Israel-born actress Natalie Portman and more than 300 others are backing pro-Hamas Israeli director Nadav Lapid after he was bullied into dropping plans to attend the Marseille International Film Festival by anti-Israel activists.
Lapid had announced that he was going to attend the festival to be part of the jury, but pulled out after several pro-Palestinian filmmakers threatened to withdraw their films if he was part of the judging panel, The Hollywood Reporter wrote.
After he quit the event, a large group of directors, actors, and others in the European film industry signed a letter decrying the “intellectual failure” of forcing Lapid to flee from the festival.
“That Israel’s greatest dissident artist [who] tirelessly denounces the fascist and colonialist tendencies of his government and its criminal moral failings in films that have won awards worldwide, should be forced to withdraw from a French festival should alarm us and mobilize us beyond this absurdity,” the letter supporting Lapid states. “It should alert us to the obvious truth: whatever crimes their state may commit, no one can be reduced to a passport.”
The letter goes on to blast the whole idea of holding people in the film industry to account for the sins of their home country governments.
Lapid told Haaretz that “I’d prefer to give these people some credit and not say this is antisemitism, but it’s definitely an insane, systematic fanaticism of a kind that’s often typical of groups like this, and it’s accompanied by violence and self-righteousness,” he said. “It also makes no distinction between individuals. In its view, I’m guilty by virtue of my identity.”
He added, “And what’s even worse is the festival’s response. Because yes, these people exist, but there aren’t many of them. Their power derives from the cowardice of institutions, which, at moments like this, prefer to make compromises, just as the festival in Marseille did.”
The film industry signatories decried the absurdity of linking Lapid to the Israeli government most especially because the director has been a harsh critic of his own country and has repeatedly sided with Hamas terrorists. He even fled Israel and has lived in France since 2021.
Lapid has accused Israel of blocking aid to Palestinians and carrying out a systematic “genocide” against them. Indeed, he was making these comments even as terror group Hamas was raiding through Israeli settlements on October 7, 2023, and indiscriminately murdering children, women, and the elderly.
He is so anti-Israel that he accuses both the “bad” Israelis and the “good” ones of genocide.
“The true disgrace of Israel – even more than what the ‘bad Israelis’ (the extreme right, settlers, etc.) did – lies in what the ‘good Israelis’ did not do. The ordinary, decent people who did nothing as their state committed a massacre, and who now have no particular difficulty living with that lack of action,” he wrote in a 2025 screed against his people.
This is the Israel-hating film director that pro-Palestinian filmmakers in France tried to bully into withdrawing from the festival. This is also the Israel-hating director that Star Wars actress Natalie Portman is supporting.
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