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With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories
(JTA) — Years ago, the Israeli filmmaker Orit Fouks Rotem took a class led by director Eran Kolirin, best known as the maker of “The Band’s Visit.” This month, movies by both filmmakers are getting theatrical rollouts in the United States.
On a recent Zoom call, Palestinian author Sayed Kashua joked: “Was that his class — how to use a Palestinian story?”
Kashua was smiling on Zoom as he said it — he is, after all, known for his often fatalistic sense of humor, particularly when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the author had given his blessing for Kolirin to make an adaptation of his novel “Let It Be Morning,” and said he loved the final result.
But like most jokes, this one had a kernel of truth: Israel’s two most recent Oscar submissions, hitting New York’s Quad Cinema within a week of each other, both — to varying degrees — tell Palestinian stories.
“Let It Be Morning” is a dark comedy about an Arab Israeli village that has suddenly and with no explanation been cordoned off from the rest of the country by the Israeli military. This event forces its Palestinian residents, including a protagonist trying to return to his comfortable middle-class life in Jerusalem, to reckon with how their dignity as citizens has been denied to them by the mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. At the Quad, the film is accompanied by a retrospective of Kolirin’s work, including “The Band’s Visit,” the basis for the Tony Award-winning musical; the retrospective is sponsored by the Israeli consulate in New York.
The all-female cast of “Cinema Sabaya,” a mix of Jewish and Arab actresses, in a film directed by Orit Fouks Rotem. (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
The following week will see the opening of Rotem’s film, “Cinema Sabaya.” It follows a group of eight women, some Jewish and some Arab and Palestinian, who bond with each other while taking a filmmaking class in a community center in the Israeli city of Hadera. Cast member Dana Ivgy, who plays the class’s instructor, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the filming experience “felt like how living in Israel should feel,” adding, “We have more women in the film than in the Israeli government.”
Stylistically, the two films couldn’t be more different. “Let It Be Morning” is a tightly plotted narrative with boldly realized characters; almost all of its dialogue is in Arabic. “Cinema Sabaya” is a loose, heavily improvisational piece that is almost entirely set in one room, and is mostly in Hebrew (although in one tense early scene, the characters debate whether to conduct their class in Hebrew or Arabic). One is a dry, Kafkaesque satire; the other is an intimate, naturalistic drama.
But together, the films provide a snapshot of the delicate dance Israeli filmmakers must perform in the current climate. On the one hand, these art-house directors are being feted on the international stage for their empathetic storytelling that incorporates or even centers entirely on Palestinian characters. But on the other, they’re being attacked by government officials for their perceived insufficient loyalty — and their films’ very status as “Israeli” is being questioned, too, sometimes by their own cast and crew.
“Everyone can call it what they want,” Rotem said of her film. “I’m an Israeli and it’s in Israel, but I have partners who call themselves Palestinians, and some of them call themselves Arabs, and each one defined herself. I think it’s really how it should be.”
“A film does not have an identity,” Kolirin insisted in an interview with JTA. “It is a citizen of the screen.”
Eran Kolirin accepted the award for Best Director for “Let It Be Morning” at the 2021 Ophir Awards in Tel Aviv on October 5, 2021. (Tomer Neuberg/ Flash90)
Kolirin isn’t a fan of the label “Israeli film” in this case, even though that is how “Let It Be Morning” was categorized at its 2021 Cannes Film Festival premiere; its own press notes also list Israel as the “country of production.” That Cannes screening took place shortly after Israel’s deadly conflict with Hamas that killed more than 250 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and around a dozen Israelis. The events turned Cannes into a political firestorm when the film’s Palestinian cast refused to attend the premiere.
“We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry into Cannes under the label of an ‘Israeli film’ when Israel continues to carry its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion, and apartheid against us — the Palestinian people,” the cast’s statement read in part.
“Each time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship,” the statement continues, calling on “international artistic and cultural institutions” to “amplify the voices of Palestinian artists and creatives.”
Kolirin himself supported the cast’s action. He knew they were grieving over the outbreak of violence in Gaza and didn’t want to put themselves in a situation where “some politician is going to wave a flag over their head or whatever.”
What’s more, he said, the status of “Let It Be Morning” as an “Israeli” film, despite the fact that around half the crew was Palestinian, was not his decision: “The film was not submitted to Cannes as an Israeli film,” he said. “You know, you fill in the form: ‘Which were the countries that gave money?’” In this case, the answer was Israel and France.
Most of the cast later did not attend the Ophir Awards ceremony, Israel’s equivalent to the Oscars voted on by its filmmaking academy, where “Morning” won the top prize (which automatically made it Israel’s Oscar submission for that year). In solidarity at the awards, Kolirin read aloud a statement from his lead actress, Juna Suleiman, decrying Israel’s “active efforts to erase Palestinian identity” and what she called “ethnic cleansing.”
Orit Fouks Rotem (Courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Cinema Sabaya” hasn’t played host to as much offscreen controversy, but its vision of Israeli multiculturalism is still inherently political. Rotem’s mother is a local government adviser on women’s issues in Hadera, and the film was inspired by her experience participating in a photography class designed to unite Jewish and Arab women. Rotem herself later led filmmaking classes in a similar vein as research for “Sabaya.”
In the film, Ivgy’s character, who is modeled on Rotem, instructs her class to film their home lives, while secretly hoping to make a movie from their efforts. When her desire to do so is revealed, the women in the class feel betrayed: They thought they were just making films for themselves, not for their stories to be told by someone else.
Similarly, Rotem said that working with Arab and Palestinian actresses made her “aware to the fact that I can’t really tell their story.” Her solution was to allow the performers — some of whom are well-known activists who had to think twice about appearing in an Israeli movie — to voice their own opinions, and to establish the necessary trust to allow them to be unscripted on camera.
She theorizes that “Cinema Sabaya” has been so well received in Israel because “it doesn’t say ‘occupation, occupation, occupation.’ It says ‘humanity,’ so people are less afraid.” (She also noted that, in real life, the women who attended her filmmaking classes bristled at her initial suggestion to make a documentary about them, telling her to fictionalize their stories instead — which she did.)
Lately the Israeli government has a tendency to view its filmmaking class as agitators unworthy of national support, particularly when they make films criticizing the occupation. Former Culture Minister Miri Regev often disparaged films she thought were bad for Israel, including celebrated international hits such as “Foxtrot” and “Synonyms.” Her current successor, Miki Zohar, has already threatened the makers of a new documentary about the West Bank city of Hebron, saying the movie smears the military and that the directors might have to return government funds.
In recent years, Israel’s culture ministry has pushed two new controversial proposals: a grant program earmarked for those who make films in settlements, which are considered illegal under international law; and a form pledging not to make films “offensive” to Israel or the military that filmmakers would be required to sign in order to apply for certain grants, which many directors have likened to a loyalty oath. For years, some of the country’s largest grantmakers have required applicants to sign a form promising to represent their projects as Israeli on the national stage.
There has also been an effort among some members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new right-wing government to end funding to public broadcaster Kan, which the country’s film industry views as another attack on its free expression.
“Kan has all this dialogue,” Ivgy said. “It has Jewish and religious and Arab and Palestinian, for kids and for grownups. And nothing is taboo there. I feel that it’s very dangerous to close that option down.”
Many Israeli filmmakers are fighting back. Hundreds, including Kolirin and Rotem, have refused to sign the ministry’s pledge, and many have also protested the settlement grant program. Nadav Lapid, one of the country’s most celebrated and outspoken directors, harshly critiqued government restrictions placed on his own work in the 2021 drama “Ahed’s Knee,” which went on to win a special prize at Cannes.
Kolirin said he had recently been on a call with several Israeli filmmakers looking to further organize against artistic restrictions, and that it had given him hope. “I had this feeling of some optimism, which I didn’t have for a long time,” he said. But he didn’t mince words when discussing Israel’s new governing coalition, which he likened to “a circus of mad dogs unleashed.”
Rotem said that the current government is “very, very bad and scary,” but that it has only strengthened her resolve to make political films.
“For me, it’s also political to show women in Israel in a deep way: I mean Arabs and Jews,” she said. “Because I don’t think there are enough films that are doing that.”
For Kashua, a veteran TV writer and opinion columnist, the question of identity in Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking is even more pronounced. After a long career of trying to write about the Palestinian experience in Hebrew as a way of reaching Israelis, he left Israel for the United States in 2014, becoming discouraged by an incident in which Jewish extremists burned a Palestinian teenager alive as revenge after Palestinian terrorists kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Now based in St. Louis, he has worked as a writer and story editor on Israeli series that center on both Palestinian and Jewish stories — including the global hit “Shtisel,” which focuses on haredi Orthodox Jews, and its upcoming spinoff, along with “Madrasa,” a young-adult series about a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school.
Israeli filmmakers choosing to center Palestinian stories can be its own radical political act, Kashua believes. He noted that the dialogue in “Morning” is almost entirely in Arabic, a language that Israel demoted from national language status in 2018 — doubly ironic as he had deliberately chosen to write his original novel in Hebrew.
“The idea that this film is ‘Israeli’ — it really contradicts the idea of Israel being a purely Jewish state,” Kashua said. He added that, while he had initially hoped a Palestinian director might have adapted his novel, he was ultimately happy with Kolirin’s approach.
“I truly love the movie, and it’s barely Orientalist,” he joked, echoing Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said’s famous book about how a Western lens on Eastern cultures can be reductive and harmful. “Which is a big achievement for an Israeli filmmaker.”
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The post With ‘Let It Be Morning’ and ‘Cinema Sabaya,’ Israeli filmmakers are winning awards for portraying Palestinian stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Loudest Anti-Israel Voices in US Congress Silent on Gaza Ceasefire, Hostage Deal
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are seen before a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2024. Photo: Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Many of Israel’s most vocal critics in the US Congress have been silent following Wednesday night’s announcement that Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage-release deal to end the war in Gaza.
As of Thursday afternoon, outspoken anti-Israel lawmakers such as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), among others, have not released public statements regarding the peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The silence is striking as each of these lawmakers has, for at least the past several months, consistently called for a ceasefire while accusing Israel of war crimes or “genocide” in Gaza.
Under the deal reached on Wednesday, Hamas will release the remaining Israeli hostages it kidnapped on Oct. 7, 2023, while Israel will withdraw troops in Gaza to a fixed line and free about 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange. The agreement, brokered through indirect talks in Egypt with the help of Qatar, Turkey, and other mediators, is slated to take effect once Israel’s government formally ratifies it on Thursday night.
Observers have noted that many questions remain over Gaza’s future and reconstruction, especially regarding the plan’s call for Hamas to disarm and for Gaza to be totally demilitarized. However, leaders around the world cheered the development as a step toward peace.
Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Pressley, and Sanders have all erroneously accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza, claiming that the Jewish state has indiscriminately targeted civilian population centers and inflicted a famine in the beleaguered enclave. Van Hollen has also accused Israel of purposefully withholding food from Palestinian civilians and lying about well-documented claims that Hamas has stolen humanitarian aid. Sanders and Van Hollen have both spearheaded legislation to block offensive weapons transfers from the US to Israel.
However, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the most strident opponents of Israel in Congress, acknowledged the ceasefire deal while simultaneously accusing Israel of “genocide” and calling for Israeli officials to be punished for “war crimes.”
“For the sake of humanity, let’s hope this will be a lasting and permanent ceasefire. While this is a hopeful step, we must demand accountability for every war crime committed during this genocide and continue to call for an end to the occupation,” Omar said in a statement.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the lone congressional Republican to accuse Israel of committing a genocide, also welcomed the news of the ceasefire deal.
“Thank you, President Trump!!” Greene wrote in response to the announcement.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties in Gaza, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel has been Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom Signs K-12 Antisemitism Bill on Oct. 7 Anniversary
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks on Aug. 14, 2025. Photo: Mike Blake via Reuters Connect
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a bill into law which requires the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools at a time of rising anti-Jewish hatred across the US.
“California is taking action to confront hate in all its forms,” Newsom said in a statement issued on Tuesday, the second anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Oct. 7 atrocities perpetrated by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists unleashed a global surge in antisemitic incidents, which have reached record levels in the US and other Western countries over the last two years.
“At a time when antisemitism and bigotry are rising nationwide and globally, these laws make clear: our schools must be places of learning, not hate,” Newsom added in his statement.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the bill confronted Newsom, a Democrat rumored to be interested in running for US president in 2028, with a politically fraught decision, as it aims to limit the extent to which the state’s ideologically charged ethnic studies curricula may plant anti-Zionist viewpoints into the minds of the 5.8 million students educated in its public schools.
With Newsom’s signature, state officials may now proceed with establishing an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, setting parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially barring antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom. However, the measure has been lambasted by anti-Israel partisans and key constituents of the Democratic Party.
Pro-Hamas groups, left-wing nonprofits, and teachers unions have emerged to denounce the legislation, which passed the California legislature last month, even as it declined codification of the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism — the exclusion of which constitutes a significant compromise for Jewish and pro-Israel activists. Additionally, it remains to be seen what the law’s ultimate effect on ethnic studies will be.
Amid these challenges and uncertainties, the bill’s supporters praised the news of Gavin’s signing as an indication of progress in the fight against antisemitism.
“StandWithUs is grateful that Gavin Newsom has signed AB 715, a bill to fight antisemitism in K-12 schools. We are proud to be part of the largest coalition of Jewish organizations ever to support a California state bill,” said StandWithUs, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group. “Much remains to be done if California is going to earn back the trust of Jewish students, families, and educators. Going forward, we will continue to use all tools at our disposal to fight antisemitism in K-12 public schools across the state.”
Maya Bronicki, education director of the Bay Area Jewish Coalition, added, “With the signing of this bill, California’s leaders publicly recognize that antisemitism is a grave problem in our schools and have taken an important step towards protecting Jewish students and other protected groups.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
In September 2023 some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
In other California news, a court recently cleared the way for students and their parents to sue school districts across the state over the adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic components which discredit Jewish self-determination in Israel while promoting harmful tropes.
The Algemeiner was notified of the decision by The Deborah Project, a legal nonprofit that filed the lawsuit which precipitated the ruling. In that case, the organization sued the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) over its using ethnic studies materials, which fostered aggressively discriminatory beliefs about Israel and the Jewish community, without offering parents the chance to review and approve of its contents.
The Superior Court of California, Alameda County ruled that the materials could be discriminatory and illegal to the extent that they violate civil rights laws, establishing what The Deborah Project described as a “landmark” precedent for future litigation.
“Jewish parents have been waging battle against antisemitic ‘instructional materials’ and instructors that expose their children to harm and hated,” Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said in a statement. “This is the first judicial decision addressing claims that the use of biased material violates the law. Now it’s clear: indoctrinating kids that Jews are evil oppressors discriminates against Jews; districts can be held to account and forced to stop doing it.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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EU, UN Push for Gaza Deal to Lead to Two-State Solution as France Irks Israel With ‘Day After’ Meeting
French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot at the Ministerial meeting on the implementation of the Middle East peace plan at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, France, Oct. 9, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
As world leaders hail Israel and Hamas’s agreement to a US-backed peace plan to end the war in Gaza, European leaders are pressing to make the ceasefire a steppingstone toward a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the newly signed deal, reaffirming France’s commitment to advancing peace, as Paris prepared to host a conference on Gaza’s postwar governance and reconstruction — a move Israeli leaders have denounced as the latest anti-Israel initiative for excluding them from the talks.
“Great hope for the hostages and their families, for the Palestinians in Gaza, and for the entire region,” Macron wrote in a post on X.
“This agreement must mark the end of the war and the beginning of a political solution based on the two-state solution,” the French leader said.
Just hours after the two sides agreed to a ceasefire deal, France brought together top diplomats from several Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates — alongside European counterparts from Italy, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, to discuss plans for Gaza’s postwar security, governance, and reconstruction.
Turkey’s foreign minister and European Union representatives also took part in the discussions.
The meeting “will work to gather concrete contributions to ensure that the second phase of [US President Donald Trump’s] plan is implemented, specifying the details of a collective commitment based on the main parameters for the ‘day after,’” the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement before the gathering.
After the meeting, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told reporters that participants “discussed the major fields to which we intend to contribute: security, governance, reconstruction, and humanitarian aid.”
Without elaborating, he said countries had identified contributions that they were willing to handle in post-conflict Gaza.
“We will share them with the United States so that they can integrate them,” Barrot said.
However, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar criticized France’s new initiative, saying it unfolded behind Israel’s back and describing it as “unnecessary and harmful” to the peace process.
“The invitation of openly hostile governments toward Israel — such as the Sánchez government — to discuss Israel’s affairs is especially outrageous,” Saar wrote in a post on X, referring to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Just one day earlier, Spanish lawmakers had approved the enshrinement in law of an arms embargo on Israel that Sánchez introduced to end what he called “the genocide in Gaza.”
“The participants may of course discuss whatever topics they wish — but there will be no arrangements in Gaza formulated without Israel’s consent,” the top Israeli diplomat said.
“Today we make it clear: nothing about Israel without Israel!” Saar continued. “Israel will not agree to the internationalization of the conflict!”
While the US works with several Middle Eastern countries to advance peace in the region, Israeli and Jewish leaders have criticized Europe and the UN for pursuing initiatives that they say accomplish little in practice.
In an interview with Euronews on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized EU member states for their recent moves to recognize a Palestinian state, calling the bloc “absent” from peace-making efforts and “irrelevant.”
Macron on Thursday warned that expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank would pose an “existential threat” to a Palestinian state and undermine efforts for peace in the Middle East.
Announced overnight by Trump on his Truth Social account, the newly signed peace deal will secure the release of all remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza, with Israel set to free nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, allow more humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave, and partially withdraw its forces.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed the deal, emphasizing the EU’s readiness to assist with recovery and reconstruction, while continuing to advocate for a two-state solution as part of the peace process.
“Today’s opportunity should be seized. It’s the opportunity to forge a credible political path toward lasting peace and security. A path firmly anchored in the two-state solution,” the top EU official wrote in a post on X.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres also welcomed the agreement, taking the opportunity to push for renewed efforts toward a lasting two-state solution.
“I urge all stakeholders to seize this momentous opportunity to establish a credible political path forward towards ending the occupation, recognizing the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, leading to a two-state solution to enable Israelis & Palestinians to live in peace & security,” Guterres posted on X.
Europe’s latest push for a two-state solution comes after several Western countries — including France, the UK, Australia, and Canada — recognized a Palestinian state at last month’s UN General Assembly, a move Israeli and US officials have criticized as rewarding terrorism.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas also joined European leaders in their calls for a two-state solution, expressing hope that the Gaza deal “will serve as a prelude to achieving a sustainable political solution that ends the Israeli occupation and leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state along the June 4, 1967, borders.”
However, Netanyahu warned on Sunday that the creation of a Palestinian state would be “the ultimate reward for Hamas after doing the greatest massacre against the Jews since the Holocaust.”
Israeli officials have noted that they in effect gave the Palestinians a state in Gaza in 2005, when Israel completely withdrew all military and civilian personnel from the enclave. Hamas, an internationally designated Islamist terror group, was subsequently elected to power in parliamentary elections and then violently seized total control of Gaza in 2007.