple narratives of blame.
This is not a greatest-hits reel of “kumbaya cinema.” Many of these movies are angry, ambivalent or unresolved. That’s the point. Art that refuses to dehumanize the other side does more for peace than any hashtag or meme because it keeps open the psychic space where change becomes imaginable. Israeli filmmakers — often in partnership with Palestinian, Arab and European artists — have been cultivating that space for years. To penalize those artists now is to confuse the cure with the disease.
A cultural boycott that sweeps in filmmakers, actors and craftspeople — precisely the people who have courted risk to show Israelis and Palestinians as fully human — lands as moral theater that inadvertently endorses the very isolation it condemns. Israeli filmmakers often fiercely challenge their own government. A better word for this boycott? “Hypocrisy.”
If you want fewer walls, you don’t bulldoze the bridges.
What we should be asking of cinema is what these films already attempt: to stage encounters that plumb the depths of conflict, to let us see and be seen, and to keep insisting — patiently, stubbornly — that co-existence is not naïve, just unfinished.
That work is crucial. And it needs an audience, not a boycott.
