Ari Folman, the Oscar-nominated director of Waltz With Bashir and Where Is Anne Frank, has said he believes the UK’s response to the Israel-Hamas war is grounded in “hypocrisy” and ignorance.
“I think there is a lot of hypocrisy,” said Folman, who lives in Tel Aviv and is filming testimonies of the relatives of Jewish people taken hostage by Hamas. “You cannot be aware of what is going on in Gaza and not pay empathy to the other side.”
In the west, he says, there is a “total unawareness that Hamas is a fundamentalistic [organisation]. They are not freedom fighters. They are sick monsters who slaughtered babies and chopped [off] heads. They raped I don’t know many girls at that rave party. These things, I don’t see them echoed.”
The director, who is a keen supporter of Liverpool football club, spoke of his distress watching the 21 October match against Everton, at which he perceived public support of Palestine was permitted, but not of Israel.
“I am part of a very strong community of Liverpool supporters. We watch games together. We have a Facebook group. During the Merseyside derby at Anfield, one of the guys came [to the match] with a very delicate sign which said “in memory of four Reds who were murdered last week.” They didn’t let the sign in. There were no Israeli flags, nothing. But they let in Palestinian flags.”
Asked about the removal of some posters of Hamas hostages in London, Folman said: “We are not naive, we know from here very well what is going on in Europe, what is going on in the world, especially in the UK and mainly Ivy League universities in America. We know about the [anti-Israel] protests.”
Folman conducted his first interview with relatives of the Israeli hostages five days after about 240 men, women and children had been taken from their homes. Four have so far been released.
In the first week, he says, “people who were interviewed had no confirmation if their beloved ones were kidnapped or dead or missing.”
Sometimes, relatives would receive the news that the bodies of their loved ones had just been identified while speaking to Folman and his team.
The director says that along with colleagues Jasmine Kainy, Eliran Peled and Smadar Zamir, the project – called #BringThemHomeNow – has so far filmed approximately 70 people.
“There will be more. There is an urge of the families to be interviewed because they want their word to be spread. Also, I think for them talking about it is a therapeutic process they need to go through. Don’t forget that they were neglected by the government in that first week totally. No one talked to them. Total chaos.”
One of the hostages, the 79-year-old peace activist Chaim Peri, is a friend of Folman; Peri’s son, Lior, has worked as a gaffer on the director’s films.
“For the last 30 years, this guy was waiting at the checkpoint for Palestinian children who are sick with cancer. He took them to the Israeli hospitals to get treatment and then he drove them back to Gaza.”
Working on the project, says Folman, reminded him of the experience of his mother, Wanda, who is now 101. Along with her new husband and her younger sister, the 17-year-old Wanda was deported to Auschwitz in 1944.
Folman’s parents were separated, but Wanda was able to successfully shield her sister until, one day, she returned from work and saw Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and his assistant. “They took her sister. She always says: ‘If I had come back five minutes earlier …’
“I think the first time it was echoing for me in real life was when I was interviewing those people and they were telling [me] ‘OK, they shot the mother, they shot the father, they left me and they took the girl.’”
The film-maker believes civilian volunteer initiatives such as #BringThemHomeNow gained traction quickly because protests against the presidency of Benjamin Netanyahu were already well established.
“We have dozens of WhatsApp protest groups. In one hour, they became rescue groups.”
Netanyahu, believes Forman, “will never stay in power now. There is so much rage in Israel about the government and how they neglected the civilians. Once there is a ceasefire, they are going to be out.”
The director predicts that the Israeli hostages will be released in exchange for the 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, but expressed bafflement as to why such a deal is taking so long to broker.
In his animated docudrama Waltz With Bashir (2008), Folman explored Israel’s role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the 1982 Lebanon war.
In his 2021 Anne Frank film, he dealt with memories of the Holocaust. But there is, Folman says, a “massive difference” between those Oscar-nominated films, conceived years after the events they portrayed, and “when you interview a mother whose daughter was kidnapped in front of her eyes four days earlier. You’re in the drama. You could see the characteristics of every interviewee coming out. People who are basically optimistic create hope. And there are people who cannot create that optimism.”
Tel Aviv, he says, is “a ghost city now. There are sirens, no people in the streets. Nothing is working. Everybody is totally into the situation emotionally. There is a lot of depression.”
The director, who was 10 at the time of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, says the current conflict is “much, much bigger because it involves not soldiers but civilians. It is something that will take years to heal.
“Yet I still believe there is going to be a solution here. All my life, I had this feeling that after a massive catastrophe, there would be new order here in the Middle East. We can’t go on living like this.”
