Israeli director Amos Gitai has batted back calls for a boycott of his new film Why War and said both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict need to clean out their current leaderships for peace to prevail.
Premiering this weekend of out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Why War takes its cue from correspondence in the early 1930s between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud on the question of the human race’s bellicose nature and how to avoid war. The work mixes reenactments of the two figures reciting their exchanges, with historic images of war in art and acted scenes of characters dealing with the psychological impact of conflict.
Although the movie has no direct connection to today’s conflict in the Middle East, Gitai and Why War have been the target of protests in Venice. Around 300 filmmakers signed an open letter opposing the movie, and Dani Rosenberg’s Hebrew-language drama Al Klavim Veanashim (Of Dogs and Men), calling for a boycott of both movies. The artists, including a number of Palestinian filmmakers and actors, including Oscar-nominated Hany Abu-Assad, Rosalind Nashashibi, Raed Andoni and Saleh Bakri, as well as filmmakers Enrico Parenti and Alessandra Ferrini; and actors Niccolò Senni, Simona Cavallari, and Paola Michelini, claimed Why War was “created by complicit Israeli production companies that contribute to apartheid, occupation and now genocide through their silence or active participation in artwashing.”
Gitai, who has long been an advocate for peace and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, dismissed the boycott calls, saying the people who signed the open letter had not seen the film and that the production had not received any funding from the Israeli state.
Gitai noted that Why War explores the question of war in a general sense rather than through “the intoxicated Israeli Palestinian relationship.”
“The film is not actually focused on Israel Palestine, although they love always to think that they are the center of the world,” Gitai said. “There is no center of the world. The planet is round. [It’s] a very important conflict, but they are not the only one on the planet,” he said.
He described the film – featuring Irène Jacob, Mathieu Amalric, Micha Lescot, Jérôme Kircher, Yaël Abecassis, Keren Morr in the cast – as a poetic associative voyage that came together across shoots in Vienna, Tel Aviv, Berlin and Paris.
“Everything is based on these great two thinkers. Karl Marx probably inspired Albert Einstein, because it’s a very Marxist piece about money and greed, or industry. Freud is about the human soul and why these smart animals want to make war.”
Despite the horror of the current moment in the Middle East, Gitai expressed optimism that the Israel-Palestinian conflict would one day be resolved.
“We cannot be deterministic about history… Sometimes the worst low point will give a place to reconciliation because these people will understand this is no the way to go on,” he said. “They cannot go on killing one another and proclaiming this as victory. These are empty propositions.”
Gitai suggested that both the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu had to be swept aside for peace to stand a chance.
“The two groups have to understand that the proposition of being under Hamas, is not a good proposition. There will be no rights for women, no Christians of the Orient, no LGBT rights, nothing. The Iranians already went this way when they got behind Khomeini and they’re stuck with it,” he said.
“We the Israelis have to get rid of the extremist, nationalist, right-wing, racist, ultra-religious government that we have. The two groups have to do some cleaning on their stuff and then maybe a new bridge can be constructed. It’s not there now but we have to keep the idea that one day, it will come, and I think it will come. What is the option?”
Gitai said he had also decided not to show any imagery from the current flare-up in the more than 70-year Israel-Palestine conflict, because he believed current coverage on both sides was further enflaming the situation.
“If we look at Israeli TV, they will only show you atrocities of October 7, the rape of the women, the burning of the Kibbutzim. If I’m a normal Israel and I see these images, I’ll say, ‘let’s kill them all’,” he noted. “[And] the Arab networks, Al Jazeera, will show you just the destruction of Gaza, so the savagery and the destruction of tens of thousands of homes in Gaza and the killing of tens and thousands of people… that most are not terrorists… civilians, children. There is now polio, a lack of food. [If I’m] a Palestinian and I only see these images, they will not see the Israeli images, [I would] say, ‘let’s continue the war.’”
He added: “TV prolongs the war. The iconography prolongs the war so we decided to make an anti-war film without images of war. We need to find new ways of rebuilding this beautiful region… even in spite of the wounds and the tragedies and bad memories, we need to build something different. This cannot go on.”
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