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Controversial Israeli film ‘The Sea’ makes its North American premiere in NYC
Israeli film director Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s latest film, “The Sea,” is about a young Palestinian boy from the West Bank who is denied a permit to visit Tel Aviv with his classmates. Longing to see the Mediterranean, he courts danger as he sets out to make the journey on his own.
The Arabic-language drama was released in Israel in July; in September, it won five Ophir Awards — Israel’s version of the Oscars — including for best picture, which means “The Sea” is also Israel’s submission into the Academy Awards for best international feature film.
And now, “The Sea” is making its North American premiere on Thursday at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan (334 Amsterdam Ave.). The screening — which also includes a reception and a Q+A with director Carmeli-Pollak and Palestinian producer Baher Agbaria — kicks off this year’s Other Israel Film Festival, an annual event that spotlights untold stories from Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Filmed in the summer of 2023, “The Sea” is partially inspired by true events: Carmeli-Pollak visited the West Bank for the first time in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada.
“Seeing what’s going on really influenced me,” Carmeli-Pollak, 57, said, describing how a border wall between the West Bank and Israel, begun in 2002, restricted Palestinian travel into Israel. “And I started to go more and more and more and became an activist.”
Carmeli-Pollak became an activist alongside groups like Anarchists Against the Wall, a group advocating against the concrete security wall between Israel and the West Bank. His experiences informed the 2006 documentary, “Bilin, My Love,” about a Palestinian village set for demolition by the Israeli government.
No one particular moment or event inspired “The Sea,” Carmeli-Pollak said. Rather, the director said it was the West Bank residents’ longing for the sea — something Carmeli-Pollak said he frequently heard — as well as their desperate need for employment, that informed the film. ”it was a long period that I met people, and they spoke about this,” he said.
Since its release, “The Sea” has been ensnared in political crosshairs: It was produced with financial support from the Israel Film Fund, a public fund that was described as an institution “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people” by a growing boycott against the Israeli film industry signed by more than 1,200 prominent Hollywood stars.
On the other end of the political spectrum, Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar, a Likud Party member, has called for the defunding of the Israeli Academy of Film and Television, which runs the Ophir Awards. Zohar, who has only seen “the most important parts of the movie.” claims the film portrays the Israeli military in a negative light.
“It is probably the hottest Israeli film of the year,” Isaac Zablocki, the executive director of the Other Israel Film Festival and the JCC’s senior director of film programs, said of the festival’s sold-out screening of “The Sea.”
“Since all this noise with the boycott of Israeli films — and on the other side, the Israeli government declaring its lack of support for this film specifically, and Israeli cinema in general — it’s felt even more important for us to highlight this film as much as possible and really give it as much support,” Zablocki added. “I think this movie, right now, is exactly what Israel needs.”
The New York Jewish Week spoke with Carmeli-Pollak just days before the film’s North American premiere. Keep scrolling for our conversation.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
Was the idea always to tell this story from a Palestinian perspective?
The idea from the very beginning was to tell the story from the point of view of a Palestinian child. That perspective allows us to strip away the almost automatic “political” baggage that comes with an adult’s point of view.
A child’s perspective is free from all that complexity. In that sense, for me the film is not necessarily just a Palestinian story, but rather a story about two societies living on opposite sides of the wall — the Palestinian and the Israeli.
We have an opportunity to see Israeli society through the eyes of this child, and perhaps to look again at things that are usually invisible or taken for granted.
How did you find the cast and crew?
The cast is a mix of professional actors and non-actors. Naturally, the boy, Muhammad Gazawi, was not a professional actor. I met him when I visited a Thai boxing club in a Palestinian city inside Israel called Qalansawe. I met there a group of tough young athletes, and he quickly struck me as a boy with remarkable acting abilities.
You said the rough cut of the film was already completed by Oct. 7, 2023. Can you tell me more about what the cross-cultural collaboration looked like at the time?
We shot the film in the summer of 2023. Apart from the fact that the producer is Palestinian, the crew was mixed — Palestinians and Israelis.
On set you could hear both Hebrew and Arabic blending together naturally. The crew made the same journey shown in the film — moving between Palestinian villages, where we received a warm welcome and generous hospitality, and cities inside Israel. Even before Oct. 7, it wasn’t common to see a joint production like this, and it was a special experience for everyone involved. For many of the Israeli crew members, it was their first time being hosted in a Palestinian village. After the war broke out, Baher and I were deeply worried and heartbroken — first and foremost for the people we care about, but also for the film.
We thought no one would want to watch such a small story when horrific events were happening all around. And indeed, at first we faced difficulties in distributing the film. But as time went by, it seems that openness to a story like this is slowly returning, and we hope the film will reach as wide an audience as possible.
What was that partnership like in the wake of Oct. 7?
I was in contact all the time with Baher, the producer. He’s Palestinian, and we were both horrified by what’s going on — by the 7th of October, and with the reaction in Gaza, which was terrible. We were really, really worried. But we also felt like maybe nobody would want to watch the film now. I spoke to the actors, like Khalifa Natour [who plays Ribhi, Khaled’s father], who were devastated with what’s going on. But our communication was just the same — as friends, as people that are in the same circle. It’s not that now, suddenly, I’m from one side, and he is from the other side. It felt like we’re still connected.
At the end of the film, when Khaled and Ribhi are being arrested by the police, there’s a shot where the Israelis at the café kind of pause for a moment; they look shocked or horrified, and then they go back to their coffee. What were you trying to say about Israeli society and their attitudes toward police or military violence against Palestinians?
I tried to make this film not just to speak about Israeli society, but about human beings, to make it more universal in a way. I was really, really inspired by “Bicycle Thieves,” the Italian film by Vittorio De Sica from the 1940s. It tells the story of a father and son, also. And I was so emotional by this film, 80 years after it was made. I felt that I wanted to make a film that people can watch years from now, and still get the story.
So the idea was about human beings and the way that people are behaving, of course, in political arrangements, because everything is politics. I don’t think people in other countries would behave differently in this kind of system that exists here.
People just live their lives. They sit in a café, they see this scene, and then, like the viewers in the cinema, they go back to their lives after they sit.
In a way, I think generally, what I was trying to say is that people are not evil. They’re not looking to hurt other people, but because the system is very, very corrupt and discriminative and injustice unjustified, this is what caused all the problems.
The Israeli Culture Ministry, led by Miki Zohar, wants to defund the Ophir Awards, which had granted you many awards for this film. Is there any update on that?
He did establish his own competition and to offer a lot of money for each prize. So he is using public money for his agenda, which is not surprising. This is the way this populist fascist government is working. And besides this, I don’t know anything new.
I would prefer to live in a place where the minister of culture supports films and supports the freedom of speech and doesn’t try to block it. But when the situation is like this, at least, he saved me from — now that the film goes out to the world — having to explain that I’m not representing this government.
What do you hope that New York viewers — especially Jewish viewers who may be unfamiliar with Palestinian life in the West Bank, or their interactions with Israelis — will get out of your film?
I don’t know if I’m telling something new to people, but maybe so. I guess liberals know there is discrimination against people that live under the occupation. But it’s not an article; it’s different when you read about it and when you experience it more in a more emotional way.
So maybe the idea is that the film can give you another aspect of this — to actually have some feelings about the story of this kid, and to maybe open these channels of understanding, and know that what’s going on here can’t go on like it used to be before. We can’t go back to the same point as before the war. There should be a deep change, and we need the support from the outside for this change. That’s for sure. There are a lot of forces inside Israel and forces in the United States that are against these kinds of changes.
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Bombing Can Weaken Iranian Regime, but Only Popular Uprising Can Overthrow It, Dissidents Say
Members of the police stand guard on a street, with a large billboard featuring Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the background, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani
A senior official from a Paris-based Iranian opposition group said on Thursday that the US-Israeli war on Iran would not topple the clerical leadership, arguing that only a popular uprising backed by internal resistance could do so.
Almost two weeks of bombing have killed around 2,000 people in Iran including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and damaged much of its military and security apparatus.
Iran has responded in kind, throwing global energy markets and transport into chaos and spreading the conflict across the Middle East, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has tightened its grip on power and threatened to crush any unrest.
“The 12-day war in June, and the current war, now in its 12th day, proved that bombings cannot overthrow the regime,” Mohammad Mohaddesin, head of foreign policy at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told a news conference.
“Even if you have 50,000 armed soldiers on the ground, you need the support of Iranian people. You need a popular uprising. The combination of this 50,000 or 20,000 or any other number with a popular uprising, then you have this power to overthrow the regime.”
Mohaddesin said he did not consider a deployment of US ground troops realistic.
The NCRI, also known by its Farsi name Mujahideen-e-Khalq, was listed as a terrorist organization by the United States until 2012.
It is banned in Iran, and it is unclear how much support it has there. However, along with its bitter rival, the monarchists backing Reza Pahlavi, exiled son of the toppled shah, it is one of the few opposition groups able to rally supporters.
Mohaddesin acknowledged that his group alone could not bring down the system. But he said mass protests, like those that raged in January until they were bloodily quashed, would resume once bombing stopped, and could eventually shift the balance.
“I cannot say how many months or a year, but … this is the track of overthrowing the regime,” he said.
Israeli officials have said that one of their objectives is to weaken the security apparatus so that Iran‘s people can take control of their own destiny.
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Trump Says It Is Not Appropriate for Iran to Be in Soccer World Cup
Soccer Football – World Cup – Asian Qualifiers – Group A – Iran v North Korea – Azadi Stadium, Tehran, Iran – June 10, 2025, Iran players line up before the match. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump said on Thursday the Iranian men’s national soccer team was welcome to participate in the 2026 World Cup but that he believed it was not appropriate that they be there “for their own life and safety.”
“The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Iran‘s sports minister said on Wednesday that it was not possible for his nation’s athletes to participate after the US launched airstrikes alongside Israel against Tehran. The attacks triggered a region-wide conflict that has shown no signs of abating.
The 48-team World Cup will be held in the US, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, with Iran scheduled for matches in Los Angeles and Seattle.
An official withdrawal by Iran from the showpiece event, which has not yet happened, would be a first in the modern era and would leave soccer‘s global governing body FIFA with the urgent task of finding a replacement team.
Iran was the only nation missing from a FIFA planning summit for World Cup participants held last week in Atlanta.
FIFA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Late last year it awarded Trump — who has campaigned aggressively for the Nobel Peace Prize — its own inaugural peace prize.
Earlier this week, Australia granted humanitarian visas to five Iranian women soccer players after they sought asylum, fearing persecution on their return home for their refusal to sing the national anthem at an Asia Cup match.
Trump had urged Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to grant asylum to members of the Iranian women’s team, saying the US would if Australia did not.
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The New ‘Tokyo Roses’: How Social Media Influencers Amplify Authoritarian Propaganda
People stand near a destroyed vehicle as smoke rises after a reported strike on Shahran fuel tanks, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 8, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
At 04:38 on the morning of March 11, 2026, the alert blasted onto my phone: “Red Alert – Tel Aviv.”
Like millions of Israelis during the current war with Iran, my family and I moved quickly into our mamad — the reinforced safe room built into Israeli homes constructed after 1993 — grateful for the air-defense systems intercepting incoming missiles overhead.
Fifteen minutes later, the sirens stopped. I climbed back into bed.
That has become the rhythm of daily life here. Restaurants reopened. Businesses operate. Children move between Zoom classes and the occasional dash to a shelter when sirens sound.
But if you relied solely on social media — particularly X or TikTok — you might believe Tel Aviv had already been reduced to rubble.
Videos circulate claiming the city is burning and the electric grid destroyed. Posts declare Israel is collapsing under missile fire. Influencers insist the truth is being “censored.”
The problem is that this supposed “evidence” turns out to be fabricated, misrepresented, or recycled footage — often not even from Israel.
In other words: propaganda.
The tactic itself is not new.
During World War II, Allied soldiers in the Pacific heard English-language propaganda broadcasts from personalities collectively known as “Tokyo Rose.” Their purpose was to undermine morale, spread disinformation, and convince American troops their cause was hopeless.
The technology has changed, but the tactic hasn’t.
Today, the propaganda battlefield is on social media, and the new “Tokyo Roses” are often Western influencers with enormous audiences.
Consider the viral claims that Iran’s missile attacks have “devastated” Israel.
Several widely shared posts attempted to support this narrative with dramatic footage supposedly showing Iranian strikes on Israeli cities.
Basic fact-checking revealed something else: AI-generated fabrications or recycled clips from earlier events.
Repackaging old footage to fabricate a new narrative is one of the oldest tricks in propaganda. What has changed is the speed. In the social media age, recycled footage and fabricated videos spread globally in minutes, while corrections rarely travel as far as the original lie.
A similar pattern appeared recently when Putin- and Houthi-supporting influencer Jackson Hinkle circulated a video claiming to show massive crowds in Iran mourning the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Fact-checkers later identified the footage as coming from the 2020 funeral of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qasem Soleimani. By the time the clarification appeared, the misleading version had already spread widely across social media.
Other influencers have gone further by promoting narratives that closely mirror those pushed by authoritarian regimes.
Social media personality Myron Gaines recently argued that Iran “poses no real threat to the United States” and that the war should end because it is “Israel’s problem, not ours.”
But Iran’s regime has spent decades building precisely the opposite reality. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has treated the United States as a principal enemy. Iranian leaders regularly chant “Death to America,” and Iran and its proxies have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American service members, including attacks in Beirut, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Tehran has built a network of proxy militias across the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
These groups have launched thousands of rockets, drones, and missiles against America and its allies while Iran continues expanding its ballistic-missile arsenal and advancing toward nuclear-weapons capability.
This buildup also fits into the broader ambitions of the China-Russia-Iran axis, which seeks to weaken American global influence.
To describe such a regime as posing “no real threat” requires ignoring one of the most documented security challenges in modern geopolitics.
Unless one believes that the world — and especially the United States — would be freer or safer with China, Russia, and Iran ascendant, the stakes should be obvious.
In other cases, the rhetoric moves from distortion into outright antisemitic conspiracy.
Social media personality Dan Bilzerian has posted messages accusing Western leaders and the Muslim governments cooperating with Israel of “selling out” their people. His posts frequently invoke conspiratorial claims about hidden Jewish forces nefariously controlling Western governments.
These narratives mirror themes long promoted by state-controlled media in Iran and Russia.
Whether intentional or not, the effect is the same: Western audiences are fed narratives that erode trust in democratic institutions while portraying authoritarian regimes as misunderstood and even noble victims.
In some cases, the messaging goes further still.
Recent posts from Candace Owens, widely shared across social media, have encouraged Americans not to serve in the US military and urged those currently serving to quit, while framing the conflict through very dark and conspiratorial accusations about hidden motives to serve supposedly prurient and venal Jewish interests.
Messages designed to discourage military service during wartime have long been tools of psychological warfare. In the 1940s such efforts were broadcast over enemy radio. Today they appear in US based social media feeds.
None of this occurs in a vacuum.
For years the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has treated information warfare as a central element of its strategy. Iranian state media and proxy networks attempt to shape global narratives by portraying the Islamic Republic as a victim while depicting Israel and the United States as degenerate and corrupt aggressors.
These campaigns rely on familiar tactics: recycled footage, conspiracy narratives, and emotionally charged messaging designed to spread rapidly online. What makes the modern environment different is that these narratives no longer need to originate inside Iran to reach Western audiences. Influencers with large followings amplify them instantly.
The propaganda circulating online often revives and relies on something far older than modern geopolitics: classic antisemitic tropes.
Many viral posts go far beyond criticism of US or Israeli policy. They invoke conspiracies about Jewish control of governments, repeat blood-libel accusations, and frame global events as the result of a shrouded Jewish plot.
Versions of these accusations have circulated for centuries. What is striking today is how seamlessly these myths have merged with contemporary geopolitical propaganda.
Authoritarian regimes hostile to Israel have long understood that antisemitic narratives can serve as powerful mobilizing tools. Portraying Israel as the center of a global conspiracy transforms a regional conflict into an ideological crusade.
When influencers with large Western audiences repeat these themes, they normalize ideas that have historically fueled violence against Jews.
The modern “Tokyo Rose” no longer sits behind a microphone in an enemy capital. He or she posts on social media.
The voices spreading propaganda today are influencers with millions of Western followers — many living safely and prosperously inside the democratic societies whose resolve they undermine. Some claim they are offering contrarian commentary. Others are motivated by attention or the financial rewards of viral outrage.
But the effect is the same: narratives promoted by authoritarian regimes are amplified to vast audiences, often stripped of context, facts, or accountability.
Meanwhile here in Tel Aviv, life continues between missile alerts. Millions of Israelis move between normal routines and red-alert interruptions as air defenses intercept incoming missiles. But it bears little resemblance to the apocalyptic fantasies circulating online.
That contrast — between lived reality and digital narrative — reveals something important about modern information warfare.
Propaganda no longer requires governments to broadcast lies. It only requires enough people willing to repeat them — and in the age of social media, there are always volunteers.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.