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Israeli drama film ‘Concerned Citizen’ tackles gentrification and race issues in Tel Aviv
(JTA) — The Israeli satirical drama film “Concerned Citizen” opens with the sacrosanct rituals of a bourgeois Tel Aviv life: a robot vacuum slides gracefully across the floor; lush house plants are watered; vegetables are blended into green juice. The score from the Bellini opera “Norma” plays in the background.
Then a car alarm rudely interrupts the utopia.
It only gets worse from here for Ben and Raz, a progressive Israeli gay couple (played by actors Shlomi Bertonov and Ariel Wolf, who are also a couple in real life) living in a pristine renovated apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood in south Tel Aviv. When Ben, a landscape architect, plants a tree on their block, his seemingly innocent desire to improve the neighborhood quickly goes awry, and a series of events forces him to face his own repressed prejudices and hypocrisy.
With the tension of a thriller, “Concerned Citizen,” the second feature film by Israeli writer-director Idan Haguel, tackles the universal themes of privilege and multicultural tension in gentrifying cities, using the hyper-specific lens of Neve Sha’anan — the south Tel Aviv neighborhood that’s home to many of the country’s foreign workers and asylum seekers, as well as the city’s notoriously rundown (but culturally vibrant) Central Bus Station.
After making its world premiere last year at the famed Berlin International Film Festival, the movie debuts in select U.S. theaters on Friday and will also be available to rent on Amazon and Apple TV+.
Ben and Raz’s apartment, a hot commodity in one of the world’s most expensive cities, is the axis around which much of the drama revolves. In one scene, a French-Jewish woman looks into buying the apartment sight unseen. Their neighbors include both the extremely vulnerable and the privileged: immigrants from Eritrea in one apartment, and a writer plotting his move to Berlin with his foreign wife in another.
Idan Haguel spoke with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the film and his personal connections to it. After losing his suitcase, Haguel chatted on his phone from a cafe in Berlin before heading to New York for the film’s American release.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
JTA: Tell me a little about yourself and how you became a filmmaker.
IH: I was born in the suburban city Rishon LeTsiyon and I always didn’t know what to do with my life. After the army I decided to go to film school. I wanted to be a scriptwriter, to do comedies. I discovered filmmaking, directing, and I gradually fell in love with that part. Then after school, I became a journalist because I couldn’t make a film — it was very difficult for me to get into that world. When my journalism career ended abruptly by the closing of the magazine, I decided that it’s now or never. I made my first feature film, that was a film called “Inertia.” That film is based on childhood memories of my grandparents. My grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon, Romania and Thessaloniki in Greece.
“Concerned Citizen” is partially about immigration. Why was it important to you to focus on the immigrant experience?
I was drawn into the irony, and, some may say, hypocrisy of living in a country that historically was formed by the narrative of [the Jew] being the immigrant of the world, not accepted into other countries, that in some ways still holding that grudge against countries that weren’t receptive to the immigrant Jew and pushed immigrants out. Of course, there is the horror story of Germany and the Holocaust and that’s the extreme end of mistreating “the other.” So living in a country formed by immigrants, [contrasted with] the way we behave to immigrants who are not part of the ethos of the Jewish immigrant narrative — I was drawn into that irony, although it wasn’t an intellectual process. It was more based on the experience of living in that neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, being marinated in the dilemmas and the daily complexity of living in Neve Sha’anan as a bourgeois, middle class person. After a few years I wanted to comment on that. I wanted to be brutally honest with myself and about myself. So my daily life and the life of my neighbors and friends became the material with which I wrote this fictional movie.
And you shot the film in your old apartment!
That was the mindfuck of the whole production, because I made the story close to me but I left a distance. I used my experience but I created these characters who are very close but very different. I shot the therapy scenes in my therapist’s clinic. I shot the building scenes in my building on my street. Everything became very, very close and it was really an “Alice in Wonderland” experience. Looking into a mirror and everything is morphing and making you look different and look differently at yourself and your life.
Can you talk about the south Tel Aviv neighborhood where the film is set, Neve Sha’anan?
It’s the outskirts of the center of Tel Aviv. It was always an immigrant neighborhood. But it changed over the years, it became working immigrants. In the 90s, there were the Romanian immigrants, and then it was Chinese immigrants who came to work in Israel. And over the last 15 years it has become immigrants from Africa, combined with older people who have lived there years and new people who are the more gentrifiers of the neighborhood, artists and gay people and those who are more economically stable. So now the neighborhood is comprised of sex workers, immigrants, junkies, dealers, and gay people. It’s a mix, but the prices have gone low, and people who didn’t have enough money to buy property in the city center started buying there. So the neighborhood has this tension of people who want to live a more bourgeois life, but they’re in the middle of the neighborhood with people who don’t have rights, who are immigrants, who don’t know if tomorrow the government will kick them out. People from all over the world. But it’s become a haven for investors and the neighborhood is in the middle of being gentrified and changed.
So it’s a very interesting setting to live in and to make a film in. It’s very dense. It’s one of the less homogenic and more diverse areas in Israel. Israel prides itself on the diversity of Jewish people coming from Arab countries, coming from Europe. But they’re all Jewish and they share a common mentality and they’re all citizens of Israel. Neve Sha’anan is more diverse – it’s people from India, China, Eritrea, Sudan, the Ivory Coast. I feel it’s a missed opportunity by Israeli society that instead of accepting these people legally and into our society, they are trying to hold back and fight against it. It’s also very ironic that Israel is becoming a state that aspires to have a government like this. It’s mind-boggling. It’s like, we learned nothing from history and our own history. It’s like people don’t want to connect dots. They just want to see the cruel history that they experienced as the Jewish people and feel like it was something personal that happened to them, and like they cannot be the victimizers at all.
You’ve said that this film is very much about the idea of who’s the victim and who’s the victimizer.
When you raise yourself and your children on the narrative of being a victim and perpetuating historical trauma it’s very hard to notice other people’s traumas, and the fact that you are creating traumas for other people. Because you’re constantly in trauma and you’re always dealing with your own trauma and you’re always the victim and you’re the center of the world, but you are not the center of the world. I think it should change. But no one cares what I think! Sometimes I don’t care about what I think.
What was the casting process like?
The casting process was through meeting people and going to plays. [I turned to] the Holot theater company to cast the Eritrean community in Israel. It was cast mainly by meeting actors from the group, having conversations with them. Basically they wanted to participate in the film and I was very lucky about that. They’re a group that used to be based in Holot outside of a temporary incarceration open prison for immigrants who don’t have permits to stay in Israel. They put them in an open prison in the desert close to the Negev.
There’s an interesting scene between the French-Jewish woman (played by Flora Bloch) who is trying to move to Israel and Ben that I thought was a very revealing moment about the ways that Jewishness is expressed when Jews are a minority in the country versus when they are the majority in the country. The French woman is concerned by France’s antisemitism and wants to move to Israel, while Ben is tortured by the complexities of living as a privileged Jewish Israeli person. Can you say something about what that scene meant to you?
One of the things I’m proud about this film is that I feel like it deals with subjects which are not easy subjects to address. But I think we managed to create a balance between comedy and drama that I’m very proud of. I think it allows the film to be self explanatory. It can reveal its deep themes and make you think, in an entertaining way. Again, it’s about irony. It’s about hypocrisy. It’s about human nature. Knowing how to experience your own point of view, and being unable to be in another person’s point of view. It’s human nature, and it’s ever-fascinating to me.
And it also happens to me a lot of times with the fact that I can be in my own shoes and identify my own narrative so much but it’s hard for me to even experience a person who is experiencing the same thing as me but in a different language in different settings. But the resemblance is there so it’s very ironic. And I think that scene is about that.
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The Silence on Tucker Carlson’s Rhetoric Is Dangerous
Tucker Carlson speaks at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Oct. 21, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
For the better part of the last two months, I have sat across the table from senior officials at the US State Department and the Department of Justice. Our conversations centered on one issue: how to confront the alarming rise of antisemitism in the United States.
As Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, this work is central to my mission, and what I witnessed in Washington was both serious and heartening. The meetings reflected an administration that, at least within the departments I visited, is approaching antisemitism with an intensity and clarity of purpose that has not always been present in Washington.
At the State Department, for example, officials briefed me on their efforts to address antisemitism on university campuses and in other sectors of American society. For years, as a member of the Conference of Presidents, I visited that same building and left with the unmistakable impression that hostility toward the Jewish community still lingered in its halls. This time, the shift was unmistakable. The institution is changing, and that change matters.
It is precisely because of this progress that the current silence regarding Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric is so troubling.
In my view, Carlson has increasingly embraced themes that echo extremist or white-nationalist narratives, including giving a platform to figures such as Nick Fuentes, whose openly antisemitic positions are well documented.
Carlson has questioned the loyalty of Jews and Christian Zionists, and has — in my assessment — amplified sentiments that undermine the safety and standing of Jewish Americans. These are not merely policy disagreements; they are messages that, intentionally or not, legitimize bigotry.
What concerns me even more is the reluctance of political leaders, many of whom have long been genuine friends of the Jewish people, to call this out with the urgency it deserves.
Carlson’s influence on the political right is significant, and ignoring this trend risks allowing antisemitic tropes to migrate from the fringes into the conservative mainstream. If that happens, it will do profound damage not only to American Jews, but also to the conservative movement itself.
The fight against antisemitism cannot be selective. It cannot stop at the water’s edge of partisan convenience. If government officials are prepared to confront antisemitism within international institutions, academia, or foreign governments, they must also be willing to address it when it emerges from figures with large domestic audiences.
Elie Wiesel wrote, “We must always take sides.” My own family — grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles — were murdered in the Holocaust while too many remained silent. The consequences of silence are not abstract to me.
America is not Europe in the 1930s. But history teaches that hateful ideas take root when they go unchallenged. Carlson’s rhetoric, in my judgment, crosses a line that no one committed to the security of the Jewish people — or to the health of American democracy — can afford to ignore.
At a moment when the Federal government is showing a renewed seriousness in combating antisemitism, it is time for political leaders across the spectrum to speak with equal clarity. “Never again” must be more than a memory; it must be a principle we are prepared to defend in real time.
J. Philip Rosen is chairman of the World Jewish Congress, American section. He has been a Jewish activist for most of his life and is currently a Board member of Yeshiva University and JINSA, and is Vice-Chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
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What’s Really Behind Attacks on AIPAC?
AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr speaking at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C., March 2, 2020. Photo: AIPAC.
In the age of websites tracking “pro-Israel money” and politicians questioning American support for Israel, one claim has become a rallying cry: AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. It’s repeated so often that many accept it as fact. But repetition doesn’t make something true, and this claim reveals more about the accusers than about AIPAC.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires registration by those who act “at the order, request, or under the direction or control” of a foreign entity while engaging in political activity on that entity’s behalf.
Notice what’s required: not merely sympathy with a foreign country or advocating for policies that benefit it, but actually operating under its direction or control. This crucial distinction is what AIPAC’s critics ignore.
If the Department of Justice, which has dramatically ramped up FARA enforcement since 2016, believed AIPAC met the legal threshold, it would be an obvious target. Yet the DOJ hasn’t pursued AIPAC. Professional prosecutors evaluating the actual legal standards apparently don’t find the case compelling. But that hasn’t stopped the pundit class.
The claim that AIPAC operates under Israeli government control crumbles under scrutiny. DOJ guidance asks whether an organization acts independently or as “an agent or alter ego of the foreign principal.” The evidence overwhelmingly supports AIPAC’s independence.
When Isaiah “Si” Kenen founded what would become AIPAC in the 1950s, he described the idea that he was an Israeli “agent” as ludicrous, pointing to constant disagreements with Israeli diplomats. When the US planned to arm Iraq, Israeli diplomats wanted to immediately campaign for arms to Israel. Kenen disagreed, arguing that opposing arms to the entire region was the better strategy.
During the Oslo Accords, AIPAC publicly supported the agreement while internally opposing Israel’s request to send US aid directly to Yasser Arafat, insisting instead that it go to Palestinians more broadly with proper monitoring.
These aren’t the actions of an organization under foreign control. They’re the actions of an independent American organization whose members at times disagree with Israeli policy and advocate for their opinion of what’s best.
Organizations like the United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) operate nearly identically to AIPAC. Founded in 2002, USINPAC helped secure the landmark 2008 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Additionally, a 2009 Foreign Affairs article stated that “the India Lobby is the only lobby in Washington likely to acquire the strength of the Israel lobby.”
Yet when you search for “FARA” and “USINPAC” together, you find essentially nothing. Meanwhile, countless articles, entire books, and dedicated websites exist solely to “expose” AIPAC and its alleged foreign agent status.
This isn’t about legal analysis. It’s about targeting one ethnic lobby while giving identical organizations a pass. Irish, Armenian, and Cuban lobbies have all shaped American foreign policy throughout our history. AIPACis targeted because its members are Jews.
What if AIPAC did register under FARA? According to FARA specialist Matthew Sanderson, it would mean filling out a few extra documents with essentially no practical effect.
AIPAC already operates under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, requiring extensive public disclosure: lobbying expenditures, specific issues and officials lobbied, lobbyist identities, funding sources, and political contributions.
Since AIPAC doesn’t accept money from foreign entities, the FARA funding disclosure forms would be blank. Since it doesn’t lobby under foreign control, it wouldn’t need to file interpersonal disclosure documents detailing who it contacted or announce itself as a foreign agent during lobbying calls — requirements that only apply when an organization operates as an extension of a foreign principal. The only potential requirement might be labeling some materials as coming from a “foreign agent,” but in today’s climate, where everyone already has opinions about AIPAC, this would have a negligible impact.
If FARA registration would change nothing practically, why does this matter?
First, truth matters. The claim is false. When bad-faith actors misrepresent AIPAC’s history as sinister subterfuge, often with antisemitic overtones reminiscent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, capitulation legitimizes their framing.
Second, selective scrutiny reveals troubling double standards. The vast chasm between scrutiny of AIPAC versus identical organizations, suggests factors beyond legal analysis drive this narrative. When the campaign focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish State’s supporters while ignoring others, we should call it what it is.
Third, FARA’s ambiguity makes it a potential weapon. A statute so broad it could require registration for “routine business activities” becomes dangerous when applied selectively based on political preferences. This sets a disturbing precedent.
AIPAC is an American organization, funded by Americans, run by Americans, advocating for what its American members believe serves American interests. That some disagree doesn’t make it a foreign agent. It makes it a lobby, like hundreds of others in Washington.
The next time someone claims AIPAC should register as a foreign agent, ask: Where’s the evidence of foreign control? Why don’t they make the same claim about similar organizations? And why aren’t DOJ prosecutors, who’ve ramped up FARA enforcement dramatically, pursuing this supposedly obvious case?
The answers reveal this isn’t about law. It’s about politics — and prejudice.
Alexander Mermelstein, a recent USC graduate with a Master’s degree in Public Policy and Data Science, is an aspiring policy researcher with a focus on Middle East affairs and combating antisemitism.
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Arab Israelis Enjoy the Rights of Democracy — The Same Can’t Be Said for Citizens of Other Middle East Countries
A general view shows the plenum at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
On October 13, the Israeli Knesset met to mark a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel that included the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke first, for 30 minutes. Yair Lapid, representing the Opposition, spoke next, for 15 minutes. Then, President Donald Trump delivered a largely extemporaneous speech lasting a little more than an hour.
A few minutes into President Trump’s address, there was a disturbance, a common feature of Knesset sessions. Two elected members of the left-wing party, Hadash — Ofer Cassif, an Israeli Jew, and Ayman Odeh, an Israeli Arab — held up signs saying “Recognize Palestine.” After a few moments of shouting, the two were removed from the Knesset chamber. (Note: They were not arrested. They continue to represent their constituency in the Knesset.)
This kind of democracy and dissent would not be possible anywhere else in the Middle East or North Africa. None of the 22 states in the Arab League operate on the basis of free and open elections, and respect for civil liberties and fundamental political freedoms.
Indeed, several of these countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and Libya) fit the category of “failed states” — unable to carry out fundamental functions, such as controlling borders.
Since 2006, the influential British news and business magazine, The Economist, has published a comprehensive annual Democracy Index, which analyzes in detail the democratic processes in 167 countries around the world. Based on 60 numeric scores, the rankings include five categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
Countries are divided into one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid (partially democratic) regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
The Democracy Index for 2024 lists 25 full democracies, 46 flawed democracies (including countries such as Israel, the US, France, and Italy), and 96 hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The Index gives an authoritarian score for Palestine.
A color-coded map of the world accompanies the Index report. Full and flawed democracies are dark blue and pale blue, respectively, while hybrid governments are yellow. Authoritarian countries appear light to dark brown.
Israel is not even visible from a quick glance at the map. To see Israel, one must either adjust the magnification of the computer image or use the “pinch to zoom” feature available with many devices. Only then does a little island of blue become visible amid a vast sea of brown.
In fact, the only Arab people in the Middle East or North Africa who have experienced what it is like to live in a democracy are the more than two million Arab citizens of Israel.
In a blog he wrote in The Times of Israel, Bassem Eid, a Palestinian activist and writer who monitors human rights abuses by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, writes that, as in other western democracies, Israeli Arabs “can vote in elections, own businesses, work, speak, and worship freely, wherever in Israel they call home.” To Eid, Israel is the best place to be an Arab.
Meanwhile, Ayman Odeh, leader of the Hadash party (yes, one of the Knesset members ejected during the Trump visit) has been working to establish a unified slate of Arab parties (a Joint List) in preparation for the next Israeli election. A unified party would energize Arab voters, increase the community’s political influence, and possibly lead to Arab participation in the government, as was the case during the short-lived Bennett-Lapid coalition that preceded the current Israeli government.
The Arab people of Israel know that Israel is a thriving, diverse, and democratic country, and that it includes a thriving Arab population. Or, as Bassem Eid puts it, Arabs have been fortunate to call Israel home.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.