While Hamas terrorists were hiding behind their own people during Israel’s war in response to the Hamas massacre of 1200 Israelis on Oct.7, 2023, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who had moved to France in 2021, felt his home country was in a state of “total moral collapse.”
So he made a film, “Yes,” to capture that collapse.
The movie, writes Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times, “tells 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.”
Here’s where the story gets really crazy.
Last month, a group of Palestinian filmmakers and their supporters threatened to pull out of the Marseille International Film Festival because Lapid was going to be on the jury. Lapid agreed to step down to avoid trouble, and offered instead to hold a public master class on his films. But that too was canceled under pressure.
Did you get that? A movie that accuses Israel of genocide was not enough for Israel-haters because the filmmaker is, heaven forbid, Israeli.
At least Hamas hides behind excuses like “occupation” to justify their massacres. These Palestinian filmmakers didn’t 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.
One would think Lapid would have learned something from being mugged by such unconditional hostility, like, for example, that Israel is hated not because of anything it does but because it exists.
Well, he got that—for a few minutes.
“For them, even if I would have been selling hot dogs in the festival, it wouldn’t be legitimate,” he mused to Goldberg.
But that cold reality collided with a cozier 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, “the letter signed by Portman calls Israel a criminal state but argues — I think irrefutably — that its dissident artists should be treated like those from any other rogue regime.”
In other words, they’re supporting Lapid’s freedom of expression because he’s one of theirs and believes Israel is a rogue regime that commits genocide.
One wonders whether Portman and her ilk would have shown such support for a right-wing filmmaker who exposed Hamas’s violence toward its own people.
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.
Imagine a film that would have captured that reality– a terror group torturing and murdering its own people.
Would Lapid have the courage to make such a film? Would Portman have the courage to defend it?
But why would they? At a time when going after Israel has become so fashionable, why risk losing your social status?
Because he bashes his own country, Lapid still sees himself as a rebel filmmaker. He’s not. Like other virtue-signaling leftists, he’s a conformist.
A rebel filmmaker would have exposed the ugly truth about Hamas, something the legacy media can’t bring itself to do.
A rebel filmmaker would have realized that Palestinians are the coddled darlings of the world and would have gladly punctured their Jew-hating, victimhood-drenched sense of entitlement.
A rebel filmmaker would have reminded the world that the biggest enemy of Gazans is not Israel but their own terrorist leaders and the leftist ecosystem that sustains them.
That rebel filmmaker would likely have talked to Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, who recently wrote on X that “Hamas’s 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.”
Of course, given that it’d go after Hamas rather than Israel, such a film (that might be called “No”) would never get the attention of a Michelle Goldberg or Natalie Portman.
You see, these champions of creative expression are not interested in a film about “moral collapse” if it shows that it is their side that is morally collapsing.
