Israeli outrage about the film was predictable. More surprising is that some leftists in Europe are boycotting Lapid and his work in the name of Palestinian solidarity. Last month, about a dozen pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to pull out of the Marseille International Film Festival because Lapid, an Israeli who’d 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. “For them, even if I would have been selling hot dogs in the festival, it wouldn’t be legitimate,” he told me.
This wasn’t the first time that Lapid has felt stung by the European left. In Spain, he said, the movie screened under police protection because of bomb threats. An Italian distributor turned it down, he said, because she didn’t want to be accused of releasing movies from a genocidal state. And though “Yes” premiered at Cannes, the most prestigious film festival in the world, he thinks others have shied away from him and his work because they feared precisely the sort of dispute that broke out in Marseille.
Given that Lapid believes in boycotting Israel, the boycott of him has elicited a smug satisfaction in some quarters. After all, Israel’s partisans often claim that the country is hated not for what it does, but for its essential identity. Israel’s culture minister gloated that no matter how much Lapid tries to curry favor with the country’s enemies, they will always see him as nothing but “a Jew from Israel.”
“Yes” mocks Israelis who view themselves as eternal victims and insist that all their critics are antisemites. After being driven from the film festival in Marseille, Lapid felt like the butt of his own film’s joke. For about 10 minutes, he said, he thought that “maybe those people in Israel were right.”
But since then, he said, the film industry has rallied around him. Open letters supporting Lapid have been signed by leading figures in French cinema, as well as by the Palestinian intellectual Elias Sanbar and the actress Natalie Portman. 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. “Russian, Israeli and Iranian filmmakers should not be threatened with erasure to atone for crimes committed by governments they often fiercely oppose,” it says.
