Editor's Notes: With elections near, every Israeli must watch this pre-Oct. 7 documentary

“What did he say about us?”

That, the filmmaker Jonathan Jakubowicz told me, was the question Israelis kept asking him in 2023. He heard it everywhere he went with his camera, from the Right and from the Left, in almost the same words.

He would finish interviewing a protest leader and government supporters wanted to know what she had said about them.

My face went hot in the dark, and it stayed hot, because I could not pretend I was watching the past. Less than three months before the first election Israel has held since the massacre, we are talking about each other again, in exactly the voice this film preserves, as if the worst three years in our history taught us nothing.

Jakubowicz is not an obvious chronicler of Israel’s soul, which may be why he managed it.

He is a Venezuelan-born Jewish director who made his name in Hollywood, with Robert De Niro in Hands of Stone and Jesse Eisenberg in Resistance. He grew up watching Venezuela, once among the most stable democracies in Latin America, argue itself into ruin, neighbor against neighbor, until there was nothing left to divide.

In early 2023, his mother, who lives in Tel Aviv, began talking to him about Israeli politics in a tone he recognized from home. That frightened him enough to get on a plane.

For readers who watched 2023 from a distance, here is what he found.

That January, Israel’s government, the most right-wing and religious in its history, introduced a package of laws to curb the power of the Supreme Court. Supporters called it an overdue correction of an unelected judiciary that had seized power no voter gave it. Opponents called it the dismantling of Israeli democracy.

Both sides believed it completely. For nine months, the country convulsed: hundreds of thousands in the streets every Saturday night, air force reservists announcing they would no longer volunteer to fly, generals, rabbis, and Nobel laureates enlisting on either side, families going silent at Shabbat tables. And while we screamed at each other, Hamas rehearsed.

That accident of timing is what makes this film unlike anything else made about Israel since. Every conversation in it happens on the far side of a line nobody on screen can see.

Reservists explain, 77 days before the massacre, why a divided Israel is a vulnerable Israel. They are not prophets; they are people talking on a Tuesday. The film never tells you October 7 is coming. You bring it into the theater with you, and it turns every casual sentence into testimony.

The world has had this film for a year and a half: a Miami premiere in January 2025, an audience award, the Jewish festival circuit, American theaters, streaming. Israel got nothing, until Jaffa.

When I asked Jakubowicz why, he told me: “Israel wasn’t ready for it,” in his reasoning, with the hostages still in Gaza, then the war with Iran. This was the first time in three years it was a good moment. Acknowledge that a foreign director kept our portrait from us for three years because he thought we couldn’t stand to look at it.

Two Nobel laureates from opposite camps, and it is one of them, the biochemist Aaron Ciechanover of the anti-overhaul camp, who turns out to be the comedian of the piece (They threw a “falafel party,” he said of the Israeli Right after the announcement of the Judicial Reform); the laughter around me in Jaffa was the laughter of people recognizing themselves.

I was reminded of two scenes.

The founder of one of the biggest women’s organizations in the protest movement, Moran Zer-Katzenstein, gives speeches that I disagree with almost word for word, but she does so with a clarity, heart and head working together that I do not recall hearing from anyone on Israeli television that year.

Additionally, Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Arab lawmaker (Arabs make up one-fifth of Israel’s population), acknowledges that Arab women in Israel have the same legal rights as Jewish women but claims they are paid significantly less.

Jakubowicz responds, “Where else in this region do Arab women hold those rights at all?” The scene is not won by anyone. The point is that. No Israeli channel would have shown a scene in which no one wins in 2023.

Jakubowicz also observes to Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, the Gibraltar-born former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, that everywhere else on Earth, the political Right is coded white.

In Israel, the Right’s base is largely Sephardi, Middle Eastern, and Ethiopian; Jews from Morocco and Iraq and Addis Ababa. If you’ve been reading our politics through American categories, that single observation will change your perspective.

Then the film reaches for the Jewish calendar, and that moment is where it stopped being a documentary for me. Tisha B’Av is the summer fast on which Jews have mourned the destruction of both ancient temples for 2,000 years. In 2005, Israel carried out its withdrawal from Gaza on the eve of that fast, removing some 8,000 of its own citizens from their homes; the religious Right experienced it as a destruction.

In 2023, the Knesset passed the reasonableness law, the first and only major piece of the overhaul to become law, on the sixth of Av, three days short of the fast; the protest camp shared black graphics reading “Shisha B’Av,” the Sixth of Av.

I do not believe Heaven schedules our legislation. I believe something worse: Twenty years apart, each camp chose those days to do the thing the other camp experienced as ruin, and both were certain they were saving the country.

I supported major parts of the judicial reform. I still do. What I could not support was how it was pursued and how it was argued, and I said so less clearly than I should have.

In 2023, you knew what you would hear before you turned anything on: Israel’s three mainstream channels against, the pro-government channel in favor, the newspapers and websites sorted to match. Nowhere, including, if I am honest, in my own work, was there room for a sentence with two halves in it: I support this clause and oppose that one.

The reform was not the death of democracy, and democracy must still be treated as close to holy because it is what sheltered Jews wherever they found it, and because this state was declared Jewish and democratic, and the second word was never decoration.

Did I do enough to keep a space open where that sentence could live? Did I translate 2023 honestly for readers abroad, who were being sold either Israel’s funeral or Israel’s rescue, and nothing in between? No. A film made by an outsider should not have been the first place I heard my own country speaking in complete sentences.

My simple conclusion: Every Israeli should watch this film before October 27.

It will not tell you whom to vote for; scan the cast, and you will find only people you already agreed or argued with. It will let you hear what we sounded like the last time we were certain, and force you to admit that the sound of this campaign, on your channel, in your feed, maybe out of your own mouth, is the same sound.

Haven’t we learned? Three years, a massacre, a war on seven fronts, the hostages, the funerals, the hospital corridors, the endless reserve call-ups, and the argument we are having now, before this election, is recognizably the argument in this footage.

The last time we talked about each other instead of to each other, we were too absorbed to see what was assembling on the other side of the fence. We now know what that costs in a way no generation of Israelis has ever known. We cannot afford to learn it twice, and this time, nobody will be able to say we were not warned.

And if you are reading this outside Israel: Watch it for the opposite reason. You are handed a cartoon of this country, flattering or damning, and asked to defend or condemn it.

This film is the version with the arguing left in, which is the true version and the more persuasive one. Notice, while you watch, that the Israelis who explain this country most fluently to the world, Michael Oren and Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, are both in this film, though almost never permitted to help govern it.

Why that is may be next week’s column.