The "state" awards ceremony for Israeli film, which Culture Minister Miki Zohar started as a governmental alternative to the Ophir Awards, will take place on Tuesday. And aside from the minister's last name, which means "radiance" in Hebrew, there won't be a single ray of light in it. This will be a ceremony characterized by collaboration with evil.
This despicable ceremony was born solely out of Zohar's objections to the fact that Shai Carmeli-Pollak's film "The Sea" won Best Picture at the last Ophir Awards, and the general criticism lobbied at the government and its policies in Gaza at the event. Zohar's message is crystal clear: This is what will be done to the movie industry for daring to exalt a film about a Palestinian boy who dreams of seeing the sea but whose dream is denied to him by the occupation. The film even won the honor of representing Israel at the Oscars.
In response, Zohar announced that he would cancel state funding for the Ophir Awards ceremony and found an alternative ceremony. His ceremony will award prizes in 10 categories, and every winner will receive 100,000 shekels ($31,000). Without a drop of shame, Zohar decided to slant Israeli art politically with the help of the oldest tool in the world – money.
To our pride, seven of the nominees Zohar announced said they would withdraw from the ceremony in protest. But once he realized that artists can't be bought with money and hollow honors, he moved on to the next tactic – financial extortion. This cultural thug announced that he intends to immediately cut 30 million shekels from the 2025 cinema budget, push to repeal the so-called Cinema Law and withhold support for unions.
This thuggery paid off. With the mediation of producer Moshe Edery, a friend of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's and the industry's strongman, the artists who withdrew backtracked and agreed to participate in the ceremony. In their press statement, they said Edery had promised that he had an agreement with Zohar under which, if they returned, last week's threat to cancel public funding for the film industry would be rescinded. Even though they were criticized for it, from their point of view, they were acting out of responsibility for the industry as a whole. Terrifyingly, however, there's no way to know whether Zohar will indeed keep his end of the bargain.
In his stupidity, Zohar has merely proven what he sought to suppress – that Israeli democracy is a collective fiction. The entire world now understands not only that Israel maintains a military dictatorship in the West Bank, but that in recent years, its government has also waged a campaign of political persecution against anyone who dares to point this out, much less to reflect it in film or on television.
No matter how much money and effort are invested in the decor, the lighting, the food and the clothing, Tuesday's ceremony will be nothing more than a show of humiliation for the artists who participate in it, and also for Israeli culture, which is being ridden roughshod over by a degenerate government and an uncultured culture minister.
The above article is Haaretz's lead editorial, as published in the Hebrew and English newspapers in Israel.