{"id":146631,"date":"2026-06-05T13:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T13:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/146631\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T13:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T13:02:08","slug":"the-jewish-filmmaker-trying-to-understand-israel-after-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/146631\/","title":{"rendered":"The Jewish filmmaker trying to understand Israel after Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few months after Hamas’ October 7 attack<\/a>, filmmaker\u00a0Gillian Mosley<\/a>\u00a0was talking to a friend in Lebanon about the devastation unfolding in Gaza as Israel’s genocidal campaign intensified.<\/p>\n

Like millions around the world, they were watching the civilian death toll climb and entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble.<\/p>\n

Gillian left the conversation with a conviction she could not shake: she wanted to do something.\u00a0The British-American Jew felt she couldn’t just sit and watch the growing destruction of Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The United Nations described Israel’s actions as the\u00a0“collective punishment” of Gaza<\/a>, which has seen more than 70,000 Palestinians (a somewhat conservative estimate) killed<\/a> in the region, a number that keeps going up despite a ceasefire agreement.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Soon, people across the globe were beginning to discover the decades of historical context that preceded the horrific attack, a subject Gillian had previously tackled in her 2022 feature documentary debut, The Tinderbox<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A personal exploration of the hows, whys and whens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict<\/a>, The Tinderbox sought to unpack the contradictions and claims tangled up in both Israeli and Palestinian narratives.<\/p>\n

Gillian’s friend said she should consider making a new documentary about the Israeli state of mind that was allowing this current devastation to happen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

How collective, generational trauma and grief, stemming from oppression, othering, and the Holocaust<\/a>, have contributed to Israel’s defiant sense of victimhood.<\/p>\n

Gillian Mosely\u00a0is an award-winning filmmaker who\u00a0grew up in a pro-Zionist family between the United States and the United Kingdom\u00a0[Instagram @britainpalestineproject<\/a>]<\/p>\n

A mentality that struggles to recognise its own history of perpetrating violence and brutality towards a colonised people since before the Nakba in 1948<\/a>, which saw the forced displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the killing of thousands more during the creation of its Jewish state.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The result is Planet Israel<\/a>, a passionately provocative documentary that intersperses interviews, facts, figures, news reports and archive footage with AI-generated “war game” animation, conceived with\u00a0AI and Graphics Designer Khaled Bazzi<\/a>,\u00a0to understand just why 75% of Jewish Israelis support the way the war is being fought in Gaza.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We were making a film about Jewish trauma and how that leads to what we’ve been watching, but people [in Israel] were saying things to me on the street like, ‘Why would the Palestinians be scared?'” Gillian tells The New Arab over a Zoom call.<\/p>\n

“It started in one place, and it just kept moving in darker and darker directions.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Confronting inherited beliefs<\/p>\n

Gillian herself is descended from a long line of famous Jewish community leaders going back 1200 years. She was also raised in a Zionist Jewish household that taught her to believe that Jews had a God-given right to the stolen land on which the State of Israel sits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The filmmaker’s late father was once a spokesperson for Yesha Council<\/a>, which represents the interests of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but “he wasn’t very happy with what was going on in Israel,” she says.<\/p>\n

“My American family, other than my favourite aunt and uncle, are all Trump-supporting Zionists.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gillian’s personal awakening began when she was 12, but her breakaway from Zionism came fully in the 1980s after making friends with a Palestinian while studying philosophy at UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n

It would be forty years before she could truly excavate her complex feelings about Israel in her own films.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With Planet Israel, Gillian continues to draw upon the journalistic skills she has honed over 25 years of developing, producing and exec producing a range of documentaries for Arte, BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, History, ITV, NatGeo and PBS, to get to grips with Israel’s current sentiment and philosophy, fuelled by increasing nationalism and militarism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“Having unleashed this horrific war machine on a rather large portion of humanity, lots of people are going to want to know what that’s about,” she explains.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0Gillian Mosely pictured with Avi Shlaim [Instagram @britainpalestineproject<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Gillian and two crew members shot the film over eight days, interviewing Israeli and Jewish figures such as Professor Avi Shlaim<\/a>, author of Genocide in Gaza<\/a>, trauma and wellness consultant Patty Abozaglo<\/a>, October 7 survivor Rabbi Avi Dabush<\/a>, and Dr Julia Chaitin<\/a>, whose research looks at “the long-term psycho-social impact of extreme social trauma (such as the Holocaust, wars, immigration, refugee experiences) on victims and their descendants, and on Jewish Israelis.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Together, they paint a comprehensive portrait of an Israeli Jewish mindset steeped in religious Zionism and emboldened by authoritarian rule.<\/p>\n

This has led to what Professor Daniel Bar-Ta defines as “a culture of conflict.”<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

This involves wielding collective memories of generational trauma, emotionally-charged orientation and early indoctrination to keep Jewish people in a state of victimhood.<\/p>\n

“My family is privileged, but most of them still think they’re victims,” Gillian explains in the film.<\/p>\n

“Once we morally disengage, it separates us from the consequences of our actions.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Through interviews, archival footage, news reports, data, and AI-generated war-game animation created with Khaled Bazzi, ‘Planet Israel’ examines the factors behind the strong support among Jewish Israelis for the conduct of the war in Gaza<\/p>\n

The view from inside Israel<\/p>\n

Of course, not every Israeli would agree with the film’s assertions.<\/p>\n

Gillian attempted to get more contrary viewpoints from right-wing interview subjects, but she says, “no one would talk to her”.<\/p>\n

Instead, she hit the streets of Israel for three days to capture the perspectives of the general public.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The responses, she shares, were uncomfortable.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most had little empathy for the Palestinian people and were overwhelmingly supportive of the government’s actions against the Gazan people, even if there were mixed views on Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A recent poll<\/a>\u00a0found that\u00a082% of Israeli Jews\u00a0support the expulsion of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries, while 56% support the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The whole idea was just to give people quite a long rope and let them reveal themselves,” says Gillian, but there was one moment where she felt the need to push back.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interviewing an Israeli called Joseph, who argued Palestinians were “raping my sisters and killing my babies,” Gillian mentioned that Palestinians were being raped in prisons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The scene cuts to a verified news report of the story, a frequent occurrence in the film to resist false narratives and opinions perpetuated by the Israeli regime. Joseph gets angry, calls Gillian a liar and storms off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“We had been standing there for half an hour, and it just all got too much,” she recalls.<\/p>\n

“For the first time in my entire working life, I actually had to go back to the hotel and have a moment, because that day was a lot.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was later during post-production that her full understanding of mindsets, such as Joseph’s, dropped into place.<\/p>\n

While editing an interview with Dr Ayala Panievsky<\/a>, a presidential fellow at City St George\u2019s University of London, it hit home just how prevalent state censorship had become in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“The Israeli media has done spectacular work at documenting and investigating the horrors of October 7 and the stories of the Israeli hostages in Gaza,” says Dr Ayala in the film.<\/p>\n

“But everything that happened since October 7 to this day to thousands of Palestinians has been entirely absent.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

It made Gillian realise that she didn’t want to perpetuate the trend of omitting Palestinian testimony. “The whole idea was to zero in on the Israeli mindset, which is actually religious Zionism, but it just became too painful for me not to hear from Gazans,” she says.<\/p>\n

“I can’t even get my head around the level of Palestinian trauma.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Can cinema change minds?<\/p>\n

While only a few Gazans are seen at the end of the film, the full interviews have been collated into a 45-minute short film called Voices from Gaza<\/a>, which Gillian’s production company is making available for free for anyone who might want to host a fundraising screening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For now, she wants as many people to see Planet Israel, and hopefully change some mindsets \u2013 especially for Israeli Jews and Jewish communities in the British and American diaspora.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s meant to reflect reality as truly as it can, and to stick people in a corner with nowhere to go,” Gillian says.<\/p>\n

“I’m not holding out a huge amount of hope, but with Jews who are either completely brainwashed or willfully ignorant, that’s the best that we can do.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Khaled Bazzi is the AI and Graphics Designer for the documentary film ‘Planet Israel’\u00a0[Instagram @britainpalestineproject<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Growing antisemitism in the UK, intensified by the war in Gaza, has seen 75% of British Jews feel a greater emotional attachment to Israel, according to polling from the\u00a0Institute for Jewish Policy Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, 40% of British Jews say Israel’s conduct in Gaza had weakened their attachment to the country, while 51% say it clashes with their Jewish values.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe a film like Planet Israel can tip the scales and inspire more understanding and empathy, for both Israelis, Jews and Palestinians.<\/p>\n

With so many narrative features and documentaries grappling with the issue over the last few years, one might hope cinema could truly change hearts and minds and stop wars.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gillian smiles. “Wouldn’t that be great?”\u00a0<\/p>\n

PLANET ISRAEL releases UK-wide on Friday, 5 June.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere<\/p>\n

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n