This Israeli Movie Makes Me Nostalgic for the pre-Gaza War Occupation - Opinion - Haaretz.com
A little boy wearing a backpack wanders through Tel Aviv; he stops passersby and hesitantly reads from a note a question in Hebrew that someone transliterated for him into Arabic letters: "Excuse me, where is the sea?" His gaze is blank, frightened. He is a stranger, alone in the big city.
A few days earlier, he was removed from a bus taking classmates on a field trip to see the sea for the first time in their lives: The soldiers at the checkpoint claimed that Khaled's permit to enter Israel was invalid. The boy sets out for the sea on his own.
This is the summary of the plot of Shai Carmeli-Pollak's beautiful film, "The Sea," which is now showing in theaters in Israel and the United States and is Israel's entry for the 2026 Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.
The day after it won five Ophir Awards, the local equivalent of the Oscars, Culture Minister Miki Zohar attacked the film, claiming it "depicts our heroic IDF soldiers in a defamatory and false light." Zohar had not seen the movie. It has been a long time since an Israeli film has served Israeli PR so well. "The Sea" shows the pre-October 7 occupation, which no longer exists, and a relatively humane Israel, which also no longer exists.
Muhammad Gazawi, star of "The Sea," and producer Baher Agbariya, earlier this year.Credit: Naama Grynbaum
Even the minister's heroic soldiers, who are heroic toward small children, are portrayed in it as far less cruel than those of today. Look what has happened to them, and to us, since then. There is no need to elaborate on the darkness of Zohar's world. To him, any film that shows a Palestinian child and an Israeli soldier is a hate film.
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"The Sea" is a movie that was made with love. It is human, and the performances are moving. The beautiful Tel Aviv of the film shows compassion for the boy and for his father, who goes in search of him despite not having authorization to be in Israel. This could not happen today. "The Sea" reminds us how much we have degenerated since October 7, to the point that even a movie about the occupation evokes nostalgia for a different occupation.
If Khaled were to walk the streets of the city today, concerned citizens would immediately call the police instead of directing him to the beach. A Palestinian child in Tel Aviv must be a terrorist. Today there are no buses bringing Palestinian schoolchildren from the West Bank to the sea. They can only dream about it, just as prisoners say the sea often appears in their dreams.
A child who lives a half-hour's drive from the sea no longer has any chance of reaching it. Even the police who stop his undocumented father would no longer treat him as they do in the film. He would be immediately beaten and humiliated, by passersby as well. There are no more Palestinian workers in Tel Aviv, and certainly not ones who have Jewish female friends as does Ribhi, the impressive and touching father in the film.
Khalifa Natour in "The Sea." It's easiest to claim that audiences aren't ready for this kind of content, " he says, "but it's not being picked up abroad either."Credit: Shai Goldman
According to the logic of the culture minister and his ilk, a film that shows Palestinians as human beings is a film that defames Israeli soldiers. Zohar is right: If Palestinians are human, how can they be treated with such barbarism?
When I was a child, I remember how Martin Denny's "The Enchanted Sea" from 1959, with the cries of seagulls in the background, cast a spell on me. Sometimes tears even welled up. The Palestinian children of the West Bank don't have a sea, even though they live just a short drive away. Once they had a sea. It's true that you had to get permission from the occupation authorities to reach the beach and take a dip. It's true that children were removed from buses, but at least some of them managed to fulfill their little dream.
There were also tens of thousands of Palestinian workers in Tel Aviv who lived in difficult conditions. That too is no more. Now, a movie filmed in 2023 is already nostalgic. The occupation of two years ago has become nostalgic. I know Gazans whose best years were the years they slept in the storerooms of the open-air markets in Israel, in inhumane conditions. Everything that has happened to them since then has been much more brutal.
"The Sea" is a nostalgic movie. It shows just how quickly the Israeli occupation is deteriorating.
One day, perhaps, we will miss the genocide of 2025 as well.