Hurray, we won an Oscar!

Whether it’s Neta Barzilai’s Eurovision win, Olympic medals, the Under-21 football team’s World Cup run, or Gal Gadot’s rise in Hollywood, we Israelis are a deeply patriotic people who know how to rally behind those representing our tiny nation on the world stage.

So when a film about Israel, co-directed by Israelis, wins an Oscar, the biggest prize in the industry, you’d expect a similar outpouring of pride.

And yet, even though everyone seems to have an opinion about the film, I’m guessing that fewer than half of my fellow Israelis have even seen it.

Hitchcock once said, “the more successful the villain, the more successful the picture”. And it is undoubtedly true here. So unsurprisingly, not many Israelis want to see us playing the unenviable part of the movie villain.

However, I want to state that as a Zionist, I’m immensely proud of this film, and proud of its makers, and proud that it took home an Oscar. The American author Edward Abbey once said, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government”. And that is exactly what Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are – patriots. They are the conscience of a nation that is highlighting the injustices our country’s leaders are doing in our name.

And yet the film doesn’t portray our leaders at all, rather it’s regular soldiers who are seen fulfilling clearly ‘black flag’ orders.

To understand this phenomenon deeper, we need to look not just at the film, but at something deeper in our national identity: the role of the army itself. We need to go all the way back to 1948, and examine the double-edged sword implications of the founding ethos of the IDF.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, championed the idea that the IDF would be a ‘people’s army,’ imbuing the newly formed force — a unification of various underground militias (such as the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi) — with explicitly democratic and collective values. This was intended to ensure that the military would serve the state and not particular political factions. It would also act as a melting pot for the diverse religious, political and ethnic backgrounds of the various Jewish populations that would serve together.

Indeed, these are the very same arguments still heard today for why the army is an untouchable cornerstone of Israeli society, where open criticism is seen as treasonous. Yes, Israel needs a united army to protect us from those who seek our destruction, but that cannot justify perpetuating an unjust, brutal, and immoral occupation.

But where the “people’s army” notion hits a snag, is when the society that it draws from becomes itself, at best, willfully blind to, and at its worst, enthusiastically supportive of, an immoral and profoundly undemocratic military occupation. The theory that the army has to serve the state is all well and good when the state acts in the interests of its people and works to protect its institutions, but when it doesn’t, it’s not surprising that the army follows suit.

A self-serving government that wants to increase its own power, over parliament, over the judicial system, over occupied territories, and yes, over another people, is pushing us further down the road to authoritarianism and fascism. The tens of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets week after week, year after year, are an attempt to challenge this process, proving that democracy is more valued by the people than those who have been designated as our official gatekeepers.

We should not be ashamed of our Oscar success — it should be a wake-up call. If we truly love this country, then we must be prepared to listen to those who have the courage to hold up a mirror to our shortcomings.